After another long day at the new job I got on the bike and headed downtown for my first trip to the Whole Foods to get frozen berries and flax seeds for my breakfast, but mostly I just needed a bike ride to shake off the whole sitting-at-a-table-and-listening thing. I rode home up the hill in a super easy gear, all loaded down with the stuff you get when you go shopping hungry. The ride home quickly turns from tourist harbor to the outskirts of downtown to emptiness. I stopped to take a picture of the building at Fallsway and Madison. It is ringed with barbed wire and has rusted-out windows on one side and the tiny slits in the walls on the other, because it’s a prison. I figured it was a jail, it being practically in downtown Baltimore. Turns out it’s a supermax prison, where people are confined to cages 23 hours a day, 24 on the weekends. They are allowed no physical contact, ever; visits are through plexiglass, and time outside of cages is spent alone, one day inside, another day outside, one hour a day, five days a week. We do that to people, to human beings. I am ashamed of us. And I’m going to spend the foreseeable future riding by here on my bicycle all loaded up with blueberries, brewer’s yeast, and vitamins, pedal, pedal, pedal. I’m going to have to think about this one. So should you, because there’s a supermax prison somewhere near you. Baltimore just isn’t hiding its one.
What I Saw Riding My Bike Around Today 
I tried to comment early from my twinphone, like, five seconds after you posted.
It just said:
you are my favorite.
Also, I was at a meeting tonight that Mitch Landrieu was, you know, hosting, and I thought about you and I looked and him and I said to myself… “How come *HE* is still here.” Then I just couldn’t stop glaring.
Jesus! and than we let them go and wonder why they aren’t “reformed.”
… then …
typing in the dark
welcome to b’more
Have you seen the National Geographic docu. about Solitary Confinement? I watched it after reading your post and was so saddened. Not to mention incredibly angry. Sigh. Oh, America…
That documentary is *devastating.*
I was locked up in the Maryland Division of Corrections and had the opportunity to grace this place with my presence. My home prison was in Hagerstown but would do overnight transitions to travel to Charles County for other court dates and would stay the night here on my way south and let me tell you, if what you have heard offends you, you would not like being in there. Not only what you have listed is true but there is more. Roaches 4″ long, mice and rats (in the cells), cold water (if they let you wash), I was there overnight and never got a mattress, blanket,pillow, sheet, NOTHING! DIRTY DIRTY DIRTY! Staph infection is wide open. The guards are straight of the boat from Africa and are very racist. Again I was there one 4 occasions over night and only was fed twice and it was a styrofoam cup of rice crispies. Its very bad there. Inhuman and dangerous. I was there because I fell behind in child support. But its really way worse than you could ever imagine.