Tuesday, January 12, 2010

NPD'S PRISON RELEASE PROGRAM

At the old Naples Police Building, at 8th and 8th South, the parking lot was in rear, by the gas pumps. There was no rear door from the PD to the lot, requiring you to exit the front and hoof around the building. Inconvenient, and cops don't like that. So it was decided a door needed to be cut in the back wall, next to the parking lot.
As always, there was no money for the project. But, there was free labor available from the inmates. More specifically, the trustees, who could be let out of their cell with a reasonable expectation they wouldn't catch the next Bloodhound Bus to Slick City. At the time we had only one who met the criteria.
Hershel Hump, we'll call him, was a good ol' boy who was a victim of love. The love of booze, hooch, liquid stupid. He wasn't a pure dunce, but he wasn't going to be designing any rockets either. When he got a full gut of the Anchor Lounge's finest swill, he'd do anything. His last misadventure was DUI. He'd left the Anchor and made it four blocks to Four Corners, where he dutifully stopped for a red light. And waited. And passed out behind the wheel, earning him three months in the Bastille, of which he had 6 weeks remaining.
Chief Ben Caruthers told Hershel that if he'd cut a doorway thru the back wall, he could go home as soon as he was finished. Hershel jumped at the proposition and, with a two-pound hammer and concrete chisel, commenced with vigor.
Trouble was, the City Jail had been built to Federal Prison standards. The exterior walls were one-foot thick crammed full of reinforcing bars. At the end of the first day he'd excavated a hole about as big as hamster's nest.
Hershel could've made a better deal if he'd waited a few years until the Sheriff's new jail was constructed. Some of the laborers on that project, figuring one day they'd probably be residents, mixed the mortar about ninety-percent sand and ten-percent cement. And they hid hacksaw blades in the mortar joints. The first night the jail was open, several convicts scraped out the mortar joints with spoons and escaped.
Not so the Naples Jail whose walls were poured concrete. So hard that Hershel was still pecking well into his fifth-week. And he'd only chipped out a hole big enough to allow the passage of a fat dog. With the prospects of him having to make life before the project was completed, some industrial saws were rented. And some welding torches to cut the steel. And Hershel finally made it back to the Anchor.
As irony would have it, when the new back door was completed, Hershel was one of the first customers to pass thru it. On his way back to jail.

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