Sensory Overload: Seeing is Believing, from Jail to Prison

By Aaron E. Olson April 14, 2022

Jail is certainly an ominous sight, but it is usually a simple building in a rural area, or a high rise in a downtown city. Ominous? Yes! Mainly for the feeling, or imagined experience within, which certainly has merit.

Inside is a different story. Less hospitable, with cells, bars and inmates in jumpsuits. However, jail always has a type of temporal feel to it. Even for the four years I was housed there.

Four years in the county jail, and the stories of prison were never ending. With every detail of the "Joint" described, by every convict who graced its gates, and still, to my shame, I was utterly unprepared to witness the meat warehouse I saw that cold spring morning.

What I had pictured in my head was some sort of prehistoric office building. Where did I get that idea from? I don't know, but I was totally off, and in an instant, reality cleared up all confusion.

The morning chain at 4:30am was more memorable than a triple shot latte before skydiving. Privacy had disappeared years ago, and dignity along with it. It was a first however, having to strip naked in front of 40 inmates and six cops. Sorry, "correctional officers" as they are technically called.

Proper verbiage and titles seemed to evade my vocabulary in the moment of being naked-as-birth, receiving the six digit number that will forever identify me. Not some number on a card kept tucked safely in my wallet. In addition, the only wallet I had was a prison wallet, and you don't want anything going in there. That's an exit only!

No. This number will be used by hundreds of human beings in charge of me, to identify and beckon me at their whim. I am not Aaron Edward Olson when I receive mail, or have a rare visit with my family. I am #327076. DON'T FORGET IT!

I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing 40 naked guys at once, and the eyeballs of six cops staring into each man's prison wallet, as he is told to bend over and spread his cheeks.

It felt like something out of a movie. Leg irons, belly chains, and 40 convicts in pumpkin suits loaded onto a bus, that from the outside it looked like a travel bus. The inside didn't!

I was greeted with hard, plastic seats. An open air toilet shared the pungent smell of days old urine and feces that instantly offended my senses. Every time the bus came to a stop, the sound of the commode sloshed, and seconds later a fresh reminder wafted across my face, biting my taste buds the one time I was foolish enough to leave my mouth agape.

Each prison is different, and unforgettable in its own right. Arriving in Shelton Washington at the Washington Corrections Center was the closest I would ever come to home -- Tacoma. The middle of the woods suddenly opens into a clearing, and simultaneously, guard towers shoot out of the grass, and there is an endless sea of razor wire coils.

My feeling of temporal was gone -- replaced by a hopelessness of permanence. I absorbed the extent to which the prison industrial complex has gone to keep me confined. I have never seen Fort Knox, but at each prison I feel like gold. Gold nobody knows exists.

Intake was another eye opener. After the bus drove into what seemed like a large town, we were unloaded at a building, almost the size of a normal jail, except this building was just the intake center alone, with many other buildings in the distance for housing and administrative purposes. Welcome to Prison Industries! Or as I prefer to call it -- the plantation.

Once again, we stripped naked and changed into a different colored jumpsuit. This time the occupants of several buses were present, newly arrived. Instead of 40 naked inmates, and 6 pervert cops, it was 180 inmates, and over a dozen c/o's. It was branding time!

After being photographed, I was given a unit destination, the distance of several football fields away.

The walk to medical came first, bed roll under one arm. I was State Property, and they wanted a physical. The routine cattle inspection was underway. Then it was off to my living unit as the entire compound stared at me, and the rest of the new fish.

My arrival at the Washington State Penitentiary only weeks later was much different. From lush forest, to the desert of southeastern Walla-Walla Washington, we were greeted with lights seen from miles away, after a 12 hour chain ride. It looked like a small city in the distance.

There was nothing relaxed about the West Complex, Walla-Walla's Maximum Security Unit. During my first of two stints here, we were brought through the old building, the East Complex, with walls that could hold King Kong! I felt like an ant. Terrified - and for good reason. Books were written about this nightmare institution. Concrete Mama and Blood Alley to name a couple. Sadly, the reputation continues as a man was just stabbed to death last week.

Four, massive concrete boxes made up the new, state of the art compound. Nothing that looked to exciting, except for the occupants. Tough guys with neck Swazi's, 666 tatted across the forehead, fights, riots, rape, and sometimes death.

I spent four months in the old death row, converted to solitary confinement. It was dark and dirty, with peeling paint. The "outside area", and i use that term loosely, was a brick box, with a steel grate as a roof. I remember praying that a bird would fly over, or maybe a plane. It happened once, and it was the highlight of my stay on the old green mile.

*CALL-TO-CONNECT Podcast: www.Patreon.com/MadeInPrison