Free The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman Page A

write him a ticket that would have gone on the cat-feeding prisoner’s record, he also let him continue feeding the cats. Then some of the other prisoners started helping this prisoner and the CO, seeing the effect caring for the cats had on these often embittered, angry men, started bringing bags of dry cat food into the prison to help them. Then one day, when the wrong CO caught the wrong prisoner with a bag of the dry cat food, all hell broke loose and what had been tolerated till then no longer was.
    After a while there were not so many cats finding their way into Mid-Orange. But somebody in authority must have noticed the effect taking care of the cats was having on those prisoners involved because, by the time Lamont had been transferred from Woodbourne to Mid-Orange, a program had been established for prisoners to care for animals. It involved dogs, not cats, and the prisoners weren’t simply feeding the dogs, they were training them. ‘Puppies Behind Bars’, the program was called. Prisoners were being taught to train dogs to be guide dogs for the blind. After September 11, some dogs were even trained for the New York Police Department and for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They were trained to sniff for explosives. Of course the dogs were not exposed to explosives in the prison but much of the training was the same as that for guide dogs. They needed to be socialised, taught how to be around people, and how to follow instructions even in situations of stress. So did the dogs.
    Like many of the prisoners, Lamont had applied to work in the dog program. But hardly anybody got the chance to work in that detail. It was a feel-good story. It was even a true story. But it didn’t alter the fact that most of the programs existed in name only for the vast bulk of the Mid-Orange prison population. There just weren’t enough places in any of the programs so you put your name down and waited like you waited for everything else. If you had something to trade or to sell, or you were well connected, you received preferential treatment. The saying went, ‘It’s not who you
know
but who you
blow.’
    ‘Well, you gots to be anatomically gifted one way or the other,’ Numbers had explained to Lamont not long after Lamont had been transferred from Woodbourne to Mid-Orange, just as Numbers himself had been some time earlier. When Lamont sought clarification Numbers tried to explain.
    ‘Well now, how else a
straight
brother gonna know how to give head? There’s “trial and error”, I guess, but you don’t wanna go gettin’
that
wrong. And even “trial and error” don’t apply at the other end. Know what I’m saying?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Okay, there’s some who so sensitive down there they tear up every second time they take a dump. These brothers frightened of roughage. But with some brothers it just slide up nice and easy like they was born already with Vaseline up there. So when the CO spreads your cheeks after a contact visit from family and such, this man can breathe easy knowing these dumb-ass lazy COs ain’t gonna go that far up inside of him. Now
that
man truly blessed. He a rich man inside; a living, breathing, walking Fort Knox. Can’t no one
learn
that. It’s a gift from God.’
    Lamont was not so anatomically, or otherwise, blessed. He put his name down for the puppy program just as he did for plumbing, carpentry and horticulture. He got none of them. Like almost half the prisoners in Mid-Orange he worked as a porter keeping the prison clean, sweeping up cigarette butts and other garbage the prisoners had left. But it was the dog program he’d really wanted to be in, particularly after he’d caught sight of a handful of other prisoners in the distance walking and then grooming some Labs not much older than puppies. Privately he’d pridedhimself on his capacity to limit his wants and expectations. That seemed to him the best way to survive his sentence. Whatever comfort even cigarettes might