Up Your Butt: Contraband Behind Bars

Up Your Butt: Contraband Behind Bars
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I recently worked on a documentary on contraband in prison, pithily titled "Prison Contraband." It was shot in two California state prisons, Avenal and Solano, and premieres in the "Vanguard" documentary series on Current TV tonight, Wednesday, November 18. It's about a serious issue--the ongoing struggle to keep prisons secure--but in the way that "Moby Dick" was both about man's fate but also about harpoons, "Prison Contraband" is also about keistering. (You can look the term up now, if you're not familiar with it and impatient, or you can wait a few paragraphs until its meaning becomes evident.)

As a documentary producer, I've worked in a lot of custodial institutions. I find jails and prisons to be interesting subject matter, because although society might think that locking someone up is the end of the story, as it often is at the end of a cop show, people sent behind bars don't actually leave our planet. They just form their own worlds within ours, supervised by employees of the state. When I started doing these documentaries, spending several weeks in Los Angeles County Jail for National Geographic in the fall of 1991, around a million or so people were locked up in the United States. Now we have over two million inmates.

Across these documentaries, my various colleagues and I held to the principle that we were not working for the Guide Michelin, rating Graybar Hotels. We simply tried to document what we saw, related to a particular issue, and to record what the staff and the inmates had to say -- or wouldn't say -- about it, so that you can see. On the other hand, even though we don't discuss it in the documentary, there is always a philosophical take-away from one of these projects.

In 2007, Laura Ling and I did a documentary for Current's "Vanguard" series called "Prison Power Play." Shot in California's Corcoran State Prison, it looked at the shadowy prison gangs that control life in California's multi-ethnic prisons--shadowy because they don't come on camera nor allow on-camera discussions of themselves by inmates, not because inmates of each ethnic or geographic group don't know who controls them. This is a serious on-going problem. But thinking about the story against the backdrop of the high levels of ethnic violence in Iraq that year, you could think to yourself -- we thought ourselves -- that what the US was confronting with Iraq's warring Sunni and Shia people, the California Department of Corrections had long confronted with the prison systems self-segregated white, African-American, northern Hispanic and southern Hispanic inmate populations and the gangs that control them.

Last year, Laura Ling, Euna Lee and I did another hour-long documentary for "Vanguard," called "Getting out of Prison," which looked at the serious problems of recidivism, but also made us wonder if, contrary to the faith we Americans generally seem to hold about our nation, sometimes you can't get so low it's extremely difficult to get back up.

And now, Wednesday night, the 18th, comes "Prison Contraband." It's about the serious problem of managing contraband, narcotics, weapons--tobacco counts in California--and the newest contraband cell phones. Because contraband supports the prison gangs, and the prison gangs manage the violence in prison. To an outsider, it's a counterintuitive story, because you would think that since a prison, with its walls and gates and electrified fences, can keep inmates from escaping, it could also keep contraband from getting in. But because of visitors, inmate workers going outside the gates every day, and the occasional corrupt employee, lots of stuff gets in.

But while working on this documentary, I found that broader abstract musings about the meaning of what we'd shot kept getting overwhelmed by the awe of the variety and volume of objects that people can get up into their body cavities -- and since these are male institutions, up into their rectums. Because, in prison, the surest method of transporting contraband, is internally, in the "prison wallet," as it's called. Keistering drugs in balloons or tobacco in balloons, of course, seems doable to anyone who's seen a movie about drug mules. But what about an eight inch knife? Or, going to the newest contraband, cell phones, a Blackberry Storm?

If you watch "Prison Contraband," you might find it difficult to concentrate on the abstract, also. But finally, one thought does emerge - it seems to be extremely difficult to control populations by force, even literally captive populations, when lots of people really want something that they can't have.

Mitch Koss is executive producer of "Vanguard" on Current TV. "Prison Contraband" airs tonight Wednesday, Nov. 18 at 10/9c on Current and Current.com. For more information, visit Current.com/Vanguard.

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