L goes to jail. again. and again. and again.

The jails have become a second office to us. (The car is our primary mobile office; the actual Intern lab is our third). We go there to speak to our clients or witnesses, who are much more easier to find and talk to when incarcerated. 

As investigators we can speak to inmates in official legal visits, where we're placed in a visitation room with the inmate, any time of the day we want, as long as we want. Visitors, however, such as friends and family, can only talk to inmates during visiting hours, usually once a week, for a certain period of time. 

Z says he finds the children in the visiting halls most unnerving. Almost all the visitors are baby's mamas, who dress their children in their Sunday best to see their fathers. The children shout, "Daddy!" when they see their fathers (through a pane of glass) led into the visitations hall. 

As any movie featuring a prison will tell you, a glass pane separates inmate from visitor, and both must use phones to speak to one another. The scenes in the movie where inmate and visitor put their hands up to the glass as if to touch are entirely too real. In fact, all of our visits seem like a movie to me. 

Whenever I enter the jails and get pat down, I want to say something cliche, like "whoa, they usually buy me dinner first!", for the audience I am certain is watching. The bright orange jumpsuits must be costumes. And that intense, soulless look of an inmate who has been in custody far too long must be an act. 

When I watched a video the other day of detectives interrogating a suspect, I had to check a few times that somebody hadn't switched our tapes with a movie.

I am convinced it's all a movie because it can't be real. Human beings can't live like that. Human beings can't treat other human beings like that. Human beings can't be locked up like animals. 

But I knew all of it was real because no one can pretend to be that scared, that sad, or that hopeless.