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Me, at the jail, booking a client in for some kind of transgression against society. I’m at the intake counter filling out the
paperwork and in front of me were some monitors showing the temporary holding crisis rooms; literal rubber rooms with padded
walls and flooring. Crisis Cell 3 had a man on the floor, curled in the ball, twitching. The jailers told me that he was coming
down off of meth and was having serious withdrawal symptoms. Crisis Cell 2 had a woman who was yelling non-stop that she
wanted to go home. The staff told me that she had actually finished serving her sentence and was scheduled to be released, but
every time they took her out to finish the processing she’d fight them, so they kept putting her back in there. And Crisis Cell 1
had a naked man who was moving around very slowly, staring at everything but mostly just the drain in the floor. He got down
on the floor and put his face about an inch from the drain and just stared it. Since there was no toilet in there, I can’t imagine
the drain smelled good at all. Oh I should also mention this guy had smeared shit all over the walls with his hands. I spent a
long time staring at those folks. I was just transfixed. I thought the cameras aimed in there should be routed to the local cable
network so people at home could watch them, too. Maybe make a special educational TV channel called “We Told You Drugs
Will Mess You Up” and just run the cameras 24 hours a day on a special jail cam channel.

As a crime prevention officer, I was expected to fingerprint a lot of little kids for “safety programs” at fairs and festivals. It was
so stupid. A few companies had figured out how to make money by selling little booklets to police departments or fraternal and
civic organizations so parents could get a Polaroid picture of their little darling child and have their fingers inked and printed
into the booklet. Do you know how hard it is to fingerprint little squirmy kids? It’s really hard. Really messy. And then one day
while I was trying to wrangle some sticky kid’s little fingers onto the paper to make some good fingerprints I realized how stupid
the whole idea was. I started asking parents “Why exactly do you want your kids fingerprinted here?” and they’d say something
vague and lame like “For safety,” and then sometimes if I was in a bad mood because their kid was extra messy I’d really start to
question them. “How does having their fingerprints make them safer?” And the general response would be like “Well, if they get
lost…then we’d have the fingerprints…and so…yeah.” Which would lead to me say something like “Listen, if your kid gets lost
and then found, they’d still know their name, right? Couldn’t they just tell whoever found them what their name is? Or are you
thinking they’re dead, and they can’t talk. Then those fingerprints will come in handy, I guess. If the head is gone and you can’t
tell who the body is. But if the head is gone, like rotted away or something, it’s a fair guess that the tips of the fingers are going
to be decomposed, too. Hey? You know what? If the police find a kid and nobody can tell if it’s yours or not, they’re going to do
a DNA test to figure it out! Fingerprints are going to be useless! You want to keep your kids safe, tell them not talk to strangers
on the internet and don’t bother with this stupid fingerprinting nonsense!” Okay, I didn’t really get that graphic with folks, that
was mostly all in my head. But I’ll bet that of all the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of little kids fingerprinted
across the country, not a single case missing kid case was ever solved because some parent had their fingerprints on file to prove
an identity.