Breakout by Paul Herron (notion reading list .txt) 📕

when to reel it in, because they don’t want to end up in solitary. Some of these guys—I’d say about forty percent—are working toward a GED.” She throws a look over her shoulder. “That’s a General Education Diploma.”

Sawyer half smiles. “Yeah, I know. I’m not that green.”

“Apologies. So Gen Pop holds the guys doing the GED programs, as well as the inmates who work in the industry units.”

“What do they make?”

“License plates. Military armor. Fast-food uniforms. That lingerie your boyfriend likes so much? Probably made right here.”

Sawyer bursts out laughing. “Fuck off.”

“I’m serious. And most of them only get paid, like, fifty cents an hour. Private prisons, Sawyer. It’s legalized slave labor.”

A couple of COs are walking past as Martinez says this. They give her a dirty look and carry on.

“Nobody likes talking about it,” she says, nodding after them. “’Cause they all know it’s not right. Anyway, Gen Pop is four units, 1 to 4. They’re separate buildings linked right through the middle by corridors and sally ports with their own security pods. After those four, we get to the specialist units.”

“Specialist?” Sawyer is already feeling lost.

“First off is the Transitional Care Unit. The TCU. That’s where inmates who need nursing care are taken. Not just injured inmates; I’m talking post surgery, maybe end-of-life care.”

“Right.”

“Next in the stack is the Mental Health Unit. You do not want to work in MHU. Seriously. Get out of any duty rosters that put you in there. Because we have special kinds of crazies here. We’re supposed to have the best team of psych doctors in the country, so we get shipped the psychos from all over. If Hannibal Lecter were real, he’d be locked up here. I fucking hate that place.”

They walk on in silence. Martinez seems lost in her thoughts.

“And the last unit?” presses Sawyer.

Martinez glances over in surprise, as if she forgot Sawyer was even there. “ACU. Administrative Control Unit. The inmates call it Super Seg—that’s Administrative Segregation to you and me. It’s where we keep the most violent offenders. The inmates who attack prisoners and staff, anyone who’s shown a direct physical threat to the life of others. They’re locked down in there twenty-three hours a day. They get one hour for exercise, and that’s it. ACU is designed so that staff don’t have to have any physical contact with the offenders at all. The cells are accessed through two sets of doors, so you have a sally port for each cell. Safest way to do it.”

“What do they do in their cells for twenty-three hours?”

“Most of them go crazy. End up in MHU. Some pace. Some punch the wall. Some read. I won’t lie, it’s no life. I’d rather die than be put in there.”

“That… sounds like hell.”

“See now, that’s the most sensible thing you’ve said since we met. This place is hell. Admin is like… purgatory. We’re the lost souls serving our time, doing penance or whatever till we’re judged. Then the deeper into the prison you go, the lower you descend through the different levels until you finally get to ACU.” Martinez throws Sawyer a serious look. “ACU is where Satan would have his throne.”

They fall into an uneasy silence. Sawyer’s stomach is clenched with fear. She’s starting to wonder if she’s made a really big mistake. Sure, she needed to be here. She needed the job. There was no other way. But this… she’s not sure she can do this.

She sees a door coming up on their left and stops to peer through the safety glass, looking into yet another faceless corridor. “Where are we now?”

“Unit 4.”

She looks at Martinez in surprise. “We’ve only passed four units?”

“Haven’t even got out of Gen Pop yet. Come on.”

Martinez starts walking again, not waiting to see if Sawyer is following.

“I don’t get it. Why is this place so big?”

“It’s what happens when you repurpose something instead of starting from scratch. It used to be an army base. The old prison? The Glasshouse? It was a military prison. Apparently, it’s British slang or something. Don’t ask me why the name stuck.”

“Seems a weird place to even build an army base, though,” says Sawyer.

“You’re lucky you’ve got me for orientation. If it was Sheriff Montoya, he’d be showing you a PowerPoint presentation right now. It’s his favorite subject. Back in the day, there were these plans to build something called the Cross-Florida Barge Canal. This was in 1935, right? Government wanted a canal network that would cut right through Florida from Jacksonville all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Why?”

“To move goods across Florida. The canals were supposed to be dug by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The plans were crazy expensive, though. Funding ran out. Nothing was finished.”

“And this place?”

“This was the base of operations for the Corps of Engineers. But when the money ran out, the army decided to make the most of what they’d already built and turned it into a military prison. That’s why the layout is so weird. It wasn’t intended to be a civilian prison. It’s been an army barracks, a building site, an army training ground, a storm-and-flood disaster management site—”

“Wait.” Sawyer is getting confused. “A what?”

“Yeah. The whole canal project was resurrected in 1964, but this time the army was told to build these huge storm tunnels underneath the Glasshouse. This site is close to the ocean. All the other dams and canals they were building would feed through here. The storm tunnels were supposed to handle the overflow if they flooded.”

“Have they ever been used?”

“Nah. Nixon canceled the whole project again in ’71. Some environmentalists were getting pissy about it. Bad publicity. He had other things to worry about, so he just scrapped the whole thing.”

“And the flood system?”

“They didn’t finish it. There are miles of tunnels about a hundred and fifty feet underneath us. Huge flood chambers. I’m talking thirty, forty feet high. Must have cost a fucking fortune.”

“So what happened to this place in ’71?”

“The army thought fuck