Let’s see! Where do I begin?

The beds are hard.

Standing on concrete gets old fast.

There is not one lounge chair in sight.

The beds are narrow.

The toilets flush like there is a suction hose connected from deep within the earth.

The only chairs you have are round, backless and connected to a round picnic table.

Did I say that the beds were hard?

For about 200 people, the opportunity to spend a night in jail was too much to pass over. And to be fair, for most it was a party that included games, Nintendo, cell phones, and a lot of running around.

For the jail staff it was a very long night, but well worth it. They found out with “not so real” prisoners that some toilets didn’t work, one shower stayed on, there were doors that didn’t lock or unlock as expected, and they were able to watch near riot conditions with a fairly controllable group of inmates.

As I walked around talking with people, both young and old voiced their awe of how big the facility was. Adjectives such as huge, big, nice, and fun were used to describe what they were seeing. During the evening there were all kinds of group activities going on that included card games, regular games and even a Nintendo Wii.

As the night progressed, the comments started to change. Not real inmates started to notice that there were no chairs for lounging. This was not a problem as they brought out their hard, blue mattresses from off their concrete pad beds to lay on the floor.

Most of the participants were aware that this kind of sleeping arrangement is not bad for a camp trip and could be endured. But I noticed that it didn’t take long for most to realize that an extended stay in jail meant not having almost any home appliance, furniture, electric plug in, coat hanger, or even privacy.

For me, I love a good book and I can very easily shut out my surroundings and bury myself deep in the written words. But I am a lounger when I read. It didn’t take long for me to get tired of the bed and sitting on a backless round seated chair was not particularly an option.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I wouldn’t last too long in jail.

For Sandra, my wife and the honoree of my date night invitation to spend a night in jail, she was much worse off. She loves games and was quickly absorbed in a variety of card games and even bingo. But I noticed that she kept looking around and wanting to see anything outside. For her, jail would not be kind.

She also didn’t get much sleep that night on a very hard bed and loud flushing of toilets that reverberated off the concrete walls all night long.

For some, they got the real feel of being locked down as some doors remained locked after they were closed. And permission from the control center was the only way the lock was released and sometimes this took a few minutes.

And some even complained of legs hurting after spending only hours walking on a non-carpeted concrete floor. I can’t even imagine how sore people’s legs would become if you had to walk on concrete 24 hours a day.

I was asked to help prepare breakfast and working in a new kitchen is always fun. And if there is a bright spot of being in jail, it would be being good enough to be able to at least help in the kitchen. There are not outside windows, but it is a break away from looking at cell blocks all day long.

If I were going to compare my night stay at the jail to anything, it would be the comparison of dorm life at college. Which, at its worse is still much better than what we experienced over the weekend. At least the toilet there was not in the same room as we were sleeping.

As the group started dispersing on Saturday morning, I noticed that the mood had shifted drastically. There really had been a fun time of rocking and rolling in a county sponsored jail house party, but I noticed the reality of what life would be for an extended stay in jail had sunk in.

The flippant and fun remarks about spending a night in jail, were replaced with a deeper appreciation of personal freedoms and basic human comforts that would be lost if you really were put in jail.

There were more comments on the number of locking doors. The hallways seemed longer as the groups started exiting. Staying in jail didn’t seem to be as fun on Saturday as it was on Friday.

I know that jailers benefited greatly from having a dry run night at the jail. But I also feel like society benefited as a small, but important group of our society, experienced a taste of what jail life is like and it was not all that great.

It will be a message they will remember for a long time. And one that I hope will be shared with others.

It would be nice to build a jail and not have it filled. So far, we have been filling to over capacity every jail we have built in this area. We could all hope that this jail will sit with vacancies for a very long time to come because people saw wisdom in keeping the law of the land rather than breaking it.

It is something that we could hope for.

kashby@vernal.com