The Questionnaire
In 1997, the governor of Arizona signed my bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology, which I’d earned from the University of Arizona. In 2013, the state of Arizona saw fit to arrest, prosecute, and imprison me for doing precisely what I was licensed by the state of Arizona to do — growing twelve cannabis plants, and possession of equipment necessary to grow and use my plants. I’d learned a whole lot of the plant science I used to grow my cannabis from studying at the University of Arizona.
It all started with a swatting-for-dollars call made to 88-CRIME, and ended with a blindfolded-and-earplugged jury convicting me of doing what my purported victim granted me a license to do. In the aftermath, a very pleasant Sheriff’s deputy handcuffed me for the trip to Pima County Jail to await sentencing.
Once booked into Pima County Jail, you get to wait overnight in a holding area, while jail staff stuffs everyone in tighter and tighter, until enough room is freed to squeeze you into the jail. This doesn’t always mean you get a bunk or anything like that. Sometimes, the only room squeezed out for you in the housing unit is a grave-sized spot on the day room floor, where you sleep in a blue, plastic coffin, under an itchy, pseudo-wool blanket.
The holding area at Pima County Jail consists of a sunken pit in the middle of the floor, with the upper perimeter festooned with tube-steel railing. Most inmates call the holding area at Pima County Jail “The Pit,” but I just thought of it as The Pigpen, with pigs having people penned up in there. The men are corralled in a large area of The Pigpen, and the women are placed into a smaller corral.
I sat there in the women’s corral, waiting for a cell or bunk or something, until roughly 3:00 am. At that time, an inmate in the men’s corral decided to knock a large TV screen onto the floor. Glass shattered loudly, and everyone who had managed to fall asleep under the bright fluorescent lights in The Pigpen was rudely awakened by the commotion.
All hell broke loose in the men’s corral as deputies scrambled the area, trying to get the men under control. Those deputies came in with tasers blazing. One deputy screamed at another, “Ah, fuck! You asshole, you tased me!”
At that point, all the inmates were herded into various areas. The men were placed into the jail-inside-a-jail tanks just off to the side of the holding area, which are normally reserved for the screeching, squawking, shitting, puking, apoplectic, and otherwise overly obnoxious inmates. The handful of female inmates were placed into solitary confinement cells. That way, jail staff could clean up the shattered-glass disaster in The Pigpen unfettered by sleep-deprived inmates begging for a bunk.
After I spent about a half hour in the solitary cell, a female deputy showed up and escorted me, along with all the other women in solitary cells, to the women’s general housing area of the jail. Home sweet home until sentencing. I was just grateful to get up and away from that bone-chilling concrete bench in solitary confinement.
Unfortunately, there were no bunks available in the women’s general housing unit. We were given plastic coffins to use as beds on the concrete floor of the day room instead.
Forty-five minutes after I curled up in my plastic coffin on the floor, a rotund, orange-bleached, Hispanic female jail guard stood in the day room, directly over the newly booked inmates trying to sleep in the plastic coffins, and hollered at the top of her lungs, “Breakfast, line up!”
Commotion around me, then another jail guard shaking me and asking if I want to get up and eat breakfast. Fuck no. What do you think I am, nuts? Night-night, dust mite, I’m going back to sleep in this plastic coffin.
I wake up to a stampede a few hours later, when the guards decide to turn all the inmates loose in the day room for an hour or so. One of the guards calls me up to the guard desk. She hands me a questionnaire and orders me to fill it out completely, and hand it back to her. Yes, right now.
What was she thinking — handing me that thing to fill out, when I’m all grumpy about being jailed despite having done nothing unlawful, and I haven’t had any real sleep to boot. Plus I skipped breakfast. Not a good time to get any serious answers out of me.
The questionnaire consisted of morality and ethics questions, with five choices as answers for each, as follows:
1 — Strongly disagree
2 — Disagree
3 — Uncertain
4 — Agree
5 — Strongly agree
We’ve all seen these sorts of questionnaires. Now, imagine you’ve just been jammed through a meat grinder of injustice, and let’s see what kind of answers you’d give to those assholes, questioning your morals and ethics like that.
It took me all of five seconds to complete the questionnaire. I took that dull, little golf pencil, and I put a big X in the square for 3 — Uncertain, all the way down, standing right there at the guard desk. Then I handed the questionnaire and the now-spent golf pencil back to the guard, and forgot all about it.
A month later, came the date of my sentencing.
I was shackled to a bunch of other female inmates, and we were placed into the equivalent of an animal-control truck for humans, for transportation to court. Upon arrival, we were unshackled and placed into a cage, located in a dungeon underneath the courthouse, to await our hearings.
When it was time for my sentencing, I was shackled and escorted by a guard into a secret elevator and taken to the fifth floor, to a small room behind the courtroom. There was a cage in that room. I was placed into the cage, and instead of unshackling me, the guard shackled me to the bars of the cage to await the arrival of Paul, my attorney.
When Paul showed up, he asked, “Why did you fill out that questionnaire the way you did? Colene’s pissed.”
Colene was the deputy attorney prosecuting me. Apparently, that questionnaire was supposed to determine whether I know right from wrong, and my uniform answer of Uncertain all the way down rendered it useless.
I just looked my attorney dead in the eye and stated, “I checked Uncertain all the way down on that questionnaire because nothing is certain, Paul.”
Because of my questionnaire being rendered useless to the court, Paul had to motion to postpone my sentencing for a month, while Colene figured out some other way to determine if I knew right from wrong, and to gather herself together enough to recommend a sentence lighter than death by hanging. Prosecutors have no appreciation whatsoever for a smart-ass defendant, not one iota. Not even if the aforementioned defendant is the funniest person the prosecutor ever met. Apparently, humor is not a mitigating factor when it comes to prison sentencing. Curiously enough, neither is post-secondary educational level.
Although the way the prosecution analyzed that questionnaire indicated otherwise, I do, as a matter of fact, know right from wrong. I am an intelligent, articulate, educated, law-abiding taxpayer. I did exactly what I was licensed to do by the state of Arizona, as outlined in the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act, and I was diligent to stay within the bounds of the law. It’s the state of Arizona that doesn’t know right from wrong, it’s the state of Arizona that has committed a crime, and it’s the state of Arizona that deserves punishment.
When all was said and done, I received the absolute mandatory minimum sentence, due to my blank rapsheet. In other words, I only got sentenced to a year in prison because I’ve never committed a crime. On my sentencing paperwork from the courthouse, it says right there at the bottom that my sentence was extremely mitigated due to absence of criminal record. The judge repeatedly threatened me with ten years in prison, and the prosecution just wanted to hang me and get it over with, but it’s hard to pull that off when the defendant hasn’t committed a crime.
I ended up doing eight months of my one-year sentence, before being booted out early for asking questions about profit margins on prisoners, and whether the astronomical cancer rate in the Arizona State Prison Complex may be correlated to carcinogenic, overprocessed, and spoiled prison food.
