The White Collar Offender

The next man the officers brought me from the holding cell looked like a business man wearing an inmate costume, the good-natured boss at the office party dressed up in a horizontal black-and-white jumpsuit to give everyone a laugh. He wore a gold wedding band and his slate grey hair was neatly combed. He wrote in his wife as his emergency contact person as I filled his name and number in on the dental paperwork. What was he here for? I wondered to myself, perhaps waiting bond on some white-collar offense? An accountant caught with his hand in the company cookie jar? I pictured his wife at their large five-bedroom home in a planned community built around a golf course. She would be blond, with a body well-toned from private tennis lessons. She probably didn't work I decided. I wondered if she felt guilty, if he had to steal to give her everything she wanted.

I moved through the dental portion of the examination quickly, no blackened, rotting, unsalvageable meth mouth teeth to document in detail. At the beginning of the physical, between asking about psych meds and how much an inmate drinks I am required to ask if an inmate is locked up for a violent crime or sexual assault. I asked the question quickly, as a formality. When I didn't hear him answer I had to look up to see him nod his head "yes." "This one," he said. I looked at him, confused. "Contributing to the delinquency of a minor," he said quietly, looking at me to make sure I understood. I realized he wasn't just caught buying beer for his teenagers to have a party in the basement, he meant contributing to the sexual delinquency of a minor. It struck me as strange that he still put his wife down as his emergency contact person. If my husband (a hypothetic individual at this point) was locked up for, well, I didn't know exactly what, but some sort of sexual act involving the underage, he sure as hell had better now put me as the emergency contact person. I wondered if the woman I saw on the edge of the gold course believed he was innocent, if she was in denial, or if she would stand by him regardless.

"So, this is a man who gets turned on by kids," I thought to myself as I continued the examination. He took no meds and had no special medical needs. Judging by the crimson undertone to the skin on his face and squiggles of burst capillaries sprayed across his nose and down the flanks of his cheeks I knew he was a drinker. I looked at him closely, searching his eyes, his face, his movements for some clue of his deviancy, something I could look for in others to tip me off, but found nothing. As I stood behind the business man in the jail jumpsuit I became aware of his small frame and wondered how jail life was treating him. I wrote a few more notes before looking up at the infirmary officer, "He's done, you can return him to his housing unit," I said, and wondered if his wife would drive down in her SUV bail him out.