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I was an inmate in 2010 at the lake county jail. When I was arrested I was 19 years old. I am a female who graduated from high school with good grades, never ditched school in my life, worked hard and started going to college. I was a student at Purdue Calumet University. I am currently almost finished with my 2 year degree even. I'm not stupid or uneducated. I am not any kind of "low-life criminal" whatsoever. For those of you who don't know, in lake county jail only has ONE holding pen for women. ONE. There are like 50 pens for the men, but only ONE for the women. I was in there the week of super bowl Sunday too which didn't make it any better. The holding pen was crowding with over 30 women when I was in there. We were treated like C-R-A-P. We are still citizens of the U.
S. and we still have rights. It was winter and they strip you from all of your clothes including bra and underwear, make you wear smocks which are barely covering your body, and then throw you into a dirty nasty cold stone pit and expect you to be warm. They ignore your medical calls on the speaker and ignore you when you're trying to find out your own information. They don't give you blankets in there, not even in the winter. If you ask for one, you will be treated even worse, no matter what your charge was.
When I was in there there was many different types of people in there for many different reasons. The majority of the women int here at the time believe it or not were just average hardworking women who were brought in for unpaid bills from over 3-7 years ago or those arrested on warrants they had no idea of for a missed court date on something they had to pay. Some were in there for being drunk, some who had addictions, etc.. Regardless of their crime they still have RIGHTS. None of these women who were in there were in for killing or hurting someone. I felt bad for a lot of the women who looked well put together and so out of place for a medicals bills or something of the sort just sitting in the corner freaking out that her life is over and crying her eyes out. When you hit rock bottom you don't still need to be treated like dirt. These women weren't acting rude or anything. I was in the pen for 6 days. In their little rule book it says that you shouldn't have to sit there any longer than 3 days in the pen. They don't care about the rules. I was frantically trying to figure out how I am going to pay bond and court costs and get my car out of the impound fast so my debt doesn't keep rising and need to get a hold of the outside world to do that. They only let you have one free 5 minute phone call when you get there and that's not enough to take care of things. When you call collect I think it charged you $15 a phone call and even then the officers would be shutting the phones off on you so you can't call out. Being in school and not being able to take care of things outside jail felt like my life was slowly rotting and being ruined.
During the week I was in there, one of the days we got this person in our cell. It was a transgender person and dressed like a female. The officers thought that this person has a pack of cigarettes that he/she was hiding in his/her pants. This person had no cigarettes whatsoever, it just so happened to be his, ahem, "package" which they though was a pack of cigarettes. They screamed at the person over the speaker phone ordering to take the pack out of his/her pants and the person and everyone in the cell was trying to tell the officers desperately that they didn't have a pack of cigarettes. The officer threatened to come to the cell to search and the person agreed to it and said search me but the officer never came. Instead, the officer told everyone in the cell over the speaker that if the pack was not turned in then everyone in the cell would go without necessities. We all tried and tried to tell the officers but you know what they did? For the next 3 days they shut the speaker off and wouldn't answer to anyone, not even newly booked women, stopped bringing us food for 3 days, shut the phones off so we couldn't call out, stopped giving us toilet paper, and "feminine napkins". The worse part was I was in a cell with over 30 women at 19 years old and I started my period and the officers were completely ignoring us. I'm sitting over here bleeding all over myself being humiliated in front of everyone crying my eyes out from humiliation and becoming desperate ringing the button trying to ask the officer for some toilet paper AT LEAST. The toilet was broken, didn't flush so we were all forced to sit there and smell the pile of everyone else human feces for days on end. The only thing that held me together was a saying written on the wall in huge letters which said "Prepare To Be Tortured, Be Strong."
I hope that every one of you who are on these comments talking bad about all the people who had to suffer through the same experiences I had to suffer through and those poor women around me, I hope that YOU some day get the chance to suffer through what I had to go through.