"Bristol Zoo Gardens now has a special enclosure for Humans (Homo sapiens), featuring the world’s most widespread species." -- Humans on Display at Bristol Zoo by Scott Beale (Laughing Squid 2009-09-01)
When the governor called, I have to admit I thought he was kidding. At least once I understood him, I thought he was kidding. After all this time that Austrian accent still throws me sometimes.
And anybody who's seen him play with that giant knife while talking about the Legislature knows what a great kidder he is. Even after I figured out that he meant zoos instead of Zeus, I still thought that his plan to turn California's prison system into a tourist attraction was a joke.Not that we shouldn't be ready to try anything to ease the Golden State's financial woes.
You've probably heard we're in the hole. Depending who you ask, we've got a budget deficit between $26 billion and $41 billion. As Sen. Everett Dirksen once said, "a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money." Whatever, it's a big hole.Once somebody thought better of furloughing the prison guards, we had to do something. We tried selling off junk in state warehouses, but you couldn't have picked a worse time, economy-wise. Everybody's looking for a bargain these days. How much could we really be expected to make?
People give away better stuff on Craigslist than we had to sell. Besides, how many people are looking for a baseball bat in "fair condition"? It didn't help that every blowhard editorial-writer and stand-up comedian made fun of us. "Great California Garage Sale." What were we thinking?I guess the governor was a little disappointed when the garage sale brought in only $1.6 million ("a million here, a million there," I hear you thinking, "pretty soon it's hardly worth getting up in the morning"). I didn't think it was so bad, really, for staplers and pencils and old office equipment. It's not like we were selling the Los Angeles Coliseum or something.
Anyway, not my department. I run the California Travel & Tourism Commission. Or used to. Now I mostly run the prison system. Or, as it is officially called now, the Department of Travel, Tourism, Corrections & Rehabilitation. You can thank the guards' union for that one.
Even though I was skeptical, I threw myself into realizing the governor's vision. Honestly, I had never paid much attention to jails before, but when I thought a little I realized that he was right, as usual: prisons are a lot like "Zeus."
To save time, we lifted at lot of material and displays from a zoo in England that had a pioneering exhibit on the subject of homo sapiens: "The human is one of the world’s most widespread species, and is present on all continents. In adolescence, the offspring adopt a more nocturnal lifestyle and engage in ritualised activities of drinking liquids and dancing to fermented rhythmical sounds, which scientists believe may help them to find a mate.”
And: “The human diet is very adaptable to regional crop varieties and personal taste, with some groups able to live almost exclusively on chipped potatoes and sugary drinks."
And particularly aptly: “Groups of humans are often fed by unrelated individuals in exchange for tokens made of paper, metal and plastic – behaviour which can frequently be seen inside this enclosure."
In California we're very lucky because we have so many human varietals to put on display, some, like Charles Manson and Phil Spector, that people will pay to see.
Although two-thirds of our prisoners are of black or hispanic origin, 25% are foreigners from just about everywhere on the planet. With 170,000 inmates to choose from, most of them nonviolent drug offenders, it wasn't hard to find participants for various displays and exhibits. It's already beginning to look like instead of spending $10 billion a year, or about $49,000 for each adult inmate, we can make this thing turn a profit.At first we thought people would just look from a safe distance, but folks are very interactive these days, so we've been able to help close the budget deficit by adding all kinds of special packages
that let tourists interact with residents, by hanging around the exercise yard, say, or by dining with mean-looking but carefully selected "criminals" in the cafeteria. We were worried about including the maximum security Pelican Bay State Prison in the program, because not much goes on there, but we've had unexpected success with a premium tour that includes several days in solitary confinement. And all before we've even had the opportunity to complete a deal with Disney to turn San Quentin into an interactive theme park.I Went to San Quentin and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
Our biggest problems weren't with finding fun things to do or with arranging thrilling but safe interactions between inhabitants and visitors, but with infrastructure. As you might expect, most lockups were situated originally without giving much thought to tourist amenities. Since the prison facilities themselves are packed with twice as many inhabitants as they were designed for, we had to come up with enough food, water, parking and lodging off campus to accommodate what has turned out to be a flood of visitors. In the end the governor's plan has not only been a boon to the treasury and to the prisoners who have been provided with all kinds of opportunities to polish their social and acting skills, but also to the 36 local communities all around the state that have benefited from new roads, water and sewer systems, motels, and eateries, nearly all of them built by volunteers from the jails.
And the prisoners' gift shops have been doing land-office business with cups, hats, t-shirts, prison model kits, uniforms, clubs, handcuffs and other paraphernalia. Demand for the Taser Toddler, which delivers a dramatic but usually non-lethal jolt of electricity, have been through the roof.
As the governor himself put it, turning the prisons into "Zeus" has been a "win-win-win" for everybody involved.
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