The third track off the late John Prine’s 1973 album “Sweet Revenge” starts off with the lyric: “It was Christmas in prison and the food was real good, we had turkey and pistols carved out of wood.”
Prine’s allegorical tale of Christmas incarcerated, he once said, is about “a person being somewhere like a prison, in a situation they don’t want to be in.”
But for some, Christmas behind bars is a literal reality. And Prine, with his enduring finger on the pulse of the American experience, got a few things right.
“We eat good,” said Dan Bowman, a trustee inmate at the La Plata County Jail.
Although there are no wooden pistols, the jail inmates did eat turkey for Christmas dinner – 24 of the birds, to be precise.
Tensions can run high this time of year, say the men living in the trustee inmate pod.
“It’s still hard being without grandkids, and kids, (my) wife, my dogs,” said Salomon Gonzales.
The inmates who work in the kitchen are responsible for producing about 600 meals each day. On Christmas, everybody gets seconds, at least, and the kitchen staff has been cooking all week to get ready.
“Everybody in here gets pretty heavy,” said Robert Kervin, a trustee inmate who works in the kitchen. “It’s a stressful time for everybody because we’re away from our families. We try to bring the best we can for everybody. We make plenty of extras.”
The dinner menu is composed of turkey and stuffing with gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans, candied yams with marshmallows, dinner rolls and cherry pie. Inmates also receive snack bags – an uncommon treat – filled with trail mix, popcorn, hot cocoa and other sweets.
To experience the holidays behind bars is, seemingly, an exercise in finding joy amid sorrow. Snow fell outside fluorescently lit halls of the detention center, but most of the men inside wouldn’t see it.
John Cochran said he would be playing in the snowy mountains if he weren’t in jail.
“It’s hard on us and it’s hard on our families,” Kervin said. “The most we have in here is each other. When we work hard together for each other, everybody in here gets taken care of. We eat well.”
Although the trustee inmates say they all tend to get along pretty well, they noted that conflicts tend to arise around the holidays at a disproportionate rate.
The work of cooking an expansive Christmas meal is a welcome distraction from hardship of missing family around the holidays.
“Working in the kitchen takes a lot of that away,” said Jesse Birch. “It gives you focus when there isn’t any focus.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
Shane Benjamin contributed to this story.
