by Wayne Rideout

Created on: November 14, 2008   Last Updated: December 20, 2008

Becoming Great

Mark 10:35-45

I was exactly one month into my new job at the State Correctional Institution, Pittsburgh, when the lockdown occurred. A lockdown simply means that all the inmates in the prison must remain locked in their cells until a security situation is resolved. This normally makes it easier on the Correctional Officers, but the other side of that is that there are no inmates to work in the large institutional kitchen that feeds the 1500 or so inmates. All those people locked in their cells and hungry, with lots of time to think about it could create a few problems.

When I arrived at my work station my supervisor, called an all-hands meeting. "Today we are going to help in the kitchen," she stated matter-of-factly. "I expect everybody to make the best of it, and show the Corrections staff that we are team players." The admonition was necessary because we are contractors, providing drug and alcohol addiction treatment for inmates, and we are not necessarily bound by Department of Corrections rules.

By the time I arrived at the kitchen, it was a beehive of activity. Blue-suited food service staff who are normally supervisors of inmate workers had pitched in and were busy cooking and fetching. The rest of us were technical staff and contractors, dressed either in khaki uniforms, or business casual. We were put to work on the assembly line filling bags with breakfast, to be distributed on the cell blocks. For the next few hours, I stuffed bread into plastic bags, while others passed brown paper bags down the line to be filled sequentially with milk, cereal, fruit, bread, utensils, and the little restaurant-style packets of peanut butter and jelly. The filled bags, fifty at a time, were loaded onto carts and wheeled to the cell blocks for distribution.

The day went on that way with an occasional break to have some prison coffee (which is pretty bad, by the way). After assembling lunch, and sweeping up, I was looking for something to do, and accosted a supervisor. "How about if I wash some pots in the back?" I asked. He agreed, and explained how to use the commercial sinks, with the automatic soap dispensers. "You might want to wear one of those smocks, to protect your clothes," he added. I found a white smock in the closet, and noticed that it was marked in large dark letters on the back, D.O.C. It was a smock one of the prisoners would have worn.

I filled the sinks with suds, and started washing. A few of my co-workers joined me, to rinse. I had a fleeting

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