The Desert IndependentTM

Serving Blythe, California & the Desert Regions of the Southwest

Call Me “Maestro”

Bob Jensen returns & reports his experiences of the last 5 months.

By Robert E. Jensen
The Desert Independent

Well, that wasn’t an entirely unpleasant five months but definitely an experience I don’t care to repeat in the future. For those not reading that PV Times back in September, I was convicted of a DUI as a result of having Valium in my system while driving in August of 2007. In August of 2008, it took a jury two days to determine if I was truly guilty and, in the end, they had no choice but to convict. I wasn’t too agreeable with the verdict, but I lived with it. Learn from my mistake. It doesn’t matter whether you take and over-the-counter medication, a street drug or a legal prescription medication – anything that impairs your driving is a DUI. There was a case of a gentleman who accidently gave himself too much insulin and it affected his reflexes. Guess what – impaired driving. As it was read to the jury, the law also does not care if you intentionally impaired yourself or were not aware that you were impaired. Anything that affects your driving reflexes is impairment. It is a far stricter standard than that of alcohol intoxication where there is a cutoff of .08 on a breathalyzer. You can be impaired by even one or two beers, but there it would be considered a “Wet and Reckless” charge. This is especially true for the elderly who may take sleeping pills and unknowingly still have impaired reflexes in the morning. If you are taking meds that affect your central nervous system, don’t drive. Period.

As is, the judge did sentence me to 6 months on an ankle bracelet, weekends in jail, a $3,000 fine and no license for three years. The ankle bracelet would cost $400 per month and the State of California would use my condo for a jail cell. On my pension, I really couldn’t afford it nor the fine so I requested Judge Christenson to simply allow me to serve out my sentence in jail and stay and extra month to negate the fine. I figured if Martha Stewart had to guts to go to prison and get it over with, I could report to the Indio Jail. That, plus having had to work with the gentlemen in the District Office for two years, I could deal with petty criminals.

Sure sounded like a good idea until the nice Deputies put on the orange jumpsuit and shackles. Only then did I think perhaps this wasn’t such a great idea. As it turn out, it was pretty unpleasant but an adventure nevertheless. After two days in General Population in Indio, they pulled my out of the tank and made me a Trusty. God works in mysterious ways. I couldn’t get elected as a Trustee to the PVUSD Board so he made me a different sort of one. I got to put on a green jumpsuit and joined 13 other inmates as a custodian, laundry worker, warehouse person, kitchen helper and all-around gopher. My fellow trustees were nonviolent offenders – white collar crimes and DUIs who were also not career criminals, just men who had made a mistake in their lives. All of us were sentenced to several months so we got to know each other well. I got to know a general contractor, a former Sergeant-Major in Great Britain’s Coldstream Guards, an industrial engineer, a computer hacker, a real-estate tycoon and some other very interesting people.

Make no mistake about it. Jail is not Austwich, Abu-Gahraib, the Gulag Archepeligo or – for that matter – Hogan’s Heroes. There are some people who do not belong there. There are also some people – no matter the nature of the crime – should never be let out to prey on society again. There are the mentally ill and those that are faking it. There are the PC’s – the child molesters, the snitches, the ex-gang members and former law enforcement officials gone bad. The Deputies have earned my utmost respect as theirs is a very demanding and sometimes dangerous job for which they are not paid enough.

I had always felt that Sheriff Joe Arpayo of Phoenix was an anachronism with his tent cities for inmates and chain gangs as well. Now I feel quite differently. Inmates need to work. I was fortunate enough to be placed in a situation where I could work my way to exhaustion 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. I could sleep like a log all night. The days went my slowly, but the weeks went by like a breeze. I could listen to the inmates in the tiers, tanks and administrative segregation scream, sing and make noise all night long because they had lost their circadian rhythm of sleep. Nightmarish.

It may sound strange, but it was also kind of tough to leave when my time was up. I was helping some younger inmates study for their GED exams, doing a bit of AA counseling for others and spent the last two weeks nursemaiding an old “Cholo” going through withdrawals after ten straight years of heroin addiction. To clean up after a grown man who has lost control of all bodily functions for a week due to a drug addiction would make anyone think twice about ever trying such an addictive substance. There was also a kind of bonding not unlike basic training in the military. You got to know your cellmates well and – no – there were no tattoos, diseases, fights nor group hugs in the showers. It was tough saying goodbye.

Everyone got a knickname when they first came to the Trustee Tank. Because I was the oldest, they initially called me “Woodstock” then “Chaplain” with the AA bit, then “Professor” because of my advanced degrees, then “Maestro” because I was teaching and tutoring the GED’s. My favorite came about though, whenever I won at checkers or dominoes. The Hispanics would call me “Pinche Hombre” and the rest would simply call me “F---king Bob!”

I kinda preferred “F—king Bob!”.

I know the gentlemen in the District Office have called me worse.