Outside Looking In

Sweet Hitchhiker

I had to run down to Port Arthur this afternoon, and like every other time I go that way – not all that often, actually – the bright yellow signs just before one gets to the prison complexes off of Highway 69, the ones that say PRISON AREA: DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS, jumped out at me. Those are signs that sort of insult your intelligence, intentionally or not.

Is there any instance of an escaped prisoner actually getting away by thumbing a ride? In the last couple of decades, anyway? If so, I’d like to meet the person who gave him the ride, the one who thought it would be a good idea to stop and pick up this somewhat desperate-looking person, probably in some kind of state-issued jumpsuit, if not actually prison stripes.

Who the hell hitchhikes anymore at all? Or picks hitchhikers up? Seems like a dangerous proposition nowadays, either way; in a prison area or not.

I have always kind of been ambivalent about those prisons in Mid-County, at least as far as them being counted on as an economic asset. Which they were, at the time they were being built. It is sort of like saying another World War would be great for the economy. I do have a neighbor (and his wife) who work at the state prison, I think it is, and they are great people and don’t seem to mind the job. I know another guy, an electrician, who had a cushy job at the county prison but quit, because being around the prisoners all the time creeped him out.

Unless one lives right by a prison at the time there is an escape, I don’t buy the argument that having prisons around makes an area less safe. Whenever I am in Mid-County in the vicinity of the prisons, it’s not the guys on the inside who worry me. It’s all the everyday crazy bastards who live down there, running around loose.

(In roughly a five square mile area between State Highway 69 and Old Pt. Arthur Rd. in mid Jefferson County, there are two youth prisons, a county prison, a state prison, and way off by itself, a federal penitentiary. I think I have that right.)

*****