Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
At the 131st Congress of Correction, the incarceration industry puts on a bizarre show. From execution jokes to soap -- without a rope -- it's a great place for networking.
Aug 27, 2001 | It's a hundred degrees in downtown Philly and the Pennsylvania Convention Center is on fire. But it has nothing to do with the weather, or with the electric fence display the Gallagher Security rep claims is "more interesting when it's on."
It has nothing to do with the burnout that can drive thin-skinned prison staff to suicide. And it has nothing to do with the protesters outside waving signs saying "Teach by Example," or with the grubby puppeteers across town, coming off yet another Mumia rally and gearing up for the next day's interruption of the American Correctional Association (ACA) meeting -- an act that will get 12 of their members arrested and incite one suited gentleman to say, "If they looked like you and me, maybe I'd listen."
No, the Pennsylvania Convention Center is on fire with the thrill of cheesy freebies, business card drawings and the 2001 Oldsmobile Silhouette some lucky prison worker is about to drive away in.
It won't be Vince Scott, a friendly rep for a Hackensack hardware firm who's busy taking down his concession. Unlike those giddily swarming the glorified paddy wagon, Scott hardly notices the grand-prize dash. Asked if he noticed the protesters perched outside the convention center for the last couple days, he dismisses them with similar lack of interest.
"They don't pertain to us," he says, adding, "We've been doing this for a few years." Protesters are an ultimately harmless side effect of doing prison business.
Besides, he says, "We're from New York, so it doesn't scare us."
Welcome to Philadelphia, cradle of liberty, birthplace of Botany 500, homeland to Hall and Oates. And a damn steamy place, besides. Especially in mid-August, when some 5,000 prison workers, vendors, groupies and their respective families chose to hold their 131st Congress of Correction. One of two conventions the American Correctional Association holds each year, it's an unrivaled networking and deal-making opportunity even for those whose business may on the surface seem unrelated to that of incarceration.
With such commercial exhibitors as Romaine Companies (makers of the ever-popular Shower Delicer enzyme shampoo), Correctional Cable TV, GlaxoSmithKline, "Soft Sheen" black hair care, Lexis-Nexis, Humane Restraint Inc., Verizon, TRW, Rit dye and Nescafé, and information tables from organizations such as the NRA, Habitat for Humanity, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and United Prison Ministries, the trade show is easily the Congress at its most surreal. But that's hardly the highlight of this, the largest gathering of corrections personnel you'll see outside of a George Bush fundraiser.
For the lucky corrections conventioneer, this trip to sweaty summertime Philly includes "The Philadelphia Story: An Overview," a tour through the historic sites of our nation's first capital, including the Betsy Ross House; Independence Hall; the Liberty Bell; and Eastern State Penitentiary, America's oldest prison building and famous former home to Willie Sutton and Al Capone, perhaps best known today as the insane asylum in Terry Gilliam's apocalyptic thriller "Twelve Monkeys."
For those who just can't leave work behind, there are enlightening side trips to Eastern State's modern-day descendants, the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (named for two guards murdered at the city's now-defunct Holmesburg Prison, once known for subjecting inmates to gruesome medical experiments, now better known as the setting for the prison riot in "Up Close and Personal"), the Philadelphia Federal Detention Center ("located within the historic district" and "bound on two sides by buildings listed on the Historic Register," brags the brochure) and the State Correctional Institution at Chester (proudly, the state's first tobacco-free facility).
And then there's the Corrections Film Festival, where video entries include first-place winners "Killing Time: HIV/AIDS in Prison," from the Alaska Department of Corrections, and "A Strategy to Increase HIV/AIDS Medication Adherence in Correctional Settings," from the Albany Medical Center's AIDS Program. (Runners-up include "The Wildest Show in the South," about the famous inmate rodeos at Louisiana's Angola state pen, and the scintillating short titled "The Touch," a "Justice Files"-type dramatization of the true story of a corrections officer who goes to jail after a female inmate seduces him -- watch out, Susan Smith!)
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