About a year after the meeting with the NACT Council, they had a general membership meeting in the chapel.  I sat at the back of the chapel so I would be available to answer any questions that might come up.  One of the leaders of the group went to the microphone, made very critical remarks about how the administration ran the prison, and then announced to one and all that the chapel supervisor and I punished inmates by using a cattle prod on them so they would pee their pants and lose their limbs.  My mouth fell open.  No one laughed.  They all knew the speaker was a little “witko”, the Lakota word for crazy.

Later that week one of our chapel orderlies was getting a drink out of the water fountain in the chapel, when it suddenly blew up on him so he had water all over the front of his pants.  The supervisor suggested he go to the cell hall and tell every inmate he saw that we had the cattle prod out again.  Being rather shy, he didn’t act on that idea.

Mary Montoya