A Hundred Grand an Hour….

It was a curious spectacle of reality and cynicism. Yes, the killer was at last shackled, and led off to prison.

He was also free four hours later, after Daddy, senior federal judge Salvador Casellas, forked up 400,000$ in bail.

It raises questions. Had Pablo Casellas ever seen the place, the Bayamón Regional Prison? Most likely not. It’s out of the way—no reason to happen on the place, you have to seek it out. 

But in fact I have seen the place, and not because I sought it. If you take the público (the lowest form of mass transit in Puerto Rico) you frequently are sidetracked there. The van will have eighteen people crammed airlessly in it, and will slide from Cataño through Juana Matos. For every victim the van discharges, another is picked up. On one side is a ramshackle community sprung up on a flood plain—squatters who have been there generations. On the other side, a housing project routinely raided for narco-traffickers.

You creep toward Puente Blanco, and then pass B. Fernández, distributor of the island’s number one beer. And then someone calls out: ¡La Regional!

You’ve suspected it, of course. There are days when the público fills up quite quickly—not waiting in the 90-degree heat for those 18 passengers.

Mostly, it’s the faces that give them away. Tight, wary, constricted. Also, of course, weary.

The body as well—add 10 pounds for every five years after age 25. 

And the sex—always women.

They tend to come in pairs—mother and girlfriend. Occasionally trios—a baby that will be passed from the back of the van to the front when the van bumps its shockless way down the pot-holed road to the prison.

At that point, 16 of the 18 people get out of the van. 

Is any prison pretty? Maybe in Norway, but this is as dreary as are our public schools. The only difference? The razor wire atop the 16-feet cyclone fence. 

I used to contemplate it, the lives of these women going to see their son or boyfriend in jail. Passing the baby, I would peer into its face. A boy, and he would be here in twenty years.

Rather—there, inside the prison.

A girl, and she would be here, in the van with me….

It was intense heat, humidity, and silence—those mornings in the van. No one talked, no one chatted. And this, on a compulsively loquacious island.

The mothers dressed drably, the girlfriends coquettishly. They started in a group to the front gate of the prison, opening their purses for inspection by the guard who awaited them.

The van would turn around—the pavement had petered out, it was now dirt, if not mud. I would stretch, lunge for the window, breathe.

I was going to write, today, about the judge. There are good reasons to suggest that he resigns. He was at the crime scene, and that scene was altered. But my mind goes back to those far-gone days when I was number three of four people crammed in one of the banks of the mini-van.

Yes, Casellas fils has seen more than I of La Regional. But I have seen by a stretch much more of the people who fill it up, who languish there, who are forgotten except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when mother and girlfriend wake at five in the morning to await the two or three públicos down from the mountains to a flat, flood-prone, sun-drenched hell.