Mark Arsenault is a Shamus-nominated mystery writer, a journalist, a runner, hiker, political junkie and eBay fanatic who collects memorabilia from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. His new novel is LOOT THE MOON, the second book in the Billy Povich series that began with GRAVEWRITER, a noir thriller praised for a fusion of suspense, humor and human tenderness. With 20 years of experience as a print reporter, Arsenault is one of those weird cranks who still prefers his news on paper. His Web site is: www.markarsenault.net
Arsenault’s newspaper series from his prison interviews is on-line here:
http://www.projo.com/extra/2004/craigprice/content/part1.htm

Escaping a Bleak Place

There’s one entry point into Rhode Island’s Supermax state prison, through the kind of steel doors you might find in a bank. The visiting room is just like the movies-two rows of plastic chairs facing each other, separated by a window. There are telephones on each side of the glass.

Though the prison sits a few hundred yards from a shopping plaza, it felt like a foreign country, the kind that barely tolerates visitors. The building looked worn down, but it was spotlessly clean because work details from the minimum-security jug down the road were constantly cleaning it. I noticed tiny handprints on my side of the glass where a child had reached for a father on the other side.

I waited maybe five minutes, then a door opened on the other side of glass and massive Craig Price shuffled in, shackled at the ankles and cuffed with his hands at his waist. I recognized him instantly from newspaper photographs. In 1987, at age 13, he had murdered a neighbor, slipping into her house and stabbing her dozens of times. He got away with that crime for two years, and then repeated the act, killing a single mom and her two daughters in a horrific night of bloodshed. He accidentally stabbed his own finger during the attack, and the wound betrayed him as the killer.

Craig Price

He was infamous in Rhode Island, portrayed on TV and in the papers as a mindless, monstrous, 275-pound killing machine.

And after 15 years locked up in silence, he had agreed to speak. I was the first newspaper reporter to interview him.

He sat down, took the phone and immediately asked me, “Did you sign that piece of paper when you came in?”

I was prepared for nearly anything he might say to me-but not for that. “Um, I signed something,” I stammered. Naturally, I had just signed where the correctional officer had told me to sign. Who reads that stuff?
He frowned and gave me the bad news. “The cops do that sometimes. You just consented to a strip search on the way out.”

Huh? Consented to a what?

No way was I taking off my pants in state prison. Nothing wrecks an afternoon like a methodical cavity search. What the hell did I sign?

Price let me hang in terror for a few seconds, then broke into a wide grin and said, “Naaa, man, I’m just messing with you.” He shook with playful laughter.

I was stunned by the disconnect-the most feared and despised prisoner in the modern history of the state…had just played little joke on me. And it was kind of funny, too, outside of the circumstances. These facts were hard to square.

That 75-minute interview was the first of my 50 visits with Price over two years, while I worked on a newspaper series on his life, his crimes, and his legal efforts to be set free. (He does not have a life sentence; the law at the time he was arrested required all juvenile prisoners to be released at age 21. Prosecutors charged Price for fights and other crimes in prison, which pushed his release date to around 2020.)

I eventually came to think of the visiting room as a two-way mirror that looked into another dimension, which most people never see. Throughout my interviews I had many moments of disconnect. He told me comical anecdotes about his childhood and of the wacky characters he has met in prison. At the same time, his crimes are unspeakable, and that fact is immutable. There were days I could not reconcile the person with the acts.

To make sense of the story, I wrote. I wrote my newspaper series, and then kept on writing. The stuff from those interviews leftover in my imagination became my third novel, Gravewriter, published in 2006.

Since then, if I really want to understand something, I write about it. Something about my brutal two-finger pounding seems to shake loose my thoughts. The horrible things I learned in prison led to a bleak place, but I wrote myself out of it.

Buy the book here.

Police officers face many difficult challenges during the course of their careers, challenges most people would avoid at all costs. For example, exchanging a few rounds of live ammunition with a doped up bad guy, or how about working really long, odd hours, or  the fear of losing everything you own if you make a bad decision in that split second you have to make it.

And there’s – getting slapped, hit, punched, scratched, spit on, stabbed, cut, cursed at, having urine or feces thrown on you, puked on, bled on, wearing goofy clothing and heavy gear, having demanding supervisors, and seeing people hurt, sick, and even die in front of your eyes knowing there’s not a darn thing you can do about it. The danger level of the job is extremely high and getting worse every day. All it takes is a couple visits to this blog on any given Friday to know how dangerous the job really is.

And then there’s the ever popular low pay, little time off, missing holiday time with your family (if you still have one), high suicide rate, alcoholism, drug abuse, and divorce.

Still, through all the pain and agony and odd baggage that’s attached to every police officer, there’s always someone out there who’ll agree to enter into a relationship with the poor saps. And that’s a good thing, right? Well, not always, but we’ll get into that in another blog post First, I want to mention the piece I wrote earlier in the week, the one about writers writing cops and guns incorrectly. Let me clue you in on a little secret, you don’t always get the romances right, either.

There are three basic types of cops in the world of fiction – the ones in a relationship, the sad sack who couldn’t hang on to a spouse if she were a conjoined twin, and the cop who’s so screwed up emotionally even mental hospitals lock their doors when they see him coming. Everyone writes those scenarios pretty well. Of course, some write them better than others, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

Well, there’s another kind, a fourth relationship that’s not really talked about a lot. Part of the exit speech we presented to new recruits leaving the police academy consisted of a few basic warnings about the potential career-ending temptations cops are sometimes faced with, like access to tons and tons of unreported cash, drugs, alcohol, the fast life, prostitutes, abuse of power, and badge bunnies.

Badge bunnies? What the heck are badge bunnies? That was my reaction, too, when I first heard about them during the police academy superintendent’s “Welcome to the police officer family” speech during my last day at the police academy.

* (Please don’t shoot the messenger. I’m not being sexist, just relaying some very real information. Of course this does work both ways; there are male badge bunnies, too, but not as many).

Well, the term badge bunny is often defined as (from Urban Dictionary):

– Badge Bunny: A female that goes out with only cops and firemen.

– Badge Bunny: A female who enjoys “boinking” and actively pursuing sexual relationships with cops.

– Badge Bunny: A female, usually of barely legal age, who spends her time chasing police officers, offering her “services” in hopes of gaining status among her badge bunny friends.

New cops, the ones fresh out of the academy, are the officers who are most vulnerable to an attack from the vicious badge bunnies. They can’t help it; the recruits are young, good looking, and freshly muscled from weeks and weeks of exercise and other training. They have shiny new equipment, sharply creased uniforms, tight haircuts, but more importantly, they have guns and badges!

Graduation day at the academy is like sending fifty or so Roadrunners out into a world of Wle E. Coyotes. Badge Bunnies know the rookie’s weaknesses because they’ve studied the uniformed species for a long time.

How does a badge bunny attack? They’re successful in various ways. For the sake of time and space I’ll list  a few their deadly methods of operation.

– The fake car breakdown, needing an officer’s assistance.

– The fake prowler call, answering the door in a sexy outfit, or nothing at all.

– The grocery store maneuver. You couldn’t reach the Special K even though you’re a good foot taller and eighty pounds heavier than the cop. Yeah, right.

– Tapping the brake pedal when they pass. The rookie officer sees the flashing brake lights each time the car passes his patrol car. Hmm, she must be signaling him. Is she in trouble? Or…

– Speeding, knowing she has all the ammo she needs to get out of the ticket.

– Hanging out in cop bars.

– Hanging out in restaurants, coffee shops, etc., frequented by graveyard shift cops.

– Hanging out at sporting events, especially softball games played by cop teams.

– Wearing tee shirts with logos that read, I Love Cops.

Relationships with badge bunnies rarely last. In fact most of them rarely make it into the light of day. These are secret relationships – brief meetings, encounters, and…well, I’ll leave it at that. I know, your next question is, “Where do they meet for their “encounters?” How about…

– patrol cars – inside and outside (lots of things to hold onto – light bars, spotlights, handcuffs…)

-surveillance vans

– police station warehouses and property rooms

– department offices

– hotels

– small airport runways (for the deputies working the rural areas)

– SWAT vehicles

Well, you get the idea.

Many badge bunnies keep a scorecard and move on quickly to the next guy with a gun. But, sometimes the relationship turns into a lasting thing with marriage, kids, and everything. But not often.

I had a brief statement that I offered to the recruits I trained when I was a field training officer. It went something like this, “Keep your gun in your holster and you won’t have to worry about shooting the wrong person.” Now, there were two messages there, right? They never, ever listened to the hidden meaning.

Hell, I could read their thoughts as I made my statement. Their thought – “Be vewy, vewy quiet. I’m hunting wabbits.”

* I’m only referring to the bad bunnies in this post – the scorekeepers. There are plenty of folks who are simply attracted to a certain kind of person, and they are wonderful folks who have wonderful, lasting relationships!