How Crime-Scene Clean-up Works

Cleaning up crime scenes is a niche industry that's both lucrative and messy. This episode, Josh and Chuck take a look at how crime-scene clean-up works.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and uh that makes the
Stuff you Should Know freshly shaven. Mm hmm. I got

(00:22):
rid of the beard. Yeah, I cleaned up this crime
scene of the face, your hair sticking on a really
weird way? Is it out from my hat? Thank you?
Now it's even crazier. Please don't like, lick your thumb
and come over like mommies to do the I should
say for those of you who might be experiencing some
sort of alarm or terror right now. Chuck kept the goatee.

(00:43):
He just shaved the beard. Part of the parts that
made it a beard, I guess the burnside mutton chops yeah,
and the neck fuzz Yeah. Looking good, Thank you, Chuck.
Have you ever seen a movie called Curdled No, it's
a little sleeper produced by one Quentin Tarantino. It's about

(01:04):
this very quiet, kind of demure woman who um gets
a job as a crime scene clean up person. It's
the girl from pulp fiction the cab driver, right. I
believe she. I believe she was the taxi driver who
drove Bruce Willis around after the boxing match from Pulp Fiction.
Oh really heard of that movie. I haven't seen it,
but I think that's her. It's worth seeing, is it.

(01:25):
But now that i've I've read this crime scene cleanup
article on our fair site how stuff works dot com. Um,
I realized just how far off the mark some of
the details were on that was it pretty far? Yeah,
a little bit. Have you seen Sunshine Cleaning? No, but
from the previous that one looks pretty far off the
mark to like I remember seeing them carrying out like

(01:46):
a mattress and just like you know, um, Mrs Brady
spring cleaning type outfits, you remember that was she had
like the little de rag and she had like the
little clam diggers rolled up and like some converse on,
just like cute is a button. That was one of
the jokes of the scenes. Actually, they were carrying out
this Amy Adams and the other girl carrying out this
nasty like bloody mattress and one of them dropped her

(02:08):
end and the other one fell on the bloody stain,
and it was just like it's really good movie though,
actually was it? Yeah? That's great? Is it by the
people who made a little Miss Sunshine or am I
just confusing that because the name it's a little indie
though Alan Arkin was in it, so maybe so I
wonder it's good. All right, Well, um, both of these
movies are utter frauds when it comes to the details,

(02:30):
right chuck uh yeah for the most part. Okay, let's
talk about crime scene clean up, the real stuff, because
there's nothing cute or about it. It's actually horrific work
and it takes a very specific kind of person and
the those people last in average of about eight months
before they get burned out in this business, right yeah, alright,
So it's actually called it's it's part of the cleaning industry,

(02:53):
and the it's a niche part of the cleaning industry,
very niche, not very heavily marketed in traditional channels. Ext
it's not how it works. Um, but it's called CTSD
con Crime and Trauma Scene decontamination, right and um, basically
what it is is it is a cleaning service on steroids.

(03:14):
There's no Mrs Brady outfits. You're wearing full bio hazard
has matt suits, no French Maids going on here, nothing
like that, because you're dealing with some really dangerous stuff.
You're dealing with um blood which often feature appropriately enough
blood borne pathogens. Um, you're cleaning up meth labs. Yeah,
that's um. And a lot of times you're you're um.

(03:37):
And we should probably warn people this. This is gonna
get a little graphic here. You can do what I'm
seeing without being a little graphic, right, But I mean
you're cleaning up like there may not be a body
there anymore, but you're picking up pieces of bone that
the the crime scene investigators missed. Um, you're scraping brain
off of walls. It's not normal work, right, Yeah, I

(03:59):
mean I think that's where the decontamination part of the
CTS deacon comes in. It's not just cleaning. You're you're
actually your goal is to return the spot to its
original condition. So like, you don't it made a point
in this article, like you don't just clean the carpet
because if the carpet has a two inch blood stain
on the carpet, there's probably a two foot blood stain

(04:21):
under the carpet on the floorboard. Right, Yeah, So cleaning
the carpet doesn't work. You gotta cut the carpet out,
maybe cut the base baseboards outright. So it is Decontaminations
who wrote this. Julia Layton, she's she's got the goods.
She definitely has the goods, but the way she put
it has to be actually clean, not just apparently clean, right, Yeah,
which I do apparently cleaning in my house, but I

(04:44):
mean we're not cutting up carpet and replacing floorboards or anything.
Um So, it takes a very certain type of person
um because of the gore that you're going to have
to deal with in a large number of your cases.
Um So, a lot of the people in um the
ct S dacon industry, or former or maybe even current

(05:07):
e M t S emergency room nurses, people who are
already trained to deal with this kind of thing. Yeah,
that that one articles. And you know, I think that
that company said they hire a lot of former firemen,
and I would think probably military people, people that have
dealt with high stress and uh, dead bodies basically. But
it's not just that, I mean you have to um also,

(05:29):
as a crime scene clean up person, you have to
have a sympathetic nature, is one of the points in
this article. Right, sympathetic but not empathetic, right, because there's
a lot of times when all the the ambulance is gone,
the cops are gone, but the family is still there
and they may be sitting there sobbing while they're watching

(05:51):
you clean the house. Um. And you you have to
be able to, yeah, sympathize with them without getting caught
up in what they're experiencing, right, and you have to
be able to remain detached, but you have to be um. Uh,
you have to be understanding to what they're going through too. Yeah.
The one guy in that article that they interviewed said

(06:11):
that he's cried along with families and stuff like that.
And um, I think they also said that some companies
offer grief counselors along with their service. Yeah, the upon
request apparently, if you want a grief counselor usually that
can be factored into the price or else the company
will will give it to you for free. Yeah. In

(06:32):
Sunshine Cleaning, there was never anyone at the scene, but um,
it was realistic in some ways because one of the
subplots involved um. One of the girls found a wallet
and an identification from the deceased and ended up looking
up her daughter and befriending her daughter, but not telling
the daughter that she had cleaned up her mother's suicide

(06:53):
or homicide scene. So they kind of dealt with that,
you know, delicately. That's great. Yeah, that's probably the one
thing you should deal with delicately, right, UM, because some
of the stuff that you're cleaning up is pretty rough stuff.
So let's talk about the three main scenes that you're
going to encounter as a UM clean up technician, Joshes

(07:17):
Number one, you've got violent death, which is homicide, suicide
or bad luck accident type of thing. You've got a decomposition,
decomposing body happening, and meth labs is a lot of
their business comes from meth labs that have exploded. Because
meth labs are known for exploding. I don't even know

(07:38):
that they necessarily have to have exploded. I think just
the fact that there is a meth lab there that
it means that you have to decontaminate the scene absolutely. Apparently,
meth labs UM are so toxic that they're UM capable
of making people who live in a former meth lab
sick like a decade on UM. Some of the toxins

(07:58):
that you're running into are things like acetone, methanol, benzene, iodine,
hydrochloric acid. This is like the ingredients of meth. Right,
this is what people are snorting. Kids. Unless you want
to turn into a disgusting, haggard wreck mess of a human,

(08:20):
stay away from meth. Meth equals death. Just look at
those pictures. You've seen those pictures on the internet that
showed the before and after. Yeah, oh god, that that
should be like on billboards in Oklahoma. We should probably
podcast on meth sometime. We have a good article. It's
liked tom she wrote it. Really, yeah, we absolutely should.
Um So one of the one of the reasons why
meth labs are so dangerous is because you are going

(08:43):
to absorb the stuff through your skin. You leave the
toxic breads to do not just on walls, but on
the air as well. So another UM, I guess prior
job experience that is good to bring to the table
if you're a crime scene clean up person is construction
background or at the very least militian, because a lot
of cases, like with UM meth labs, like if it

(09:04):
was a house or an apartment or something, you have
to knock everything out. Anything that UM can't be put
in some sort of decontaminating chemical. UM has to be
taken out, thrown away. That includes drywall, floorboards, carpet, all
this stuff until it's just down to the bones of
the building. Yeah, or they will tear it down or
more likely, uh, haul the trailer away. Well, let's talk

(09:27):
about this. We said that you're not wearing, um, just
normal everyday spring cleaning clothes. You're wearing like a full
on biohezard suit. Right. What are some of the other, um,
I guess tools of the trade chuckers. Well, there's there's
a laundry list, Josh. You you definitely want your protective gear. Um,
you have to have biowaste containers like big fifty five

(09:48):
gallon drums to hold this stuff. You can't just throw
it in a bag into the back of your van. No,
there's regulations you gotta follow. Um, you're gonna have your
regular cleaning supplies that you would need to clean up
any kind of you know, mops and disinfectants and that
kind of thing. You've got your more hardcore supplies like
industrial strength, like hospital strength, the disinfectants, right, which only

(10:11):
allow the merca bug to survive. Really, now, there's like
hospital acquired mercer infections. I don't know anything about that. Yeah,
or they like get used to the industrial cleaners in there,
Like these superbugs are like bring it when you spray
it on them, it's worse than ticks. You can have
an ozone machine which removes odors. You can have a
fogger which they will use to shoot um stuff into

(10:35):
like air ducks to get rid of odors. Right, well,
it'll um. It takes a chemical and kind of gets
it around corners and stuff. You get everywhere with it
when you have when you run it through a fogger,
apparently you've got some enzyme solvents you want to kill bacteria,
and it can also liquefied dried blood, which can be
pretty nasty to get out once it's equagulated and dried, right,
which is why you want shovels. Yeah, Apparently chuck after

(10:59):
what three hours to two hours and blog coagulates into
kind of a jelly like goo that you can shovel
into bags. So gross, but very very thick bags, biohezard bags.
They also include in this article putty knives to scrape
brain matter from the wall because apparently brain when it
dries becomes like cement, and we'll stick to something like

(11:20):
cement which is really gross and sad. You can also
use a steam basically a steamer to steam it back
into gooiness. Yeah. And then my favorite thing, which is
be the first thing in my van, would be the
no touch cleaning system. And these are like big long
scrubbing brushes, uh, heavy duty sprayers, things like that, like

(11:43):
pressure washers and no touch cleaning system seems like the
smartest cleaning system, yes it is. Yeah. Then, like you said,
you want some carponry tools, probably ladders, stuff like that,
and then a camera because you need to take before
and after pictures for insurance, and you wouldn't think about that, right,
And actually apparently most insurance covers this, right, Yeah, insurance

(12:03):
covers it a lot of times. Or if it's a homicide,
I think it's paid for by the state, by the
federal government really Crime Victory Victim Reparations Agency. Okay, and
I know the state agencies that do that too. So well,
we're getting aheair of ourselves. I don't mean to jump
the gun, but let's talk more about some of the scenes. Specifically,
we talked about meth labs, Chuck. One of the other

(12:25):
big ones that you'll be called out too, that makes
quite a message when a decomposing body is found, right, absolutely,
he had to call him decomps in the in the trade. Uh,
that's not gonna be like usually, it's not gonna be
some big nasty um blood sprays and like brains and things.
It's not gonna be all over the place, but it

(12:45):
can be pretty nasty because a decomposing body, Josh, is
really gross. Your body swells up, um insects move into
your body and take up residence. Your organs are going
to digest themselves, and your skin liquefies. Yeah. Remember we
talked about um rick or mortis or no I think
it was on the Body Farms episode. We talked a
lot about how decomposition works. So if you want to

(13:07):
know more about d COMP, go listen to our Body
Farms um eppie right. Yeah, And of course there's the smell.
You can't talk about decomposition without the smell. And as
Julia Layton puts it, it would bring an average person
to his knees. Yeah that's bad. Yes, apparently it's ammonia.
It's an ammonia based smell created by d COMP like

(13:28):
the litter box. Yeah, you ever cleaned out of litter box.
I have toxic plasmos is all over the place, that's right. Um.
The other thing too with a d comp is and
this you know, you don't think about these things when
you hear about it on the news. But someone actually
has to go behind after the body has been removed.
There's probably liquefied parts of the body there. And there's

(13:49):
also maggots that have already feasted and have the blood
inside of them, and you gotta get it. You gotta
get rid of them too, because they're carrying you know,
disease maybe right, And you have to basically scour the
place looking for maggots, collect the maggots, and then you
dispose of them through burning, right, tastes like burning. That's dcompey,

(14:31):
that's dcom. Now let's get down to the one that
everybody's fascinated with that all the movies are about. And
those are murder scenes, suicide scenes, accidental shootings, basically where
somebody was shot it's specifically in the head, I guess
is the worst. I mean, you've seen Full Metal Jacket, right,
remember pile? Yeah, someone had to clean that up. Somebody did. Yeah,
I'll bet it was a joker. Well, somebody in the

(14:52):
art department for the movie. But uh, yeah, a violent
death is not good because there's gonna be lots of blood,
especially sue sides they say are probably the worst for
the blood. Yeah, which is why I guess I can't
see shooting yourself in the head at home. That's just
so so much of a problem. It's just a huge problem.
At least go to a hotel or a motel. And

(15:13):
that Hunter Thompson did, he shot himself in his basement
while he's on the phone with his wife. But I mean,
I think it's fine for him that he was on
the phone with her because apparently he'd let her know
that this was happening. This wasn't like a she had
no idea that something like this was going to happen.
But at home. He did it at home, which I
can understand wanting to be at home. But yeah, I

(15:34):
guess shooting yourself in the head if you're going to why,
I don't see why you would do it at home. Yeah,
I agree. Uh, And like we said earlier, it has
to be really, really clean, So any bodily fluid is
a potential pathogen. And not only that, but after you leave,
if you don't get it all up, it can lead
to mold and bacteria and cause people to get sick

(15:55):
like months afterward. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you have to, like
you said, restore this place to the state it was
in before the trigger was pulled, right, Yeah. And it
can take up to I mean a few hours to
up to like forty eight hours to do this. Yeah.
And apparently a good crime scene clean up company is

(16:17):
gonna charge you about six hundred bucks an hour. It
ain't cheap, um for one room with lots of blood
for a homicide or suicide, it's gonna cost between three
and sixth grand I guess right. One of the reasons
why it's so expensive is because these people don't just
take the stuff home and throw it in their trash
out front. Right. There are really specific permits and rules

(16:39):
that govern disposal of this, which, by the way, we
should say the actual industry itself is not regulated. It's
not nationally regulated. No, but they generally follow Ocean's bloodborne
pathogen standards, which requires training and certification itself. Um, But
to be a crime scene cleanup technician that you don't
there's no national certification or even state or local certification.

(17:02):
It's just company training. Yeah yeah, right, and but um,
you know, we'll talk about the training in a minute.
But they obviously want to do a good job because
the last thing you want is I mean, the turnover
is already high enough, you know. Um. But like we said,
there is plenty of permits and um standards and procedures
to follow in disposing of this waste. Right, yeah, you
can't just like you said, you can't throw in the
dumpster like they do in Sunshine cleaning. You have to

(17:24):
incenterate it. And there are medical waste incinerator companies and uh,
the one thing I thought they charged by the pound,
which I thought was kind of gross. But how else
are you gonna do it? Because it's a pound of nastiness. Yeah,
And the other thing I thought was kind of gross
was they a lot of them have minimum charges. So
if you don't have the minimum you have to keep
this uh bio human bio waste in van, well, not

(17:49):
in your van, but if it's hot and in like
a refrigerated space until you have collect enough of it
to go to the incinerator. You know, I'll bet it's funny.
I'll bet the same um, the same companies that that
operate medical waste incinerators also just so happen to have
some cold storage units that you can put your waist
in until you have enough to burn to But I'll

(18:09):
bet it's I'll bet if you're in the industry for
a while you're friends with some guy who operates it
and you kick him like fifty bucks to throw your
stuff in with somebody else's or whatever. But you better
be incinerating it following proper procedure, else you're a horrible jerk, right,
And it's not just the gore that has to be
disposed of. Um, if you have just deconstructed a house

(18:31):
that was a meth lab, you've got to do something
with this waste. Again. Can't just take it to the
dumpster you came and take it to a normal dump.
You have to take it to special dumps that are
um out of public reach, right right, Um, And just
transporting it you have to have a special permit for that, right,
You have to have a has Met permit. Yeah, my friend, uh,
my friend Timmy has he works in has Matt Disposal

(18:53):
And now yeah you met Timmy. Now he does a
lot of um like trained derailments and stuff like that,
but he used to live in Oklahoma, and in Oklahoma
nothing but nothing but meth labs and he had to
do He didn't do crime scene cleanup, but he he
worked on teams that investigated sites, I think. And he
said that he saw bodies that had dirt the body

(19:15):
that they've shoveled dirt in their mouths and would choke
on it sometimes because apparently once whatever badness happens and
it becomes airborne, it's such a like awful reaction, like
that you're breathing this in, they start just putting something
in their mouth to try and quell this nasty taste.
So they would like stuff dirt in their mouths until

(19:36):
they died. It's not nasty, said, that's horrible. It's another
reason not to cook or do meth. What a mini um.
So let's say you all this is like yeah, yeah, yeah, okay,
and you're looking to earn no, I don't know, between
thirty five and fifty grand without a high school diploma.

(19:56):
We should say, um, what what do you need to
do to be come a crime scene clean up technician? Well,
we already talked about some of the UH traits they
look for in somebody like to be empathetic and maybe
to have prior training with the dead bodies and stuff
like that. But they will actually give you test um
to make sure that you won't like throw up on

(20:17):
the scene in front of a family. Yeah, it's like
monster's ball. Yeah, that would be awful to go. Can
you imagine losing a family member in your home and
then someone coming in to clean it and then they
start throwing up all over the place. Plus, if you're
the owner of the company, that's just extra work, that's
more clean up that you can't charge for. Right, So
they will actually put you through a test to pass

(20:40):
a gross factor that um. It ranges from like looking
at pictures of dead bodies to actually cleaning up dead
animals carcasses to make sure that you won't vomit. And
I wonder if they tell you that it's actual like
human stuff, but it's actually like a fox. Oh like
Halloween when you when you reach into the shape grapes

(21:00):
and their eyeballs. Yeah. Um. You also really really really
need to get a hepatitis B vaccine every five years.
As a matter of fact, as many letters as there
are types of hepatitis I would get a vaccine for
each of them probably every month. Yeah, what do we
get for Yeah, so we can still wouldn't qualify huh. Um. Also, Chuck,

(21:22):
even if you are a very strong person, we like
we said, the turnovers about eight months on average, and
you are um really at risk for a couple of
stress disorders UM, critical incident stress syndrome and secondary traumatic
stress disorder. And basically the first one is you were

(21:42):
on site of like horrific events routinely it's tough to
shake off. And then the other one is if you
become too attached to the families grief you're you, you
basically can leach off of their post traumatic stress disorder
and have secondary stress disorder, can very traumatic stress disorder. Yeah.
They also obviously look for people going in that don't

(22:04):
have any sort of like depressive disorders to things like
that that probably wouldn't be a good job to put
someone who was manic depressive to crimes and cleanup situation. Chuck,
not at all. Uh. Let's talk about the business a

(22:40):
little bit. I think you said six hundred dollars an hour,
but a room can like a bloody room can cost
up to like three thousand dollars to get clean. I
thought it was three to six. Yeah, it's one to three.
I misspoke. I'm sorry. Well, it could be six depends
on how many people were killed in there. I mean,
if it was a really nasty scene, it could be six.
I'm sure. And you said also that the Crime Victim

(23:02):
Reparation Act pays for agency. Agency pays for, um, the
cleaning bill if it's a homicide. UM, if it's I
don't know if it's a suicide, because I know that
insurance generally doesn't cover suicides for anything. But maybe if
it's an accidental death or something like that, your homeowners
insurance will cover it. In most cases, you're not going

(23:24):
to have to pay the bill. Um. And we said
also that marketing and advertising can be tricky. Hotels and
motels are the two largest businesses that have to deal
with this suicide. So if you own a ctsdcon company,
you probably go to every hotel and motel convention there is,
which appropriately are held in hotels. Uh. And you hand

(23:46):
out cards, right, You hand out cards to homicide detectives,
You make friends with ambulance drivers. You just make sure
that everybody is going to contact these families first if
they're asked, you don't want to pimp in your card.
But if if the families like, what are we gonna
do about this, they can say, well, I know this
guy is good. Yeah, that's actually how it worked in
Sunshine Cleaning. Yes, Amy Adams was a regular house cleaner

(24:10):
making beans, and her boyfriend was Steve Zon and he
was a homicide detective. Steven is great and he's awesome
and he um he he told her like, you know,
you can make a lot more money by doing this,
and he got her her first job and first referral,
and it just kind of grew from there. Um, it's
a burgeoning business, right. Yeah. And apparently if you like

(24:34):
to name your business after yourself first day and last name,
this is the this is the industry for you. This
in waste disposal. Yeah, what was the company from San Francisco?
In there there is um Neil Smithers crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. Right,
And and they have people they send out all over
the country. Now, but I think it said that they

(24:54):
do about four hundred cleanups in San Francisco alone each year.
This is two thousand six. That's more than one a day.
Is well, And here we reach to the debate right.
The crime scene cleanup companies literally make money off of tragedy, right,
horrific tragedy. And a lot of people argue like that

(25:17):
there's this kind of commercialization of death, of tragedy, and
and that why are we so okay with this? Um?
And I can kind of see that, like maybe this
is something that should be a free service of a
police department, worked into the budget or something that a
city does, right. Um. But at the same time, you
can really make a case like, if you need someone

(25:39):
like this, it's a really good thing that they're around,
whether it's a commercialization of death or not, because before
this it was up to the family to do it,
or maybe some friends of the family or something like that.
But isn't that just way way worse. I don't even
cleaning up your loved one's brains in your home, Yeah,

(26:01):
that's obviously way way work. But like a private toach
truck company comes and gets a car after car accident,
so that's not taken care of by the police, so
sort of sort of the same thing. I definitely fall
in the line like, yeah, this is fine, this is
perfectly acceptable capitalism. Yeah, well, and until it is covered
by the police department. Then somebody's should be making money,

(26:23):
and it should be top dollar because it's no fun
to clean up brains and bone out of drywall. You know,
I know, And I mean if you leave it to
the city, can you imagine the job of a city
worker would do. And well, that's the other point, man.
These people are paid good money because they restore it
to its original condition, and your right, I would not
want to see the employee doing it. If you're a

(26:43):
city employee who is good at your job, we apologize
in advance. It's the rest of the people in your
field that make it hard on you. Um. And if
you are a crime scene cleanup technician, we want to
hear from you. Oh yeah, Uh send us an email
uh to the email address that I will give at
the end of the show because I got ahead of myself.

(27:06):
If you want to learn more about crime scene clean up,
go type that into our search bar. Crime scene is
crime hyphen scene clean up is clean hyphen up uh,
and we'll take you to this really really good article. UM.
And that means now, friends, that it's time for listener mail.
Jerry had a big problem with the hyphen thing. Like

(27:26):
you were you were out of the room getting some coffee,
and I had to explain to the hyphens and that
you've capitalized the first one and you don't capitalize the second.
I can see that. And she said, this is the
most difficult title we've ever had, Is it really? She said?
She said, yes, Okay, she's tittering. H Josh. This is
prison email part two. We had part one? Was it

(27:49):
right before this one? Are we going to split those up? Uh?
We have to have the one that we recorded go first,
or else we've got two and then one. Okay, so yeah,
this came out on this is Thursday. Right. That's more
confusing than college football rankings in quantum physics. Uh so
this is the end of the prisoners email the guy
who was busted for math and then went on the

(28:10):
lamb and then went to prison and is now a fine,
upstanding citizen. We will continue with this. Food items available
from the commissary like ramen noodles, can corn or chicken,
and soda pop were valuable for trade as well. Pack
of rama noodles were often uses currency for bets on
things like football games. To the betting rama noodles on
a football game, I guess when you're in the whoscal

(28:32):
you're doing what you can to, you know, make it
just like the outside. Or prizes and handball tournaments organized
by enterprising inmates who would often keep five as an
entry fee for putting the tournament together. Huh that crazy.
I think it's crazy that this guy wasn't in a
minimum security federal prison and he was still playing handball. Yeah. Uh.

(28:56):
There were two escapes during the year that I was
at the camp. One person took a blanket and threw
it over the top of the barbed war fence. That
was just regular barbedar, he said, not razor wire, and
he climbed over in the middle of the night, and
that was pretty much how he got out. Did they
catch the guy? Uh, Yes, both were caught. The second
guy left his job at the State and motor pool
during the day, so I guess he just got in

(29:17):
one of the cars and left, which is pretty smart
way to escape. It's a pretty typical way to escape. Again, Well,
that's actually what he says. He stole a state vehicle
and he said both were caught in under forty eight hours. Shank,
And here's just some little points he makes. Shank is
indeed both a bourbon and noun, although shiv was much
less common in usage. Somebody said it was east coast,

(29:38):
west coast, but another credibility, well, this is Nevada, so
shank is what they said there. In addition to the whole,
the special housing unit was known as the shoe as
an s h U, and it was more frequently referred
to as the shoe than the whole, So we were
sort of wrong in that one. And one of the
more colorful terms that you can here in prison was

(29:59):
to key stir something. Yeah, and can you imagine what
that might be? Of course, I mean to hide something
in a very uncomfortable place. You wreck them, yeah, not
like this stop watch? Did you not know that you did?
You get dysenterry from that when you put a watch
in your keys there or a wrist watch. Sorry, it
wasn't a stop I got dyson. Tearry little man. Another

(30:24):
term was man walking, which meant that correction officer was
out in the yard walking around, so someone would yell
out man walking, and that was a cue to hide
any contraband or desist any activities like tattooing, which was
you didn't want the corrections guys to see tattooing each other.
They're heavy critics. Exactly. I've already written much more than

(30:45):
I intended, Guys. I could go on for much longer
about many of the topics, including racism, which was extreme,
the power structure, and what it was like not having
freedom even though I worked outside the camp and mostly
an unsupervised fashion. Uh, favor trading and so on and
so on. It's weird that I have so much to
write about even though I was only in total for

(31:06):
about eighteen months. So it wasn't three years. It was
eighteen months total. Eighteen months, man, can you imagine? Oh
my god. So that's the end of part two of
the prison prisoner email. It's part two of two. Huh yep.
And he's on the up and up now and we
wish him all the best. It sounds like he's doing
really good. Thank you, anonymous jail bird. We appreciate you.
Who doesn't work here? Right? It is not Jonathan Stricklin. Okay, um,

(31:28):
let's see if you have a we already did this
this whole email thing, right, crime scene clean up? Uh,
just say the email address. Yeah, Just send your emails
to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it

(31:48):
how stuff works dot Com. Want more house stuff Works,
check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot
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