Stuff You Should Know - How Crime-Scene Clean-up Works

Episode Date: September 7, 2010

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And that makes this stuff you should know. Freshly shaving? I got rid of the beard? Yeah. I cleaned up this crime scene of a face. Your hair's sticking out in a really weird way. Is it? At least on. Out for my hat? Yeah. Thank you. That's even crazier.

Please don't lick your thumb and come over like mom used to do. I should say, for those of you who might be experiencing some sort of alarm or terror right now, Chuck kept the goatee. He just shaved the beard part or the parts that made it a beard. I guess the burn side mutton chops. Yes. Yeah. And the neck fuzz. Yeah. Looking good. Thank you. Chuck, have you ever seen a movie called Curdled? No. It's a 1996 Little Sleeper produced by one Quentin Tarantino. It's about this very quiet kind of demure woman who gets a job as a crime scene cleanup person. It's the girl from Pulp Fiction, the cab driver, right? I believe she was the taxi driver who drove Bruce Willis around after the boxing match from Pulp Fiction.

Oh, really? I do know the movie. I haven't seen it, but I think that's her. It's worth seeing, is it? But now that I've read this crime scene cleanup article on our fair site, HowStuffWorks.com, 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, too. I remember seeing them carrying out a mattress just like Mrs. Brady spring cleaning type outfits. Yeah. You remember those? She had the little D-Rag and she had the little clam diggers rolled up and some converse on, just like cute as 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 end and the other one fell on the bloody stain and it was just like, It's a really good movie, though, actually. Was it? Yeah, it was great. Is it by the people who made Loma Sunshine? Or am I just confusing that because Sunshine's not the name? I don't know. It's a little indie, though. Alan Arkin was in it, so maybe so. I wonder. It's good. All right. Well, both of these movies are utter frauds when it comes to the details, right, Chuck? Yeah, for the most part. Okay. Let's talk about crime scene cleanup, the real stuff, because there's nothing cute or da-da-da about it. It's actually horrific work and it

takes a very specific kind of person and those people last an average of about eight months before they get burned out in this business, right? Yeah. All right. So it's actually called, it's part of the cleaning industry and it's a niche part of the cleaning industry. Very niche. Not very heavily marketed in traditional channels, right? Exactly. It's not how it works, but it's called CTSDCon, crime and trauma scene decontamination, right? Yeah. And basically what it is, is it is a cleaning service on steroids. There's no Mrs. Brady outfits. You're wearing full biohazard hazmat suits. No French maids going on here. Nothing like that, because you're dealing with some really dangerous stuff. You're dealing with

blood, which often feature appropriately enough blood-borne pathogens. You're cleaning up meth labs. Yeah, that's a big one. And a lot of times you're, and we should probably warn people, this is going to get a little graphic here. Sure. You can't do crime scene 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 crime scene investigators missed. You're scraping brain off of walls. Yeah. It's not normal work, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that's where the decontamination part of the CTSDCon comes in. It's not just cleaning. You're actually, your goal is to return the spot to its original condition. Right. 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 under the carpet on the floorboard. Right. Yeah. So cleaning the carpet doesn't work. And you got to cut the carpet out. Yeah. Maybe cut the base, baseboards out. Right. So it is decontamination. So who wrote this? Julia Layton? Yeah. She's got the goods. She definitely has the goods, but the way she put it, it has to be actually clean, not just apparently clean, right? Yeah, which I do apparently cleaning in my house. Me too. But I mean, we're not cutting up carpet and replacing floorboards or anything. No. So it takes a very certain type of person because of the gore that you're going to have

to deal with in a large number of your cases. So a lot of the people in the CTSDCon industry are former or maybe even current EMTs, emergency room nurses, people who are already trained to deal with this kind of thing. Yeah. That one article, I think 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 dead bodies, basically. Yeah. But it's not just that. I mean, you have to also as a crime scene cleanup person, you have to have 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 ambulance is gone, the cops are gone, but the family's still there. Yeah.

And they may be sitting there sobbing while they're watching you clean the house. Yeah. And you have to be able to sympathize with them without getting caught up in what they're experiencing right then. You have to be able to remain detached, but you have to be understanding to what they're going through too. Yeah. The one guy in that article that they interviewed said that he's cried along with families and stuff like that. And I think they also said that some companies offer grief counselors along with their service. Yeah. Upon request, apparently, if you want a grief counselor, usually that can be factored into the price or else the company will give it to you for free. Yeah. In sunshine cleaning, there was never anyone at the scene,

but it was realistic in some ways because one of the subplots involved 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 or homicide scene. So they kind of dealt with that delicately. That's great. Yeah. That's probably the one thing you should deal with delicately, right? 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 cleanup technician. Josh? Yes. Number one, you've got violent death, which is homicide, suicide, or bad luck accident type of thing. Right. You've got a decomposition,

a 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 that they necessarily have to have exploded. I think just the fact that there was a meth lab there. Oh, well, yeah, that's true. It means that you have to decontaminate the scene. Oh, absolutely. Apparently meth labs are so toxic that they're capable of making people who live in a former meth lab sick, like a decade on. Some of the toxins 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, 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 should be on billboards in Oklahoma. We should do podcasts on meth sometime. We have a good article on site. Tom, she wrote it. Oh, really? Yeah. We absolutely should. One of the reasons why meth labs are so dangerous is because you are going to absorb this stuff through your skin. They leave the toxic residue not just on walls, but on the air as well. Another prior job experience that is good to bring to the table if you're a crime scene cleanup person is a construction background,

or at the very least demolition, because a lot of cases with meth labs, like if it was a house or an apartment or something, you have to knock everything out. Anything that can't be put in some sort of decontaminating chemical 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 haul the trailer away. Right. Well, let's talk about this. We said that you're not wearing just normal, everyday spring cleaning clothes. You're wearing like a full-on biohazard suit, right? What are some of the other, I guess, tools of the trade, Chuckers?

Well, there's a laundry list, Josh. You definitely want your protective gear. You have to have biohaze containers, like big 55-gallon drums to hold this stuff. You can't just throw it in a bag into the back of your van. There's regulations you got to follow. You're going to have your regular cleaning supplies that you would need to clean up any kind of mess, you know, mops and disinfectants and that kind of thing. You've got your more hardcore supplies like industrial strength, like hospital strength disinfectants. Right, which only allow the MRSA bug to survive. Oh, really?

No, there's hospital-acquired MRSA infections. I don't know anything about that. Yeah, or they get used to the industrial cleaners and they're like these super bugs or like, you're going to bring it when you spray it on them. It's bad news. That's worse than ticks. Sorry about that one. You can have an ozone machine, which removes odors. You can have a fogger, which they will use to shoot stuff into like air ducts to get rid of odors.

Right. Well, it takes a chemical and kind of gets it around corners and stuff. You get everywhere with it when you run it through a fogger, apparently. You've got some enzyme solvents. You want to kill bacteria and it can also liquefy dried blood, which can be pretty nasty to get out once it's coagulated and dried. Right, which is why you want shovels. Yeah. Apparently chock after what, three hours? Two hours? Two hours. Blood coagulates into kind of a jelly-like goo that you can shovel into bags. So gross.

But very, very thick bags. Yeah. Biohazard 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 will stick to something like cement. Right. Which is really gross and sad. You can also use a steam, basically a steamer to steam it back into gooeyness.

Yeah. And then my favorite thing, which would be the first thing in my van, would be the no-touch cleaning system. These are like big, long, scrubbing brushes, heavy-duty sprayers, things like that. Right. Like pressure washers. The no-touch cleaning system seems like the smartest cleaning system of all. Yes, it is. Yeah. Then, like you said, you want some carpentry tools, probably ladders, stuff like that.

Sledge hammers. 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 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. Oh, really? Crime victim reparations agency.

Okay. And I know there's state agencies that do that, too. So. Well, we're getting ahead 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 big ones that you'll be called out to that makes quite a mess is when a decomposing body is found. Yeah. Right?

Absolutely. Decomps. Yeah, they call them decomps in the trade. That's not going to be like usually it's not going to be some big nasty blood sprays and like brains and things. It's not going to be all over the place. But it can be pretty nasty because a decomposing body, Josh, is really gross. Your body swells up, 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 rigor 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 know more about decomp, go listen to our body farms epi, right? Yeah. And of course there's the smell. You can't talk about decomposition without the smell.

No. No, and as Julia Layton puts it, it would bring an average person to his knees. Yeah. That's bad. Yes, very bad. Apparently it's ammonia. It's an ammonia-based smell created by the decomp. Like the litter box.

Yeah. You ever cleaned out a litter box? Sure I have. Toxoplasmosis all over the place. That's right. The other thing too with a decomp is, and 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 also maggots that have already feasted and have the blood inside of them. And you've got to get rid of them too because they're carrying disease maybe. Right. And so you have to basically scour the place looking for maggots. Collect the maggots and then you dispose of them through burning, right? Yeah. Tastes like burning. Wow.

The war on drugs impacts everyone. Whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course. Yes, they can do that.

And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss y'all. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting?

Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. That's what it works for. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Introducing The Biz Take, your all things music, business, and media podcast. Join me, Joe Wasleski, and my co-host, Colin McKay, every Wednesday. Where we discuss the breaking news, changing the music industry.

And what your favorite artists and creatives are up to. Colin, who's your favorite artist? Oh, you know, the Tri-Fecta, Demi Lovato, Rana Grande, Captain Beefheart. Snap back to reality M&M style. Join music industry professionals Joe and I as we pull back the curtain of the successes and failures of The Biz. You guys have been hanging out a while. What are they doing, Colin? I guess listening to an ad.

Sorry. Listen to new episodes of The Biz Tape every Wednesday on the Nashville Podcast Network. Available on iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. That's decomp, eh? That's decomp. 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 Pyle? Yeah, someone had to clean that up. Somebody did. Yeah, I'll bet it was Joker. Well, somebody in the art department for the movie. Yeah, a violent death is not good because there's going to be lots of blood, especially suicides,

they say, or 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 that what Hunter Thompson did? He shot himself in his basement while he was on the phone with his wife. So awful.

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 she had no idea that something like this was going to happen. Right. But at home, he did it at home, which I can understand wanting to be at home. But yeah, I guess shooting yourself in the head if you're going to, I don't see why you would do it at home. Yeah, I agree.

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 like months afterward. Right. You got to get it all out. 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 48 hours to do this. Yeah. Depending on obviously, yeah. And apparently a good crime scene cleanup company is going to charge you about 600 bucks an hour. Yeah, it ain't cheap. For one room with lots of blood for homicide or suicide,

it's going to cost you between three and six grand, I guess, right? Yeah. One of the reasons why it's so expensive is because these people don't just take this stuff home and throw it in their trash out front, right? There are really specific permits and rules that govern disposal of this, which by the way, we should say the actual industry itself is not regulated. Yeah, it's not nationally regulated. No, but they generally follow OSHA's Bloodborne Pathogen Standards,

which requires training and certification itself. Right. But to be a crime scene cleanup technician, you don't, there's no national certification or even state or local certification. Right. It's just company training. Yeah, yeah. Right?

And but, 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. Sure. You know. But like we said, there is plenty of permits and 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 incinerate it. And there are medical waste incinerator companies. And the one thing I thought they charged by the pound, which I thought was kind of gross, but how else are you going to 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 bio human bio waste. In your van. Well, not in your van, but if it's hot. And then like a refrigerated space until you have collect enough of it to go to the incinerator. You know what? I'll bet it's funny. I'll bet these same, um, the same companies that operate medical waste incinerators also

just so happen to have some cold storage units that you can put your waste in until you have enough to burn to. That'd be smart. But I'll bet it's, I'll bet if you're in the industry for a while, your friends with some guy who operates it and you kick him like 50 bucks to throw your stuff in with somebody else's or whatever. Yeah, just to see that happen. But you better be incinerating it following proper procedure or else you're a horrible

jerk, right? Yes. And it's not just the gore that has to be disposed of. If you have just deconstructed a house that was a meth lab, you've got to do something with this waste. Again, can't just take it to the dumps you came in, take it to a normal dump. You have to take it to special dumps that are out of public reach. Right.

Right. Right. And just transporting it, you have to have a special permit for that, right? You have to have a hazmat permit. Yeah, my friend, my friend Timmy has, he works in hazmat disposal. And now I met him. Yeah, you met Timmy. Now he does a lot of like trained arraignments and stuff like that, but he used to live in

Oklahoma and in Oklahoma. Nothing but meth labs. Nothing but meth labs. And he had to do, he didn't do crime scene cleanup, but he worked on teams that investigated sites, I think. And he said that he saw bodies that had dirt, they 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 that they would like stuff dirt in their mouths until they died. Wow. How nasty is that? That's horrible. It's another reason not to cook or do meth. Yeah. Wow.

What a mini. So let's say you, all of this is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, and you're looking to earn, no, I don't know, between 35 and 50 grand without a high school diploma, we should say. What do you need to do to become a crime scene cleanup technician? Well, we already talked about some of the traits they look for in somebody. Right. Like to be empathetic and maybe to have prior training with the dead bodies and stuff like that, but they will actually give you tests to make sure that you won't like throw up on

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 cleanup. Yeah. That you can't charge for. Right. So they will actually put you through a test to pass a gross factor that 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. Right. 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 reach into the shaved grapes and their eyeballs. Yeah. Yeah. You also really, really, really need to get a hepatitis B vaccine every five years. Yeah. 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 did we get? Hep A for Guatemala?

Yeah. So we still wouldn't qualify, huh? No. Also Chuck, even if you are a very strong person, like we said, the turnover is about eight months on average. Yeah. And you are really at risk for a couple of stress disorders, critical incident stress syndrome and secondary traumatic stress disorder. Yeah. And basically the first one is you're on site of like horrific events. Right.

Routinely. It's tough to shake off. Yeah. And then the other one is if you become too attached to the family's grief, you basically can leach off of their post-traumatic stress disorder and have secondary stress disorder, secondary traumatic stress disorder. Yeah. They also obviously look for people going in that don't have any sort of like depressive disorders or things like that that probably wouldn't be a good job to put someone who is manic depressive into a crime scene cleanup situation.

No, it wouldn't. Chuck. Not at all. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table.

Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty, exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting?

Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. That you call civil asset for. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Introduce the biz tape. You're all things music, business and media podcast.

Join me, Joe was last key and my co-host Colin McKay every Wednesday, where we discuss the breaking news, changing the music industry. And what your favorite artists and creatives are up to. Colin, who's your favorite artist? Oh, you know, the trifecta. Demi Lovato, Rana Grande, Captain Beefheart. Snap back to reality M&M style. Join music industry professionals, Joe and I,

as we pull back the curtain of the successes and failures of the biz. You guys have been hanging out a while. What are they doing, Colin? I guess listening to an ad. Sorry. Listen to new episodes of the biz tape every Wednesday on the Nashville podcast network available on iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, let's talk about the business a

little bit, I think you said $600 an hour, but a room can like a bloody room can cost up to like $3,000 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. Yeah. And you said also that the crime victim reparation act. Yeah. Pays for agency. Agency pays for the cleaning bill. If it's a homicide, I don't know if it's a suicide because I know the 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. Yeah. In most cases, you're not going to have to pay the bill. And we said also that marketing and advertising can be tricky. And touchy. Hotels and motels are the two largest businesses that have to deal with this. Yeah, with suicide. So if you own a CTS decon company, you probably go to every hotel and motel convention there

is, which appropriately are held in hotels. Right. And you hand out cards, right? Sure. You hand out cards to homicide detectives. You make friends with ambulance drivers. You just make sure that everybody's going to contact these families first. If they're asked, you don't want to pimp in your card.

But if the family's like, what are we going to do about this? They can say, well, I know this guy's good. Yeah, that's actually how it worked in Sunshine Cleaning. Really? Yeah, Amy Adams was a regular house cleaner making beans. And her boyfriend was Steve Zahn. And he was a homicide detective. Steve Zahn's great.

He's awesome. And he told her, you can make a lot more money by doing this. And he got her first job and first referral. And it just kind of grew from there. I got you. It's a burgeoning business, right? Yeah. And apparently, if you like to name your business after yourself first day and last

name, this is the industry for you. Oh, really? This in waste disposal. Yeah. What was the company from San Francisco in there? There is Neil Smithers Crime Scene Cleaners Inc. Right. And they have people they send out all over the country now.

But I think it said that they do about 400 cleanups in San Francisco alone each year. This was 2006. That's more than one a day. Right. That's sad. And here we reach the debate, right? Crime scene cleanup companies literally make money off of tragedy. Yeah.

Right? Horrific tragedy. Yeah. And a lot of people argue that there's this kind of commercialization of death of tragedy. Sure. And that why are we so okay with this? Right. 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. Right. Something that a city does. Right, right. But at the same time, you can really make a case like if you need someone like this, it's a really good thing that they're around. Right.

Whether it's a commercialization of death or not. Right. Because before this, it was up to the family to do it. Right. Or maybe some friends of the family or something like that. Yeah. But isn't that just way, way worse? I don't know.

Cleaning up, cleaning up your loved one's brain in your home. Yeah, that's obviously way, way worse. I would think so. But like a private tow truck company comes and gets a car after a car accident. Sure. So that's not taken care of by the police. Right. So sort of the same thing.

I'd 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 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 a city worker would do?

Well, that's the other point, man. These people are paid good money because they, they restore it to its original condition. And you're right. I would not want a city employee doing it. If you're a 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. And if you are a crime scene cleanup technician, we want to hear from you. Oh, yeah.

Send us an email to the email address that I will give at the end of the show because I got ahead of myself. If you want to learn more about crime scene cleanup, go type that into our search bar. Crime scene is crime hyphen scene. Clean up is clean hyphen up. I know. And that will take you to this really, really good article. And that means now, friends, that it's time for listener mail.

Jerry had a big problem with the hyphen thing. Like you were, you were out of the room getting some coffee and I had to explain to her 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? Jerry. So she said, she said, yes.

Okay. She's tittering. Josh, this is prison email part two. We had part one. Was it right before this one? Or are we going to split those up? We have to have the one that we recorded go first or else we've got two and then one. So yeah, this came out on, this is Thursday, right?

That's more confusing than college football rankings in quantum physics. So this is the end of the prisoner's email. The guy who was busted for meth and then went on the 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, canned corn, or chicken and soda pop were valuable for trade as well. Pack of ramen noodles were often used as currency for bets on things like football games.

She was betting ramen noodles on a football game. Huh. I guess when you're in the, the whoo-scow, you're doing what you can to, you know, make it just like the outside. Sure. Or prizes in handball tournaments organized by enterprising inmates who would often keep 5 to 10% as an entry fee for putting the tournament together. Huh.

Isn't 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. 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 wire fence. That was just regular barbed wire. He said not razor wire.

Well, sure. 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 motor pool during the day. So I guess he just got in one of the cars and left, which is pretty smart way to escape. That's a pretty typical way to escape.

I guess. Well, that's actually what he says. He stole a state vehicle and he said both were caught in under 48 hours. Shank, and here's just some little points he makes. Shank is indeed both a verb and a noun, although Shiv was much less common in usage. Somebody said it was East Coast, West Coast, but I doubt their 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 SHU, and it was more frequently referred to as the shoe than the whole. So we were sort of wrong on that one. And one of the more colorful terms that you can hear in prison was to keister something. Yeah. And can you imagine what that might be? Of course. I mean, to hide something in a very uncomfortable place.

You wrecked them. Yeah. I know. Like this stopwatch. Did you not know that? Sure you did. You get dysentery from that when you put a watch in your keister. Yeah, or a wristwatch.

Sorry, it wasn't a stopwatch. Rush. I got dysentery. Little man. Another 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. 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. Yeah, exactly. I've already written much more than 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 in mostly an unsupervised fashion. 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 about 18 months. So it wasn't three years.

It was 18 months total. God, 18 months, man. Can you imagine? No. Oh my God. So that's the end of part two of the prison prisoner email. That'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 jailbird. We appreciate you. Who doesn't work here, right? It is not Jonathan Strickland. Okay. Let's see. If you have a, we already did this whole email thing, right? Crime scene cleanup.

Yeah. Just say the email address. Yeah. Just send your emails to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more howstuffworks? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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