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There are few soft surfaces in prison, so when one of us drops a pair of glasses or a radio or gods forbid a cell phone, it’s bad. Whether a gadget is contraband or purchased from commissary, it may be impossible to get the money to replace it. You probably can’t fix it yourself. But you can take it to Gizmo.
Gizmo is our resident Fix-It Guy. There are many Gizmos in many prisons across the country, and their hustle is considered an honorable one. Corrections departments profit off selling us electronics at a markup, so it’s no surprise that they offer no way to fix anything that breaks.
Radios, for example, cost $50 at commissary, and to discourage concealment of contraband are also encased in a brittle clear plastic. Falling three feet from the table to the floor is all it takes. Gizmo will weld the broken casing back together using empty ink pen cartridges, and get the radio working again for the price of a bag of coffee.
Here in Georgia Department of Corrections prisons the contracted optometrist only visits quarterly, which means broken glasses can take four months to replace if the timing’s unlucky. Then another month to deliver the new pair. For a modest fee, Gizmo likely has the right earpiece or tiny screw to fix the pair you have, today.
Perhaps the power adaptor for a contraband phone has been confiscated, but the charging cable remains. Gizmo will use salvaged wire and plastic cling wrap to make a “pigtail”—a coil of copper wire surrounding but not touching a central post made of the same wire—soldered to the cord and sized to fit whatever it needs to.
Prisoners who are isolated in the Special Management Unit have no wall outlets. For $5 plus cost of materials, Gizmo will assemble AA battery packs to send them. If you’ve ever been able to talk to your loved one while they were in the hole, chances are you can thank their prison’s Gizmo.
Anyone who smokes anything in here needs a way to light it. Using a pencil, paperclip and piece of copper wire Gizmo will fashion a “popper” that can be plugged into a wall outlet to create a spark. The price is one soup.
A standard wall outlet can be removed from the wall and outfitted with wires to turn it into a multiplug. If the number of devices that need charging exceeds the number of outlet ports in a cell—two— Gizmo will turn an old adaptor into a three- or four-port multiplug using tape, three layers of wood or glued cardboard and two slivers of steel shims.
Need an extension cord? After appropriating a length of electrical cord from one of the floor buffers, or power cords from any unattended DOC machinery, Gizmo will use two wires of equal size to make an extension cord attached to a wall outlet or a multiplug. With two of those you can charge eight devices at the same time from the same cell. Someone from the maintenance crew may have to come flip the circuit breaker back to the ON position.
Gizmo also makes “bugs” for boiling water—necessary to heat soups and coffee, and to add a bit of warmth and humidity to one’s living space during cold, dry winters. Tie two metal plates together with a wire attached to each, and a tongue depressor part in between them. Plug it into a wall outlet, submerge the other end in a bucket of water, place the food to be heated inside a plastic bottle or bag and then place that into the water.
Gizmo also buys broken electronics, if he can use them to repair other broken electronics. He recycles a lot of what most people would consider trash—dead cell phones and radios, broken headphones, paper clips, rubber bands, ink pens, the twist ties from bread, any and all scraps of copper wire. From these he builds his screwdrivers, clamps, brushes, electric soldering irons and other tools.
Solder, the metal alloy easily melted to fuse parts together, can be heated, removed and reused. Gizmo cools the recycled solder into pellets he stores in empty tubes of ChapStick. The ChapStick itself serves as a substitute for flux, the paste that allows the soldering process to work properly. More elaborate soldering irons can even be made using plastic cling wrap, a toothbrush, heavy wire, solder and an ID card clip.
There’s only so much Gizmo can do to repair the cell phones themselves; the internal circuitry is so small that soldering is nearly impossible. Screens and batteries can be replaced, but it’s hard to find the parts to do so since those are themselves the parts that are in highest demand. If your phone gets fried by a high-voltage adapter, you just have to keep the SIM and SD cards and hope they’re compatible with the next phone, at whatever point you’re able to get another one.
Corrections departments despise contraband cell phones, and prisoner self-sufficiency in all its forms, but they owe a lot to the Gizmos in their custody for fixing what would otherwise stay broken, including things the state paid for like communal microwaves and TVs.
Despite the anti-cell phone propaganda, contraband phones allow us to prepare for re-entry and maintain relationships with friends and family. Radios can be the difference between suicide and making it through one more day. Without multiplugs, there’d be a lot more fights between cellies over who gets to use the outlet and for how long. Electronic device repair is a valuable job skill that every corrections department should be helping develop through formal vocational programs, but so far they don’t seem inclined to support the next generation of Gizmos.
Images via Anonymous