“You’re a good-looking kid…You ain’t stuff and you don’t want to be stuff. Stay from the bandidos. Paco is one of them…Take no gifts from no one.”
Prison life has its own vocabulary. Thanks to the movies and plays and TV, sometimes that jargon makes it into the outside the world and even into the mainstream. A lot more never does. In this particular case, the “stuff” that a good-looking inmate wouldn’t want to be is the object of sexual favors. It is a reference to becoming the object of sexual release through homosexual activities that is, of course, not considered to be proof of homosexuality.
“Sit down, Murphy…I’m talking to this…this scumbag…yeah, he’s a child rapist…a baby rapist, how old was she? How old?...Eight…seven.”
The story place over the course of a day in the House of Detention on what prison guard Nett here describes as “nice floor…a quiet floor” which has never experience serious trouble before. That record seems about to be broken with the arrival a new inmate. Clark Davis is a pedophile, a sexual deviant, a molester of children, and as such even the worst of the other inmates view him with repulsion and disgust. The conflict derives from his unexpected arrival and placement into a part of the prison where it seems he especially does not belong.
“I don’t hate you. I hate what you’ve done. What you are capable of doing. What you might do again.”
Juan is the voice of reason among the inmates on the floor. For this reason, Clark Davis chooses him to confess and confide in. But Juan’s got a big problem. He is Puerto Rican and Davis tells him a story about choosing a Puerto Rican girl as one of his victims. Juan’s got an even bigger problem: Davis could have confided in the only other white prisoner on the floor, Longshoe, but he doesn’t. For pretty obvious reasons. Thus Juan has been put in the position of trying to be the voice of reason on a floor where Puerto Rican and black inmates outnumber the whites and the only other white guy doesn’t care that he shares the same pigment as Davis anyway.
The conflict becomes less about the hierarchy of acceptance and unacceptable criminal acts and more about social structure and the reversal of what constitutes normality. Davis is a well-spoken white guy amongst barely literate minority street toughs. On the outside, he is normality and they represent the Other. Inside, however, things are reversed and that change to fundamental organizing principle of social structure alters everything. So, you see, Juan finds himself with a very big problem when the decision is made to eliminate the Davis problem.
