An Arresting Scene at the Vista Jail : Hospital Days Range From High Comedy to Low Tragedy

Have you ever been arrested? Taken to jail in the middle of the night? Locked into a module (in modern jails, like Vista’s, they don’t call them cells any more) with an assortment of other inmates, all of whom are lounging around scowling, scratching and looking--at least to your apprehensive eyes--like ax murderers?

Probably not.

“Very few people know what goes on in a jail,” said Vaughn Waight, who has supervised the hospital and infirmary since the County Jail here was built in 1978. “There’s high drama here. There’s also comedy. And sadness. I never come to work expecting it to be a typical night. There’s no such thing.”

It is 9 p.m. on a Tuesday and Waight is doing paper work in the shining infirmary--even the hanging plants look as if they have been polished--and talking to nurse Barbara Sandwell.

Waight is large, bearded, curly-haired. (Sandwell says he looks like “a young Peter Ustinov.”) Sandwell is small, with beautiful brown eyes and the “crumpled rose” look of a woman in her mid-30s who has been short of sleep all week.

“There’s someone with stab wounds in his leg . . . someone with an infected eye,” she mutters, leafing through the file cards filled out at the admitting desk. Across the hall an accused murderer with hepatitis watches her, with pumpkin-yellow eyes, through the window of the isolation cell.

The Vista jail is not a large one. Tucked away behind the courthouse in an area that borders on flower fields, and gardens where people grow things like 12 varieties of lettuce, the jail was built to hold 246 beds.

“But right now we’re so overcrowded we’ve got about 90 people sleeping on the floor on mattresses,” said Sheriff’s Capt. John Burroughs, who commands the jail.

About 35% of the people brought in need some form of medical treatment. Alcoholic prisoners receive anti-seizure medicine. Heroin addicts also need to be medicated. Street people, as well as illegal aliens who have lived without a roof over their head for months, often come in with undiagnosed infections.

Some Are New to Medicine

“We’ve had illegal aliens who have never had any kind of medical treatment. Ever. Not even a thermometer in their mouth,” Waight said.

But mostly, he said, prisoners come in with all the usual complaints seen in the office of any general practitioner. Bad backs, diabetes, flu.

If they are seriously ill or injured, it is the jail nurses’ responsibility to decide whether they should be transported to Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside.

“We had two men in . . . who got into a violent fight in their module over a San Diego Chargers game on TV,” Waight said. One man, he said, was so enraged he bit off the other one’s ear. The deputies had to turn hoses on them to break them apart.

“And I ended up hunting around, in two feet of water, for the ear so it could be sent to a plastic surgeon, with its owner, to be reattached. Most suturing jobs, though, we can handle right here.”

Waight, who is married and has three children, trained in the Navy and at UC San Diego. His specialty training has been in the psychiatric field.

“This job draws on every bit of experience you have,” Sandwell said. Born in England, she was a nanny for a super-rich Italian family before training as a nurse in London. She was working as a midwife for an oil company in Saudi Arabia when she met and married her American husband, David.

Has she ever delivered a baby at the jail?

“Not yet,” she said, smiling. “Most of the prisoners are men.”

She has come fairly close to it twice, though. In March one of the female deputies, Deanna Albini, stayed at her post at the central monitoring switchboard until a few hours before her daughter was born.

The other occasion was a troubling one for Sandwell. The young woman, 19, had been living on the streets.

“She was a little . . . dim,” Sandwell said. “Someone had obviously taken advantage of her. When her labor pains started she was terrified because she had no idea what was happening to her.”

While they waited for an ambulance, Sandwell explained to her how a baby is born. “But someone like that--it’s hard to put them out of your mind,” she said.

The clock on the dispensary wall, which runs on 24-hour military time, now reads 21:15 (9:15 p.m.). A young male face, framed in dishwater blond hair that is one-half inch on top and pony-tailed at the back, appears suddenly behind a barred grill. Waight passes him a small paper cup (the kind dentists tell you to rinse with) containing ulcer medicine in a solution of apple juice.

Drugs Given in Liquids

“Drugs are given in liquids whenever possible so they can’t be hidden in a shoe and sold later,” Waight explained, gesturing at a tray of color-coded cups holding the night’s medications.

Another face looms behind the bars. A bronzed, soap-opera-actor type of face this time, followed by a face with no teeth. Behind the grill, where the men are standing, a hallway divides the west wing from the north.

Now that the Oceanside jail no longer holds prisoners overnight, everyone arrested between the north border of Del Mar and Escondido is brought to Vista. The west wing is for the felony prisoners, the ones whose bail is more than $2,000. It is for the murderers, the rapists, the ones who rob with violence. The two men who have just been brought in for scalping another man are in the west wing.

The north wing is for misdemeanors.

“The 18-year-old, arrested for the first time in his life because he’s driving home from a party after too many beers, goes in the north wing,” Waight said. “At least until his parents can pick him up. Which they’ll be encouraged to do quickly. There’s no way he’ll be put in with the hardened criminals.”

As if clued by the mention of drunk driving, the intercom that connects the admitting gate with the infirmary buzzes. A drunk driver has just been admitted. A nurse is needed to do a blood test.

“Jail nurses have a reputation for doing the most painless blood tests--because we get so much practice. On a Friday or Saturday I do around 15 a shift,” Sandwell said. A ring of keys clinks at the waistband of her white pantsuit as she scurries down seemingly endless corridors. As she passes the open door of the padded cell--where violent drunks are locked in to cool off--her white shoes make a soft, squish-squeaking sound against the linoleum.

The man arrested for drunk driving is waiting for her in a dingy room just inside the admitting gate. He is in his 20s, huddled in a chair with his head in his hands. The room is so small his denim-clad knees are almost touching the Breathalizer machine.

“Look over there, sir. Relax your hand,” she murmurs. (“I always try to be polite. If it’s humanly possible,” she said. “A jail nurse isn’t there to make judgments about inmates.”) A deputy watches from the doorway as she swabs the man’s arm with Betadine.

Outside in the hallway, there is the sound of loud swearing. Another deputy is coming through the gate with his hand under the elbow of another drunken man. This one is limping and bruised as well as inebriated. And swearing. A few hours earlier, the deputy explains, the man was beaten up by his girlfriend because she found him in bed with another woman.

“I really see the deputies as unsung heroes,” Sandwell said. “Most of the ones here are young, with college degrees. We have an ex-helicopter pilot who was an officer in the Marines . . . an ex-professional boxer . . . one who is studying to be a lay priest. They have a lot of self-esteem, which makes them tolerant. What we have at Vista jail is a lot of people doing a very good job, and doing it quietly.”

A Burglar With a Bad Back

Back in the dispensary, Waight’s curly head is bent over, under the shining plants, as he prods a bare back. The back belongs to a burglar. The man was fortunate or unfortunate enough--depending upon your point of view--to have his back go out on him in the middle of a burglary.

Bad backs, Waight said, are a favorite of inmates faking illness.

“The criminals love to put one over on us. They get bored, stuck in a module, for 23 1/2 hours of 24 hours.” There are books in print, he said, on how to fool the authorities if you are in jail. “But all the criminals read the same books!”

One prisoner, he remembered, turned up in the dispensary claiming to have fallen off a top bunk. He wanted to be taken to the hospital for X-rays.

“He did have a heck of a large bruise on his back,” Waight said. “But when I looked closer I realized he’d done it himself with carbon paper. One damp cotton ball, and it was the fastest cure in medical history.”

A family physician--Dr. John Connolly--comes into the jail twice a week. “We save up the difficult cases for him,” Waight said.

Really difficult, or unusual ones, are sent along, with a deputy, to a specialist.

“I saw a parasite in a man’s eyes once,” Waight recalled. “It was the strangest thing. It looked like a wisp of smoke.”

It is now nearly 11 p.m., the hour when Waight and Sandwell end their shift, and others of the seven-member nursing staff take over.

Waight chose to work the 3 to 11 shift. “That’s when most of the action happens,” he said.

Sandwell, who has two teen-age stepchildren, would prefer a day shift but, with 2 1/2 years on the job, she doesn’t have enough seniority.

“I agree with Vaughn that the job’s a rewarding one, though,” she said. “You learn more, and you learn it faster, than you would in a hospital.”

“There’s no special training for jail nurses,” Waight said. “Not yet, anyway. You pretty much learn on the job.” He paused, looking thoughtful. “You learn a lot about human beings in here. That man who was just in, for instance--the burglar with the bad back. I’d never met him before tonight. And yet I’ve met that man a thousand times.”