Dennis Latham: Life, Fiction, and the Pursuit of Madness

My novella, Bad Night In The Holding Cell , is based on a night I spent in the Cincinnati Justice Center back in 1987. The internal description of the Justice Center is exactly how I remember it. You could smoke in jail then, so if you had cigarettes, you could be a popular man in the holding cell. This was a no frills jail for sure, and if you had to take a dump, you had to do it in public where the jailers and everyone in the holding cell could share your adventure. A bare toilet with one of those torpedo tube sounding flushers, and where you were the main act, could constipate even hardened criminals. I was used to going in public because in Marine Corps Boot Camp, we had to use lines of bare toilets with no walls in between them for privacy. When I was in Vietnam, the Vietnamese dropped their pants and went where ever they happened to be standing. But for an American at home, public toilets with an audience was not the normal life event. The prisoners in the story ex