Let’s do lunch
I AM WAITING in the back of my 737. This is a through flight, a flight that makes a scheduled stop on the way to the final destination. Three passengers have remained onboard, two law enforcement officers and a prisoner they are escorting.
It is not unusual to see LEOs with a handcuffed prisoner. Escorting LEOs travel in pairs, are always the first to come on board and always sit in the last row of seats. The escorted prisoner sits in the middle seat between the two of them. When we land, the three of them are the last to deplane. The prisoner’s handcuffs are discreetly covered up with a jacket draped over their shackled hands. They are never violent offenders. The other passengers never notice what is going on.
We have some time on the ground before boarding so I offer the LEOs and their prisoner something to drink. This prisoner is a little unusual. She is a woman. Most escorted prisoners are men, many of them deadbeat dads, returning to wherever they came from, to serve a sentence, to pay a fine, to answer questions asked by a judge in a court of law.
This prisoner asks permission to use the restroom while we are waiting on the ground. The officer unfastens her handcuffs, walks her to the bathroom, stands outside the door until she is finished. I curiously ask his partner, “What did she do?” I’m so surprised to see a woman prisoner on my flight.
“She embezzled money from her employer,” he tells me. Ahh, I think . It’s always the bookkeeper who cooks the books, empties the till, cashes the checks. White collar crime, an infraction that hasn’t physically harmed anyone, yet it’s still a crime, of course.
The prisoner finishes in the bathroom and the law enforcement officer once again clasps the restraints on her wrists, escorts her back to her seat, fastens the seatbelt around her. He sits in the aisle seat. The prisoner and I start talking.
She is quite pleasant. She is well-spoken, well-read, well-traveled, well-educated, probably from a nice family. We hit it off and continue our conversation like old friends. She is telling amusing stories about her husband, her kids, her dogs. We laugh at each other’s jokes. We actually have a lot in common. Instead of being a flight attendant and an escorted prisoner, we could have been best friends! She’s so affable I almost forget the circumstances of our meeting. I feel like saying, “Would you like to go have lunch?”
A year later, I have another female escorted prisoner on my flight, the last flight of the night which is delayed by over an hour. The LEOs are obnoxious, rude. They are not government officials, they are basically bounty hunters, full of themselves, proud they caught a fugitive whom they are bringing to justice. They repeatedly tell me they have to get their prisoner to a detention center in Tampa that closes at midnight and now the flight is late. They demand to be allowed to get off first. The two of them and their prisoner are seated in the very last row of a completely full airplane.
I tell them no, that is not Delta’s policy. They will deplane last. No exceptions. “And besides,” I tell them, “you are NOT going to parade that girl in handcuffs up the aisle in front of 200 people!”
Their prisoner is an extraordinarily beautiful girl in her early 20s, remanded on a drug charge. She is so pretty, with a beautiful face and a darling figure. She has long dark hair, lush and full, curling down her back. The flight attendants whisper about her, huddling in the back galley. We are shocked that someone as strikingly beautiful as she is sitting on our airplane in handcuffs, going to jail.
Inflight, the prisoner asks permission to use the bathroom. The LEOs don’t follow her or humiliate her by standing outside the door, thankfully. When she comes out of the lav, another flight attendant and I pull her aside. We are old enough to be her mother, perhaps even her grandmothers.
We talk to her softly, kindly, tell her what a beautiful girl she is. We tell her that she is so young, she has her whole life ahead of her. She can be or do whatever she wants. “You need to straighten up,” Gerri admonishes her. “You need to get your life together!” The young girl listens intently, nods her head in solemn agreement. “Find new friends,” I tell her. “Ditch the boyfriend. You deserve so much more than this.”
If I looked like you, I’d rule the world, is what I’m really thinking.