It wasn’t until the first door closed behind me that the feeling of claustrophobia began to slowly creep over me. As the echo of that metal slab reverberated through the concrete hall, I knew turning back was no longer an option. The only direction now was forward, through the confined labyrinth that is the Lane County Jail.

In jail, doors are not only the barrier between imprisonment and freedom; they are symbolical of past choices as well. The people who are locked away in the Lane County Jail chose to walk through the wrong doors in life. When open, doors represent the promise of a better path. The inmates in this jail have, for now, lost their chance to open any doors in life.

“Every door in here has its own unique sound,” says Deputy Sheriff Joe Pishioneri, my tour guide for the day. Pishioneri is a jovial, upbeat man who constantly evokes a sense of enthusiasm and an expertise for how to run a jail. He should though; he’s done a lot of time there, 26 years to be exact. After working there for such a long time, Pishioneri is ingrained in the space that makes up the Lane County Jail. I couldn’t ask for a better person to crack open a door and give me a glimpse of a society like none I had ever seen before.

The narrow corridors of the Lane county Jail are designed with a system of locking doors at each end of the hall. The reason behind this system is to keep inmates from walking freely around the facilities. By confining their movement to small sections of the jail at a time, Pishioneri and the rest of the staff can maintain a better control over the inmates. The concept feels like an airlock system used to depressurize one’s surroundings before entering an environment. The only difference was that for me the pressure of my surroundings would only increase as I moved further through the doors of the jail.

Our tour through the jail began with the holding cells. These were large and barren rooms where arrestees are first sent. Pishioneri explains that these rooms can sometimes be filled with nearly 40 people, but on this day they weres empty. The wooden doors to the rooms are covered in top to bottom in carvings and scratches. One of them says “J loves S.” Another says “Save the trees!” The etchings reveal frustration and boredom. They tell the story of so many people whose poor choices led them to that room. These are rooms that have left a mark on people’s lives, and in return those people have left their mark on the rooms. I had a feeling though that these rooms were only a warm up for the real cells.

Another metal door slid to a rumbling halt behind us as we walked into a hall with a dozen tiny isolation cells on our left. Pishioneri explains that isolation cells are for inmates with mental issues. We walk past a few of these cells, peering through the tiny circular windows, hoping to catch a glance of an inmate. While most of them where empty, inside one of them was a man lying hunched in the fetal position. Pishioneri led our group into one of the cells and I was immediately hit with the putrid odor of stale piss. The smell lingered heavy inside the small confines of the cell as we packed all 13 of us into the space. “Do you know why these walls are painted grey like this?” Pishioneri asks the group while standing on a solid block supposed to resemble a bed. “To prevent poop painters from smearing their business all over the place.” In one corner of the tiny room is a filthy sliver of a window, surely too dirty to let much light into the cell. After five minutes in the room, my heart is beating increasingly faster and my skin crawls with a grimy feeling. An officer passing by jokes about locking us up inside, and while the sense of humor of the staff in the jail is slightly comforting, physically I’m anything but. Eventually we shuffle out one by one back into the hall and wait patiently for the next door to open.

As the door to the pharmacy room began to turn open I felt brief suction of air rush past me. Inside, the pharmacy felt refreshingly sterile compared to the gritty stench of the isolation cell. In the corner is a pregnant inmate reclining in a hospital bed and watching TV. We walked by with a brisk pace to the door at the end of the hall, which greeted us with a familiar draft of stale jail air.

At this point during our tour, the jail felt like an empty dungeon. With a discombobulated sense of direction, my mind swirled with a slight headache. Every room we had been through so far had felt like a deserted ghost town. Inside the next room though, we would finally get a glimpse of life behind bars. At the end of a narrow hall was a circular room with officers sitting in the middle. The dimly lit room felt like a command center located at the heart of the jail. Glancing up, I realized I was surrounded by inmates. These were men and women considered dangerous to society and there I was ten feet away with only a sheet of glass separating us. My instincts told me to stare in awe. Except for prison movies and TV shows, I had never seen this type of society in person. But the fear of eye contact kept my gaze focused towards Pishioneri. That was until he informed us the glass walls were one-sided mirrors. Suddenly, everyone’s eyes were latched onto the life behind that wall. Three men in a circle bounced up and down in aerobic activity while other inmates tossed cards back and forth on small circular tables. Even though there seemed to be little excitement inside those rooms, there was both a strange allure to watching the inmates as well as a feeling of guilt. I was a visitor to the jail but in that room I felt like the prisoners were on display for us to study and critique. Claustrophobia was hitting me harder than ever in that room, but not because I felt trapped by the walls around me. Instead, I felt claustrophobic for the inmates who lived in such a confined area with almost no personal space.

I left that room with feeling a loss of reality. I couldn’t understand how living in such conditions was possible. The jail was a place of locked doors and I couldn’t wait to reach the front door. I could hardly focus for the rest of the tour, following Pishioneri blindly through a maze of halls and rooms. When we finally reached the end of the tour, I bursted out into the fresh air of the real world and inhaled a deep and satisfying breath. Seeing life inside the jail provided a fascinating perspective on what it means to live confined and without freedom. The inmates inside made choices to open the wrong doors in life and those doors led them to their temporary home inside the Lane County Jail.