I’ve seen some weird stuff come up for sale periodically on CraigsList, but nothing—and I mean nothing—has come across quite as strange as this Jail Bus for sale in Kentucky on GovDeals.com, a government liquidation site. “What is a Jail Bus?” you ask. Read on, dear reader. Read on.
It seems that Kentucky enacted some kind of “Scare Kids Into Stayin’ Out of Prison” program that entailed a traveling jail. The easiest way to make this happen, clearly, was to build a prison cell in a surplus handicap bus and then wrap a seven-foot-high inmate behind bars on the side with “DO THE CRIME PAY THE TIME!” awkwardly traversing the Blue Bird’s side cladding so that “PAY THE TIME!” is barely legible. At a glance, it looks like one of those hired sign-trucks advertising that crime is a pretty darn good time: “DO THE CRIME [ILLEGIBLE CRAP].”
“Hey, Billy, did you see that bus drive by?”
“Yeah, it says to do the crime!”
“Which crime?”
“Who cares?!”
[Billy and friend remove mattress tags]
I’ll spare any political thoughts about crime and deterrence here, but these scared-straight things usually look a bit hokey to adults in retrospect, which means they probably looked extra-hokey to kids who got out of third-period English to walk to the back parking lot and see Otis’ drunktank from the Andy Griffith Show in the back of a short bus. Maybe it had a lasting effect on lots of kids and I’m just being cynical. Surely, some BangShift reader enjoyed a visit to the Totally Legit Jail Bus.
Whatever its use at the time, here it is for sale now on a government liquidation site and this thing is tailor-made for some seriously sketchy stuff. Mobile prostitution lair? OK, maybe the giant inmate on the side will scare away the clientele. So the whole inmate mural thing might actually, in this case, prove a deterrent. Mobile dungeon for the white-collar set? Again with the giant inmate on the side, but the world is indeed a twisted place.
Tow vehicle for the 24 Hours of LeMons? Now we’re talking! That’s some really sketchy stuff.
You can find this extraordinary bus on GovDeals.com right here.
It could be used to tour cruises and shows and anyone who swapped an LS into anything else could be locked up and horribly tortured – especially if the recipient was a Ford…..