I was working for an HVAC contractor and we did a job at a prison. We would work at night while all the residents were locked up and sleeping. We had a corrections officer escorting us the whole time. The hallways were all on the exterior of the building and lined with large windows. That allowed the guards in the towers outside to watch people moving within the building.
One night, in the wee hours of the morning, we’re walking down the hallway when a red laser dot appears on the wall next to us. All of us contractors freeze instantly. We don’t know what is happening and we DO NOT want to get shot. Our escort gets on his radio and tells the guys in the tower to stop fucking with us. The little red dot disappears and we go on with our night.
We were briefly afraid for our lives because some bored asshole prison guard couldn’t resist flagging us with the muzzle of his rifle and teasing us with the laser sight.
"Haha I’m pointing my gun at you" is exactly the kind of garbage-tier humor that only a moron in law enforcement could appreciate.
I worked with a guy who said he was one semester from finishing his degree but never finished it. I said “you should go back and finish it!” and he replied “dude, I was working on that degree in prison, I’m not going back to finish it!”
I guarantee you he was offered little to no transitional support when he left prison, which plays a reason why a lot of people don’t finish the degrees they worked on in prison. Trash system and then supporters of it have the nerve to blame incarcerated people for not magically improving their lives like [exception to the rule].
I was connecting network ports in a psychiatric ward hub room when a patient out in the hall started aggressively humping the door. I paused to watch, though to myself “this is still better than talking to doctors” and went back to what I was doing.
I was locked up in one for a couple of weeks after I tried to kill myself, and the only thing that experience did for me is to make sure I keep the ideas to myself next time so no one can interfere. Must be something about the locked doors that turns psychiatric nurses into prison guards mentally, but none of them apart from a trainee from abroad was pleasant to deal with and one was a proper nurse Ratchet. I’ll give you a snippet of her professional behavior and care for the mental wellbeing of the patients.
I was laying on a sofa in the common area reading a book after lunchtime, and had not seen a single other person for about half an hour. Also there was another sofa just like the one I was on and two armchairs in the room. Enter nurse:
-I have to ask you to get off that sofa.
-What? Why?
-Someone might want to come in and sit on it.
-But there’s plenty of other places here to sit, also I’ve not seen anyone around for a good while anyway.
-But they might want to sit right there anyway.
-What about me wanting to be right here now?
-Stop being difficult!
-Did you want to sit here?
-You have five seconds to get off that sofa or I’ll get the orderlies and we’ll sedate you!
Fuckin power tripping bitch.
edit: So many typos…
For what it’s worth, most guys who’ve been in prison have little to no interest in revisiting their time inside for obvious reasons. There’s of course some (relatively) happy times but they’re largely outweighed by the bad, often traumatic times that many former inmates understandably downplay because they’re used to the "suck it up" attitude.
Also, talking about prison with people who’ve been in prison is one thing but talking about prison to people who have never been in prison often just results in the same tired old questions, many of which come with a very morbid but almost gleeful curiosity. That said, most people who’ve been in prison aren’t too thrilled about talking about it even with other formerly incarcerated people.
Obviously there’s some former inmates who love talking about prison but I think guys like that just want someone to listen to them more than anything. Those are also the types of guys who lie their asses off about their prison experience and were probably known inside as a bullshitter.
There’s other exceptions, like inmates who are outspoken about their experiences specifically to open peoples’ eyes about how the supposedly “correctional” system is nothing but a sick form of traumatic retribution that only increases the rate of recidivism (and likelihood of people becoming victims of crime, I’ll add). So even if a person doesn’t give a fuck about inmates, they kind of should because the crueller and inmate is treated, the more likely he is to offend or re-offend in the future.
Things like AMAs are rare because that requires verification which for a million opsec reasons is a horrible idea.
I’m curious what you think of the Nordic prison system, in Norway for example. I once saw a docu about the head of such a prison visiting an American one and they just had such different perspectives.
Funny you should mention that documentary…
I’ll just say it was (and still is) very popular among inmates and many are outraged when they find out what the Nordic system is like, specifically in Norway. Guys were losing their shit when they saw the humane living conditions, especially when it was explained that yes-- even Norway has hardened criminals who are nonetheless treated with decency and the ultimate goal of reintegration/rehabilitation.
I’m really glad you asked about that documentary. I’m guessing it had to have been the same one-- at some point they show the apartment-like living quarters and show the inmates living a very normal looking like, not even dressed in an orange jumpsuit.
But yeah, a lot of guys felt a mix of emotions watching that documentary. Happiness for Norwegian inmates that they actually aren’t being treated like shit, happy that even the COs there seem to be genuinely rehabilitative-minded, but outraged and very sad that all this time we’ve been told all the "soft" approaches like Norway’s isnt effective and that Norway doesn’t have hard criminals like N. America (low-key racism is implied IMO), only to find out Norway does have hard criminals, many of which are able to turn their life around when they’re not dealing with state-inflicted traumatic retribution.
Guys are more likely to open up about their prison experience if they know there’s a chance it could perhaps help guys currently inside. Not every formerly incarcerated person is open to this but you might be surprised.
the guys I met in intake
When I was in the intake prison I was around a lot of people going down for multiple decades. People who were going to max.
Ate lunch across from a guy who had murdered his gf while paranoid on meth. He burned their house down trying to cover up the crime.
One of my cellies was in for stealing atms and shooting at the cops during his arrest.
My other cellie for sex trafficking. Would pick women up at the bar and take them for a motorcycle ride. Then sell the women to a biker gang. He said he knew it was wrong and that he deserved the decades he had, but would do it all again.
There’s really no best stories though. It was all pretty shitty and depressing.
Once I got to medium it was pretty smooth. Read a lot. Wrote a lot. Meditated a lot. Tried to avoid mindless self indulgence so I wouldn’t be fucked when I got out.
And it was still very difficult to reinitgrate with all my family living out of state.
