What is prison like? Hmm, there are all of these shows now about what life and love is like behind bars, so you have seen it, and now you know.
There are no TV cameras in a real prison. Thinking that TV shows reflect real prison life would be like watching Law and Order and saying you know how our legal system works.
Do you think any warden running a bad prison is going to let camaras in? They won’t even let Senators into the detainment camps. If you are still under the delusion that only bad people go to prison, think again.
I was neither guilty or charged with a crime and yet, there I lived. Research is starting to show that up to 10% of convictions could be wrongful. (https://thehighcourt.co/wrongful-convictions-statistics/ ) Prisons and jails are overcrowded with the poor and the mentally disabled, not a proper placement for these individuals.
The US incarcerates individuals at a higher rate than any other country. The count is over two million, and of that number, over 500,000 have not even been convicted or sentenced for a crime. (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html)
Once you have gone through the police, you are handed off to the judicial system, which is a system that does not consider you human. I love Shawshank Redemption; it is probably one of the best prison movies out there. It goes through what being incarcerated is really like, all the way to getting released. I love that scene when Morgan Freeman is out and asking to use the bathroom and is told he does not have to ask permission. How do you de-train that?
Those that support the now standard lock them up philosophy need to consider, then what?
There are a few people locked up for murder or what is classified as “heinous” crimes, but most are not.
A large portion of the incarcerated are there for drugs, check writing, car theft. These are most certainly not things requiring a death sentence.
What do you want accomplished while they are locked up? Do you want them to pay for their crime and get rehabilitated? Yah, prison is not designed for that. It is more like being sent to a warehouse. You get filed by a number, and as long as you do not attract attention, you get passed through to the next shelf.
Well, Ms. Winters, they have classes while they are in prison. Yes, they do, classes that are required, and if you do not go, you are sent to the “hole.” I have already described that experience.
Prison under our current standards is not a place for rehabilitation, learning, or growth. It most certainly is not designed to train a person how to behave in “normal society.” It is just warehousing people. What is worse is that it is often run by selfish and greedy people.
The private prisons are often given a set amount of money, and whatever they do not spend on prisoners, they get to keep. This means medical, housing, and food portions are cut to make more profit. To qualify as a prison officer, you have to posses a certain level of cruelty.
My dad, for example, retired as a prison guard. He was asked if he could shoot someone without even seeing their face. His answer was yes. My dad takes great pride that he sent someone to segregation, the “hole” for having toilet paper in their room. Toilet paper! He wrote it as a major infraction because the inmate could have started a fire with it. Again, toilet paper is illegal.
Finished craft projects are illegal, and writing paper that you do not have a record for is illegal. Saved food from a meal is illegal. Sharing is also illegal. When I was incarcerated, the fire alarms would cause seizures in sensitive people, and helping them was illegal.
Pushing someone in a wheelchair was also illegal. Human contact was forbidden. Prison is a wonderful way of stripping any kind of humanity from a soul.
Prison is different from jail. They give you a number, and that is now who you are, a number. My Doc number is engraved in my memory never to be forgotten.
In prison, it goes on every correspondence to anyone. It is recited in every picture card count, fire drill, room search. It becomes who you are—Inmate _____.
Once you leave jail and enter prison, it is like landing on an entirely different planet.
They say receiving is the most dangerous part of prison, kind of like the sorting room on Harry Potter. Everyone is thrown together in one locked-up unit. Murderers and check writers are all confined in the same place.
I specifically remember my orientation. My officer probably does too. I had no tattoos, no history of drug use, and no criminal record previously. She looked at me and said “Mrs. Winters, I have no idea what you did to get here, but it is going to be ok,” and then she sent me to be deloused. You thought that was just in the movies. Well, that was exactly what happened.
Jail can be a prep for prison, but remember that I did not think I was going to prison. I taught Sunday School and was a Christian counselor. It is not that I thought God would save me. I assumed like in all the TV shows that an investigation would be done, the truth would come out, and the mistake would be corrected.
Now I was in prison. I was getting strip searched, deloused, and assigned a cell. I had no pillow and a blanket that could better be described as a sheet. I had a cellmate that did not stop talking.
I got used to room searches in receiving. My cellmate’s violations included things like soap, shampoo, writing paper, envelopes. I am not shitting you. Possessing these things was now considered a crime! You are in real trouble if you have an extra blanket.
Receiving did have some benefits; we had a toilet/sink in the room. Remember Shawshank. Yah, my days of being able to use the bathroom without asking permission were soon to end. Getting a drink of water was also limited. We take these things for granted, but in prison, they become a privilege.
I was assigned to medium custody (all inmates with pending court issues were assigned to medium custody). I knew that prior to my designation.
I hit the law library as soon as it was possible. The length of my sentence also dictated a higher custody level. Medium did put me with only one cellmate instead of the dorm rooms in minimum, so there were some advantages. But I will never forget the clank, clank of the doors.
We had “movements” on every hour where we were cleared to come and go, but not any other time. Lock down was real. The doors would bolt shut and that was it until we were released. Clank, clank, lock down.
Prison punishes first and usually does not bother asking questions later. Keeping your nose clean and staying out of the line of fire is a survival need.
We had a day room that was accessible most of the time, but not always. My superpower in prison was feeling the tension in the room and going to my cell. I would be playing cards or knitting, and the hair on the back of my neck would stand up, and I would know to retreat.
There was a pretty bad fight. A girl was brushing her teeth, and someone came from behind her and grabbed her head and slammed it into the sink. I was told that she also kicked her down the stairs, and there was blood, lots of blood. I missed it; I was safely tucked in my room.
The assailant said that she did not know the girl and had no beef with her. However, her girlfriend was in segregation, and she wanted to go to segregation too. Fighting gets you there.
The girl that got hurt did not do anything but brush her teeth in the wrong place and at the wrong time. Watching the room becomes a safety issue, quickly.
I learned to pay attention to everything. But that skill was born out of necessity.
The other thing is that you do not want to see things either. You do not want to answer questions. Rules for communication are different in prison. On the outside, you may talk to the police officers about the car accident you just witnessed. In prison, you are a snitch. It is better to be gone when something happens. Think of Shultz on Hogan’s Heroes—“I see notin,’ I hear notin,’ I know notin’.” Hopefully, you will never get locked up, but if you do….
Sharing—sharing is illegal in prison. I do not remember how the rule is written exactly, but it was put in place to prevent strong arming. You are to neither receive, nor give to others, ANYTHING—not toothpaste, not soap, nothing. If you cannot prove on your paperwork that you own something, it is illegal.
The only exception to this rule was guard specific. In the chow hall, some guards would allow people to share what was on their plate, but only within the table where you were sitting, and only some guards would allow it.
Prison brought me back to a life of starvation. I sat around the 90-lb marker for most of my stay. They did not give us enough food to survive.
A lot of people put on weight in prison, but they usually had bad diets before or used drugs. They do feed you a lot of carbs, pastas and such, but my body burns carbs very quickly. I am a carnivore and need a high protein diet; most prisons do not provide much meat.
The pictures of me locked up are pretty scary. I was bones. The clinic did write me a medical need for protein shakes, but a lot of the kitchen staff found them delicious, so even though I had medical clearance for them, they were not always available. I will talk about money in a moment, but here is where family and friends stepped up.
I could not afford canteen food, but those loved ones that could, would visit all the time. I remember multiple visits where my guest would say that they could not stay, but they needed to feed me. The visiting rooms had vending machines. They did not provide real meals, but hot pockets or other snacks. They would get whatever was available and stay long enough for me to throw as much food in mouth as time allowed.
The guard’s mercy in the mess hall also helped. People would invite me to come sit at their table so I could finish their plates. Shit on a Shingle—it did not matter, it was food, and I was starving.
Eventually they switched to boxed food, so I no longer had the ability to eat the leftovers from someone else.
The lifers got together when they found out I was so skinny because I could not afford food. They were not going to allow it. I do not know how they set it up exactly, but they distracted the guards during canteen and put bags and bags of groceries out for me. They put them outside the canteen room, and I was to pick them up like they were mine. There was peanut butter, crackers, top ramen (a prison staple), beans, food for weeks! I cried so hard. You want to talk about thankful and being blessed, starving for years and then being given a bag of groceries. What those women did for me I will never forget. It was against the rules. We could have gotten in big trouble, but they were willing to take the chance to feed me. Their kindness did not end there.
If you read the child abuse section, you know I have birthday issues. Now I was in a locked situation. There were steel doors that “clank clank, clank clank,” and the cage was set.
I worked at the law library. The timing was important. I went to work at first movement and got back right at afternoon count. I was out of the pod all day. It is true that our birthdays are listed on our badges, but for my 30th birthday, I had no idea what was about to happen. Count was called, and returning to my cell was just part of the day.
My cell was blown up with “Happy Birthday” everywhere! Wrapped packages, presents, lots of them. It was a picture card count where the officers came to the door to check our identification and to make sure that we were in our cell. There was NO way they could have missed all the decorations and packages.
This was highly illegal! It was one of the best birthdays I have ever had in my life. When I came out to say thank you, we played games and told jokes, and they brought more snacks.
You think you have had wonderful birthdays. When people go out of their way even at the cost of being locked down 23 hours in the day to throw you a party—that is love. Best birthday EVER!
I think this is one of the biggest problems I have with the prison system. I got to know a great many “criminals”, while in custody and to be honest their biggest crime was being poor.
A large percentage of people commit crimes because they feel they have no choice.
I’ve seen news broadcasts of disaster areas. When the people raiding the stores are white they are called ‘resourceful’. If a disaster area stores are raided by people of color, they are called thieves. It’s the same activity.
Money and Prison—where do you start in prison reform? Hmm… let me think about that. Time has passed since I was in, but during my stay 25 years ago, the cap out for most jobs was $55 a MONTH! If your job required 100 hrs. a week, you were still paid $55 for the MONTH. Oh, it gets so much worse.
Out of that, they take cost of incarceration, (even though I was not court ordered), victims compensation, other fees, and the one that really pissed me off was my cable bill.
I did not have a TV for most of my stay, yet I was billed every month for cable. I tried fighting it. They said that one day I might get a TV, so I am required to pay the cable bill.
To the best of my knowledge, the rest of the world does not work that way.
My $55 a month dwindled pretty fast with the deductions that I was not court ordered to pay and services I was not using.
When I was a clerk at the law library, my wages were the same as in laundry. Eventually I earned my way into a job that paid $1.10 an hour. It was a for-profit company, so they were definitely reaping the benefits.
Our country that condemns other countries for slave labor locks up over two million of its citizens every year, bills them for being locked up, and uses their labor for profit companies.
Prison is just the United States way of continuing slavery. If it were not, people that defraud others of millions would be behind bars not given a fine. Podophiles’ would be locked up, not given day passes to continue their crimes. And, men who murder their wives would spend more time in prison than the women defending themselves.
Prison strips everything you need for living in society. You become slave labor earning money for whoever has the government contract. You lose your ability to make everyday decisions. You lose being human.
Locking people up and warehousing them like cattle or lab rats should be a crime. This subject deserves more attention than I’m giving it here. Maybe one day I’ll write a book on prison reform.
The recidivism rate is high for a reason. The longer a person is in prison, the less likely they are to acclimate back into society. The “rules” for life are much different.
Acclimating back into society is a major issue and just as traumatic as being thrown in prison…