Adventures in Prison

Fail saving throw. Disarm unsuccessful.

What is my motive

I know of the plea bargain scam, ill freely volunteer I know it from the movies, where its a favorite plot element. The US justice system is so thoroughly career and money driven that the term justice is absolutely laughable. Or cryable. Very obviously the law dictates only one thing: you better be rich as fuck. In Holland there are milder issues, the plea bargain scam isnt as polular. Its rather irritating stuff like that murder is less severly punished than tax evasion or such more formal crimes. The law seems to admire murderers as potential social projects.

I do not see eye to eye with N on everything. But sure, even without him I am aware of the re-institutionalizing aim. But I dont believe in it. Prison either ruins people or teaches petty criminals the real work. Or it launches rap careers. Sometimes a person comes out intact, apparently. Congratulations are in order.

What did not exist in Ns time is the prison industry. US prisons are increasingly privatized, paid for by tax money and a prisoner costs thrice what a university student costs. It is lucrative to incarcerate people. That, as far as I can figure, is the reason the US has by far the largest prison population of the world. Its juicy business. What happens inside the prisons is simply facile violence, diseased instincts at play, prisonguards are of course the lowest type of humans. Below even street police.

Amazing how many guys I come across in the various industries who are acolytes of certain books. Every real estate investor has read rich dad poor dad or the art of the deal. It’s their unwritten sacred mythology. It tells them how to think and act, what code to follow. Far more than their bosses or their peers ever could. For me it was George be careful, the autobio of maverick ad man George Lois. It directed my attitude and code in the board room. I’m sure soldiers have their epic code, cops, teachers.

I bet that someone could pen the ultimate prison guard model – a book that touches at the core of how a prison guard should act, think and feel, written by prison guards, for prison guards. A tome/manual that touches deep to the core psychology and meaning-making mechanisms. But of course the book wouldn’t be written by prison guards. It would be written by detrop under a pseudonym.

One could imagine a book like this becoming required reading for newbie prison guards. It would be gritty but with a moral center, a code, that would influence guards to follow an inner compass preventing them from some of the baser injustices.

This book can only be written by a convict. It’s what Kierkegaard would have done.

It could also be a great book for real estate developers and ad men, parents, farmers. The Tao Of Prison Guards becoming like the art of war in the 80s.

Then if you are as mad as you pretend, you take the money and use it to become the joker or the penguin or whatever your end goal is. But probably better off using it to become yourself

prisonbooks.info/2012/09/06/bre … -facility/

What pissed me off was having my yard time taken away because of some shit other inmates were involved in. This was routine for the prison. A few assholes do something wrong and everybody is punished for it.

I knew the gang members had the cell phones and I knew they had timed the attack on the officers because the word got around. When the officers came into the pod to get the cell phones the gang members were already waiting for them. A few of them had taken the broom handles of the brooms and hid them in their cell. When the officers ordered a shake down (cell search), the gang members walked into their cells with the officers, shut the door behind them, and went to work. It took about a minute or two before the guard in the control booth figured out what was happening. When he called the code 4, the PERT team stormed the pod. At that very moment, a coordinated attack on the other side of the prison was set off; inmates were waiting until they heard the call to attack the officers… the code 4 required the entire team to move to blue pod… so there was nobody left to take control of the other pods. The inmates knew this, and simply waited until the call was made before they attacked. Very strategic.

Nothing I could do but sit there and watch. You mind your own business. Helluva fight, though. Sounded like these guys were getting beaten to death in those cells. A few of the guards were talken out on a gurney, blood was everywhere. The PERT team almost gassed the fucking pod, but they got it under control fairly quickly.

Now the worst thing that comes out of this kind of stuff is not the loss of privileges for the whole prison, but the suspicion everyone has about who the snitch was. Those who aren’t in with the gang are usually the suspects. If you try to explain you aren’t the snitch, they believe you are the snitch… or else you wouldn’t have felt the need to prove you weren’t. I remember there was a tension in the air for weeks after that riot. Any false moves and it was over for you. They got all the phones, which put my buddy Auto out of work; he was the phone guy who could strip the phones of metal components so they wouldn’t set the metal detectors off. It paid really well. I remember after that, Auto began gambling on the scrabble board more. One time he played Zwieback on me. He built off the K, got a seven letter word bonus, and hit the triple. Cleaned me out. Took every pack of ramen noodles I had. I got em back though, and then some.

In prison you have to come up with a hustle if your people don’t send you money. You can’t live off seventy cents a day wages, so you either gamble, sell drugs, loan shark, do radio work, or make shit. One of my hustles was making novelty envelopes, tribal and abstract tattoo prints and letter paper. I got a dollar per envelope or letter paper, and two dollars for a tattoo print. This is some stuff I had left when I got out of prison. I’m no artist, but it paid well, and they were quickly made, so I did what I could. The inmates loved this shit, especially for writing their girlfriends.

Envelopes:

Tattoo prints:

Letter paper:

Zoot, you just don’t know how much I can relate to what you’re saying in this thread.

Those doodles are not bad at all.

I think you’re being smearcastic.

Really…no. I’ve been wrongfully accused maybe 6 or 7 times now. And, I got hit by a truck in 1999 while on a motorcycle and compressed the whole top chunk of my spine, and pinched a few nerves back there, and I mean, I’m 35 and I’ve fallen down and off of things enough times to where I started to feel the things that people tell you will hurt when you get old a long time ago. Without certain “medications”, I can’t lay down flat for more than a few hours at a time. I’ve spent more on attorneys in my life than it would have cost to own a small condo in some places. Most of the guys that I grew up with have spent significant time behind bars and some of them well over half their lives, a few of them will be there forever. Hell man, I’ve got a case pending right now that I’m actually not going to discuss the details of. It’s a serious one. Maybe the most serious one ever. It’s easy to think that I"m a smug arrogant yuppie, but you’ve got to factor in that I’m probably coming from roughly the same place as you in life, and like you, I’ve demonstrated that I’m better than the position that society has offered me, and like you, I’ve dealt with the backlash of that on many occasions.

My advice? Stay out of jail. Live like a ghost. Have as little contact with authority as you can. Never let anyone know where your money is.