Did you know that inmates in federal prisons and federal prison camps consider it to be very bad manners for you to look into their cells or cubes as you walk past? By not knowing this one basic inmate rule it could lead you into a physical confrontation on your very first day inside. Always look straight ahead when walking past other inmate’s houses.
Well, this just makes sense. Rubbernecking is annoying enough when you’re at the office or in school - it’s always unsettling when people overtly turn their heads to look into the room you’re in as they walk past. Imagine living in a cell 24/7 where you couldn’t close the door to prevent that, it’d get old pretty fast.
There was a rumour when I was at University that my halls of residence were designed based on a Swedish women’s prison. Looking at those pics reassures me that the rumours can’t be true. The prison looks much nicer than my halls ever did.
Clearly all that coddling leads to sky-high crime rates.
Exactly.
Better to send people with an ounce of pot into a pound-you-in-the-ass-prison, so they can learn that crime doesn’t pay. That’s clearly how Rywill has cleaned his city of crime…
Damn, the Germans have better-furnished cells than my uni dorm room.
I wonder if having bright, cozy, comfortable environments helps with the rehabilitation process?
The weird thing about that is that if you are a prison rape survivor it kind of implies you know all this already.
I mean, how dumb do you have to be to go to prison or jail, survive being raped there, then come out and read a book to tell you how to survive being raped in prison? If you’re that dumb would you even know how to read?
I guess my point on my previous post was that, depending on the facility you’re gong to, either you’re not going to have trouble or you are. No book is going to help that. At most it’ll ‘help’ in the sense that you’ll be walking into the lion’s den knowing all there is to know about lions, for whatever that’s worth. You still won’t be armed though. And if you are armed then you don’t need to know jack about lions.
It does, among other things. Access to books and magazines, teaching skills, communication (such as liberal visitation and phone use), and other things help significantly reduce recidivism and increase chances for successful social reintegration among convicts with lower sentences, like say 5 years or less, first time offenders, etc.
Um… did you read it at all? Because it’s actually about how to avoid being repeatedly raped once you’ve already been made a target, and I don’t think being raped once instantly conveys a deep understanding of how to not continue to get raped.
If there was a pamphlet that taught you a way to act that would make 85% of lions not attack you, would that not be worth reading before wandering into a lions’ den unarmed?
If the what the pamplet had to say was “Run to the lion that seems least interested in immediately eating you, and hope he doesn’t want to share his future meal with the other lions.”, I think that’s a pamphlet I can pass on and not really miss the assistance.
For reference, go to this link: http://housing.queensu.ca/virtualtours/jeanroyce_hall/jeanroyce_hall.html
And choose “Single room” as a location to see the conditions I lived in for a year 2 years ago.
EDIT: “North American Dorm Room or European Prison?” might actually be a fun image game.
It’s a little better than that. It says “expect rape, but at least this way you probably won’t get AIDs, and won’t get beaten and raped.” I can’t really make a lion analogy to that work. I mean, “run to a lion and convince it to eat a hand, instead of going for the throat” is better, but it’s still not all that close.
I was curious, so I did some googling. Just read an article by a guy who has been in medium and max prisons for seven years, for what he claims is a false accusation of rape. His article is basically on how to survive as someone falsely accused of a sex crime, but this caught my attention:
"For the most part, prisons and correctional institutions are not the hell holes of years past. The “get tough on crime” craze has mutated into “get tough on prisoners.” Although prisons are not for continued and endless punishment, politicians don’t want to educate or rehabilitate prisoners. Prisoners are to be warehoused like the commodities they’ve become. College courses and vocational training in prison are a thing of the past. With all the new prisons being built in the U.S., doing time has become quite sterile — even safe — because all the new prisons are so controlled and high-tech that prisoners now spend most of their time in their cells.
The idea that prisoners really run the joint is a myth. Some of the older prisons are still dangerous, but these are slowly being phased out. It used to be that only the worst, most dangerous, and most hardened criminal was sent to prison. It was no wonder that penitentiaries were dangerous. But these days, with so many first-time offenders doing mandatory prison terms and so many people being sent to prison, the nation’s lock-ups have become diluted with nonviolent prisoners. Today most prisons can even be considered safe.
In all my years behind bars, I’ve never seen a murder, a stabbing, or a rape. I believe some prisoners try to brag how tough prison is to make themselves look tough. They romanticize their prison experience by telling their friends and family how brutal prison was and how they had to fight for their lives every day. Prison, however, may be harder for the innocent man convicted of a sex crime because of the scorn. In the old days, a convicted sex offender — innocent or guilty — was sure to get physically attacked. Today, that is not the case. A man wrongly convicted of a sex crime can make it out of prison unharmed if he stays on his toes and keeps alert.
What about all the violence you read about what goes on in prison? Of course, violence does happen in U.S. penitentiaries, but with over 1.6 million Americans locked up these days, the chance of being one of the few hundred inmates who are killed or seriously injured is slim."
He does talk about fighting, as a way of not being seen as weak, but interesting that he claims it just isn’t as bad as the media portray it.
FWIW
Can you provide a link for that Jeff? I’d like to read it in full.
On the surface it seems like the author makes some excellent, and what should be obvious points about the current state of US prison time if we weren’t so overwhelmed with media coverage, movies, tv shows depicting every day in prison as a scene from Shawshank Redemption. You know the one.
The cynical bastard in me wonders why I’ve never heard this guys take on prison life before now.
Thanks for the link. Did you read the entire article? It’s not that believable once the authors biases and prejudices come up.
Yeah, and I’ve found that most articles of the type seem to be biased in some way. For example, one was by a guy who seemed intent on proving how badass he was.
But if anything, since his whole premise is the injustice of the innocent man jailed, I would have expected him to make it seem worse that it is, not better.
25 Hours is a good movie about a guy about to enter prison for the first time. Nothing about prison itself, just coping with going there.
Hey Rywill. You were so certain and then felt oddly silent. Are you busy reading the paper I linked or perhaps busy considering switching to the defense side of things?
I liked that movie.
Minor, but still…
The scene that stayed with me was where he had his friends beat him up because he felt he couldn’t go to prison without any scars.