This menu must meet FDA minimum daily adult nutritional requirements in order to meet the U. Reality, however, is quite different. Depending on what else is in season and therefore cheap, we also got greens collard or turnip , squash, corn, or mixed vegetables.
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However, I can testify to another inmate complaint which was that the high soy content can make you constipated. However, for those inmates who steadfastly refused to eat this food, even my very tight-fisted deep south state offered a few alternatives. A lot of guys got the alto for that meal, which was served at least once per week on the 4-week rotating menu.
My state was also forced by court order to offer alternative menu options for inmates with special religious or dietary needs. For example they got sandwich bags full of grape tomatoes the only camps where I saw tomato bits in the salad were Hayes, where they were fresh from the garden, and the SSRC East Unit. Second, your inmate ID card was tagged to make it impossible for you to buy any food at the canteen except the designated kosher items.
No Cheetos or Ramen Noodles for you, inmate! So why did so many inmates sign up? The answer should come as no surprise since we are talking about prison inmates: Some of the new items were:. Therefore the impact of these new items would probably not be felt as strongly once they were spread out across four weeks instead of just one, even if some of the items were intended to be offered several times each month. Living off the canteen. Yes, the prison canteen sold all the usual kinds of junk food you might find at your neighborhood convenience store: Like any convenience store, the canteen also sold microwavable fast food items such as bacon cheeseburgers, chicken sandwiches, and burritos.
Inmates bought so many of them that they were used as common currency around the prison compound. And how the heck do you get the hot water you need to do that in a prison dorm?! And why would every prison in my state willingly retrofit every water fountain in every dorm to provide scalding hot water? To cook soups with, of course! And heaven forbid that the water heating unit should crap out or there will be hell to pay! There have definitely been prison riots over less serious issues than that! Anyway, as you may or may not know, each Ramen Noodle package consists of a rectangular block of dried noodles twice as long as it is wide.
Inmates train for riots. At yard time, you'll see a ton of them doing martial arts together. Sometimes they'll start a fight with three or four guys just to see what our response is, that way they're able to work up a counter for it. They figure out what our moves are, and then they practice their methods for beating us while we watch.
You'd think we might be able to turn that right around and train to counter their new methods, but, again, there's no money for training. We do have some tools to fight back, but they have to be used on us before we're allowed to use them.
So the guards have to get pepper balled, which is not as hilarious as it sounds: A pepper ball is a shotgun round loaded with pepper spray, and it just sucks. The pepper spray we use in prisons will eat the bottom right out of a Styrofoam cup -- imagine it in your eyes.
But even that isn't much of a deterrent -- remember, there's simply no way to punish the worst of these guys. If you have a to-life sentence, what am I going to do to make that worse? An inmate killing an inmate will usually get 30 to 50 days of segregation. Those inmates who beat up that female guard?
Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment
They had five years added to their life sentences. It's completely meaningless -- if you're a lifer, prison might as well be a license to kill. That's one of the reasons we let them have things like Xboxes and PlayStations. If you give them video games, they'll be less likely to start fights. So once a week we'd hook up a bunch of TVs in a classroom so all of the murderers and rapists could play Halo.
There's nothing more interesting than seeing guys who have killed multiple people deathmatching each other. Teabagging seems a lot less innocent when you know it might end with one of the aforementioned riots. We had a riot in one of our facilities over a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The inmates had an issue with the amount of jelly and decided to hold a sit-in, then the sit-in got violent. Even if most of the hundred people in the room are being reasonable, as long as a couple of them are acting crazy, they get to control the mood. Today's going to be about poo-flinging.
We had some out-of-state inmates who didn't like that we didn't allow blue jeans or conjugal visits. They got together in the yard during exercise time and decided they wouldn't leave. We locked them in the yard, so they dragged all the free weights up to the bars and brought them down on the barrel locks, popping them right open.
Prison Sucks - Typical Morning Among Fellow Inmates
Once free, the first target -- instead of "the guards" or "the front gate" -- was the soda machines, which we had for some reason. The inmates knocked them over, burst them open, and savored the sweet taste of free prison Pepsi. So now we had a bunch of caffeinated, riotous inmates. They forced their way into the control room, broke out all the windows, trashed the equipment, and only then realized they had no way to open the doors again. So they had to go back to the free weights so they could hammer the door frames into dust and break back out of the control room.
During the riot, one dude who'd switched over from the Crips to the Bloods realized that his new friends didn't really care for him. They chased him down and stabbed him five or six times, but he made it back to his cell and locked the wooden door. Then they burned the wooden door down and stabbed him 15 or 20 more times until he crawled out of the room.
He made his way out of his cell and all the way down the hall to the guards, being stabbed all the while. He survived again -- a human can survive a lot of stabbing and wound up suing the prison for a bunch of money. One of the great tragedies of the prison system is that so many young people only realize their talents after getting locked up. You take a bunch of guys with zero college or legal work experience, lock them in a big building, and suddenly they're master engineers.
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I found that if you give these guys a PlayStation controller, they'll quickly make you a quality electronic tattoo gun. Scott Campbell This looks cool, but they could get the same functionality out of a pen, some string, and a needle. And what about ink? Sure, the stuff inside a pen works OK for a little while, but it fades real quick. Sure, it isn't exactly sterile, but you know what they say: You can't make an omelet without rampant staph infections.
You've probably heard about prisoners being pretty good at turning stuff like spoons and pencils into deadly knives, but that stuff is easy work. A skilled prisoner can make a knife out of literally any solid substance you care to give him. We had one inmate spend days wetting sheet after sheet of newspaper and compressing them together under a small stack of books. Eventually, the paper dried into a rigid cardboard brick. The inmate sharpened this on the floor of his cell, and in about a month he had himself a fine little face-stabbing knife.
But prison ingenuity is at its best when it comes to the business of getting shitfaced. Each cell contains a bunk bed with a small gray box for that bed's inmate to store his stuff in. And in most cases, "stuff" is a synonym for "personal brewery. When they open it up, suddenly the building is full of a stench like oranges and puke.
Some inmates will cut it with Metamucil so it goes down easier, which does not help matters as far as our noses are concerned. That's not even getting into what happens when these guys drink the stuff. Once, a huge dreadlocked dude chugged an entire gallon of prison wine or "pruno". He got aggressive, and the whole mess ended with two empty canisters of prison mace, three injured guards, and one passed-out prisoner who woke up very confused the next day. It seems like fear of nonstop rape is what scares people most about prison, not any of that trivial stuff like losing your freedom for years or having a criminal record.
Well, I worked in prisons for seven years, and I only saw one rape. If you're wondering how all of these males can go without sex for so long, well, who says they do? There are plenty of guys who are willing sex partners. You'd walk by cells and see one guy's head bobbing up and down and just knock on the gates and say, "Hey, you crazy kids, that's enough! That's not to say that sexual assault never happens or to trivialize the problem for the people it happens to.
But the truth is that between 0. In reality, a lot of prisoners just embrace being one of the, uh, more desirable men in lockup. You probably assume that prison is ordered a little like Dante's hell and inmates wind up on different "levels" based on the severity of their crime. If you make it into a federal prison for a nonviolent drug charge, you might wind up cell mates with Johnny the Cop Stabber, who, despite his colorful nickname, is a serial rapist. He's a complex man. As a private prison, we were only supposed to get inmates up to a "medium" level of severity.
We had a points system, and once they got above a certain number, we had to send them to the state. My job for a while was to do that paperwork, and guess what: The state would fiddle with the numbers all the time in order to dump the inmates on us. I'd go into their records and add up their infractions and realize that these guys were much more dangerous than the state had said.
7 Horrifying Things You Didn't (Want to) Know About Prison
Whenever we wound up with someone who was WAY too violent for our prison, the state would wait forever to take him back. That means that prison, like America, is a great melting pot. But instead of being a place for people of all nations, faiths, and creeds to live together, it's a place where kids who made one dumb mistake hang out with career criminals.