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].
Can't he transfer to a campus without bars on the windows?
Yeah, and that's what I said next. That wasn't the funny part of the story though.
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.
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.
lol I forgot to include psych wards!
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...
holy shit I can edit the title of my post
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.
Weirdly enough, this quote is hilariously accurate if you consider COs to be IRL dementors.
From the wiki:
"Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them... Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you."
Replace "Dementors" with "Corrections officers" and I bet most people who've been to prison would say that's an accurate statement.
The only thing that sucks about this Michael Scott scene is that very few people remember the reference :( Prison Mike is fucking hilarious
Working in corrections requires NDA signatures. You’re not going to get much.
Edit: referencing The States
I wasn't asking the COs
There's a whole other 50% in the buildings that didn't.
Please, COs break protocol on a daily basis. They just don't leak shit so much to the public. Instead, they do stuff like take highly inappropriate photos of inmates and share them in their little group chats.
Good. Disgusting COs can fuck off.
