Being sent to prison is one of my biggest fears. I wouldn’t last a month in jail. I occasionally watch the MSNBC series Lock-up and it’s always reinforces my desire to stay out of prison at all costs. First, I’m a bit claustrophobic. I will avoid using an elevator if I can. The idea of being trapped in a contained space freaks me out. As I mentioned before, I refuse to watch the movie, The Descent, because it involves people being trapped in an underground cave. So I don’t know how I’d cope with being locked up in a cell.
Then there’s the lack of privacy. I was watching one show, where new prisoners are brought in the first day. They had around 20 guys in one room, made them all strip naked, and then turn around, bed over, and spread their buttcheeks. I can imagine how dehumanizing that must feel. And, of course, most of the time you’d have a cellmate, which is probably even worse than being locked in a cell alone. You both have to use the toilet right in front of each other! And I’d always be worried that my cellmate might try to kill me in my sleep.
Or even worse…
Y’know what I’m sayin’?
I also wouldn’t want to be involved in the idiotic racial conflicts that seem to dominate most hardcore prisons. They had inmates saying that whenever there is some kind of big racial fight you pretty much HAVE to join in, and fight on your “side,” whatever you are. So if, for example, a bunch of Black guys are fighting some Hispanic guys, I’m supposed to jump in and fight the Hispanic guys too, even if I’m not involved. And if I don’t, then the other Black guys will come after me later, for not joining in. How effed up is that?
So, not me, I’m staying on the straight & narrow path.
Been there. Done that. Not fun.
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I saw the title of this blog and I thought that you were announcing that you were going to jail.
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Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
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Exactly!
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Me too. I’m way too good-looking to go to jail.
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I don’t think anybody ever wants to go to jail, but I see what you mean.
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See, now that’s why they create jail in the first place, so that people will want to avoid them. What I find effed up, is that people are aware of what jail is like, know that they could get gang raped in the shower, shanked in the yard, never see a woman again, etc…yet, they still commit crimes….
I find all of it baffling.
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The simple answer to that is that most people who commit crimes, at least the first time, don’t think that they will get caught. Me, I’m sure that I would get caught, I think I’d make a lousy criminal.
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If you commit a financial crime or large-scale proportions, like Bernie Madoff, then you might not end up in the gang type of a prison. You’d be quite secluded.
and what about Paris Hilton?Apparently she had a swell time!
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Unfortunately, I’m not smart enough to commit the kind of White-Collar crime that gets you sent to one of those Country Club type of minimum security prisons, nor famous enough to get the protective custody that celebrities like Hilton get in jail. They’d just dump me in general population with the drug dealers and gangstas, and end up someone’s b***h.
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Lockup is one scary show. They should show that in Elementary schools, to scare the kids early on into behaving themselves.
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I saw an article on prison coaches who teach you how to survive on the inside, but I’m sure it still sucks.
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I found a whole website dedicated to teaching people how to survive in prison:
http://www.federal-prison.org/
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I wouldn’t mind it so much, as long as you kept T-bag away from me.
Oh, and J.R., you so know you’d end up in solitary confinement. The worst of both worlds.
– Ray
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Yeah, I can’t decide if solitary confinement would be better or worse. On the one hand, I wouldn’t have to deal with the other prisoners, on the other hand it would make my claustrophobia even worse.
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I’d probably end up some big lesbian biker chicks’ bitch.
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I ended up in jail one night on holiday in New Orleans. Got drunk and got in an argument with a guy in a public house around the french quarter – ended up in a cell with other individuals that night who had been picked up and i can honestly say that i am glad my drunken Mr Hyde personality was still alive and well – i have never talked so broadly scottish as i did that night sounded like old Sean Connery at his finest and meanest – sobered up and got out with my rectum intact. AMEN!
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“sobered up and got out with my rectum intact.”
I nominate this for Comment of The Year.
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