Life in the prison economy
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Cheetah
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Very cool thread.
What considerations are there for allergies and medical issues? My personal pet peeve is food allergies, of course: I can't have egg, nuts or poultry. So all kinds of pasta, stews, waffles, bread, and whatnot with eggs, nuts and poultry is also out. Seeing how useful eggs and nuts is for easy nutrients, it's a real bother in the outside world, but I wonder how I could get by inside jail or prison...
What considerations are there for allergies and medical issues? My personal pet peeve is food allergies, of course: I can't have egg, nuts or poultry. So all kinds of pasta, stews, waffles, bread, and whatnot with eggs, nuts and poultry is also out. Seeing how useful eggs and nuts is for easy nutrients, it's a real bother in the outside world, but I wonder how I could get by inside jail or prison...
Timsup2nothin
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Your life would flat out suck, and I honestly don't know how you would survive. The chow hall is inmate labor, and counting on them to follow the strict "no chicken has ever touched this pan" type protocols that regular restaurants follow is dicey at best.
I knew guys who were diabetic and had to check in at medical for insulin, and they seemed to manage, mostly, but were always running afoul of the cops because they might be headed to medical when some rando cop thought they should be headed to their unit.
Timsup2nothin
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I am yet again convinced that Jordan Peterson is a babbling idiot. Prison is a collection of rule breakers, and aggression has almost no correlation with that at all. Most of the really aggressive bullying types I've encountered in the real world never actually get in fights because they are afraid of the consequences that come with breaking the rules. The biggest source of stress in prison is that you have all these rule breakers confronted by unbreakable rules that have immediate and potentially mortal consequences attached.
Note that he might be closer to right about something like a supermax security facility, I have no way of knowing. I met plenty of people who had done time in a US Penitentiary, which is the BoP's high end security facilities, and I doubt Peterson's claim would apply any better there than it did in my own medium security FCI. But people who go to supermax don't work their way down system so I never met any of them, or even met anyone who had ever met any of them.
Knowing JP, he almost certainly just made it up 
Timsup2nothin
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With this I have to table the discussion of hustles and jump ahead to follow the path of actual prison jobs.
I enjoyed my grounds job for about two years, but ran out of excuses. I owed a bunch of money in court assigned restitution, plus some small amount in fines, and I had thus far not paid any of it. My counselor had been on me pretty much since I arrived to take a job in the factory so I could make some token payments that would look good to my probation officer when I got out. Part of being on supervised release involves your probation officer assessing your income and expenses and determining a payment plan, and in the professional opinion of my counselor guys who show up having managed to avoid any sort of payment during incarceration were likely to get less sympathetic treatment from their PO when they actually needed to have money and pay bills.
I was also thinking that working two hours a month was exactly the kind of lifestyle habit that fit really well with going back to robbing banks for a living, and that since I was going to be saddled with a PO for three years that career choice would be hard to pull off. So getting accustomed to punching the ol' clock was probably a good idea. I put myself on the list, and due to my restitution issue I was given priority...yes, factory jobs were strictly voluntary, and were in very high demand. In fact, my large amount of restitution put me very close to the top of the list and in fairly short order I joined the ranks of good blue collar factory workers with the kind of job that the US long since shipped overseas because no one wants them...and that the Republicans have bemoaned the loss of ever since.
We made furniture. Have you ever noticed how every government office you go in seems to have the exact same furniture? Solid. Not particularly imaginative styling. Particle board with a sort of plasticy veneer like you find in cheap mass produced furniture everywhere. If you work in one of those offices you might notice that unlike the cheap stuff that office furniture is made with an extremely dense higher grade of particle board that is made to last basically forever, and you might also notice sometime that on the bottom of the conference room table, or under the desk in the knee well, or somewhere you normally wouldn't see, it is all stamped "Unicore Prison Industries." If you run across some dating back to about 1998...I made that.
Cheetah
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Yeah, I imagine it would be hard. Luckily I don't react to traces of anything, so my fear is mostly that I would have to trade away eggs and other stuff I can't eat, and in worst case even risk skipping a meal if there was nothing there I could actually eat.
I don't suppose there are any menus to choose from, or special diets made for specific people?
Timsup2nothin
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I would think that there must be. I mean, they can't legally starve an inmate just because they have allergies so they are an inconvenience to the system. I just never saw it in operation, or thought to ask about it. One of my closest running mates worked in the chow hall and if it had ever occurred to me to be curious I'd probably know all about this, but it just never did.
It's also possible that you'd have to be sent to Rochester, which is (or at least was at the time) the BoP's medical treatment facility. A guy on our yard got diagnosed with cancer and they shipped him to Rochester, then we got him back several months later when he was in remission.
Ajidica
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What is it that makes jails much worse than prison? I know you mentioned jail populations are more transient, but does that have an impact on, say, food quality? Is it just that jails are county maintained by counties with fewer resources than federal/state institutions?
aimeeandbeatles
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If it's not too personal, how long ago was this? I am curious whether there might have been many changes since.
Timsup2nothin
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Lower resources is certainly part of it. There are also a lot of aspects that stem from that transient nature.
The inmates themselves are often not "good inmate material." Like the phone guy, they may not really have a grasp of their situation, which makes them unpredictable in an environment where having unpredictable people around is a serious threat to...well, everything.
But another aspect is complaints. One thing prisons don't have a shortage of is lawyers. Like I said to Cheetah, I know that any prison system would have to do something about keeping him fed because that's the law. If a prison just disregards the law some mob of prison lawyers will contact their lawyer friends outside and hand over all the work product required to sue the place into the ground. If there's a lawyer in a jail he's either not going to be there very long at all, or at the very least he isn't going to be there long enough to look at any case but his own. The pictures shown earlier of jail meals I can tell you with absolute certainty would produce a lawsuit against a prison in a matter of days, if not hours.
Jails are mostly full of people who are going to court, so the jail can generally get away with doing very little about keeping them busy. It sucks. As in I spent four months in a county jail, during which I made about seven court appearances, and the other hundred odd days I really just sat around. That's not great, but it's not unreasonable...for a few months. If I'd had to do that for four years I'd have probably flipped out at some point. People who run prisons understand that, so they aren't inclined to force inmates into just sitting around.
Timsup2nothin
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Latter half of the nineties, but I seriously doubt that much has changed. I knew guys who had been in for twenty plus years at that time and hadn't seen much change and I haven't seen any indication that the BoP has been pushed into any corners since.
Ajidica
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@Timsup2nothin One of the big pushes in liberal/progressive criminal justice circles is focusing on prisoner rehabilitation through better treatment in prison (less dehumanizing conditions) and rehabilitation programs such as job training or counseling to try and prevent recidivism. In your experience, do you think that is workable? That meaningful rehabilitation programs are both technically possible (not talking politically viable here) and would have a strong positive effect?
Timsup2nothin
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That's a tough one.
I think recidivism has a whole lot more to do with dehumanizing conditions outside of prison rather than in it. For the most part I think the prison system is doing pretty good at playing the crappy hand it gets dealt. The worst card in their hand is overcrowding, and the better response to the wildly common public mindset of "well, just lock up everybody but me forever" would be to change that mindset rather than just endlessly building more prisons.
I regards to rehabilitation directly, I already pointed to one aspect. I went to work in the factory to get readjusted to working. When I was a bank robber I obviously didn't have any compelling need for a typical job. In prison I didn't have any compelling need for a typical job. If I had just ridden that seven year run out the gate the shock of going to work at a lumberyard (my first post prison job) and just the simple requirement to show up every day and stay there would have probably reminded me of why I had thought robbing banks was a good idea in the first place. To be honest even before I started robbing banks I was in sales and that's another seven years where I pretty much came and went as I pleased. So despite the obvious issues of "prison slave labor" the factory was, in fact, a key element in my personal rehabilitation.
It's important to recognize though that I made it that way. I knew what I needed, and I got it. I also participated in a pretty avant garde drug rehab program that I was kind of lucky to qualify for. It had had a very successful test run, in that graduates of the pilot program had a shockingly low recidivism rate over three years post release. So in their infinite wisdom the BoP appealed to congress to be allowed to incentivize it. Inmates serving sentences for non-violent crimes could get a year taken off if they completed the program. Bank robbers like myself couldn't get the year off because bank robbery is by definition a violent crime, but when I was in prison the lawsuits were flying regarding whether someone who didn't use a weapon or make any threats was really a violent criminal, yadda yadda yadda.
Anyway, to clarify how I qualified. My particular methods involved taking a road trip for a week and hitting three banks in a pretty wide scatter. I was always pretty wired on adrenaline when I was out on the job, between the obvious rush of the robberies and the long hours of driving. This friend of mine gave me a little bag with some pot in it, suggesting that I could and probably should use it to mellow me out a little bit so I wouldn't be so frazzled when I got home. I never used it, but it was tucked in my sock when I got arrested. Carrying drugs at time of arrest made me a 'drug related' case, so I could get into the program.
But of course all the drug guys could get in, and almost all of them were designated as non-violent offenders so they qualified to get the year off. Also of course the massive success of the pilot program went completely off the cliff, because people who took the program just to get a year off were no less likely for recidivism than people who didn't take the program at all. It was a really effective program for people who wanted to understand the nature and consequences of addiction, not a miracle barrier against recidivism.
I do not credit the BoP with getting me off dope. I also don't deny that maybe they did. At the same time I did their program I did NA and worked it from the perspective of 'if I ever say this doesn't work it will not be because I didn't give it a fair shot', made a massive commitment to practicing Yoga, got older and theoretically wiser, gave at least a cursory exploration to every religion known to man, and had the advantage that my addictive nature had actually shifted from chemicals to the natural rush of committing major felonies and I didn't feel much incentive to shift back. If I gave in to addiction it would most likely be in a bank, and that still holds true today. As people in the program would say, I had found my drug of choice.
Zardnaar
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Most horror stories about prison involve lots of boredom. Are you allowed board games or D&D?
Timsup2nothin
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Chess sets, dominoes, cribbage boards, and decks of cards could be bought at commissary. Board games could be checked out from the rec department, but I don't think they had much of a selection and I didn't personally have any involvement with that. D&D is basically books, so it could have been available though you'd have to come up with alternatives to dice, or get some made.
Zardnaar
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Yeah I've heard they aren't allowed the dice. Draw numbers out of a hat is used.
Timsup2nothin
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That would work. You'd also be surprised at what kinds of things can be crafted by people with a whole lot of time on their hands.
I don't know that I'd say the dice "aren't allowed." The commissary is a limited resource and there's a whole lot of things that I doubt anyone would see as any sort of security risk that just aren't available.
EDIT: To clarify, books are allowed to be sent in from outside, at least at the security level I was held at. There were some limitations that I can't claim to clearly remember, but I seriously doubt D&D books would have been a problem.
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Timsup2nothin
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So, the furniture factory.
At eight AM we would get counted at our work stations, and were expected to already have gotten our regular tools from the cage. For me that meant a tape measure, clearly marked with a number that matched the numbered silhouette on the board. There was a cop at every cage, and he had a list of inmates on a clipboard where he could note the tool numbers as he checked them out. For everyone's convenience I always got the same tape measure, from the same cage, manned by the same cop, and got the same number written next to my name. That was normal procedure. Really, the cops could probably have just copied a master list with all the normal tools noted and just made checkmarks as they went out.
At eleven we broke for lunch and had to be back again for count at twelve thirty, and we were off at three. So five and a half hours to get an eight hour day's pay, not bad, although the starting rate of twenty-four cents an hour might be discouraging. The short days resulted from having to comply with the needs of the prison. The units opened at six, and the chow hall started serving breakfast at six-thirty, but you can't really have a count until everybody has had a chance to eat. Then we had to knock off in time for everyone to get their tools checked in and make our way out through the metal detectors, and again that put us in with everyone else in the chow line for lunch so we had to be allowed time to eat and make it back to be counted.
Off at three meant clean up and get tools turned in, because getting tools turned in was a huge deal. The cops would check everything in, lock up the cage, then double check that all the little silhouettes were covered by the appropriate tool. If anything was missing, no one could leave until it was found. In case there was a missing tool drama we had to have time to get it resolved and still be able to get out of the factory and back to the units for the four o'clock count. The four o'clock count was the real deal.
The four o'clock count was the official count forwarded to the BoP headquarters to be totaled up for posterity. All work stopped, everybody went to their unit and stood by their bunks until two different cops came by and counted. Those movies where the escaped inmate fakes out the cops with a mannequin tucked in their bed...yeah, the cops have seen that movie. So everybody is locked down until the cops have recorded all their counts, verifying that they are the same and match the expected numbers for each dorm or block of rooms.
I always enjoy playing this game with people. The four o'clock count went off, without fail, at four o'clock and was diligently reported by around four thirty every afternoon, 364 days a year and 365 in a leap year. Yes, you read that right. I'm gonna open up for guesses as to what day is so honored by the BoP that the four o'clock count is done early.
At eight AM we would get counted at our work stations, and were expected to already have gotten our regular tools from the cage. For me that meant a tape measure, clearly marked with a number that matched the numbered silhouette on the board. There was a cop at every cage, and he had a list of inmates on a clipboard where he could note the tool numbers as he checked them out. For everyone's convenience I always got the same tape measure, from the same cage, manned by the same cop, and got the same number written next to my name. That was normal procedure. Really, the cops could probably have just copied a master list with all the normal tools noted and just made checkmarks as they went out.
At eleven we broke for lunch and had to be back again for count at twelve thirty, and we were off at three. So five and a half hours to get an eight hour day's pay, not bad, although the starting rate of twenty-four cents an hour might be discouraging. The short days resulted from having to comply with the needs of the prison. The units opened at six, and the chow hall started serving breakfast at six-thirty, but you can't really have a count until everybody has had a chance to eat. Then we had to knock off in time for everyone to get their tools checked in and make our way out through the metal detectors, and again that put us in with everyone else in the chow line for lunch so we had to be allowed time to eat and make it back to be counted.
Off at three meant clean up and get tools turned in, because getting tools turned in was a huge deal. The cops would check everything in, lock up the cage, then double check that all the little silhouettes were covered by the appropriate tool. If anything was missing, no one could leave until it was found. In case there was a missing tool drama we had to have time to get it resolved and still be able to get out of the factory and back to the units for the four o'clock count. The four o'clock count was the real deal.
The four o'clock count was the official count forwarded to the BoP headquarters to be totaled up for posterity. All work stopped, everybody went to their unit and stood by their bunks until two different cops came by and counted. Those movies where the escaped inmate fakes out the cops with a mannequin tucked in their bed...yeah, the cops have seen that movie. So everybody is locked down until the cops have recorded all their counts, verifying that they are the same and match the expected numbers for each dorm or block of rooms.
I always enjoy playing this game with people. The four o'clock count went off, without fail, at four o'clock and was diligently reported by around four thirty every afternoon, 364 days a year and 365 in a leap year. Yes, you read that right. I'm gonna open up for guesses as to what day is so honored by the BoP that the four o'clock count is done early.
