Current mood:	sad
Current music:	Trance Energy
Entry tags:	life, politics

Prison's a Breeze
Ya know, a couple years ago you could have heard me saying "The prison system is too soft, we're paying shitloads of tax money to allow these people to eat regularly, sleep, and watch TV all day." However, now that I have an uncle in the prison system and I got a taste of what it's like in there having visited him this past weekend, I have to say, I was wrong... partly.

To be sure, I still say we have far too many people in the prison system, we have the highest percentage of people in prison in the entire world, including China which is supposed to be a more fascist state than the US. Most people in prison are there due to drug related charges, of course that wouldn't be so if drugs were legalized and the government stopped telling us what we can and can't do with our own bodies. When the prisons get full do they release some people with these bullshit charges? Nah, they just build more prisons! There's alot of money to be made off the prison system so it profits alot of people for there to be alot of people in jail, but I digress, that's not the injustice I want to focus on today.

"The prison system is too soft" is not an uncommon argument to hear from hardliners on the right, and some on the left, but ya know, it's bullshit. My uncle is currently in minimum security, remember that because you have to keep in perspective that everything I'm about to say goes on in the supposedly less restrictive level of the prison system. When I arrive at the prison (which only deals with medium security and below) I immediately notice the ten foot or so fence with rows of razor wire on the entire fence, on the bottom it's more like a triangle with three rows on the bottom level, two rows on the next level up, and then evens out at one row per level all the way to the top. It's pretty clear you are not getting anywhere near that fence, and that's if you get over the inner fence which has razor wire on the top third or so of the fence. I later learned that in the eight foot gap between the two fences there's a truck which routinely makes it rounds and sensors buried in the ground. So no digging out and no climbing the fence, you're in there.

I finish my smoke and walk into the prison once the family infront of me walks out and the guard waves me in. I have to empty my pockets and walk through a metal detector. I tell the guy my uncle's name and give my name because you have to be approved to see him before you even go to the prison which took over 3 months to get done. Everything clears so the guy starts inspecting my stuff and tells me I can't take my Zippo in and I'll have to leave it there. I asked him if the unopen pack of smokes is alright and he says yeah and everything else is cool too. Then he takes me into a room, shuts the door, and frisks me, but he could've strip searched me if he wanted to (it's on the form you fill out for visitation rights that they hold the option to). I'm clean so he leads me back out to the lobby where they take my picture for future reference. Then, and this shocked the hell out of me, they have a hand-scanner for taking your hand print. I had to stick my hand in the scanner three times for a proper reading and then I was given a little card with my visitor pin number (more on this later). OK all of the preliminary stuff done so this young black girl, had to be my age, escorts me through a number of secured doors which we have to be buzzed through one at a time. Then she leads me through this picnic area outside and into the prison wing which is a long straight tube with all of the prison dorms attached to either side but the visiting room is right in the front so we didn't see any of the dorms.

Once in the visiting room they have all these shitty folding tables and uncomfortable chairs set up. The girl I'm with hands a guard in there a piece of paper with my pic and my uncle's pic and the guard tells me to sit at this small table against the wall looking out the window (not much of a view, but better than staring at the wall). This whole process has taken about 15 minutes. I wait for about 30 minutes until my uncle comes in, apparently he was taking a nap so it took him a little while to get up there. It's been over four months since I last saw him and almost two years since we had any physical contact or something not between us with someone listening in so I hug him and we sit down. First I ask for and get the truth about the night he was arrested, which I don't want to get into at this point in time, then I ask him what's it like in the clink. Now understand in all of his letters he's told us how professional everything is and stuff that just sounded a little too easy, well that all went out the window. He said to read his letters and ad "not" infront of all the shit like that.

He says that you catch alot of humiliation and degradation the first few months or so you're in there because the guards don't know you and don't know if you're going to cause any trouble so any chance they get to put a boot in your ass they take it. If you're anything less than polite they'll give you shit. To illustrate what I mean, when we went out for a smoke break once my uncle took a drink outside with him when he wasn't allowed to, the cop called his name and nodded his head back towards the door, my uncle said "Yes sir, sorry sir" and took the drink back inside. Later he told me "Now imagine if I had said no to that guard. First he would insist that I take it back inside and if I still said no he would've beaten me over the head with his baton, then they'd throw me in the box (commonly known as the "hole") for awhile, and give me a year or more of close management." Close management is solitary confinement. All that over a fucking drink. Oh yeah and get this, you'll get six months in the box for horse playing, you only get three months for fighting. So I asked him more, "well other than that what's it like in the dorm?"

There are many dorms going off the long tube which I mentioned before, his is a smaller dorm that holds about 60 people and they all sleep on bunks that have lockers for their stuff. There's no air conditioning. Imagine that, being in a cement box in the south during the middle of summer with no air conditioning. Now also imagine 60 other hot and smelly sweaty guys in there with you, the funk is unimaginable. So what about TV? It's useless, they have the sound jacked all the way up to the point that you can't hear anything even when you're right underneath it. Not to mention the bass is so loud that you feel it through out your entire body and you never get used to it so the TV becomes a tool of psychological torture rather than a break from the situation you're in. You are constantly reminded where you are at all times and you're broken down until there's no hope left in you whatsoever and it's exactly the same every fucking day, what we call "Groundhog's Day." Also remember that this is minimum security prison.

I've never seen a man so happy to have an ultra light menthol cigarette and air conditioning in my life, you know it's bad when you see a man's eyes light up as if he were entering heaven over things we take for granted.

We talked for over four hours when they yelled that it was time to wrap it up. They seperated us into two lines, visitors and prisoners, but before my uncle got in line I asked him "So was it better than Groundhog's Day?" Again his eyes lit up and he gave a simple "yeah" that was heart breaking. I gave him one final wave while they escorted us out back to the door we came in from. Each visitor had to enter their visitor pin number and then place their hand in the scanner for ID verification before they were buzzed through. Once through I picked up my license and went outside to wait for my ride.

Anyone who wants to say that the death penalty is necessary to punish someone is full of shit. I'd like to see them last a month in prison and come back out saying the death penalty is still necessary. However, I also see now why alot of ex-cons are not reformed like they're supposed to be. Prison is a place to learn how to be a hardass with discipline, it's boot camp for criminals and is even refered to as "camp" by many. How can we expect them to come back into society and be decent citizens when we're giving them the training to be better criminals and teaching them that with certain amounts of power you can get away with anything?

Dedicated to both my uncles, the one who's confined to this world and the one who's not.