It’s eerily quiet on the cell block and the doors that morning haven’t been opened
as they usually would be.
Suddenly the inmates hear the thudding of footsteps – it’s a shakedown.
Some inmates frantically search for the best hiding places to put their contraband.
One of the guards shouts to the prisoners with an offer…give us the contraband before
we find it and you won’t get charged.
“Yeah, right,” think most of the men who’ve spent a few years in prison.
There’ll be no amnesty, or at least in the past some guards didn’t make good on their
promise.
One particular inmate has a lot to fear.
As the guards approach his cell he tries his darndest to fit half a pack of Wrigley's Juicy
Fruit chewing gum into a small wall crevice behind the wash basin.
He’s in a lot of trouble if they find that stuff.
Like most people you might wonder why prisoners could get into so much trouble for having
some harmless chewing gum.
In this case the prisoner – let’s call him Bill after the founder of Wrigley’s
gum – had no intention of just chewing that stuff merely for enjoyment’s sake.
Bill wasn’t concerned about his bad breath, and he wasn’t a gum chewer because he was
suffering from stress… or had a bad habit of grinding his teeth.
What Bill really wanted to do with that gum was make an impression of a key he thought
he could steal and later return.
You see, once you have that impression you have a good chance of replicating the key,
and in prison you could say keys are the last things prison staff want prisoners to get
their hands on.
Another thing gum can be used for is jamming door locks, which could be a huge problem
for officers when an inmate is intent on self-harming or causing some serious facial damage to another
inmate.
Those are the two main reasons that chewing gum in prison is banned.
Now let’s have a look at some other everyday items that are usually verboten in the penitentiary.
Some of them we’re sure will come as a surprise to you…well…unless you’ve been around
the prison blocks yourself.
A lot of prisoners pass the time by sketching or writing diaries or perhaps writing the
next great American crime novel, and while paper is for the most part allowed, one thing
prisoners can’t have are Spiral-bound notebooks…you know, those ones with the rings holding the
thing together.
You might automatically think that the reason is because the metal rings can be fashioned
into weapons, and you’d be right, but there’s another reason.
That’s because if a prisoner has some smarts he or she might be able to pick a lock with
a device made from those rings.
The next one from what we can see only applies to prisoners in England and Wales.
This rule was only introduced in 2013.
Some prisoners over there can get through many hours enclosed within those prison walls
by watching movies.
There’s not always good movies on TV and so prisoners might have the choice to watch
DVDS.
Ok, that’s good for them, and if they want, they might even re-watch old prison escape
movies such as “The Great Escape” or “The Shawshank Redemption.”
But, there’s one kind of DVD they cannot have and those are movies that have an R-rating.
You might think that sounds pretty stupid when a lot of those men have actually lived
R-rated lives, but the back in ’13 the Justice Secretary said he no longer wanted inmates
watching violent movies or films that depict too clearly how babies are made.
Back to the U.S. and censorship there is also alive and well, but this time we are talking
about various books being banned in certain states.
Texas has banned 12,000 books in its prisons, with some of those being classics written
by the likes of William Shakespeare and the man that penned “Big Brother is Watching”,
George Orwell.
For a while in Colorado’s prisons you couldn’t even get their hands on Barack Obama’s two
memoirs, because the state said they were, “potentially detrimental to national security.”
That decision was later reversed, but a lot of activists in the U.S. still say book banning
in prisons on such a wide scale defies logic.
One of the most popular books in U.S. prisons and other prisons around the world is called,
“The 48 Laws of Power.”
In a dog eat dog environment, this could be said to be essential reading – ask the rapper
50 Cent.
It became so popular that a bunch of U.S. prisons have now banned it.
Moving on, getting a good night’s sleep in prison can be hard because of the noise
but also because of the lights.
One thing you’d think is that the prison commissary would sell is sleep masks, but
if they aren’t available in the prison store then technically they are classed as contraband.
We found one prisoner whose hustle was making prison masks, but he was in fact breaking
the rules.
It seems that earplugs are usually available, so at least an inmate can block out the noise.
As for the next one, some of you will immediately know why it’s considered contraband while
our more innocent viewers may have to think about it.
In prison you’re not allowed to store any of your bodily fluids, and that goes for ALL
fluids that can possibly come out of your body.
We don’t think we need to go into too much detail.
It doesn’t matter if some prisoners have adopted an alternative health kind of lifestyle
and have decided to imbibe their own urine, you just can’t keep that stuff.
The reason is, some crazed or aggrieved inmates might fashion some kind of squirting device
and fire the liquid at the guards.
This is something prisoners refer to as “gassing.”
One big pain in the exterior for a lot of prisoners is the fact they are not allowed
to take lists into prisons of addresses and telephone numbers.
Some prisoners will just have to remember the important numbers and addresses and then
write them down on the paper they are given.
In time they can get more numbers and addresses from people they call or write to.
We found one guy that wrote his numbers down in a bible he’d been given, but in some
prisons you’re only allowed a certain kind of bible – the soft kind.
It differs from prison to prison, but in some places you might only be able to order a certain
number of books, and those books might have to be softbacks.
The reason for this is that those large, hard backs might make a good hiding place for a
prison knife, and while hiding a shank in the spine of a bible might seem immoral, it’s
been done before.
Another reason is a thousand-page encyclopedia with a rigid hard back would hurt a bit if
you were hit over the head with it.
Sometimes prisoners accidentally find themselves with contraband and that might be because
they have been sent some legal paperwork from their attorneys.
There have actually been cases of prisoners getting into trouble for having staples and
paperclips that were part of a package sent by an attorney.
A staple or two might not make a good weapon, but one thing staples are good for is making
tattoo needles.
As for paperclips, those harmless things if used correctly can help a man to get out of
his handcuffs.
Basically, anything metal and pointy is not allowed in prison mainly because it can be
used to puncture things or unlock things.
You should also know that prisoners can’t just store lots of certain items.
Sure, there are hoarders in prison, but those guys often find themselves on the wrong side
of the guards.
It could be something as harmless as toilet paper, but if you have enough of that stuff
and a lot of time on your hands you could harden it until it became something known
as the “toilet paper shank.”
This is also the reason prisoners might not be allowed to have full-length pencils, because
they can be used to put a hole in a person.
What prisoners are usually given are short pencils referred to as golf pencils.
It depends which prison you are in and what kind of security unit you are housed in, but
often all a prisoner will have to write with is one of those golf pencils.
This is a real pain for some prisoners who write a lot, and they have been known to modify
them and make them longer.
Sticking with pencils, if you add enough water to the graphite you can make something to
put on your face.
In women’s prisons believe it or not makeup might be available to buy at the commissary,
but that’s not always the case.
Sometimes women or men who like to wear makeup can use the shells of M&Ms and mix them with
water.
Once a prisoner has the candy and has the palette, all kinds of colors can be made.
While this is hardly the crime of the century, once those candy shells become makeup they
are contraband.
As for jewelry in federal prisons in the U.S., you can wear wedding rings without stones
or engravings in them, and you can get away with a necklace if it has a religious medallion
connected to it, but any jewelry shouldn’t have a value of over $100.
People have actually been killed with jewelry and if it’s worth too much someone might
kill you for it.
In 2010 in one U.S. prison an inmate asked another inmate to try on his religious necklace…
after which he strangled him with it.
In one prison handbook we found that this was against the rules: “Manufacturing of
dice, dominos, chess sets, cards, or any other form of games.”
Ok, it’s against the rules, but it happens.
Prison wouldn’t be prison if inmates didn’t have dice that they had made out of toilet
paper, and some prisoners have been known to take the time to create an entire chess
set.
It’s not easy to do, but one prisoner said he had making such things down to a fine art,
and he had a template since when his cell was shaken down he always lost his instruments
for game-playing.
He said sometimes things needed to be stuck together, which wasn’t always easy in prison
because glue is hard to come by.
There is always an alternative though since the stickers on shampoo bottles and toothpaste
can be used as an adherent.
A lot of games are banned simply because they can lead to gambling.
Gambling can lead to sore losers and also to prison debt, and in turn that can lead
to fighting and at the very worst, death.
It all depends on where you are and who’s guarding you, but some staff will turn a blind
eye to such activities.
If there is a shakedown, well, blind eyes are not usually turned in those circumstances.
We found one prisoner who said while incarcerated he and other inmates would go to great lengths
to create the tools needed to play Dungeons and Dragons.
In the day room you’d find an Aryan brotherhood table, and a Mexican mafia table, and close
by you’d find the Dungeons and Dragons guys.
The guards would mostly allow them to play, but he said the problem was when a newer guard
would find an elaborate game map they’d created and automatically think it was an
escape route from the prison.
When that happened things turned a little serious.
On one such occasion a young guard was about to confiscate the map when an older guard
approached him and said, “Don’t worry.
That’s no escape plan, it’s a Dungeons and Dragons map.”
In response to that, the younger guy just called him a “nerd.”
Ok, so this last one is hardly a household item unless you include humans being “items.”
We found in some prisons when inmates have gotten lonely they have created…hmmm…how
do we say this…they have created a partner, someone to hold and to love and to cherish
during those long hours locked up.
Homemade lovers are not on the list of allowed items, though, and so if you get caught with
one you could find yourself having to explain it to the guards.
Now you know what you aren’t allowed to have in prison, take a look at these shows
and imagine how you would survive prison.
We present to you, Hell on Earth, in “What Happens In The H Unit At Federal Supermax
Prison?” and "I Spent My Whole Life In Prison".