The gavel has fallen and you’ve just received a decade behind bars for a crime you believe
was an act of self-defense.
You are by no means a hardened criminal, in fact, you’ve barely been in trouble before.
You never, ever thought one day you’d end up behind bars.
You’re suddenly accosted by grim thoughts of what might happen to you there.
Perhaps you’ll be beaten up for being weaker than others.
Maybe you’ll succumb to something awful in the showers.
Will you be reduced to being some frightening man’s servant?
These are the fears that we guess a lot of people feel initially, but prisoners will
tell you there are worse things to fear in prison.
We went online to look at what ex-cons said about their experience serving time in prison
and the things that at times they just couldn’t handle.
While the violence and bullying and exploitation can certainly get a person down, a lot of
former prisoners said those issues weren’t the worst part at all.
Let’s now have a look at what they said: Living in an Uncaring Environment
One prisoner wrote that he didn’t get bullied.
He didn’t get his things stolen, and he wasn’t forced to do what others told him
to do.
He could hold his own.
But this man was a caring man.
He didn’t like what he saw, but as things tend to go in prison you can’t really help
everyone.
He wrote that he just got caught up in this world, a world that can be ruthless.
He said one day it hit him that he had started to think this prison environment was normal.
He said he thought he was starting to lose his mind.
He was realizing that he was becoming institutionalized; that he was forgetting his principles.
Prison had changed him.
He began to think that things such as violence over a really small issue was ok.
He had in fact normalized his environment, and that began to get to him.
Waiting While prison shows depict prison life as around-the-clock
chaos, a lot of prisoners might get involved in what we might call bad behavior out of
sheer boredom.
One prisoner said the waiting to be released is a killer.
He wrote, “It’s honestly hard to remember the months in there because most of the time
NOTHING’S HAPPENING.
Nothing.
You’ve read until you can’t stand it.
You’ve slept all you can.
You can’t play cards cuz your celly is sleeping.”
Another person said this about boredom: “One of the worst parts of prison life is
pure boredom.
For the lower-intelligence persons, it is no problem at all; they can be amused for
hours watching cartoons.
But for those of us whose IQ is above 90 it is torture.
Mental torture can be worse than physical torture, and it takes work to keep one’s
mind sane and functional for years and years on end.”
Saying that, we also found some prisoners that had jobs, kept busy, studied, read a
lot, and actually made good friends.
It’s degrading One word we saw a lot when reading prisoner
stories was “degrading.”
Some people wrote that being treated like a child certainly gets to you.
A female former prisoner wrote, “It is degrading and infantilizing.
You are treated in a way that I would not treat my seven year old; given candy at Christmas
and rewarded for spying on others.”
Another prisoner wrote that inside people were not allowed to be adults, that the whole
system functioned to dehumanize a person.
He said, “If you were a teacher you could not teach.
If you were a lawyer you could not give legal advice.
The second worse was seeing the system as being built on nothing.
People were rewarded for being docile children who told on one another.
It was like a dysfunctional home.”
He said rather than rehabilitate people the system actually tried earnestly to disempower
prisoners, to incapacitate them of their intelligence and humanity.
The Temperature Some people have said if you are in a prison
where the weather is hot, the temperature can really start to affect your mental well-being.
If you’ve seen our show on the British drug kingpin Shaun Attwood who did time in Arizona
you’ll know he said he was so hot his skin started to peel off and he was covered in
welts.
Another person in a different prison said it was the cold that got to him.
He wrote, “They keep the temperature down at 60 degrees which means that you have to
stay huddled in a corner to conserve body heat.
Because this was observation I wasn’t allowed to have anything.”
The Vera Institute of Justice said the temperature in prisons is no laughing matter at all, and
it can seriously affect a person’s mental and physical health.
Ok, so dangerous people might be lurking around and on occasions might threaten the prisoner,
but the heat or cold are inescapable.
The Vera institute said many states do not have to regulate the temperature, and when
the heat rises it only exacerbates the problems in prison such as anger issues and depression.
Worst still, in 2011, ten people died in Texas prisons from heat-related issues.
Many others have fallen sick from heat-related illnesses.
The Vera Institute concluded: “From melting shoes in Arizona camps, to
New Hampshire prisoners flooding cells to try and cool themselves down, to the videos
of air conditioning-deprived incarcerated people screaming for help in St. Louis.
These are all reminders of our desperate need to ensure that human dignity is protected
inside prison and jails.”
Life on the Outside This one should be pretty obvious so we won’t
spend much time on it.
Prisoners are all well aware that life goes on.
The worst torment for some might be what they are missing out on.
Holiday dinners, birthdays, children being born.
On top of that, you’ll hear a lot of prisoners saying that having a lover on the outside
can be a regular dose of torment, especially if a visit didn’t go down well.
Another prison wrote this, “Someone like a close family member goes into a hospital
or dies, you can’t be there!
My grandfather who I loved and looked up to died my first year in prison.
I never had a chance to show him how I finally turned out.”
Prisoners have a lot of time to think about what is happening on the outside and what
might be happening behind their back.
It’s not always what is happening to them that is the problem, but what isn’t happening
to them.
Sleeping Issues You’d think you’d have a lot of time to
get some Zzzzs while you are in prison, but some prisoners say that all depends on who
you are sharing a cell with… if you share a cell.
One prisoner just 18-years old said he had to share a cell with a rather burly-looking
gangster who you could say was not the kind of guy you would want to complain too much.
The former prisoner wrote that this man snored loudly every night, and before he got into
that routine he would, errr, get to sleep by fantasizing in his head while utilizing
his hand for the purpose of momentary ecstasy.
He said he didn’t get much sleep with this guy in his cell, but fortunately he wasn’t
with him long.
You’ll find many stories of prisoners asking for a cell change.
You can only imagine what it must be like sleeping near someone who you believe is out
of his mind and dangerous.
The Food Just about everywhere you look online where
prisoners are discussing what they hated about being locked up they talk about the violence,
but more often they talk about the bad food.
No one seems to like the food inside.
But on top of that, in 2015 the Marshall Project cited an investigation that revealed in one
jail in the USA the prisoners were just not fed enough and they were literally starving.
The investigation said that some prisoners had resorted to eating toothpaste and toilet
paper.
We kid you not.
There are other reports of prisoners losing so much weight it became dangerous, while
some people say more violence occurs when prisoners are underfed.
The Marshall Project wrote that all detention facilities in the USA should have regulations
as to how many calories a prisoner gets, but it differs from state to state.
Some places are much better than others.
We saw photographs of trays of food and we can say that many of them just looked like
trays full of slop.
The grits and bread meal looked like it belonged in a Charles Dickens novel.
Morgan County, Alabama, was particularly bad and we wouldn’t wish those trays on our
worst enemies.
It turned out that in 2009 an official at that place was arrested himself after police
found he’d taken $200,000 that should have been spent on prison meals and put that cash
into his own bank account.
We might add here that it should be the criminals on the inside, but you don’t have to look
far to find out criminality also happens in those who are employed to watch over the prisoners.
This can also get a man down.
According to an article in The Guardian newspaper some prisoners in the USA are fed on less
than $1.20 a day, so we guess you can’t get much for that.
Critics said that some prisoners would prefer cat food.
Some of you might retort, well c’mon, what do they expect.
Our taxes shouldn’t go to good food for criminals.
But hold on there, because various studies have found prisons spend way more on healthcare
than on food and many of the health issues are related to nutrition, or lack thereof.
We might ask how much bad behavior and violence can be correlated with overheating, lack of
nutrition, and all the other things we have mentioned.
You could say a perfect storm is perpetually hanging over the prison roof.
What You Are in For It just rankles some people that they think
they shouldn’t be in prison in the first place.
Some people do time for being found with cannabis, a drug that many people think should not be
illegal.
Legislation in some countries, including the USA, has changed, but still prisoners are
locked up for being caught with this stuff.
To those prisoners that feels like an injustice.
We found a story of a former cop who went undercover inside as part of a documentary
film to see what prison life was like.
This was his conclusion after 60 days inside, “I couldn't go to bed at night knowing that
if I stopped somebody with a little dime bag of weed, I were to arrest them and put them
in a place like that — I wouldn't be able to live with myself.”
So, some prisoners might just feel like they are victims of a faulty system, and no doubt
for them just the fact they have been locked up is the worst thing about prison.
There’s also the problem of going into prison after a small crime and having to protect
yourself inside and getting more time.
These words are taken from the movie, Shawshank Redemption, “On the outside, I was an honest
man, straight as an arrow.
I had to come to prison to be a crook.”
The worst thing for a person about prison might be the fact they end up becoming a real
criminal in there.
Time is Up For some prisoners, the end of a phone call
or a visit is one of the worst things about prison.
It can be heartbreaking for some people.
One guy wrote, “He takes the phone and slammed it into the payphone holster and abruptly
hung up on my daughter.
Still breaks my heart because I cherish every minute I can have with her.”
The Noise Maybe some of you might think if you got locked
up you’d just get your head down and read a lot, and while some people do that, it might
also be a problem because of the noise.
Some prisoners have said the constant loud noises are enough to drive someone crazy.
Another former prisoner wrote, “There is nothing quiet and there is no solitude when
you are in prison.
The sheer number of people in prison prohibits you from ever finding a moment of peace.
Headaches will become your new best friend.”
Have you served time in prison?
If so, which of these things got to you the most?
If you haven’t done time, which do you think would affect you the most?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video Jail vs Prison - What's ACTUALLY The Difference?.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.