So you end up behind bars, you, the reasonable man, the cool operator, a person who doesn’t
need to solve problems with his fists.
You’re an intelligent being, not an animal.
You’re a lover, not a thug.
But here’s your prison predicament Mr. Moderate, your penitentiary problem, the confinement
Catch 22.
You have to fight in this place.
If you let people push you around, you’re gonna get picked on, you might end up a punk.
Don’t fight, you’ll have problems, and fight, you’ll have problems, too.
You can’t win, and that’s prison.
This is what you tell the staff after you hit a guy back.
They didn’t care about this prison paradox.
You got time in solitary.
After the next time you defended yourself you lost your prison job, and after your next
scuffle you were charged with assault.
Welcome to the vicious cycle of the American prison system.
Let’s face it, in the end everyone in prison is a loser, a punk to the system.
You can try and beat that system, but it will break you in the end.
A lot of people doing hard time at some point realize this and they try to settle down,
do the time, not let the time do them.
But if you’ve seen the podcasts, read the books, watched the documentaries, you’ll
know that even the most intelligent and calmest types will tell you that in prison you might
have to let that Homo Sapien rage show at some point.
Inside those prison walls that reptilian part of the brain might have to override your fleshy
reasoning machine now and again.
We are not saying you can’t do your time and stay out of trouble.
We are not saying that you will definitely have to fight.
But we are saying that it’s a very real possibility.
And as we said, if you don’t fight back, other predators will see this as a weakness.
They might later try and exploit you.
That’s why you’ll hear a lot of former prisoners saying just hit back, lose your
mind a bit, show them that even if they beat the hell out of you, they’ll have to work
for it and get hurt doing so.
Those predators will think twice about trying to take advantage of you after that.
You don’t have to be a jujitsu black belt or trained boxer to smack someone in the face,
to gouge their eyes.
We all have some of that violent DNA.
Before we were social animals, we were warriors, each of and every one of us.
Ask any Neanderthal.
Oh you can’t, we killed them all.
With early humans it was fight or die.
And in some respects the prison system brings out the early human in people, the tribal
thug, the atavistic ape man.
Fight or die, like the bad old days.
You can choose to be separated from other prisoners, but the isolation will hurt after
a while.
You can choose not to fight back as we said, and you will get exploited for your weakness,
just like the weak member of a tribe.
The prison system WILL make an animal out of you.
Don’t you ever forget that.
The best thing is to not be there in the first place, but hey, some folks have ended up on
the inside for not paying parking tickets, or deciding to eat a psychedelic mushroom
and be at one with nature.
As we said, once inside those walls you might be presented with the prison Catch 22.
Fight and get in trouble and don’t fight and get in trouble.
Even if you didn’t start it you can’t tell the staff the truth because prisoners
take a dim view of informers, rats or snitches are about as popular as chomos.
You keep quiet, and you get time in solitary, or at least receive some kind of punishment
such as not being able to get things from the prison store, the commissary.
As we said, fight again and get in more trouble even if it wasn’t you that started it.
Really hurt a guy that might want to even kill you and find your small sentence turning
into a big one.
The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote a play called “No Exit” with the common catchphrase
from that being “Hell is other People”, and prison is about as close to this as is
possible in this world.
You can go inside a good man and end up metamorphosizing into a person you never knew existed.
The authorities know you are stuck in this paradox where you are told to be good and
behave yet the system itself denies you the possibility of doing this, but they either
don’t care or can’t do anything about it.
Rules are rules, even when they make no sense.
Prison is irrational.
Those words should be written above every prison entrance.
So, there you are.
This is what you can expect inside.
We don’t want to sound hyperbolic and say prison will present you with fights every
day.
Some people do indeed manage to keep their head down.
Some prisons are less violent than others.
But in the USA and many other countries, violence is a part of prison life.
Ok, so let’s now take you through a fight.
Here’s the scene.
You’ve not been inside long and some guy pushes you out of the queue in the canteen.
You push yourself back in.
You need to eat.
He then just lashes out.
You have to defend this, otherwise you’ll be seriously injured.
What he doesn’t know is that you can box.
You catch him right on the chin and knock him clean out.
You get back in the queue, but the guards are now on you.
We should say that in some U.S. prisons you might just be expected to fight right away
to see what you are made of.
You might hear prisoners calling this a heart check.
So you’ve gotten into this fight, what now?
If the guards didn’t get there or somehow didn’t see it the guy might get picked up
and be asked if he wants to go again.
You might even get jumped by his friends.
You might not have heard the end of it.
But let’s just say you’ve been seen by the staff.
They are likely going to surround you, tell the others to stand back, tell you to get
on your knees and put your hands behind your head.
Usually people don’t get just knocked out and so you might have been pounding this guy
for like 30 seconds or a minute.
If you don’t do what the prison officer says you might get pepper spray in your eyes,
which if you’ve ever experienced that you’ll know is rather unpleasant to say the least.
Most prison too have something called an emergency response unit, too.
Pepper spray or not, you are bleeding and he is in a terrible state.
You are now going to be escorted to the prison hospital and a nurse is going to clean you
up.
You’ll be in restraints of course.
Something one former officer also wrote online is that it’s not just the prisoners taking
notes on how well you fight, how your heart stands up, but officers will be watching new
officers and prisoners will also be seeing how an officer deals with two powerful, or
at least enraged, men.
A fight inside means much more than a fight on the outside.
Ok, so you have broken prison rules.
You can’t do this and not get punished in some way, or at least have to explain yourself.
We must say here that how you’ll be punished depends on a few things.
Did cameras show that you certainly didn’t start the fight?
As you know, you shouldn’t inform on the other guy, so you can’t give all the details.
As senseless as that may be, especially given you were defending yourself, it’s the inmate
code.
That code wasn’t written by sensible men.
Something else you must understand is the extent of damage you have caused.
If you have knocked out three of this guy’s teeth; headbutted him so hard his nose shattered,
and punched him with such ferocity you split his cheek and it had to be sown up, well,
that’s a crime on the inside as it is on the outside.
You can be charged with assault.
You might get many more years.
Your also now a dangerous man, with fists like weapons.
You might need to be separated from the prison population either because you are a danger
to others or that dude’s buddies are planning to cut your throat.
The staff are going to weigh all this up.
Some staff in prisons have also been known to purposefully create Gladiator environments
either for entertainment or they want someone dead.
We don’t think this happens often.
You are going to be in solitary confinement while the prison staff are working out why
this violence happened.
Was it premeditated, was it a gang attack on you, or was it just expressive and unplanned?
If you’ve been set on by a gang in a premeditated attack the officers are going to have to make
sure that doesn’t happen again.
But let’s say it was what it was, just a reaction to an action in that queue.
First of all, you might have to fight this guy again behind closed doors.
Prisoners also know blind spots where fights take place.
But you’re still in solitary so you can forget about that for a while.
If that guy was in a gang, which is highly likely, he might get punished for getting
whooped or you might have to tackle someone else from that gang at some point, or join
it, or do something else.
At some point soon, you’ll be told what offense you have committed and maybe a likely
outcome.
In the UK it’s written that within 48 hours this happens.
By the way, while you are in solitary that other guy is in the prison hospital.
You are uninjured.
Let’s say you’ve beaten this man within an inch of his life.
That’s serious, and the prison might be put into lockdown.
One process you’ll have to go through is called an adjudication or hearing.
If you’ve watched the prison shows you’ll know this means sitting in front of people
and being told what you did and what’s gonna happen to you.
You can add to this or just say yes, I did that.
Guilty as charged.
Whether guilty or not, you are guilty because most of the time you won’t claim self defense
and blame it on the other guy.
Remember, prisoners don’t snitch.
You can be sure no one else saw the fight, too.
Even if you’ve been beaten almost to death, physically abused in the worst way, some guys
that quite like you won’t even snitch.
This is another example of the craziness of prison.
You can’t be good even if you want to be.
The system ensures you lose every sense of your personal ethics.
If you want to check if you’ve been treated fairly and actually broken a rule you can
head to the library where you should find a Prison Discipline Manual.
You’ve been found guilty and you should be given a written notice about this.
In the UK the prisoners call this a “nicking sheet.”
It should be the same in the USA after you’ve had a hearing with officials or sometimes
the warden.
You’ll be told what you’ve done and what it going to happen to you.
It might just be your privileges taken away from you.
But you’ve done some damage, so as we said, you might be charged with an offense.
You might have to do time in the hole.
You might lose that cushy prison job.
You could have your "good behavior" time removed, or have time added onto your sentence.
The guards might decide to ransack your cell, making a huge mess and perhaps finding some
contraband.
You might lose some of your cherished cell items, and perhaps the worst, you might get
transferred to a prison known as a hellhole full of maniacs.
All because you defended yourself and all because some moron was in a bad mood.
This is real life No Exit.
It’s not easy to get out in one piece.
Just be glad he didn’t bang his head when he fell and it killed him.
Then you’d likely be doing life and you only went in for selling your buddy a handful
of those mushrooms.
But let’s change this a little and say it ended up being a minor scuffle and no one
really got hurt.
In that case you might just get what’s called a shot, rather like a blemish on your prison
record, a little slap on the legs.
Maybe it was a one off and the staff go easy on you.
But if you want something in the future: new job, more items, your shot, or shots, will
be taken into account.
So, there you go.
A 101 of prison fighting.
We don’t need to tell you that the U.S prison system is brutal, and you now know it brings
out the animal in a person.
So, as former inmates will tell you over and over again, just try not to get sent there.
Use your head and try and stay out of trouble, be good, be safe, and tell us what you think
about this story in the contents.
Also, be sure to check out our other video Why A Prisoner Proven Innocent Can't Be Released.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.