Welcome to Jail; Have a Nice Stay

By Editor Incarcerated (a.k.a. Anonymous)

As I type, there are more than two million people behind bars in the United States. One of every four black men between the ages of 20 and 30 is incarcerated. Millions more people are on probation or parole. In fact, 1 of every 32 Americans is currently caught up in the criminal justice system. In the District of Columbia, one in every three adult men is under some kind of penal supervision. Despite our vast numbers, we are, except for an occasional cartoon in the New Yorker, largely ignored and completely voiceless. We exist in the popular culture mostly as the punch line of a joke.

I say "we" because I am one of the incarcerated millions, a prisoner in what has become this country's endless War on Drugs.

Despite having spent many years in prison, though, it would be presumptuous of me to claim to speak for everyone who is locked up. I am not really representative of the average convict. For one, I am white where the norm is black or brown. I am middle-aged where most are young, educated where most have never finished high school, and a federal prisoner where most are being held by the states. Nevertheless, I have at one time or another been held in nine federal facilities ranging from Pennsylvania's Lewisburg Penitentiary, to the camp where I am now, and every sort of place in between.

In addition, I have firsthand knowledge of a handful of county jails-thanks entirely to the feds' miserly attitude toward bail. And from what I've seen in all of these stops, prison is prison and convicts are convicts. (County jails are the worst, by the way; nowhere else even compares to their capacity to inflict misery. Guys celebrate the day they get transferred to a pen.)

I'd like to tell you that I'm innocent, a victim of circumstance being unjustly held by a vengeful and misguided system. I'd like to, but I can't, because I'm guilty as charged, perhaps even guiltier, maybe even guilty as sin. Everybody used to think it was cool when I got all those A's in Chemistry, but then. I won't go there. Instead, I'll just say that not too many people in jail claim to be innocent anymore. The standard line is more like, "Sure, I did it, but this sentence isn't fair."

Maybe you didn't know that. Maybe there's a lot you don't know about convicts and prison. Maybe you think you know what it's like in here, but you're just plain wrong. Allow me, then, since I'm monopolizing the only typewriter in the law library that still works, to help separate you from some widely held misconceptions:

1. THE COURTS ARE MANNED BY SOFT-AS-A-GRAPE JUDGES WHO DOLE OUT SLAPS ON THE WRIST.

Some shrewd PR guy in some prosecutor's office somewhere must have come up with this one. It really doesn't work that way. Fifteen of my last 30 years have been spent in prison, the last 10 in a row. This is the result of two arrests, one in the late '70s and another on Groundhog Day, 1993. I am the norm, not the exception. Don't believe all that stuff about second chances. Today it's one strike and you're out.

This is especially true of drug guys. All the places I've been have been full of kids doing decades or more for a few hundred dollars' worth of dope. The kid who bunks next to me-well, he's not a kid anymore-is halfway through a 15-year sentence he caught from a D.C. judge for $600 worth. The judge even apologized when he handed out the sentence. It was the guidelines, he said there was nothing he could do.

2. PRISON IS SOME SORT OF SODOMITE BACCHANALIA.

Though I am usually willing to swap jokes and jibes with just about anyone, this one is getting worn out for me. Mention prison and the next thing you are likely to hear is some wisecrack about anal penetration. Both David Letterman and Jay Leno seem to be contractually obligated to mention it at least once a month. As soon as someone's friends find out he's going to prison, he can be assured of receiving soap on a rope as a going-away present, along with instructions that should he ever drop it, the way to retrieve it is to kick it into the corner of the shower and pick it up with his back against the wall.

I've come to accept that, as with fart jokes and bathroom humor in general, there must be something inherently funny about anal penetration. I also understand that we have brought a large part of this upon ourselves. I was at Lewisburg, for instance, when an outside construction crew came in to work on the roof and convicts lined the fence in the yard to wolf-whistle at the ones wearing shorts. But enough is enough already.

The truth is that sexual orientation is not a matter of convenience, and the amount of sodomy in here is not more than you are likely to find in a big-city nightclub; it's less if you include the disco era. As far as rape is concerned, in 15 years behind bars, I've yet to see one. As in any sizable population, there is a sufficiently large gay segment: There are plenty of volunteers, and prison administrators usually accommodate their needs. In one prison where I was a resident, the psychology department made women's underwear available to those who were so inclined. I'm talking about federal prisons-again, men's federal prisons. I have no idea what happens in women's prisons, though I like to imagine it sometimes, which brings us to the point of what sex in prison is really all about. To quote Woody Allen, "Sex is like bridge: If you don't have a good partner, you need a good hand." Euphemistically referred to as "polishing the knob," "buffing the bishop," "roughing up the suspect," or "haciendo pueta," onanism is common indeed. The medical department even recommends it as a prophylactic against prostate problems.

Most prisons today are built with individual shower stalls as opposed to the type of shower rooms you may remember from gym class. (Lewisburg still has shower rooms, but it is considered bad form there to shower nude. The custom is to shower wearing boxer shorts.) These shower stalls are virtual masturbatoria, and you would be well advised to scrub one out before using it, especially if you find a page from the Victoria's Secret catalog stuck to the wall inside. There is even, among certain strangely twisted (and usually younger) convicts, a market for prosthetic devices known as "fifis." I will say no more.

I can understand the animus a citizen might harbor toward someone who robbed his business or burglarized his home or raided his pension fund. I can even see how someone might feel better imagining that person suffering the worst kind of retribution, though I certainly would never wish such harm on anyone myself. But most of us aren't in here for such acts. The majority of us are what they refer to as "nonviolent drug offenders," the people who get locked up to protect you from yourselves. Our crimes were private transactions conducted between consenting adults. Collectively we are Mr. Happy, the guy you used to scramble to find so you could score a little something to take the edge off on a Saturday night, the guy you used to be so delighted to see that, even from in here, it's sometimes hard to figure out what we did that was so wrong especially since we are sure that since we've been gone, you've found someone new. Why would you want to wish anything so terrible on us'

Please, lighten up on the sodomy jokes.

3. FEDERAL PRISONS ARE COUNTRY CLUBS.

This one really ticks me off. There is no such thing as a country-club prison. I can only assume that whoever coined this has either never been to a country club, or never been to a prison. I have spent time in both. Trust me when I tell you that there is no similarity. Can you imagine a country club where 130 snoring, stinking, farting guys sleep stacked on bunk beds arranged not even two feet apart in a tiny little dormitory, and then stand in line in the morning to use one of six toilets, which are only rarely in working order at the same time.

And that picture someone took when all the Watergate guys were getting locked up, the one that seems to show a golf course at the Allenwood Federal Prison Camp' That was taken at a clever angle to make it appear that the golf course was part of the prison. There has never been a golf course at a federal prison. If you don't believe me, call the Bureau of Prisons. They love answering questions like that.

Consistent with this idea that the feds run country clubs is the delusion that this country operates the best, most humane prisons in the world. Even on the inside you can hear convicts opine that they feel blessed to be incarcerated in the good old U.S. of A. instead of some other place, at which point they invariably mention some Third World backwater. While I have no doubt that conditions in Suriname or Burma or Burkina Faso do not compare favorably with those here in America, how come you never hear anyone mention Italy, where serving the kind of food American prisoners eat would be considered uncivilized? Or France, where the thought of dinner without wine is unthinkable? Or Sweden or the Netherlands, where years of forced celibacy would be deemed a violation of a prisoner's basic human rights? Among the nations that Americans like to compare themselves to, only here, and I guess Japan, is removal from society alone believed to be such inadequate punishment that additional punitive measures are required.

American prisons are, for the most part, overcrowded, dirty and dangerous places. Having always been a federal prisoner, I cannot speak with authority about conditions in state prisons, though people tell me that they are, in the main, abysmal. Nor have I spent more than a little time in county lock-ups. I would have spent none if that stuff the Eighth Amendment says about bond was more than just words on paper. so I have never experienced a horror show like the old Salem Jail in Massachusetts, where the policy was to house six men in 23-hour lock-down in a two-man cell that contained neither running water nor modern facilities, only a chamber pot in the form of a five-gallon bucket with a seat attached that was emptied twice a day. I've also been spared a stay at Holmesburg, the former Pennsylvania state prison, which, after it was condemned, was used by the feds as a pre-trial holding facility. There, prisoners were commonly thrown into dank, dark dungeons where the only way to have light in your cell was to buy a length of electrical cord from another prisoner and figure out a way to tap into a live line, after which you had to buy a light bulb. I have, however, been a guest at the old Allegheny Jail, which the cognoscenti tell me ranked right up there with anything Central America or the Caribbean had to offer, complete with beatings and everything.

Speaking of the Third World, I once had the opportunity to ask an erudite Nigerian convict, who supported himself in prison by writing habeas corpus appeals and habeas corpus petitions (he averaged two to three a month at about $1,000 a pop), what prison conditions are like in his native land. Absolutely horrific, he assured me. He didn't believe that the average American could survive even a short stay. But, he went on, for the kind of money a convict spends to get by in an American prison, someone could probably bribe his way out of a Nigerian prison, or at the very least hire someone to do his time for him.

You tell me where you'd rather be.

4. ALL PRISONERS ARE STUPID.

This is the converse of a belief widely held in here: that everyone out there is gutless. This is not to suggest that prison is some kind of graduate seminar, except maybe of crime. (I worked in the prison garage for only a week before I learned how easy it is to pop the ignition switch out of a Ford.) Nor am I referring to what is commonly called "street smarts," which I have found to be nothing more than a high level of paranoia combined with incredible baseness, selfishness and a willingness to do things that most people would consider beneath them. All of this aside, it has been my experience that IQ distribution pretty much mirrors the usual bell curve, even if we seem to get more than our fair share of guys who have been failed by the big-city school system.

My guess is that the idea that everyone in prison is stupid is based on the line of thinking that goes: They got caught, ergo they must be stupid because, as everyone knows, there are some things that one just cannot do. I suggest, however, that the way the world really is set up is that-in all but a few cases-you can do any damn thing you want to do really, anything that you can think of.

Of course, you may have to deal with the consequences. I say "may" because, TV cop shows, aside, people do get away with things once in a while. I believe it was Machiavelli who observed it is not the severity of the punishment that deters one from pursuing a particular course of action, but rather the certainty of being caught.

I think we all can agree that Machiavelli was no dolt.

5. ALL PRISON GUARDS ARE MISANTHROPIC SADISTS LIKE THE ONES PORTRAYED IN THE MOVIES.