Although this is a situation I would rather be able to "do over" and it's something I'm ashamed of,  I'm going to post on it since it may be of general interest.

Roughly two decades ago,  I found myself in a situation that required me to spend several months in federal prison. I purposely did not pay federal transfer taxes on several items covered under Title II of the National Firearms Act. My company made the items in order to facilitate a request for proposal from one of the local Navy SEAL teams in the area I was then residing.

Since they were NFA act items the potential penalty for not paying the transfer tax or registering the items (four of them) was a maximum 10k fine and ten years in federal prison for each offense.  I fought the charges as best I could and finally ended up accepting a plea agreement to a lesser offense that "only" carried a max jail sentence of 33 months. In the federal system there really is no time off for good behavior so 40 years is 40 years. There was a good bit of politics involved as well, but that is a different post entirely. I took the plea agreement and ended up spending four or five months at a minimum security "club fed" type prison.

The problem was that,  at that time, the federal government did not have these facilities in every state. (Maybe they still don't) They contracted with local authorities to temporarily house prisoners awaiting transfer to their final destination.

Unfortunately, for the first couple of weeks,  I was cooling my heels at the local city jail. The only space available was in the maximum security section. (No matter that my deal was for minimum security) This section consisted of ten cells with bunk beds, so, twenty prisoners could be held there. The ten cells opened into a hallway that had a single entrance/exit at the south end. There was another hallway in front of the first hallway where the guards patrolled.  At the opposite end was an open shower and toilet. There were about 15 prisoners of which two thirds were black and the rest were white.

Each cell had a stainless steel sink/toilet combo. Bottom line was no privacy and the place did not smell too good. It is worth mentioning at this point that the United States, with the exception of the death penalty, does not punish prisoners, it confines them. It is largely the prisoners that punish themselves. (As an aside, a prison guard who works an eight hour shift and completes a 30 year career, will have voluntarily spent the equivalent of ten straight years behind bars.)

The ten cell doors were usually open so the inmates could mingle. There was a color TV at the north end. Majority vote determined the channel selection.

So, is prison as bad as it is portrayed on television? Yes.

Where to start. Was I scared? Umm, concerned might be a better word. I was waaaayyy out of my normal element and, for the most part, took a disinterested observer position. While at this jail I was left alone. Weak inmates were attacked as were the new arrivals who thought they would try to play bad ass. It was a power play by the inmates to show they had some control over you.

We had one black inmate I called Michelle the he/she. He was a male who thought he was a female. I kind of felt sorry for him since just about every night four other black inmates would take him to a cell and give his ass a workout. Better him than me.  In general, blacks hung with blacks and whites hung with whites. In this facility, I did not witness any inter-racial violence.

As a conservative, I had some preconceived notions about prisoners. I assumed most people who were in jail belonged there, but was aware of the occasional miscarriage of justice where an innocent person was wrongly convicted. (Or someone who was just an unwitting tag-along would get the same sentence as the guy that actually did the crime) I'd actually say this happens about 5% of the time. Another 10% of the inmates could use some type of different sentence that would take them outside of prison. The other 85% of the inmates should never be released under any circumstances and, frankly, should just be humanely disposed of.

One day, a black inmate approached me and asked me to read his presentence investigation background report (AKA a BIR) to him since he could not read it himself.  This kid had committed at least 15 burglaries and had a long rap sheet. The thing that got me was that the report mentioned that when this kid was in the eighth grade, he got off the school bus, went home, and opened the front door just in time to see his father shoot his mother six to eight times and then daddy turned the gun on himself. I think daddy survived.  There was no mention in the report that the kid was ever given any counseling or therapy. He was just left to deal with the situation on his own, with his limited mental faculties. The line in the report that really got to me was where the report writer had written...(I still remember this verbatim) " the court cannot understand why the defendant has failed to respond to repeated leinency."

The one time an inmate got his ass kicked was when he took a styrofoam cup of water and threw it on the back of the TV, shorting it out.  (The guy was a few beers short of a six pack.)

There was drug usage in this jail. The guards supplied some of the inmates with herb. Inmates had a canteen fund that families could contribute to up to 25 bucks a month or so. Inmates could buy cigarettes or snacks to suppliment the three bland meals per day.

We also had an inmate that could make jailhouse wine. He would take undercooked bread and would collect the fruit cups and put these and other ingredients into a cleaned out toilet to ferment. I never tried it, but other inmates said they got a good buzz off it. The guards looked the other way. Why? Two reasons. One, drunk or stoned inmates were usually pretty mellow and two,  if a guard got too snotty with an inmate, the inmate would take a styrofoam cup, or his hand, and scoop a turd out of the toilet and throw it at the guard.  

One thing that did irritate me is that when I was self employed I was working 7 days a week, 12 hours+ a day to keep the business going, put a roof over my head and pay my medical and other insurance and yet, while in prison, the government was giving me a roof over my head, three meals a day, medical and dental care and haircuts all at no cost to me.  I actually overheard another inmate mention this to one of his buddies. He lamented the fact there were no women he could have sex with, but otherwise preferred jail to being on the outside.  I would still much prefer freedom to confinement, and all the negatives that go along with incarceration, but the gubmint does meet an inmates basic needs, and more,  in the case of club fed incarceration.

After a couple of weeks in local jail it was off to a newly constructed regional jail for about 10 days. I was in a two level open cell block at this facility. I was figuring on an easy stay, but after about a week I had a nasty surprise one night. At around 2 a.m. I awoke to five black inmates beating me up while dragging me down the stairs toward the showers. ( Now, you men reading this can say all you want about you being able to kick their ass and not letting them get at you, but I had worked bar security for  four years and was younger and in pretty good shape and I could not stop all of them)

Things were not looking too good, at least in regards to keeping my butt cherry from getting popped, but prison being what it is, the commotion had awoken some of the white inmates on the lower level who were not about to let a bunch of niggers gang rape a fellow white inmate. Yours truly was able to dodge a big bullet on that one. Interestingly, the two black guards disappeared for about half an hour while this was happening.

Well,  when I finally got to club fed it wasn't so bad. Think of a community college campus surrounded by barbed wire. We had cafeteria style dining, which we could walk to unescorted. We could use the gym or go to the library, accomodations were made for most ofthe common religions.

Getting a visit was somewhat unpleasant in that we were subject to a strip search before and after the visit. I found this rather humiliating.

A month or so into my stay at club fed, I made an insulting remark to a staff member and found myself in special housing for a couple of days. Special housing consisted of two moderately long rows of cells that faced each other and had a desk at one end where a guard sat. Two other guards patrolled the block.

After a shift change, the new desk guard was chatting with some inmates and he asked one of them why he was there. I did not see this inmate but he sounded black or could also have been a wigger. Anyway, the inmate explains that he and two of his friends had been drinking and doing drugs when one of his friends says he wants to go perform a satanic ritual on a corpse. (Of course, that's something we all do when we get a good buzz going)

They all agree and go get shovels and drive around cemeteries looking for a good target. They find one. It is the grave of a young female in her late teens or early twenties. She had only been buried a week so, in their minds, it was fresh meat. He relates that they spent quite a bit of time digging up the casket. They took the crypt cover off and used it as an altar. They opened the casket and removed the corpse and put her on the the crypt cover.

His two friends had sex with her remains and he mentioned (this is what led me to give the story some credibility) that his friend was complaining that the embalming fluid was burning his dick.  The inmate then says he didn't do anything sick like that, he just jerked off on the dead girls face.

As he was cracking his nut, he was illuminated by the spotlight of a police car. Truly, a Kodak moment if ever there was one. He was in special housing at a federal prison because this happened in a southern state (either Georgia or Arkansas as I recall) and he was there in protective custody. His two friends were apparently still recovering from injuries received while "resisting arrest." Read into that what you will.  Honestly, if I had been that girls father all three of those guys would be dead. Period.

Long story short, OBEY THE LAW.......until our slimy government forces you to disobey it.