Ord fra en tidligere fengselsbetjent

Jeg leste en artikkel her en dag, skrevet av en som har jobbet i fengsel, som jeg syntes var så godt skrevet at jeg tok vare på deler av innholdet. Har ikke linken til hele greia for hånden, men om noen føler for å være skikkelig nøye på det skal jeg alltids klare å trylle det frem. Ville bare dele noen setninger med dere:

”One of the great tragedies of the prison system is that so many young people only realize their talents after getting locked up. You take a bunch of guys with zero college or (legal) work experience, lock them in a big building, and suddenly they're master engineers. I found that if you give these guys a PlayStation controller, they'll quickly make you a quality electronic tattoo gun.”

“You've probably heard about prisoners being pretty good at turning stuff like spoons and pencils into deadly knives, but that stuff is easy work. A skilled prisoner can make a knife out of literally any solid substance you care to give him. We had one inmate spend days wetting sheet after sheet of newspaper and compressing them together under a small stack of books. Eventually, the paper dried into a rigid cardboard brick. The inmate sharpened this on the floor of his cell, and in about a month he had himself a fine little face-stabbing knife.”

“You probably assume that prison is ordered a little like Dante's hell and inmates wind up on different "levels" based on the severity of their crime. Nope! If you make it into a federal prison for a nonviolent drug charge, you might wind up cell mates with Johnny the Cop Stabber, who, despite his colorful nickname, is a serial rapist. (And the head of the Bible study group – he’s a complex man.)

As a private prison, we were only supposed to get inmates up to a "medium" level of severity. We had a points system, and once they got above a certain number, we had to send them to the state. My job for a while was to do that paperwork, and guess what: The state would fiddle with the numbers all the time in order to dump the inmates on us. I'd go into their records and add up their infractions and realize that these guys were much more dangerous than the state had said. Whenever we wound up with someone who was WAY too violent for our prison, the state would wait forever to take him back.

That means that prison, like America, is a great melting pot. But instead of being a place for people of all nations, faiths, and creeds to live together, it's a place where kids who made one dumb mistake hang out with career criminals. There's a reason our recidivism rate is so very high: Prison is crime college. I had a 19-year-old kid in there who went on a joyride in his grandma's car. She called the police, hoping they'd just put him in jail overnight to scare him. But the DA decided to make an example out of him and charged the kid with car theft. Now he's in prison, learning how to steal cars for real.”

at least the kid will stay in shape.