I can feel for this guy. I just spent 8 years without seeing the sun or breathing fresh air. (Jail) I hope he's taking some vitamins. I'm assuming he's doing no exercise?
Welcome back! Weird question- anything you found enjoyable in jail? I sometimes think I’ll thrive in isolationism of sort. Obviously jail is not voluntary but curious how you manage to stay sane.
Interesting question. You could also ask - is there anything positive about jail?
It gives you a lot of time to think about your life, that's for sure. I finally had time to think that while I believed myself to be a good husband, I realized I'd actually been a pretty shitty one. It gave me a chance to finally understand and self-diagnose my mental health issues.
I lost 90lbs in the first six months of jail. I went from an overweight 260lbs to a sane 170lbs. That was from being able to strictly control my diet and do a bit of exercise in my cell each day.
If you love reading, like I do, then you can do a lot of that. The biggest problem was access to books. In some jails, e.g. Cook County Jail, you might have almost no access to books unless someone sends them to you from the outside. And if you read a book in three days like I do, then your friends and family might get exasperated at constantly sending you $20 books for eight years. Also, the guards are going to take all your books off you as fast as they can and throw them away. I read over 800 books in jail.
I went to the Hole three times for 10 days a piece, once for telling my wife in a letter that I'd traded a packet of coffee for a stamped envelope, second time for taking too long trading my rice with someone for a chicken nugget, and third time because the jail had a secret intelligence operation running against me (I got all the documents under FOIA eventually) and so the guards threw contraband into my room, right in front of me, and then arrested me for it.
For 10 days at a time, the Hole isn't so bad. I don't know if I would hate it more if it was longer. My first trip there I wasn't prepared and didn't know how anything worked. They had a great selection of books in the Hole if you could get to them. The next two times I went I distracted the guards and managed to grab books before I got locked into the cell, so my time went a lot better. The first time I went they had a policy of putting you in there naked for the first day, but I sued over it, so the next two times I didn't have to suffer that indignity.
You can usually get some peace in the Hole. Jail isn't good for people like me who don't mind isolationism because 99% of the time you will have a cellmate to start with. If your cellmate cannot or does not want to read, then they will try to talk to you for the 16 hours a day you are in the cell awake together. And when you are out of the cell you are likely in a room the size of a standard living room, but with 50 other guys, so you will get no peace there either. Going to the Hole might be your only chance to get a few minutes of quiet.
Ooo.. hard question. I read a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. There were only fiction books available in the jail libraries, so that was the bulk of my reading. In fiction my favourites were probably the Southern Reach trilogy and the 3 Body Problem trilogy. I also really liked Shantaram.
I did make a list of every book I read but the jail destroyed it. I feel for the author of Shantaram: "His manuscript was destroyed twice by a prison guard, each time after he had written between 300 to 400-odd pages. Referring to this in interviews, Roberts said the guard was "a very harsh critic", remarking that "if you get past something like that, you can take some criticism when you get it from book reviewers.”"
I’m not in US (and neither the person you asked), but I felt very nostalgic when covid situation only began in my city. It wasn’t a lockdown, only an advisory statement and a common fear of unknown. Empty streets, almost no cars passing by, which I could count on my fingers from a balcony back then. I wanted to just walk the city and feel it. Now that it got back to normal, it pushed me back to my apartment. Because when it’s “normal” I rather feel like a bug in an engine full of whirring cogs.
I was in the Cook County Jail for the last three years and that was stated to be the epicenter of the entire pandemic at one point. I think it was the end of March 2020 when a guy on my cellblock said that he couldn't smell anything. When my cellmate and I got back to our cell my cellmate started opening any packets of food he had and shoving them under my nose "SNIFF THIS!" Neither of us could smell anything. We all got it bad. I was on an "old man's" deck, so everyone was vulnerable and everyone got sick. The guard from our deck went home and died it from it.
They weren't doing proper tests. They would do very occasional temperature checks, but everyone wanted to avoid being moved to the COVID wing that had been set up as the conditions there were atrocious, so if you had a temperature you would drink a cold drink just before you put the thermometer in your mouth, and that seemed to get you through.
A thousand of us got sick in that one building alone, and ten of us died. They took all the soap away from the facility shortly before things blew up. Someone had beaten their cellmate to death with a soap-filled sock, which is a standard method, and they decided to stop that by removing socks and soap. So we didn't have soap for washing our hands for weeks, and then only a bar the size of your finger to last you for showering and washing your hands for a whole week. Plus, the workers were supposed to sanitize everything, but if you're paying people $1 to work 16 hours a day you can imagine how good a job you get.
I think it was about 9 months into the pandemic when I got my first COVID test. I didn't go to court for a whole year. They keep you in a county jail "to ensure your appearance at court", but I could not go to court because I was in jail. Basically everyone was quarantined, so jail detainees were not allowed in court. We weren't even allowed to use the laptops for Zoom appearances lest we infect the laptops. So, if I had been out of jail I could have gone to court by Zoom, but because I was held in jail I could not go. So COVID took a year of my life that way.
They eventually decided to move to single-man cells and get rid of all the double-bunking, but this requires twice as many cells. They didn't have working cell blocks to house everyone. Doesn't matter. They just opened up all the cell blocks that had been shuttered for years. Oh - none of the electrics, plumbing and heating works? Well, I'm sure someone will fix that eventually. I remember at one point my cell being 3C (35F) for three days. That was really cold. They did move some people when their cell dropped to 19*F. We went for weeks at a time with no hot water, so I was the only one brave enough to take a shower. [I was working on my Wim Hof method]
Basically, it was a fuck-up from beginning to end. Everything in jail is a fuck-up because there is no real oversight of anything. There's no conspiracy, it's just that is institutional laziness, and in jails the "customers" (detainees) can't complain about anything being fucked-up or you'll be punished for it. So as a jail employee you can easily get away with not doing anything that your job requires.
LOL. I've not even scratched the surface with all the things that went on during COVID in the jail. We were also locked in our cells for over 23 hours a day most days. Sometimes we didn't come out for days at a time.
"The jail in Chicago is now the nation’s largest-known source of coronavirus infections, according to data compiled by The New York Times, with more confirmed cases than the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., or the cluster centered on New Rochelle, N.Y."