| 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. |