Prison for Dummies...Chapter 2...Your first day.

Your first day in the slammer is in many ways similar to your first day in school. You get off the bus, apprehensive. If you are paying attention to your surroundings, and you should be, you will notice the following.



1. 70 or 80 percent of the people who just got off the bus with you, are NOT white. It is true that blacks and Hispanics tend to get time more often, and more of it, however any advantage you enjoyed due to your whiteness is now null and void. To quote the black guy who befriends Edward Norton in American History X, "you the nigga in here." If you are a reader of color, congratulations, it's finally paying off.


2. The black guys can be divided up in two groups. The first group is made up of thugs in their late teens , early twenties. They are loud and talk incessantly. In fact they wont shut the fuck up. This is most likely their first bit, and they are scared. The fear has them all jacked up and on edge. In order to mask the fear factor, they talk loud , and trade stories about 187's and smokin some fool. It's probably mostly bullshit, but they think it makes them sound hard. If someone yelled BOOM, like Denzel in Training Day, these toy gangstas droopy pants would fall off completely.



The second group of black guys are 30 and up. They are the exact opposite of the frenetic hyper hood rats. They are quiet, talk in a mumble, and posses a sleepy eyed look, a look that says they ain't hardly bullshittin. In other words, these guys have been down this road more than once. Most of them probably have sentences longer than the young black guys have been alive. These guys, you do not want to get cross-ways with.




3. The Hispanics , and I group everyone from Mexicans to Cubans as Hispanic. Sue me. All I know is that they all talk the same and I cant understand a word of it. Some of this group, the Cubans to be exact, are twice as loud as the young black guys.




4. The white guys , can be defined as three separate groups. You have your regular criminal types. While they may or may not have done time, they are streetwise and know the score. Like the older black guys they are quiet and best left alone.

The second subsection of white guys are the tax cheaters, the kiddie pornsters and are referred to as Opies, as in Opie, Andy and barney. They have lived cushy white collar lives and they find themselves as out of place as Farrakhan at a Nascar race. They are scared shitless and spend most of their time studying the floor.

The third subsection of white guys are young, teens and twenties , like the young black guys. Another thing they share in common is trying their best, and failing miserably, to sound, act and look, like they are from the Hood. Most of them are from the burbs, got caught selling or making meth or slinging crack , or taking stolen cars across the state lines. Of all the people who annoyed me in the joint, these wanna be but never will's are at the top of my shit list. The really odd characteristic that many of these Wug's, white thugs, share is a pretty fair number of them are racist. They are sporting SS lightning bolts on their necks, or White Pride Tattooed on the back of their arms. I never could figure it out. These clowns tried to sound like a stereotyped black thug, they sport wife beater or over sized T shirts, droopy pants, and say Yo, or Know wha Im sayin , but they claim to hate blacks. It's important to note that this hate doesn't extend to actual confrontation with the black guys. In the 5 years and change I spent away, I never once saw or heard of one of these Aryan posers actually having a physical beef with anyone of color. Not once. That isn't to say that there isn't a genuine group of Aryans, it's just that they tend to stay segregated, leaving room for these posers to act the part, on a purely superficial level.


So there is your cast of characters. It is important to note that you have been up for 12 hours or better. You couldn't sleep on the bus because the black box was slowly cutting off your blood flow, the young black guys were rappin, poorly, and Mr. Dookie breath kept invading your airspace. You are tired.

You go through a long list of questions, from medical conditions to religious preference. you strip down to your bare ass, while some corn pone eating prison guard looks in your mouth, under your balls, and the bottoms of your feet. You are instructed to spread your cheeks, squat and cough, the idea being that anything you might have secreted away in your colonic strongbox will come shooting out. If you are easily embarrassed you are a deep burgundy red at this point. Get over it. On average you will be patted down, strip searched and have your personal privacy invaded a half dozen times a day, minimum.



You are instructed to step in to a tiled shower stall. It has several spray heads jutting out of the walls and ceiling. It kind of reminds you of one of those high priced multi head showers. Hey , maybe this isn't so bad after all. You are told to hold your breath and close your eyes tightly. The next thing you know you are hit with a 20 second blast of something cold that smells like kerosene. You have just been gassed. Debugged as it were.



After more questions , you are handed a gray wool blanket, a sheet, a plastic pillow, a towel and some foam hospital shoes. You are herded down another set of halls to a cell block or pod. It is basically an octagon main room surrounded by 2 man cells. No bars, just a steel door with a greasy sliver of window in it. You get a sandwich and a beat up apple. Congrats, you made it through your first day.

*** Authors note***
The reader may notice that my marginal proper English usage has taken a nose dive in these Prison for Dummies posts. That's because I'm in character, as it were. I am trying to teach you proper prison slang and vernacular. The one thing you don't want is to look like an Opie. Besides, it's my blog, you want proper grammatically correct writing, tough shit. This is prison, you rarely get what you want.