Guy Montag is the name of the main character in the book Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Montag is a fireman in an age when firemen are used to burn books rather than fight fires. Great book.
I mean this as a serious question. Why did you start this thread? What do you hope to accomplish by answering our questions?
Do you ever plan on answering any questions?
smam
Finding a big guy and letting rip is not too bright an idea.
Even picking on a little guy may not be very bright.
You need to know with whom you are dealing, and how well he is backed up and you need to be sure you are well backed up too.
Every jail has groups that operate together, picking one individual from that group could be bad news.
Besides all that, you would be surprised at what can be used as a weapon, I have seen toilet brushes broken off at the head and the shaft sharpened and used to impale anopther, you would not think that ordiary nylon brushes could be so dangerous.
Other mundane but nasty favourites could be sweeping brush handles, if wood they break easily and provide a lethal stabbing weapon, a suace bottle full of water can be a very good cosh, one prisoner in Wakefield prison in the UK tried to kill serial murderer Peter Sutcliffe by stabbing him in the eyes with felt tip pens, and was not far from succeeding.
Althought there is a certain amount of ‘Baroning’ where you borrow once and repay twice, baccy is not the main tradeable commodity.
Most cons smoke, and all use hand rolling baccy, it goes much further, and when it is not being actively smoked the cig will go out, which is a further saving, but it does make lighters a more valuable item.
Many ways, depends on the type of prison.
The main way is through family and friends visits, drugs will be passed either orally during a ‘kiss’, or hidden within a childs clothing so the con can collect when holding the child.
Drugs moved in this way are sealed in plastic wrapped packages or condoms, they may be concealed in the body by the visitor (use your imagination) which the visitor finds a way to pass on to the prisoner, who will then hide the drugs in a similar way, this is known as ‘plugging’
Visits rooms are monitored by CCTV and there are plenty of staff, but it only takes an arranged distraction, such as a heated conversation elsewhere in the visits room, to provide the blink-of-an-eye-time to transfer drugs.
In Prisons where there is no physical contact due to a screen then drugs may come in by items handed to the visits staff for the prisoner, trainers are one favourite, LSD on letters, sewn into clothing, or clothing impregnated with drugs, or even seeming solid items that can be broken down into solution which can then be evaporated off to extract the drugs. Drugs can be hidden in almost anything, including toothpaste tubes, CD cases, hard book covers etc
Crooked staff can bring in drugs, there are very many staff working in prisons who have no contact at all with prisoners, those staff could bring in packages, and leave them in strategic locations to be collected. Obviously staff who do have contact with prisoners can just bring in drugs and hand them straight to the cons themselves.
Prisons consume large amounts of goods and stores, prisoners have been know to find out where those goods are supplied from and get at the people who work there to plant drugs for later collection on arrival in the jail.
Some prisons have inmates who work away from the prison itself, such as maintaining roadside verges and the like, drops are arranged for such prisoners to collect them.
Drugs can simply be thrown over the fence in a container such as a tennis ball that has been filled with them.
There are ways to detect them, and various procedures and checks but I will not mention these.
Often the drugs themselves are not found immediately, but there are ways of working out who are the main players and who their contacts are.If someone is in prison for dealing drugs on the outside, there is a very strong possibilty they will be involved on the inside, it is not difficult to know who to watch.
It may come as a surprise at first to many, but one of the big drug problems in prisons are steroids of various sorts, plus all the other chemicals that can help assist in putting on muscle bulk or improve in recovery times after heavy training.
Maybe some kind of reward, he may not answer any questions till he has recieved 5 cigarettes from each of us.
If you wish to know more about prisons and if the OP fails to respond I shall attempt to do so.
Have you ever been ‘banged up’ ‘the slammer’?
jus joshing, dont answer that.
Why such a large aount of time for purse snatching? Why would such a small crime equal a felony? Why arn’t murders given sentences like that?(I don’t mean 1 year, but equaviantly).
On the smuggling issue, one of my friends had a brother in prison. He used to smuggle in rolls of quaters for him which had apparently become their main currency. The prisoners had figured out at one corner of the yard was a blind spot for cameras. People on the outside would just throw stuff there.
Ha ha! Prison rape! The height of comedy! I salute you, sir!
:rolleyes:
To the OP: You say you were in county jail. What was the criminal demographic of your fellow prisoners? In other words, what were the proportions of people serving time for violent crime, or drug crime, or sex crime, or gang association, and so on.
Was there anybody there who had served hard time in a separate stint, before ending up in county? Were they treated differently from everybody else by the guards, or the other prisoners?
What was the schedule for an average day? (Wake at 6am, breakfast at 7am, macrame and needlepoint at 9am, etc.)
Was there any observance of holidays?
How did the prisoners divide themselves socially? By race, or by religion, or by crime, or…?
I do hope you come back to address our questions. The smart-assedness of some people notwithstanding, I’m very interested.
YOU??? No way!
:eek:
Are you back in jail now?
What constitutes a felony conviction. As far as I know this is a purely American term.
Has your parole officer interfered with your ability to post?
I don’t know why the OP has not responded, but it might be a cathartic experience and I hope that other posters would respect the fact that this might possibly be a fairly difficult experience for him/her.
It is all too easy to write someone off as a vicious nasty criminal but most ofenders do return to the community at some time, I may be presumptious but I hope that this thread does not become accusatory.
Thanks, Fang. Yeah, it was a good book. I read it a thousand years ago and forgot a lot.
casdave - the OP suggested that in his experience non consensual sex was rare, but I note that he was in a county jail (and less than a year) vs. a prison. I know you work in a prison.
it’s been my experience (working w/felons) that there are substantial differences between the ‘average’ experience for the person incarcerated in jail (commonly for less than a year), vs. those who’re incarcerated in a prison (commonly for more than a year).
this may be difficult for you to gauge, but would you agree w/the OP’s assesment that non consensual sex was ‘rare’? (understanding that if you personally had evidence of such a thing you wouldn’t ‘look the other way’ )
it also may be a whole different situation w/female prisoners.
I don’t know about the FL, but here, “purse snatching” is not a separate crime. It’s a form of robbery, which is defined as forcibly
stealing.
Marc,
I thought that the “Ask the ____” threads were in IMHO. If I was wrong I apologize. At the same time I do not see why this should be in Great Debates. There is nothing to debate. Also the OPster hasn’t replied.
Slee
Alietta No, unfortunately. I don’t think most of the people get rehabilitated by their stay in jail–in fact many see it as a joke. I on the other hand have completely learned my lesson–although I regretted what I did even before I did it, so I may be a special case.
On the subject of voting: I did vote in the midterm elections, so either Texas (where I live) doesn’t know about my conviction or they don’t care.
The story of WHY (I’m not saying this was a good reason, it was just my reason):
Myself, my roommate and my fiance all decided to move to Florida on a whim (we were being evicted, because my other roommate couldn’t make his part of the rent), Mistake Number One. My fiance’s father agreed to drive us there, and we would pay his way back. We drove straight through, and arrived 22.5 hours later. We had been told that we could stay with a friend of my fiance’s, but when we arrived (after driving 2000 miles) she told us that we could not. We rented a motel for $200 a week, cutting our remaining funds down to $100. We tried to find work, going to “work today, get paid today” type places, only to find that there wasn’t much demand for an out of work software designer/computer engineer.
After exhausting all other options (including my fiance dancing at a strip club–something that completely killed me) on Friday, we had only two days left before we would be homeless in a city where we knew only one person whom refused to help. My future father-in-law was becoming restless at being stranded halfway across the country with only one change of clothes, and the end of his vacation time nearing. As we saw it, we had only one option: crime. we toyed with the option of ripping off vending machines, but couldn’t find any that were secluded enough to risk. Finally we decided to snatch a purse.
My roommate, My future father-in-law, and I went out to find someone to snatch from. we found a woman walking alone, and Father-in-law and I approached her from behind.
As I snatched the purse, everything seemed to move in slow motion, I remember vividly how it felt in my hands–clammy and cold, like it didn’t belong in my grip, which of course it didn’t. I cannot state enough that I felt horrible for what I was doing, but in my mind I could find no other way out*. I did not, nor would I have harmed the woman in any way. If she had resisted the snatch in any way, I would have let go, and left her alone–as I said, I felt like a horrible person already.
We ran back to the car (well I did, and Father-in-law ran the wrong way) and began to pull away with My roommate driving. We planned to leave Father-in-law there as he had actually played no physical part in the crime, and come back for him later. Just as we were about to pull out of the parking lot, he came running up to the car and hopped in.
As we sped down the road toward the motel, we noticed a car following us, and it’s driver talking an a cellphone. trying to lose him, Roommate turned a corner a bit too fast and jumped a curb, bursting the front tire. Our pursuer hadn’t made the turn, so we decide to fix the tire behind the building, and continue to the motel by back roads. We fixed the tire in about 1.5 minutes,and I cleaned out the purse and stashed it in some bushes. Total take: $241 cash. We were pulling out of the parking lot when a cop pulled in front of us. [At this point, don’t ask me why, but a line from Office Space flashed through my mind: “Why is it all these gorilla mafia guys can be so good at crime, and smart guys like us suck at it?”]
We were arrested, and I (as well as my co-defendants) spilled the beans immediately. I gave the money to the cops (they also took the remaining $30 of our money, and I don’t know what happened to that), told them where the purse was, and the victim recovered all her belongings (plus $30, but I write that off to emotional distress charge, so I never raised a fuss) and identified me as the assailant (kind of a moot point, because a:I’d already confessed, and b:I know she didn’t get a good enough look at me to pick me out if there had been anyone else in this “lineup”.) and we were taken to jail.
I’ll address more questions shortly (I promise)