Al Jazeera made a video with a gentleman who spent the last 4.5 decades in the slammer.
How different the world seems. Man, it musthave blown his mind.
When I see pictures from 2005, it seems like a different world; what the hell must a person from 1975 feel like?
Prisoners regularly see movies, TV, magazines, newspapers…
I am guessing the year he went is a typo. The difference in his age when he went in and got out is 44 years- but 1975 was 40 years ago.
This is what I always wonder about. This type of article comes up from time to time and they act like people in prison are completely cut off from media. Like they’re just sitting there reading
The only thing I can think is that reading materials, film and TV were extremely limited in this particular prison, and that the man who was just released might not be a big reader, or perhaps can’t read. Forty-five years of playing pinochle, though, must get boring.
Jail ages you.
That’s not like living in the world.
It’s one thing to read about social and technological change and evolving mores and habits or to view representations of it in both fictional and nonfictional TV and movies; it’s another one to experience it, especially absent a family support network. Even under normal circumstances one could do a lot of reading and media viewing on, say, life in some foreign city (for example in my case, Mexico City, or Liverpool) and still be a fish out of water when you get there as an inhabitant as opposed to a tourist.
I’ve heard that after many years in prison, people can’t handle life outside and commit a crime just to get back “home”.
Any truth to this?
Not necessarily people who’ve been in a for a long time, and not necessarily people who consciously decide to do so, either.
It’s been a commonplace for a long time that people (usually men) who are on the margins might prefer to be locked up for the winter with at least some food and warmth guaranteed than doss on the streets. But I can also distinctly remember a TV documentary in the UK about a local magistrate’s court and some of the cases coming before it, one of whom was a young man who’d been in and out of trouble with no family behind him, until someone took a chance on him, gave him a job and he seemed to settle down. The trouble was, the children came too soon, he got into debt, he and his wife were falling out and couldn’t cope, and he committed some stupid petty crime he could never have imagined he’d get away with. It seemed to me obvious he was desperate to be locked up so he wouldn’t have to sort out the mess he’d got himself into.
I’ve a better question though, “how would jail be like after 44 years outside?” A 70’s edition of GBOWR says the longest time a prison escapee evaded capture was 44 years. The second time, he was turned in by his son.
Watching somebody do something on TV or in a movie is hardly the same as experiencing it yourself.
Wonder how the world looks to the family of the policeman he tried to murder 44 years ago?
Your point is…?
Honestly, just being able to choose your own schedule, clothes and food would be such a difference after 44 years in prison that I think it’d take me a few months before computers and cell phones became the thing I marveled over.
Just a guess: The writer assumes that the thread is being written to elicit sympathy for the criminal.
You can’t handle the truth.
Tried to? He got 44 years and wasn’t even successful at it?
Not just that but the sheer size of your new world; what used to be so constricted and tiny now seems so fucking huge. That could impact a person just getting out of a half-century in prison in a few different ways, it seems.