In the past, there were different types of prison sentences is German criminal law. The most severe was Zuchthaus, which was meant to include correctional measures that, in practice, usually involved forced physical labour in addition to detention. On the other hand of the spectrum, there was Festungshaft (“fortress detention”, because it was often carried out on military compounds). The conditions of an inmate under Festungshaft were rather lenient (for instance, they could receive visitors in their cells) and the crucial difference to other types of custodial sentence was that it was not “dishonouring”, i.e., it did not carry the same social stigma as ordinary prison sentences. It was often imposed on military officers involved in duels (which were technically illegal but still widely accepted). Hitler received a sentence of five years of Festungshaft for his attempted coup of 1923 but was released after nine months, during which he wrote Mein Kampf
All these distinctions have since been abolished, and there is nowadays only one form of custodial sentence for adult convicts, carried out in a Justizvollzugsanstalt. Juvenile detention, pre-trial detention for suspects and Ordnungshaft (imposed for contempt of court) are legally different concepts but also served in a Justizvollzugsanstalt, although I believe that the harshness of the conditions differs from that of a regular prison sentence. Yet another concept is Jugendarrest, which is a very short-term detention for juvenile delinquents of a weekend up to four weeks. This is carried out in separate facilities, not in a normal Justizvollzugsanstalt.
In the states, a jail is for sentences up to a year (and includes people who are being held awaiting their trial). Prison is for sentences over a year.
And I’ve been told by people who’ve done both that jail is indeed worse. In prison, you can usually get a job. You have some sort of routine, including time to exercise, or maybe study. People in prison get GEDs, or learn some skills. In California, for example, there is a program for prisoners to learn to fight fires. Here in Florida, there’s a program to train service dogs.
In jail, meanwhile, you just sit and wait. You stare at people all day. I also hear how bad the food is - the stuff you get is gross (and not nearly enough), and the commissary sells what I’ve heard called “gas station food”; it’s total junk.
And the turnover is high, and people aren’t always segregated that well. So, you might be in for a drunken fight and hear somebody talking about raping and killing people. There seems to always be an underlying issue with violence - a client told me that the other day he went back to the jail after being granted bail (he was waiting a few hours to get released), and a guy punched him because he said he was getting out. He was more worried about telling the guards, since he feared a worse beating if he snitched.
(In fact, just yesterday I was visiting somebody in jail when I saw a guy being moved out of his housing unit for fighting. The guards were telling him they were going to take him to medical, and then he’d be in a different pod. I was leaving around the same time, and could see the other inmates staring at this guy through the glass. Those were some of the scariest stares I’ve ever seen).
If I was going to be sentenced, I’d rather do a year in prison than half that time in jail.
I came here to say the same, you pretty much covered it.
I’ve known people who have been to jails and prison, hell I’ve even had people thrown into jail and sentanced to prison so I have some direct knowledge of how it works here in the states.
Jails are considered way worse than prisons from the inmates perspective, I’ve known people to have to sit an wait in jail while counting the days until they could get to prison. At least in prison there is some sort of order and things to do, in jail you just sit there and eat crappy food. Jail is basically a zoo where all of the animals are put in a single cage.
Most jails do not have organized gangs like prisons do and at first you may think that this is a good thing, but it turns out to be more of a Lord of the Flies senario where people gather around a strong man or group. And this may get you in trouble when you get to prison if that strong man belongs to another group than the one you end up wanting to be with in prison.
I question the premise of the OP, or even how one would go about establishing that jail is “worse” than prison as a Factual Question. This probably belongs in IMHO.
As I recall, this was the first break in the Charlie Manson murders. One of the Manson girls was in jail (for something like theft or drugs) and was an inmate with a woman who had been writing bad checks. The check writer was horrified by the stories this teenager was telling her of these murders she had participated in, so she told authorities about it.
I believe “dinner” is often a slice of bologna between two pieces of bread. And a cup of juice. You can supplement it by buying pork rinds or candy bars, for example.
Oh, an anecdotally, here’s another vote for jail being worse than prison.
Having worked in prisons for 20+ years before retiring, I can affirm that inmates I encountered preferred prison over jail. Prison has more opportunities for recreation, hobbies, meaningful work, canteen options, visitations, halfway decent libraries, counselling, etc. And while the food was often disparaged in prison, there was near universal agreement that at least it was better than jail food.
Back when our prison system was overflowing, we would house the lower risk inmates in regional jails that had room. The inmates hated that, and would come to me pleading for medical exemption status to keep them from being shipped out of the prison.
I have a friend who spent a week in jail, and he can testify to the awfulness of jail food. He said that they’d often get a bologna sandwich for lunch and dinner, which consisted of one slice of bologna between two slices of white bread.
Prisons are generally tightly regulated by a state or federal bureaucracy. The conditions in jails, on the other hand, are often dictated by the whims of a county sheriff; often one who has won an election on a promise to be “tough on criminals”.
Yeah, it really depends on who’s running the jail. I’ve been in jail a couple of times for possession of marijuana. One of them was really pretty nice. In the large holding cell I was in, we had cable TV and board games to occupy us. So I lost at chess repeatedly while we watched things like Soylent Green on TCM. I came in too late for dinner and left too early for breakfast, but the other inmates told me that for food the staff would pick a fast food place, take everyone’s orders and go pick it up. Apparently if you’re going to be there for more than a week, you would get moved back to a set of smaller cells. The food was the same, but they didn’t have TV.
And yeah, in TX there is a level of incarceration between state prison and the local jail. It’s the county jail. It’s basically short term prison. My sister’s been in both the county jail and state prison. My understanding is that county is a lot more like regular prison, you can get a job and go exercise. But you do have the issue that inmate turnover is quicker, so I’d imagine you have a less stable community inside county than a state prison.
Speaking of New York here. We also had dog training programs and fire fighting crews. Some of our inmate fire fighting crews would even march in local parades.
I’m sure everyone has heard the cliche about a elderly pet being sent upstate to a farm. That actually happens in New York. There is a prison run horse farm in the Catskills. And when horses from the NYPD get too old to work, they get sent upstate to this farm.
As for education, New York state requires that every inmate is supposed to complete their GED if they don’t have one. So all incoming inmates are placed in school programs if they don’t have at least a high school diploma.
As an aside, there’s a YT channel devoted to the history of food. One ep shows how great the food at Alcatraz was. Best eating most of the inmates had ever known, designed to keep them bloated and docile.
(I once did an internship filling prescriptions for outside institutions. The local jail used up a mountain of docusate sodium stool-softener every day)
My brother has spent time in both. For him, prison is better because of the medical care. In jail, medical care is almost non existent. If you really need care, you are sent to a local ER. He was sent to prison once while suffering from kidney failure. He was put on a transplant list and received a new kidney a few months later. Plus they made sure he had the anti-rejection drugs he needed. Upon his release from prison, he was sent to a county jail due to another legal issue he had. While there he was regularly denied the anti-rejection drugs. This almost killed him. It took that for him to clean up his act and stay out of jail. So far, so good for 13 years.
There was an interesting episode of the podcast Ear Hustle talking about the San Quentin reception center which is used to transition people between jail and prison. Spoiler alert: everyone thinks prison is better.
Jail is also relatively local. Unless one lives someplace with a prison, and sometimes even if so, being sent to prison means being sent a significant distance from home; which can be a problem if you’d otherwise have visitors but they can’t afford the time or cost to get there.
Here, at least, if you get sent to jail you’re probably staying in your home county; if you get sent to prison, it’ll probably be hundreds of miles away.
I suspect it depends on the individual prison and the individual jail. I get the distinct impression that some of each are much worse than others. And I don’t know to what extent being closer to home might, for some people, outweigh better access to courses etc.; which is worse may also depend on the person incarcerated.
Once sentenced, prisoners in the UK are supposed to get some educational opportunities, and for some categories of prisoner there may be open prison where they work outside in ordinary jobs during the day. Or I believe there’s one prison where they prepare inmates for work in catering by running a restaurant open to the public.
On the other hand, some work/training opportunities can go wrong. ISTR they tried getting prisoners to do data entry on one census, but had to drop it when they discovered too many cases where someone’s profession as a police officer or prison warder was entered as “Bastard”.
But AFAIK prisoners on remand (awaiting trial or sentence), and possibly those on short terms, necessarily have fewer options, because no-one can make any long-term plans for them.