Stuff You Should Know - Prisons: Not as Fun as You'd Think

Episode Date: August 12, 2010

Most people have a basic understanding of how prisons work, but it's often heavily influenced by fiction. What's it really like behind those bars? In this episode, Josh and Chuck reveal the practices, controversies and harsh realities of prison life. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Estimates are based on your posted account balance at the time of the estimate and do not include pending transactions or any other purchases you make before the end of the billing period. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, as if you're surprised. And that makes this Stuff You Should Know, right, Chuck?

Yes, we are here, Josh, and can we talk about prisons now? We can talk about prisons. Remember in the Presidential Pardons episode? Oh, yeah. I was talking about how people have been calling for President Obama to reduce, to basically issue a blanket pardon for people who are convicted under the mandatory minimums for crack. Yes.

Remember, there's a huge disparity. Right. And I said it was like five to one. It's actually, it was, I think, 180 to one disparity, right? Wow. Boy, got that one wrong, didn't you? Well, he did it. Like, pretty much as we were recording that.

Really? Yeah. Wow. He signed this law. Congress was passing this law that reduced the mandatory minimum and basically, in effect, overturned the sentences of first-time offenders who were convicted and were given these five years and anybody who was convicted under the old mandatory minimum laws.

So there's going to be a lot of people coming out of prison. Looking for crack. Well, that's one argument. Yeah. That's not very fair to say. No, it's not. I mean, isn't that kind of the way that Americans, and probably people in general, view prisoners,

it's like you did something wrong, so you deserve to be where you are, but it's without having any real concept of what prison is like. Yeah. I mean, I know I don't want to be in prison. No, no. Have you ever seen the movie An Innocent Man? Remember we talked about that? Yeah.

Tom Selleck. Very scary scene. That was it for me. I was like, I don't ever want to go to prison ever. Yeah. But that's about all I knew about it until we started researching for this very robust podcast on how prison works. Agreed.

Yeah? Yeah. So Chuck, I guess apparently when this article was written by Grabinowski, it was I think 2005-ish, or that was the latest stats he had. And he said that there were like more than 2 million people in prison, right? And it's actually decreased. Yeah. I've got 1.6 million at the end of 09, but when I look at these stats,

they're all kinds of stats. You know, 1 in 31 adults is in the correction system, but that includes jail, prison, probation, and supervision. So they narrowed that down to only in prison, one in every 100 Americans is in prison. I know, isn't that crazy? That is crazy. Did you see what fair state topped the list

for the most number of adults in prison? That's right, Georgia. Georgia, 1 in 13 people. Yeah. 1 in 13 adults in Georgia is in the correctional system. That's crazy. Yeah. We live in a state of criminals.

Yeah. Either that or like a real police state, one of the two. Yeah, I'm not going to comment on that. So Chuck, we should probably calm down. Let's settle down here. Let's talk about prison. Prison is a deterrent, it's a punishment, and hopefully increasingly it's becoming a place of reform and rehabilitation.

Yeah. We'll talk about that a little bit. Sure. But in the U.S., there's pretty much three types of security levels for prison, right? Yeah, with one extra little added measure that we'll talk about. It's a big extra, though. Yeah, you got a minimum. Yeah.

You got medium, and you've got, of course, everyone's favorite, maximum security prisons. Right. And minimum security prison. We're mainly going to cover maximum because that's really the most interesting. Sure. Even though I think they said like only 25% are in max. Is that right?

Well, according to 2005 stats. Right. Yeah. But minimum is more like a college campus, that kind of thing. It's like that weekend that you did orientation at the college you eventually went to. I would think that's like minimum security prison. Right. And that's definitely nonviolent offenders with pretty clean criminal records,

or maybe you've served time in a medium and you were really good, and they were like, hey, let's bump this dude down to maximum, or minimum. Right, yeah. Right. Then you've got medium, and that's the one that actually you would see most on television shows or something. People think that's a maximum, but when you see prisoners able to move around and play cards and stuff like that, that's generally medium from what I understand, right? Yeah.

They have dorm room style accommodations a lot of times with eight or 10 guys to a room. Right. And like you said, the little social day rooms where they hang out and trade cigarettes. Like on Oz? Yeah, exactly. Do horrific things to one another. We'll get to that too. And then of course the granddaddy of them all is the maximum security prison.

These are the violent offenders, guys that have escaped or tried to escape. We're going to say guys a lot, I think less than 10% of the prison population is female. So it's not like we're not trying to give the ladies their due. We know you can do awful things as well. It's a props to you, but we're going to say dudes a lot. Well, there's, and then there's that subcategory that it was pretty rare that came about in 1983 at the maximum security prison in Marion, Illinois. I think not Julie yet.

Yeah. Marion, right? Yeah. Two guards were murdered in two separate incidents on the same day. Yeah. And the prison went into lockdown. They call that a bad coincidence. Is that what they called it?

That's what I call it. The prison went into lockdown, which is where you're in your cell all day. You can't move around. You can't do anything. You have no freedom of movement. And it remained in that state ever since. So it basically gave birth to the super max prison, right? Yeah.

And since then a lot of prisons have been opened as super max prisons during the state of lockdown. And if it sounds a bit familiar, basically the entire prison is a series of solitary confinements. They're the whole. They call it, officially it's called security housing unit and SHU, but everyone calls it the whole. Right.

Just like in the movies. And as far as prisons go, solitary confinement and then especially super max is extremely controversial, right? Oh, yeah. Solitary confinement originally was created in 1830 by a warden at a prison in Pennsylvania. Yeah. With the lofty goal of giving a convict nothing but time to contemplate what he'd done. Yeah.

What he'd done. I think anything that was supposed in 1830 is a good way to punish people. You might want to review that notion again here in 2010. So yeah, they basically found out that actually these, they don't sit around and think about all the bad they've done. They kind of go nuts. And not just kind of go nuts. They go clinically insane as anybody would, right?

Or they go in sort of insane and they really go off the deep end, right? Because prison has also and still remains used to house them mentally ill at times, not as much or as overtly as before, but still you find the insane in prisons, right? The other problem with a super max facility besides the fact that it amounts to torture, psychological or otherwise is that these things, these places are reserved for the worst of the worst. Supposedly. And in any given state, there's a couple maybe of the worst of the worst, but a super

max prison may have a couple hundred cells. You got to fill the cells somehow. So you have relatively minor offenses or convicts going into super max prisons and then killing themselves in really horrible way. Yeah. This is a big buildup in the nineties. I think they said by the end of the decade and of the nineties that 30 different states had a super max prison.

Wow. And you said that each state only has a handful of dudes that even qualify. So like you said, they get put in there, they kind of go through a zucosis of sorts, like weird behavior, right? Yeah. Like the bears walking in circles, except way, way worse, way, way worse. This one guy in Wisconsin, he was a 16 year old car thief. Another guy, a 20 year old David Tracy, hanged himself in a Virginia super max and he was

19 and he had been there for two and a half years for selling drugs. No, he'd been there for a year and he had a two and a half year sentence and he still hung himself. He couldn't even make it a year. He had to pull himself halfway into a two and a half year sentence. Yeah. Because he was immediately put in solitary confinement. And then it gets worse.

Apparently, people have been known to swallow razor blades. One guy in Indiana super max prison choked himself to death with a washcloth. And another guy, a 21 year old mentally ill prisoner in that same prison, set himself on fire and later died from those wounds. Yeah. But the good news though, my friend, is that a lot of super maxes have been downgraded since then. Like the current trend is to downgrade your super max to regular max.

So they're kind of getting the message a little bit that we really don't need this many super max prisons. Yeah. Apparently the nineties were bad. Yeah. But there is only one federal super max. Only one. Which one?

ADX in Florence, Colorado, ADX Florence. But like you said, it's mostly on the state level. It's for like the really, really bad tax evaders. I imagine ADX is not the kind of place you want to take a tour. I wouldn't think so. The single federal super max is not the kind of place you want to be. 2023 is already well underway everybody, so don't wait any longer to level up your small business.

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scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the page and enter our code STUFF. A binge worthy show about Jesus? The chosen season three is here. Come and see what the buzz is about. The chosen explores the imperfect and messy relationships of real humans following Jesus.

The first six episodes are available now. Stream each new episode for free. Plus watch exclusive content like the after show only in the new chosen app. Download the chosen app on mobile and TV streaming devices. BingeJesus.com to learn more. So Chuck, you buddy have just been popped, say, growing marijuana indoors. You're going to prison. Let's come to terms with that.

There's a couple of ways that you actually get to prison, right? Yeah. And they are as follows. You can take a taxi, which apparently is more routine than we would imagine. I had no idea. You can be dropped off by a friend or family member. That's what I would choose. As in I think the 25th hour, that's what Edward Norton did.

I'd have my mom take me when you dropped me off at prison. You can also take the prison bus, right? It's called the diesel tour. The diesel tour, because it's a prison bus, it's not like some luxury Greyhound bus liner. You know how nice those Greyhounds are. Oh yeah, they're nice. It's not like that.

It's kind of cramped and nasty and smelly and it sounds like a locker room on wheels. Well not just that. You go take yourself to the sheriff's department and curse your family member for not being like, really, you couldn't just take me the rest of the way to the prison. So you get to the sheriff's department and you basically just wait there for the prison bus to come pick you up and then you stop at sheriff's department after sheriff's department after sheriff's department. Well that's the insulting part.

You're like, all right, can I go to prison? Can I just start this please? And they're like, well we got to make six stops on the way. Just hold on. And the bus is going to break down in exactly eight minutes. We're going to go pick up your future boyfriend first. So Chuck, you finally get to prison, right? Thank God.

Those cookies that your mom gave you have been taken away from you. I mean just immediately. You didn't even get to eat one. They're chowing down on those. The guards are. And you have a new moniker. You have a new name, a new catch-all name that describes you as a newly inducted prisoner. You're a fish.

Just like in the movies. You know a lot of this I thought, that's just like in the movies. And it is just like in the movies because they know a lot about prison so why would you make a prison movie that was completely unrealistic when you can make the real deal and it's very compelling. Yeah. And we'll talk about movies too. But yes, you are a fish, Josh.

All your stuff is taken and catalogued, hopefully kept. We'll get to that later as well. Some of it might be lost along the way. You are allowed to bring in like your reading glasses and maybe a few books. No cookies though. No cookies. Your legal papers if you, you know, are into that. And so you're processed, right?

And you're actually processed often in full view of other cons. In the fish tank. And they call it, yeah, they call it the fish tank because all the guys who are already in prison can sit there and watch, right? But they keep you segregated for about 30 days or more. Yeah, I had no idea it was that long. I didn't either. I thought it was like they deloused you, they sprayed you with a fire hose, gave you an

orange jumpsuit and threw you in there. That's what I imagine. But yeah, no, for 30 days you're basically segregated. I imagine with the other fellas on the diesel tour, you know, and you are assigned a job most likely. But you're in this fish tank though. Like you're on full display like for 30 days, dudes are sizing you up, getting hungry. Well like in Shawshank when they, they took bets on who was going to be the first, got

first fish to break down and cry that first night. Who won? It was that fat guy broke down and cry and then he got beaten and bad things happened to him. He got hit in the green mile and I didn't like that one. No, Shawshank was definitely better but I often confused scenes. They were shot almost exactly the same. Yeah, sure.

Agreed. So once you get out of your fish tank, you get your sell assignment, you may get your job. Right. And again, for about 10 cents an hour, that's what you're paid. Yeah, should I read the letter real quick? Sure. There's actually a site on the web called prisntalk.com.

It's not as hot as you would think. But you can go to forums there and read ex-cons and maybe even some current cons if you have internet access and like a minimum security, talk about things on these prison forms. So I found a letter, I was digging around about jobs and this one guy said the worst job he had was being a dorm janitor. He got paid 40 cents a day, this is not by the hour. Well. 40 cents a day, five days a week, there were four dorms, total of about 60 guys in each,

two bathrooms in each. Yeah, you don't want to have a salaried prison job as a convict. I'm not sure if that hit home, 60 guys sharing two bathrooms and this guy was in charge of cleaning that. Yeah. On a daily basis. I do appreciate you repeating that. So he swept off in, he said he kept the dorm rooms clean, you've never seen a battleground

of chaos until you've seen a bathroom after 30 guys take a shower, mud, dirt, torn tissue, blue state soap. So I guess they get soap assigned to them, I never really thought about that. Sure. He had a tobacco spit in the hangout room, garbage, cigarette butts from roll-ups, basically this dude had to clean that stuff up for 40 cents a day and he said that was the worst job he ever had in prison. All right.

And he didn't even mention the fecal matter. Well, I think that's implicit. Oh. Well, I just made an explicit check. Yes. So that is one example of a prison job that you can get and then you're off to your room which I would encourage everyone now to walk off eight feet by six feet wherever they are and get a good look at how large that is and that's about the size of your prison cell.

That's close to what we're at right now. Yeah. That's small. I feel a little claustrophobic in here. That's two dudes. I'm not afraid to admit it. Usually. Well, it depends.

Most prison cells are designed for one guy and then as prisons have grown increasingly overcrowded, they'll go and bolt another bunk to the wall and then voila, you have a cell for two and then sometimes there's three or whatever. Usually if it's designed to house more than one or two people, it's a dorm and it can accommodate about eight guys per cell, right? Yeah. I mean, we could do a whole podcast on overcrowding and the issues there. That's like a very deep problem but we'll just mention it and say, it stinks.

I'll bet, literally and otherwise, right? Yeah. So, Chuck, you've got the general population cell blocks, which are all of the cell blocks aside from the fish tank and maximum security, which is also known as the hole, right? Yeah. And you've basically, did you watch Oz? A little bit. I think from what I understand, that's really accurate.

I'm sure it is. It's like a centrally located guard in like Loosite or whatever, like you can't get through this. Yeah. Operating all the cell block doors and letting people in and out and they have a 360 degree view. Oh, yeah. Right?

Well, in each one, I thought this was interesting. Each wing is fully staffed in case you need to lock down that wing. Oh, yeah. You've got all the dudes there. You need to take care of it. Right. And it can be sealed off from the rest of the prison. Exactly.

Because apparently the riot mob mentality can spread like wildfire among a prison population. Yes. Yeah. So, and you would think, you know, people try to escape, which by the way, there's a double check. There's a stuff you missed in history class podcast about Alcatraz and the Great Escape. Oh, really? Or the Escape from Alcatraz.

Yeah. Great movie. So if you want to learn more about that one, you can check that out, all right? If you're so inclined. But to make sure that no one has escaped at any given point in time, they do counts. Yeah. About the same time every day. Just like in the movies.

Probably the same time every day. Uh-huh. They just do a head count where you have to, like, line up and they say, okay, everybody's here. Right. Then at night, they walk around and count you while you're sleeping. Right? Yeah.

And then not only are you there, but you're where you need to be. So if they say, well, Josh, you're in Chuck's cell again, you know where you need to be. So they'll beat you down and take you to your own cell. Right. You need to be here. Don't you hear our podcast? But Chuck is my partner. I wonder what the goodfellas, uh, that had to be minimum or was that just a sweetheart

deal? That was a sweetheart deal. Remember when they were all in the same room, like cooking steaks? Yeah. The one guy could slice the garlic so thin it would liquefy in the oil. So great. So Chuck, let's say you've become acclimated. You're no longer a fish.

You've shanked your first guy, um, and you, you're settled in for a nickel. Right? It's shank a verb. Yeah. It's shank is a verb and a noun. And shiv is also another name for a shank, right? Which is a homemade knife. Yes.

Okay. I just want to get that clear. I don't know that it is 100% clear. Well, a shiv and a shank, I know can both be nouns for the knife, but I've also heard that you can shank someone. And you can shiv someone. Oh, you can? I think they're both nouns and verbs.

They're very loose in prison. I like that. They're very understanding. Yes. Yeah. With the vocabulary. Yes. Um, so you settled in and you are living your life in prison, behind bars, you know?

Um, it's, it's, I would imagine fairly horrible, but there are bright and shining moments. Yeah. And those basically consist of the trip to the commissary, right? Yeah. And I don't, I didn't know this. They don't, you don't see this a lot in movies. All you see is the black market stuff. Right.

But there is actually a commissary where you can, you have an account where you, your little prison money goes into your account. They obviously don't give you cash. That wouldn't be a good idea. Right. And, uh, you go to the commissary and you say, Hey, I'd like, um, whatever's approved on the list, you know, like a pack of smokes and, uh, uh, people magazine. And they're like, well, that's, you know, three and a half dollars.

So go work, go work for a month. Here's the people from January, 2008. Yeah. Woohoo. Right. Sexiest man alive. And actually they debit each, each, um, prisoner has an ID card that is linked to basically their prison work account when they're paid, they're, they're debited credits or given

credits and then it's debited from their account when you buy stuff from the commissary. Yeah. I learned about that from Snoop Dogg. Oh, really? Yeah. So that's the fancy modern prisons have it all electronically hooked up, which makes sense. But, um, like we said, there's also a black market, which you have seen in every prison

movie ever, there's dudes trading cigarettes for favors or for protection or for better books or better, uh, people magazines or whatever. And there's also visits from out of doors. Yeah. Right? Sure. Uh, that's how you get the bad stuff in. We, a lot of times, again, good fellas to remember, uh, Karen snuck in like those huge

bags of pills. I mean, just like, like in her purse or in her bra or something, they clearly didn't check her. No. Again, I think that they got special treatment. Right. And Chuck, um, one of the things that I would imagine goes for a pretty high price, you know, maybe a dozen cigarettes or so, um, is prison wine, right?

Yeah. Which, uh, prison wine, Pruno, have you ever seen the site, um, where the guy eats nasty things? No. Steve, Steve don't eat it? No. Um, it is really funny. And I saw this years ago, this guy made Pruno prison wine in his house and it's made with

like fruits. It's sort of like a sangria type of thing. Then you put like moldy bread in a sock and it's like soaking all together in a bag till it ferments and it's, I imagine pretty disgusting. Hmm. Steve said it wasn't that bad. He drank it. He did a white and a red.

He said the white smelled like rectum, but he said it tasted just like alcohol. And he said the red actually wasn't that bad at all. Huh. It was like two buck chuck. Then he said it tasted wine like and, uh, got him drunk. Two buck chuck. Which is, which is the deal. And, uh, so that, that was the deal with Pruno.

Wow. I wouldn't recommend trying in this at home, by the way. No, but that's the whole point. I mean, you're not at home, you're in prison and you want to get drunk. So you make Pruno. Yeah. Unless someone wants to, like you said, with visitation, you can sneak things in if you're on the, you know, on the download.

You're really not supposed to do that. What are you not supposed to? You get searched. No. And, um, and yes, we are talking about visitation as well now, right? I didn't realize that, um, visiting hours are basically like business hours. Yeah. I didn't know that either.

I thought it was like one day a month and everybody came at the same time on the same day, but that makes zero sense. Yeah. Um, prisoners are assigned a set number of visits per month. I think the maximum number of visits you can get per month is for the most exemplary prisoner on the planet. Yeah. I would imagine that that's something that they take away pretty, pretty routinely if

you, you know, are being disciplined. Yes, Josh. And you also have to have a list when you go in of who you say can and can't visit you. And if you're not on that list, you can eventually visit, but it's going to take a long time and a lot of paperwork and red tape. Yes. Right. Yeah.

Um, investigators, your lawyer, and that's about it, right? Yeah. But they still keep track of all that. And your search coming in, the prisoner and the, and the visitor both searched coming in and out. Right. I don't know if it's full body cavity. It probably depends on the max level.

Sure. Or your crime, I think kind of follows you around in prison. Oh yeah. Sure. Like what you did, what you're convicted of. Like if you were convicted for smuggling things in your butt, they might check you a little more carefully. Sure.

So first now, since we're talking about, um, oh, and during the visitation, like just regular visitation, right? Um, at a minimum security, remember this is just like college orientation weekend. Um, it looks like a waiting room. Yeah. Um, and then in maximum security, visitation is like through that bulletproof glass on the phone. Yeah.

It's pretty accurate. Yeah. And then there's a different kind of visitation that I think everybody likes to, uh, think about, at least thinks about whenever they hear prison and that is conjugal visitation, right? Yeah. It's, it's one of the two ways that you can have sex in prison. Right.

Yeah. This is far more of the, um, the, I guess more governmentally defended way of having sex in prison. Yeah. I'd say so. Um, conjugal visits actually were, um, originated in 1918 in Mississippi at the state prison in Mississippi, where they remain in effect, but originally they were created as a reward for hard work on the chain gangs and stuff, right?

Well, and to incentivize them to work harder too. Right. Um, and it worked really, really well. Um, nowadays that's not used quite as, um, overtly as an incentive or reward. Right. Um, it is a reward for, for good behavior or you have to be like, you know, the one who can get as many visits a month as one possibly can, right, level of good behavior prisoner. But, um, it's generally defended in two ways.

One is a basic human right. Like you have a right to have sex, even if you're incarcerated, just like you have a right to food and water and be kept clean. Sure. Right. Um, and then the other way, and this, this appears to be much more legitimate in the eyes of, um, the, the correction system. It's a way to maintain the family bonds throughout a stint in prison.

Yes. That's sweet. And that's what it's even officially called as the extended family program. Right. So it's not just about sex. Like you can have your whole family come over and barbecue in some prisons. Well, yeah. In some states it's, um, in Canada, I think they have, uh, their, their, I guess, visitation

areas look like apartments. Yeah. Have barbecues. They're such wusses. You can have up to three, um, family members at a time visit, or you can just have your wife and it has to be your wife and you have to have been married before because that's the whole point. They want, they don't want you to turn into even more of a deviant than you were going

in. They want you to keep talking to your wife and keep, you know, loving your kids, being loved by your kids and to make that, that transition back out into the normal world that much easier. Right. So you have one of those, uh, serial killers and you have one of those weirdos that writes you. Uh-huh.

And you marry. And then you marry them. They can't come and visit you and have sex, right? Right. No. Okay. No. Um, if you are gay, however, and you have a domestic partner and you are in Mexico

city, Brazil or California, you are entitled to conjugal visits as well. Yeah. Which is pretty significant in California because in 2007 you could have a conjugal visit if you were gay. Yeah. But you couldn't get married if you were gay thanks to Proposition 8, which was just overturned. Yeah.

Yesterday. It's not over yet. No. But Proposition 8 was overturned yesterday. Yeah. So that's the, that's the skinny and conjugal visits, not, not quite as, again, like arrested development. I don't think it was.

Yeah. And they don't use it a whole lot anymore. They say it's pretty uncommon. No. There's only six states, right? Yeah. One of the rules for the visiting person is the dress appropriately. And they said on the list of rules was no transparent clothing or bare midriffs, strapless

attire or anything with obscene or offensive language so your wife can't get all dolled up in her baby doll lingerie. I don't know. I think they're like, can't you just put a trench coat on like everybody else? You know? Yeah. Have you not seen the movies? Exactly.

I think the mix, it's a mixed bag on whether or not experts agree or they agree and disagree whether or not it actually serves a really good purpose. Well, yeah. And the studies on it have, have shown mixed results about whether or not it prevents recidivism. Yeah. That's one bonehead word. That's why SK. That's why SK.

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BingeJesus.com to learn more. So Chuck, you mentioned there's another way to have sex in prison and this is one of the reasons I don't want to go to prison because... Well, actually there's two more ways. Oh, yeah? Well, you can have consensual sex with another man if you're in there. Oh, okay, sure. It doesn't necessarily mean you're homosexual.

A lot of guys just... There's nothing wrong with that. A lot of guys just do that because they're in there and there's also rape that happens in prison. That's the reason I don't want to go to prison. Just one reason. In 2007, Josh, we have a statistic from the Bureau of Justice says 4.5% of state and federal prisoners reported being raped in the past year and that is 70,000 prisoners in a year.

They were sexually abused by either guards or other inmates. See, that's all over the place because there's other... I've seen other numbers. One 2004 study found that 0.005% even reported being raped while they were incarcerated and then a lot of those were probably untrue. Well, that's the deal is reported. That's the key. Like rape goes unreported a lot just period, but it definitely goes unreported in prison

because you don't want to be a snitch. Well, sure. But no, I think these are people who have been let out already. Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh. But then in 2003, the year before, Congress created the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Did you know about that?

And the number they used was 13%. An estimated 13% of prisoners are raped during their incarceration. Yeah. And their goal is zero. Well, yeah, and they're like, you have to have a zero-tolerance policy on inmate to inmate rape and guard to inmate or employee to inmate rape, that kind of thing too because it's not just inmates raping one another. Guards at correctional facilities have been known to be a little heavy-handed and possibly

psychotic themselves. Yeah. And I can say this because my cousin was a prison guard for a little while. A corrections officer? Yeah. My cousin, Wolf. Was he a high school grad? Well, he had to be.

Yeah. But you don't have to go to college to be a corrections officer. No, you don't. You just have to know how to shoot a shotgun. But to be the warden, you do. Yes. Okay. Josh, let's say you're in prison and you commit an offense.

Or you're caught raping somebody under the new zero-tolerance policy. Yeah. Well, if you're caught raping someone or murdering someone, you would actually go to trial. Oh, okay. For real. But if you're caught doing something a little less offensive, you can go to the hole. They can remove your good behavior time, transfer you to a scarier prison. Or like you said, limit your visiting hours.

I'm sure that's a good way to dig back at a prisoner. Sure. Say you can't get visits. And you get demerits called shots. And they log those to your little file. Yeah. And they take those into consideration when you're up for parole hearing or you're up to maybe get more visitations.

If any time they're looking at your behavior, they'll look at the shots. They follow you around. You don't want any shots. And that's official punishment. There's also unofficial punishment needed out by guards, right? Yeah. I would rather have the official punishment, I think, because just like in the movies, the guards can shake you down.

They can quote, unquote, investigate what you have in your room and what they're really doing is like destroying the things that you've grown to depend on to keep you sane. I know. Have you ever seen Birdman of Alcatraz? Yeah. God, it's so sad. It was awful. And they take his birds away?

I know. Well, and in Escape from Alcatraz, they took away the one guy's paints, the old dude that painted. That was like the only thing he loved and they took away his canvas and his paints. Some jerk warden. It's always a jerk warden. Well, yeah. Except Brew Baker, we'll talk about that too.

And guards can also beat you down and if nobody sees it and no one reports it, then it's just what happens. Well, I think that's officially sanctioned. I don't think that they have to get permission to beat you down if they say, hey, this guy's getting a little ornery, so I'm going to break a ribber, too. But what I'm saying is I think they have a pretty wide berth as to what sanctions the beating. And Grabbinowski put it, I'd like to quote him here, it is not uncommon for guards to

fire shotguns at prisoners whenever they see any commotion. I didn't understand that one. And I double checked and it says at prisoners. Not just fire shotguns, like up in the air or something, it's just like, hey, you guys are scuffling. Boom. Yeah. I don't know about that one.

Yeah. This is indoors. So like we said, snitches are not, you don't want to be a snitch in prison. It's very much that mentality that you see in the movies where keep it quiet, don't rat on anyone because if you do, then, I mean, who knows what's going to happen? Well, I can tell you what's going to happen. You're likely to be shanked or shipped, which is the same thing. Or raped in Shawshank.

Yeah. Remember Andy's problem there with the sisters? Mm-hmm. Yeah. But he got back. That was one of the great redemption scenes of all time, I think. That whole movie was great, I think. It sure was.

Oh, no, I'm sorry. I was thinking of the Green Mile. Oh, sorry. But the funny thing is, and it's not funny to the guards, but there are way, way more prisoners than guards. And every once in a while, in history, we've had these big uprisings where the prisoners have actually taken control of the prison. Yeah.

If you work at a prison, you don't want to hear the word Attica sounded out by, like, in chant form by one or even more, one or two prisoners. Is that what they use now? It's the signal? Well, no. I mean, like, that means that there's violent unrest right around the corner. I thought that was a signal now. I was like, Attica.

I don't know if it's a signal, it's more like a call to arms, you know? Gotcha. And all of a sudden, there's toilet paper on fire and guys are coming at you and it's just not good. Yeah, that didn't work out too well. No, it was 1971, right? And apparently Attica Prison in upstate New York was really, really deplorable as far as its treatment of the prisoners went, which is really saying something because they're

prisoners to begin with and to have, like, the prisoners even know, like, you can't do this. That's pretty bad. So they took a couple guards hostage, rioted, held them and demanded for better treatment and the state of New York was like, OK, all right, we hear you and we're going to storm the prison. And I think 33 people died. 39.

Yeah, 39. No. 39 guards, yeah, 39 guards and prisoners died. And that was in 1971. And then in 1980, there was one in New Mexico, right? Yeah, the New Mexico State Pen near Santa Fe was another uprising and that was where 33 inmates were killed and no guards were killed, but seven of them were captured and beaten pretty severely.

Right. And apparently some of the inmates that were killed died from torture. Oh, really? It's just pleasant. I mean, think about it, Chuck, it's bad enough to go to prison, but one of the aspects of prison is that there's an end to your sentence, right? There's a light at the end of the tunnel if you can make it. Yeah.

Dying in prison is about as bad as it gets, especially dying of torture in prison. Yeah, that's pretty bad. So Josh, let's say you don't die. Let's say you serve your time and you do get out. What goes on there? Well, you would be like 90% of all prison inmates. 90% get out. Yeah, which is one of the reasons why you want those family bonds in there because you

want to keep people on the up and up rather than prison represents a real double-edged sort, either it reforms people or it makes them worse. And a lot of that depends on how a prisoner's treated and the options get into them in prison. One of the big trends now is education as part of rehabilitation. So I think every single state prison in the U.S. offers a GED course and some of them require it for parole, which is good, right? There's also vocational courses, that kind of thing, right? Yes, but once again, like in Shawshank, you can take that course and pass the test, but

if you have a jerk warden, you still might get shot. You know what we should have done at the beginning of this podcast? We should have just said everybody go watch Shawshank Redemption and we'll see you next week. Everybody's seen it. Everyone loves that movie. Yeah. Can we talk about the movies now?

Are we there? Not quite. Chuck, there's a lot of people out there who don't think that prisoners should just be left to rot, that there should be prison reform, that there shouldn't be any rape, that Congress shouldn't have had to have passed a law requiring zero tolerance on prison rape. And there's actually been a prison reform movement going around since, I think, 1790. Possibly earlier than that.

I don't know why that's happening. So clearly it's working if it's still in effect. Yeah. And there's a huge on prison reform as well. And again, you want prison reform. You want your prisoners treated in a way where there is the potential for rehabilitation because of recidivism. Right?

Well, yeah. I mean, that's why they pay them to work these jobs because they want to give them some semblance of normal life. So when they get out, they can say, oh, well, I held a job in prison for the first time in my life, maybe. Right. They were like a drug dealer. I love you.

Right. Well, think about it. Recidivism, the highest rate is among property offenses, and that is a crime of the poor. Breaking into someone's house and stealing their stuff, that's what you do when you're poor. Yeah. And that's got the highest rate of recidivism. So it would seem like some sort of education or occupational program would help deter that.

Well, yeah. But the other stat, though, that kind of makes me feel weird is that I think 67% of people who commit crimes to go back into prison, it's an entirely different crime than they commit. Oh, yeah. Which was like, that was really discouraging. I would think maybe if the guy just can't not steal TVs, he gets out and steal TVs. You would think so.

At least go back to what he knows. But yeah, that's a little staggering. It is. That would shut any quicker up. And what is the rate? I saw, I can't get like the most recent stat, but it looks like between 50% and 60% somewhere in there from year to year for recidivism rates. Yeah.

In 94, it was 67.5, right? Yeah. I think it's gone down since then. Yeah. And that's surprising because the incarceration rates have gone down too, which is totally bucking a trend. I think... Oh, they're going down?

That's what you said. Remember in 2005 that these stats are based on, it was 2 million and change. I'm sorry. 2 million, 193,000 prisoners in the U.S. You said it was less than 2 million in 2009? Yeah. But I think that's people that are currently incarcerated, but that doesn't necessarily mean more people aren't being incarcerated on a daily basis because I think that's true because of mandatory minimums.

I think more people than ever are being incarcerated. So maybe that was people that had left, I don't know. But whatever it was, there was a 274% increase between 1982 and 2008. That's huge. Oh, yeah. And we spent, I think, 51 billion dollars to incarcerate people in prison and jail, whereas I think that comes out at 29,000 per inmate per year. And remember our bail podcast?

I do. It costs $1,250 per inmate per year for probation. How much? $1,200 rather than $29,000. These minor offenses thrown on these guys, especially the car thief that was in a Super Max that was 16. Oh, yeah. I mean, come on.

Nonviolent offenses? You can rehabilitate that kid. Sure. With some work. All right. So Chuck, I think it is movie time, don't you think so? Yes, Josh. Movies.

I made a list of my favorites. Feel free to chime in. Shawshank Redemption. That's number one for me. The Green Mile. That's not on my list. What else you got? I've got Escape from Alcatraz because I saw that when I was a kid and it's still like

an awesome movie. Papillon Classic. With Dustin Hoffman with the glasses? Uh-huh. Just Hoffman with the glasses. And Steve McQueen. Yeah, right. He was in The Great Escape too, also a great prison movie.

Cool Hand Luke was probably the funniest one of the lot. The longest yard, actually that might have been the funniest one. Never saw either of them. Really? You're nuts. Bad Boys Classic. With Will Smith. No, no, no, no.

The Sean Penn one about the Juvie detention. This one, Sean Penn was like 19 years old and he was in juvenile detention and he filled a pillowcase up with soda cans and just annihilated this dude one night. Wow. Yeah. That's called a sock, by the way. No, that's when it's in a sock. Oh, okay.

I imagine this is, me, he's called a Slace. American History X, that was pretty brutal. Yeah, that was very brutal. Blue Baker, did you see that one? No. That's where Robert Redford went in undercover as a prisoner to sniff out how awful the prison was because he was going to be the next warden. You're talking about the natural.

And then Most Depressing, definitely Midnight Express for me. The Turkish prison one? Yeah. Midnight Run was pretty depressing. Really? That's right. And Animal Factory is the one I'm going to say is the most realistic. I have not seen that one.

That's the one that Steve Buscemi directed and Edward Furlong and I think Willem Defoe is in it. It's really good. And it's called Animal Factory, so you have a pretty good idea that it's realistic. I saw a taxi to the dark side last night and it is not, it's about the U.S.'s policies on torture and how we implemented them post 9-11, but there's a lot of prison stuff in it, like Abu Ghraib and Bagram and stuff like that, it's pretty disturbing. Yeah, we didn't get into, I mean, there's so much about prisons that we didn't get

into here. We could do like three more podcasts if we wanted to. And if it seemed like we danced around something, oh, I don't know, Capital Punishment? Yeah, didn't go there. That's coming. I can't wait to do that one. It's going to be sweeping. There's going to be top hats and like people doing like the can-can and stuff at the beginning.

It's going to be enormous. Yeah, I think we have the Rockettes lined up on that one. Yeah, I think we have the Rockettes lined up on that one too, in Prison Garb. So Chuck's telling me he's given me the double wink, which means there is no listener mail, right? It's too long and too full of goodness. You know what that means. That means we just haven't gotten any listener mail.

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