Quote:
Originally Posted by TLO
I have a questions about jail/prison
Are they really as dangerous as popular film/culture would have you believe?
Do you have to join a gang for protection? (Not jail, but prison)
How is the food?
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I've been in and out of jails and prisons as part of work for the past 25 years. Never got sent there and one of the perks of the job is I can tap on the glass and be let out.
To answer your question, are they as dangerous? Depends on the institution. Pre-trial facilities in places like Chicago or Baltimore or Los Angeles can be dangerous in part because people already know you. That is, they know who you hang out with or what charges you're facing and other matters. On the other hand, pre-trial facilities in my neck of the woods are fairly low key.
I say 'fairly' but pre-trial facilities generally have a much larger turnover so people are not as invested in making it habitable. Inmates serving longer sentences in prison frequently want things to be fairly quiet and to run smoothly. Whether the place is dangerous, though, can vary widely from institution to institution.
Federal BOP has roughly 3 levels of security classifications: minimum, medium, and maximum. BOP has a whole worksheet to determine classification. It considers an inmates: age, sex, offense, offense characteristics (did a drug charge involve guns or violence), criminal history, any history while on supervision/pre-trial release. This means that a 45 year old banker who is guilty of mortgage fraud and has no other criminal history will wind up in a different facility than a 20 year old gang-banger convicted of drug and gun charges. The prison where the banker spends his time is generally not violent and there are not likely to be any gang members there, let along requiring that you join a gang to get along.
Other places, though, are far more violent. I have a client who testified against some people. They sent him to Beaumont, Texas. It's called 'bloody Beaumont' for a reason. The gangs wouldn't take him because word got out he snitched and he had a rough time inside. Another client was not a Hells Angels member, but he was closely associated with the club up here. His attitude toward DOJ could charitably be defined as .... "bad". He got sent to a prison that is filled with Bandidos, a rival MC. He had to stand his ground a few times.
In many federal prisons with gang members, the prison will house primarily one gang. So one prison is primarily Bloods and another Crips. This diminishes the number of gang fights in the facility. I had a case where the pre-sentence report writer wanted to say my client was a Crip because some nobody told one of the agents that they were the '21st Street Crips'. My client, though, had Blood tattoos. We argued to the judge that the statement about 'Crips' be removed from the pre-sentence report because he needed to go to a facility where they housed Bloods, not Crips, based on his tattoos. (This was all on the record so I'm not breaking attorney-client privilege.) The judge removed the statement about the Crips.
As far as food, it's generally equivalent to bad college dorm food: largely institutional. In some lower security facilities, inmates can actually cook their own food. In higher security facilities, food can be a means of punishment or recognition of an inmate's danger. At SuperMax, for example, inmates are frequently fed a 'loaf' that is nutritious but very bland.