While you're in federal prison (part 1 of 4) federalprisondude.com/going-to-federal-prison/what-its-really-like The role ======== The hardest adjustment is not the food, the noise, or the absence of privacy. It is that you stop operating as an individual who makes decisions and start operating as an occupant of a position. The very one thing - The most important part of your entire bid (term of imprisonment) --------------------------------------------------------------- Do not do anything to get anyone else fucked off. There is nothing more important. For people at lows and camps, everyone is just trying to go home. At the same time, some people are hustling, and you must not do anything to disturb their hustle. This means stay out of the way. Do not be nosy, do not look into people's cells, do not glance, do not talk about people you don't know (or talk at all because the telephone game is so poorly played). This is a hard adjustment for many. The federal prison population is full of characters who you wouldn't otherwise see or interact with in life. That doesn't make them novelties. Your business is your business. Theirs is theirs. The adjustment - Nothing about your day is yours ------------------------------------------------ When you eat, when you sleep, when you can move between buildings, when you must be standing next to your bunk to be counted. Counts (the daily headcount where everything stops) happen several times a day and everything stops for them. You will spend a remarkable amount of your life waiting for a number to clear. The second thing to absorb is that explaining yourself does not work. On the outside, being reasonable and articulate is an asset. You can talk your way through most friction because the people you deal with are weighing your reasoning. Inside, nobody is. Staff are applying rules and avoiding liability. Other inmates are reading your behavior as a position, not as an argument. Your intent is invisible and largely irrelevant; only what you did is legible. This is disorienting for people who are good at explaining things. Several of the skills that made you effective in your career are, in here, either inert or actively counterproductive. The goal is not to be liked, respected, or feared. The goal is to be unremarkable - someone who does not generate problems for staff, for their car (your social group inside), or for the people who sleep near them. That sounds like a defeat. It is not. It is the single hardest thing to do consistently, and doing it well is what makes the time pass without incident. Day one - Intake ---------------- Intake is administrative and tedious: property, a strip search, medical and mental health screening, photographs, a bed roll, and a housing assignment. The dramatic version people imagine does not happen. What happens next is the part nobody prepares you for. The vetting - Someone will find you ----------------------------------- Within hours of arriving on the unit, someone from your car will introduce themselves. This is not a threat and it is not hazing. It is an intake process, and it serves a purpose for them: your behavior is going to reflect on them, so they want to know who you are before you become their problem. The first question - The paperwork conversation ----------------------------------------------- The first real question you will be asked is what you are in for. What is actually being determined is whether you have a sex offense. That is what "good paperwork" means. Your judgment and your presentence report (the report that follows you the whole sentence) do not show one. You may never be asked to produce anything - usually the question is the whole of it - but your initial classification paperwork reflects your Walsh Act status, and that is the document people mean. How to answer: state your offense plainly and briefly. Do not inflate it, and do not embellish. Do not go vague either - vagueness reads as concealment, and it is the one answer that creates suspicion where there was none. People with financial cases get an additional round of questions, most of it curiosity. The population is broadly fascinated by fraud and a fair number of people will ask you how it was done, as though there were a recipe. Deflect pleasantly and repeatedly. You are not obligated to be interesting. The intake kit - You arrive with nothing ---------------------------------------- You will not have access to commissary (the prison store) for your first week or two. In the meantime you have no soap, no toothpaste, no shower shoes, no coffee, and no writing materials. Your car will front you the basics. This is expected, it is routine, and refusing it marks you as strange rather than principled. It also is not a favor in any deep sense - it is an intake kit, and everyone got one. Do not accept anything from anyone outside that process during your first weeks. Unsolicited generosity from a stranger is a known opening move, and the debt chapter explains where it goes. Territory - Your space ---------------------- You get a bunk and a locker. Everything you own fits in the locker, and the amount of property you are permitted is capped. Learn immediately where your area ends and someone else's begins, because that boundary is the source of more friction than any other single thing. Cars ==== You have one from the day you arrive. You do not choose it, and the only real choice you have is how you conduct yourself within it. The structure - What a car is ----------------------------- A car (your social group inside) is the group you are aligned with inside. It sorts primarily by race, then by region, home state, or city. You have one from the day you arrive. You do not choose it, unless you explicitly choose to do so. By default, it is assigned to you by demographics, and the only real choice you have is how you conduct yourself within it. The exchange - What you get, what you owe ----------------------------------------- What you get: - Information - who to avoid, how the unit works, which officer cares about what; - starter supplies before your first commissary (the prison store); - a default position if something goes wrong, without having to earn it; - and somebody to ask, which in the first month is worth more than any of the rest. What you owe: - Conduct that does not embarrass them; - your share of unit chores and cleaning rotations; - showing up when something is expected of you; - and paying what you owe, on time, without being reminded. Who runs it - The driver ------------------------ Most cars have someone who runs things - called the rep (the guy who speaks for a car). They mediate internal disputes, handle business with other cars, and are who staff-adjacent problems get routed through. You do not need a relationship with them. You need to know who they are and not create work for them. They understand their role, and you must understand theirs. They may not like you, but they will still back you. If you have problems, go to your rep. Why it holds - Collective consequence ------------------------------------- This is the concept that explains everything else. What you do lands on your car, not just on you. If you run up a debt you cannot pay, your car hears about it before you are approached. If you cause a problem with another group, your car absorbs it. This means that if you create a problem, it's your own people who beat the shit out of you. By keeping everything in the family, it protects the yard as a whole so nothing pops off. And so this is why they vet you on day one, and it is also why the structure holds. Everyone has an interest in everyone else being unremarkable. The correction - What a car is not ---------------------------------- Cars are not gangs. There is overlap in some places, but the car itself is closer to an administrative unit - a mutual-aid arrangement with rules. Most of what it does is boring: chores, intake, dispute resolution, and making sure the television schedule does not turn into an incident. The surprise - The part people do not expect -------------------------------------------- You can be friendly with anyone. Cars govern business, not conversation. You will end up genuinely close with people who have nothing in common with you - different backgrounds, different offenses, different everything. Some of the best conversations you will have in your life happen in here, with people you would never have met and will never see again. That is not a sentimental observation. It is just what happens when you take a cross-section of the country and give it unlimited time to talk. Fork: how tightly cars operate, how quickly you are approached, and how much is expected of you varies significantly by security level. At a low, all of it is tighter - cars at a low covers the difference. The unwritten rules =================== None of these are posted anywhere. All of them are enforced. The absolute one - Property --------------------------- Do not touch anything that is not yours. Not to move it, not to borrow it, not to look at it. This is the closest thing to an absolute rule in the building, and violating it accidentally is the most common way a new person creates a problem. If something of yours is in someone's way, they will tell you. Do the same. Territory - Space ----------------- Do not sit on another person's bunk. Do not stand in their area. Do not lean on their locker while you are talking to them. Shared equipment - The television, the microwave, the phone, the laundry ---------------------------------------------------------------- While you're in federal prison (part 2 of 4) federalprisondude.com/going-to-federal-prison/what-its-really-like The unwritten rules (continued) =============================== Televisions are governed - by schedule, by informal claim, or by whoever has established rights to certain programming. Ask before you touch one. Sports schedules in particular are settled well in advance. The microwave, the phone, and the laundry all run on turns. Take yours, do not exceed it, do not leave your property sitting in the machine, and do not remove someone else's to make room for yours. Clean the microwave when you are done. Phones especially: do not hover near someone who is on a call, and end yours when your time is up rather than when your conversation is. Lines: do not cut, and do not hold a place for somebody who is not standing there. Hygiene - Showers, and cleanliness as an obligation --------------------------------------------------- Showers: wear shoes, do not linger, and do not look at anyone. Units are inspected, and the results affect everyone - often determining which unit goes to chow (the cafeteria) and commissary (the prison store) first, which is the only thing that guarantees the stock has not run out. Your area is not a personal matter. Treat it accordingly. Conversation - What not to ask ------------------------------ - The details of someone's case beyond what they volunteer; - whether anyone cooperated, ever, under any circumstances; - how much time someone has left, if they have a lot; - and anything about anyone's family situation. The other half - What not to volunteer -------------------------------------- Your money. Not what you had, not what you have, not what is coming to you, not what your restitution number is. The population comes overwhelmingly from people who had very little on the outside. Discussing your finances is the fastest way to become a target for a debt arrangement, a loan request, or resentment that has nowhere useful to go. A sentence beginning with the words "we kept trying to make more" has no good ending in here. Debt ==== Debt causes more problems than anything else in this guide. There is no cash in here, so almost everything you do economically creates one, and new arrivals walk into that without recognizing it. The mechanics - Stamps or commissary ------------------------------------ There is no cash. Nearly every transaction is either an exchange of stamps (the inmate currency) or a promise to pay on a future commissary day (going to the store). That means almost everything you do economically creates a short-term debt, and the interest has the potential to be high. The rule - Pay when you said you would pay ------------------------------------------ That is the whole rule, and it is not really about the money. A small unpaid debt escalates far out of proportion to its size, because what is actually in question is whether your word is good. The amount is beside the point. Once you are someone whose word is not good, every subsequent interaction gets harder. In practice - Practical guidance -------------------------------- Cheat sheet - Do not borrow anything in your first month beyond your car (your social group inside)'s intake supplies. - Do not lend to anyone you do not know well. - Do not accept unsolicited gifts from people outside your car. A gift that later turns out to have been a loan is a standard play, and it is run on new arrivals specifically. - Do not gamble anything you cannot cover - which in practice means do not gamble during football season until you have been there long enough to understand the stakes. - If you are going to be short, say so before the payment is due, not after. That last one matters more than people realize. Coming to someone in advance is a normal conversation. Being found short after the fact is a different conversation entirely. Where the credit actually comes from - stores, rates, and what things cost - is covered in the economy. Information and trust ===================== Assume that nothing you say stays where you said it. That is not paranoia. It is a structural feature of a place where several hundred bored people have nothing to trade but information. The mechanism - The telephone game ---------------------------------- The telephone game is played constantly in prison and it is played badly. Information moves fast, arrives distorted, and gains detail as it travels. Something you said quietly to one person in January will come back to you in March as something you did not say, attributed to a conversation you do not remember having. This is not paranoia and it is not unique to any one facility. It is a structural feature of a place where several hundred bored people have nothing to trade but information. Off the table - What never gets discussed ----------------------------------------- - Cooperation - yours, anyone else's, or as an abstract topic; - the specifics of anyone's case, including your own beyond the basics; - your finances or your family's; - anything you would not want repeated to the person it is about; - and anything you would not want a staff member to hear. On paper - Written material is not private ------------------------------------------ Electronic messages (the inmate email/phone/money system, all monitored) are monitored and stored. Mail is inspected. Phone calls are recorded. And anything sitting in your locker - letters, notes, a journal - can be read during a shakedown and will be if it looks interesting. If you keep a journal, write it knowing someone will eventually read it. Most people who get into trouble over written material did not think anyone was paying attention. The part people skip - Do not repeat things either -------------------------------------------------- Carrying news is a losing position. Whoever delivers a piece of information becomes the person associated with it, and if it turns out to be wrong - and much of it is wrong - that lands on the carrier, not on whoever made it up three tiers back. Being known as someone who does not repeat things is one of the very few durable reputations worth having, and it is built entirely by saying nothing on a large number of occasions. Working with staff ================== Start from one assumption and most of this follows: staff will do the minimum required of them, and when they do not, there is no meaningful recourse. The premise - The operating condition ------------------------------------- That is not a complaint and it is not cynicism. It is the operating condition. Nothing happens because it ought to happen. Things happen because someone asked, and then asked again, and wrote down when they asked. Discretion - Why the rules are applied literally ------------------------------------------------ Bureau employees are not paid to exercise judgment, and exercising it is a risk they carry personally. If someone bends a rule for you and it goes badly, that is on them. If they apply it rigidly and you are inconvenienced, that is on nobody. So discretion runs one direction: toward no. The person in front of you usually is not being obstinate. They are declining to be the person who authorized an exception. The practical consequence is that you should never frame a request as an exception. Frame it as the ordinary application of an existing rule. "Can you make an allowance for me?"A question with one answer. "The policy says this is done at this point, and I am at that point."A different conversation. Correctional officers --------------------- The officers (a uniformed guard) who work your housing unit are, for the most part, reasonable people being paid to supervise adults. It is a job, not a calling, and most of them would prefer an uneventful shift. The rules for dealing with them are simple. Respect them and they will generally respect you. There are two reliable ways to get on the wrong side of an officer, and neither is the one people expect: - Making their job harder than it needs to be; - and being an obvious kiss-ass, which reads as an angle and is noticed by everyone. Most officers have one or two specific things they care about. One wants the unit quiet during count (the daily headcount where everything stops). One cares about where you are standing when the doors open. One cares about laundry, or the microwave, or the television volume. These are idiosyncratic and mostly unwritten. Learn them and follow them. It costs you nothing and it buys the only thing worth having here: being remembered as someone who is not a problem. That reputation pays out in small discretionary ways, and small discretion is the only kind an officer has. It is not a friendship and you should not mistake it for one. Officers cannot help you with your sentence, your release date, your programming, or your case. Asking them to marks you as someone who does not understand how the building works. Who else is watching - There is a second audience ------------------------------------------------- Every interaction you have with an officer is being watched by people who are not the officer, and they are reading it differently than you are. Being visibly friendly with staff - long conversations, private ones, the same officer repeatedly - reads as informing. That suspicion does not require any evidence to take hold, it travels faster than any correction, and it is very hard to walk back once it exists. So adopt one practice from your first week: when you need to talk to staff about anything beyond a passing exchange, bring someone from your car (your social group inside) with you. While you're in federal prison (part 3 of 4) federalprisondude.com/going-to-federal-prison/what-its-really-like Working with staff (continued) ============================== The reason is not protection. It is a witness - a person who was standing there and can say what was and was not discussed. It costs nothing, it is entirely ordinary, and it forecloses a problem that is far easier to prevent than to repair. Be pleasant with officers. Be brief. Do it in the open. The unit team - What a unit team is ----------------------------------- Your unit team is the small group of staff assigned to your housing unit who manage your case. Knowing who does what will save you an enormous amount of wasted frustration, because most anger inside comes from asking the wrong person for something they were never able to give you. - Case manager. Your record, your sentence computation, release planning, halfway house (the halfway house before release) and home confinement (finishing a sentence at home under monitoring) referrals, transfers, and your visiting list. The most consequential staff member in the building for you. - Correctional counselor. Day-to-day unit administration. Job assignments, forms, phone and contact lists, commissary (the prison store) problems, general questions. - Unit manager. Supervises both. Your first escalation point when the direct ask has actually failed. You will meet with them at a scheduled program review, commonly called team. It happens on a regular cycle, more frequently as you get closer to release. It is where your progress is reviewed and where decisions get recorded. The ask - Working your case manager ----------------------------------- Your case manager will not do anything you have not asked for. This is the single most important sentence in this section. It is rarely personal. Caseloads are large, there are no meaningful performance metrics attached to your outcomes, and nothing bad happens to anyone if your paperwork sits for four months. The cost of that delay is borne entirely by you. How to ask, in order of how well it works: - One request at a time, stated in one or two sentences; - in writing, through the inmate request system, so a copy exists; - with the policy reference if you have it; - followed up on a fixed schedule rather than whenever you get anxious; - and never in front of an audience. Do not open with a threat to file a remedy. Filing is a real tool, but using it early spends a relationship you will need for years and gets you categorized as a problem. Escalate to the unit manager only after a direct request has genuinely gone unanswered, and be able to say when you asked and what you were told. Have the person outside call the unit team as well. Two points of pressure on the same request work better than either alone, and a call from outside creates a small amount of the one thing staff actually respond to, which is visibility. The remedy process - What the administrative remedy process is actually for -------------------------------------------------------------- There is a formal grievance process. It begins with an informal resolution attempt, proceeds to a written complaint to the warden, and can be appealed to the regional and central offices. It is slow, and outcomes tilt toward staff. Use it anyway, but use it for the right reason. Its realistic value is not that you win. It is that a dated, written record now exists showing what you asked for and when, and that record is what makes anything later possible. Which is why you keep your own log of dates, names, and what was said. Without it you have an argument. With it you have a file. The short version - Four rules ------------------------------ Cheat sheet - Be unremarkable to officers, and be seen being unremarkable. - Be specific and persistent with your unit team. - Ask the right person, in writing, one thing at a time. - Write down what they said and when they said it. None of this is difficult. It is just relentless, and almost nobody does it, which is precisely why it works. What conflict costs =================== How fights start varies by where you are. What a fight costs does not, because it is set by policy, and the arithmetic is worth knowing before you are standing in it. The menu - The sanctions ------------------------ A fight produces an incident report (a disciplinary write-up) - a shot - which goes to a disciplinary hearing. Available sanctions include: - Loss of good conduct time (days off for staying out of trouble), which moves your release date directly; - time in the special housing unit (solitary), which is isolation and which is worse than anything you are currently imagining; - loss of programming eligibility, which stops your earned time credits (time off earned through programming) from accruing; - loss of visits, phone, and commissary (the prison store); - a disciplinary transfer, usually to a higher security level, which resets every relationship you have built; - and a reduced or eliminated halfway house (the halfway house before release) recommendation, which is the one nobody thinks about and which is frequently the most expensive of the lot. The math - The arithmetic ------------------------- A fight that lasts twenty seconds can cost months. Not metaphorically - the good time and the lost credits and the shortened pre-release placement are all countable, and they add up faster than people expect. It also does not matter much who started it. Both parties usually receive shots. Self-defense is a concept that exists on the outside; in a disciplinary hearing it is a mitigating argument at best, and often not even that. Count what the credits are worth in your own case with the time calculator. The exit - Stepping back without looking weak --------------------------------------------- The concern people have is that walking away marks you. In practice it does not, provided you use the correct channel. The channel is your car (your social group inside). Leaving the area and letting your driver (an inmate who runs a group) handle it with the other group is not weakness - it is the expected procedure, and it is how the overwhelming majority of disputes actually resolve. Handling something yourself when it should have gone through the car is the thing that causes problems, not the reverse. What you do not do, ever, is involve staff in a dispute with another inmate. There is no version of that which improves your situation. Fork: how fights start varies by security level. At a low, the honest version - causes, the escalation pattern, and the procedure - is in how conflict actually happens. The economy =========== There is a functioning service economy inside every federal facility. It is not hidden. Knowing the going rates is what keeps you from being overcharged, indebted, or embarrassed in your first month. The disclaimer - Why this is here --------------------------------- Most of it is tolerated until something else goes wrong, and staff are aware of it. It is in this guide because knowing the going rates is what keeps you from being overcharged, indebted, or embarrassed in your first month. This is a description of a market you are about to live in, not a manual for operating in it. The money - Currency -------------------- There is no cash. Three things do the work instead: - Stamps (the inmate currency). Books of postage are the standard unit of account for small transactions. A book trades below its face value, and the discount varies by institution. - Commissary (the prison store) goods. Shelf-stable food and hygiene items function as currency, particularly for people who are out of stamps. - Outside transfers. Anything large is settled between people's outside contacts. This is how significant balances actually move. Retail - Stores --------------- Someone in every unit runs a store. It is exactly what it sounds like: an inventory of commissary items, sold on credit to people who have run out between commissary days (going to the store). The standard rate is two-for-one. You take one item now and return two on your next commissary. Some stores run three-for-two on larger items. Store operators keep ledgers and treat it as a business, because it is one. Stores exist because commissary access is limited and weekly, and because people misjudge how much coffee they need. This is also the single most common on-ramp to a debt problem. A two-for-one is a hundred percent interest rate over roughly a week. Compounding that a few times is how someone ends up owing more than their monthly spending limit. The market - Services --------------------- Nearly everything you would pay someone to do on the outside, you can pay someone to do here. While you're in federal prison (part 4 of 4) federalprisondude.com/going-to-federal-prison/what-its-really-like The economy (continued) ======================= - Haircuts. Every unit has a barber, some of them genuinely skilled. Cheap, and one of the more universally used services. - Laundry. Wash, dry, fold, and return on a schedule. Priced monthly. - Tailoring and pressing. Hemming, altering, and ironing creases into your greens. This matters more than an outsider would guess - appearance is one of the few things people control. - Cleaning. Someone will clean your area on a regular schedule. - Cooking. People who can cook build elaborate meals out of commissary ingredients, and they are often very good. You supply the ingredients and pay a fee, or you pay for the whole thing. - Food from the kitchen. Kitchen work comes with access. Eggs, meat, produce, and seasoning leave the kitchen and get sold on the unit. This is a substantial informal industry and one of the reasons kitchen jobs are sought after. - Extra trays. Buying someone's tray at a meal, from people who would rather have the stamps than the food. - Legal work. Jailhouse lawyers write motions, administrative remedies, sentence computation challenges, and post-conviction filings. Prices run from trivial for a form to genuinely expensive for a full motion. Quality varies enormously - a few are excellent, most are not, and the confident ones are not reliably the good ones. Anything you file goes out under your name and is your problem. The same warnings apply inside as out: paying non-lawyers for legal work. - Phone minutes (your monthly phone allowance). Monthly phone time is capped, and people who do not use theirs sell the remainder. This is one of the more common transactions in the building, particularly toward the end of the month. - Cell phone use. Contraband phones exist and time on them is rented. It is one of the most expensive things available, priced according to risk rather than effort. - Tobacco. Federal facilities are smoke-free for inmates, which makes tobacco contraband, which makes it expensive. Prices vary more between institutions than any other item on this list - by a wide margin, and unpredictably. Pricing - How prices work ------------------------- Price tracks scarcity and risk, not labor. A haircut is cheap because the barber is not risking anything and there are several of them. Anything contraband is expensive because someone is carrying real exposure, and the price is mostly that exposure being sold to you. Prices also vary substantially between institutions, and the same item can cost several times more at one facility than another. Do not arrive with a fixed number in your head. Local rates - what a book of stamps trades for, what the store marks up - are tracked per facility in the facility guide. The downside - What it costs if it goes wrong --------------------------------------------- Running a store, gambling, and bartering are all prohibited acts under the disciplinary code, notwithstanding that they are ubiquitous. Possession of contraband is treated considerably more seriously, and possession of a phone most seriously of all - the standard outcome is a stretch in the special housing unit (solitary), a substantial loss of good conduct time (days off for staying out of trouble), and a transfer to a higher security facility. Enforcement is episodic rather than constant. It tends to arrive after something else has already gone wrong, which is a poor thing to rely on and a very common thing to rely on. You will make your own decisions about all of this. Make them knowing the price, which is the only thing this section is for. Your time ========= The dominant experience of incarceration is not danger. It is boredom, repetition, and waiting on people who are not in a hurry. The reality - What the days are made of --------------------------------------- Most of what you are afraid of right now will not happen. Nearly everything that actually wears on you will be administrative or tedious, and there is a great deal more of it than you expect. The structure - Build a routine in the first month -------------------------------------------------- People who structure their days do their time better than people who do not. This is the most reliable observation in this entire guide and the one most likely to be ignored. A job. Programming, which you want anyway for the credits (time off earned through programming). Exercise on a fixed schedule. Reading with some purpose to it rather than whatever is lying around. Something you are learning that has an end state. The specific content matters much less than the fact that the day has a shape. The warning signs - Watch for the drop -------------------------------------- Depression inside does not usually announce itself. It looks like sleeping through the afternoon, then through the morning. Skipping commissary (the prison store). Not going to rec (recreation time). Letting mail sit unanswered for a week, then two. Telling people not to come for visits because the drive is long. Every one of those has a reasonable-sounding explanation, which is exactly the problem. Notice the pattern rather than the individual excuses, in yourself and in the people around you. The crash - The visit cycle --------------------------- Visits are the best hours you will have and the crash afterward is real. The same is true of good mail and good phone calls. Everyone experiences it, almost nobody mentions it, and knowing it is coming takes most of the sting out. Do not stop taking visits to avoid the crash. That trade looks rational and is not. The calendar - Do not count days -------------------------------- People who track the number are miserable. The standard formulation is that the days are long and the years are short, and it is accurate. Work in program cycles, seasons, or team meetings, and let the arithmetic take care of itself. The erosion - What it does to you --------------------------------- A year of not choosing what to eat, when to sleep, or where to stand does something to the part of you that makes decisions. It atrophies, the way anything unused does. The people it happens to are not the people who expected it. It is generally the ones who were most certain it would not. What it looks like: deferring choices you could make, waiting to be told, letting outside relationships lapse because maintaining them takes effort and the effort feels pointless, and gradually finding the institution's rhythm more comfortable than the alternative. The counterweight - What helps ------------------------------ Cheat sheet - Keep making decisions, even trivial ones, deliberately. - Maintain your outside relationships actively, especially when it hurts to hear what you are missing. - Stay current with what is happening at home rather than tuning it out. - Keep a project with an end state, and finish it. - Plan for release from early on, not from the last six months. The time passes either way. What varies is who walks out.