By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
Working in a prison, both teaching and working on a research project, taught me a great deal about this world, which is foreign to most people. I learned that real life in a prison is a stark contrast to common beliefs. Some people adjust very well to prison; others never adjust. I know of several persons who committed suicide rather than go back to prison. A few who served their time and were released committed a crime to get back in. Public institutions are required to provide medical care to inmates as a consequence of the 1976 Supreme Court ruling Estelle v. Gamble, which found that indifference to a prisoner’s injury or illness constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. I know of cases involving persons who committed a crime to be sent to prison to get free health care. The U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to intervene in a lower-court order, which leaves a requirement in place for federal prisons to continue funding gender-transition treatments for inmates. The 7–2 decision denied the Trump administration’s request to halt a lower court’s ruling.
After the fear of prison subsides, most inmates understand the reality of their situation. They are facing years, often decades, inside four walls. Many don’t get out unless transferred to another facility or in a box. Your whole life comes down to a few acres, surrounded by 20-foot-high walls protected by piles of razor wire.
Almost everyone has an assigned job which usually begins after the morning prisoner count and ends before the afternoon count. Most inmates have the weekend off, but most would rather work seven days because days off tend to be long and very boring. Most prison jobs involve day-to-day operations and maintenance inside the facility. This includes preparing meals, cooking, baking, serving food in the cafeteria, and cleaning kitchens. Other jobs include scrubbing cell blocks, cleaning common areas, collecting trash, and washing inmate laundry. Some even work as plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters, and mechanics to repair facility infrastructure. The best jobs include working as office clerks, bookkeepers, data entry operators, library assistants, or GED/peer tutors serving as inmate orderlies or hospice care assistants. Often, inmates do the jobs that they did on the outside.
The key to running a prison and reducing problems is to keep the inmates busy. And sports are an excellent way to achieve this important goal. In a large correctional facility, sports and recreational programs are highly structured to maintain institutional safety, reduce stress, and teach transferable rehabilitation skills. Sports-related positions are divided into two distinct groups: civilian/staff career roles employed by the government or private operators, and incarcerated individual work assignments. Large facilities rely heavily on the incarcerated population to run local intramural leagues and manage the weight room to allow inmates to work out. These roles generally require clean behavioral records and offer valuable skill development. Some prisons have football teams or organized football activities, though full-scale tackle football is rare today due to safety concerns.
For obvious reasons, inmates must use only facility phones which are recorded by the institution. Federal inmates are capped at 500 minutes per month, and individual calls are limited to 15 minutes. Many facilities provide government-issued or vendor-provided computer tablets that are not connected to the internet. They are used only for reading books or articles, music, games, or monitored internal messaging. Once an inmate transitions from a prison to a federal halfway house, personal smartphones are typically permitted. Most prisons allow outside entertainment such as Johnny Cash’s live prison concerts, which are among the most famous examples of outside entertainment brought into the American correctional system. Cash’s deep empathy for the incarcerated led him to perform dozens of free shows for inmates over a span of nearly thirty years. Other guests that come to the prison to speak include government officials, singers, actors and ex-inmates.
On days off, you are free to entertain yourself. Most prisons have a large library available to inmates. An inmate could sleep all day, but must be counted in the morning and evening. One cannot usually sleep all night, then all day, and then sleep the next night. Nights are pretty calm, but at lights out, you are expected to sleep. And there are another 500 inmates that want to sleep at night, so if you are up all night, you’d better not keep others awake, or there’ll be hell to pay the next morning. Many inmates watch a lot of TV. Some live much the same way in prison that they did on the outside. There is a lot of time to fill, and many have a library in their cell with hundreds of books. Some inmates earn a law degree in prison. Others earn a minister’s degree. Most want to stay busy. Is prison punishment? For some, it is; for many, it is just a different place to live for a few years. Many inmates are much better off in prison than on the outside. For many, the experience of prison reduces the fear of returning, and this is one reason why over 70 percent recidivate and end up back in prison, the revolving door fact. For many, it is a way of life that we, the taxpayers, fund. One estimate is that it costs the state close to 80,000 dollars a year for the average inmate. The ACLU regularly litigates against prisons and jails to deal with some rights the inmate claims were violated.