We need to swap stories sometime. Here in Maryland it's very basic in what they have. Everything's pretty cheap. They have a basketball court but no weights. The computers look like something out of the 80's. The air-conditioning goes off and on in the summer. Mostly they sit around and play cards when they're not working.
As far as Lawrence Phillips goes, from the letters he writes he sounds like what they call "institutionalized." The inmates call it a "three hots and a cot" mentality. Crime and prison is all he knows, along with the violence that goes along with that. Chances are he was also raised in that mentality in the foster homes he grew up in.
Our prison is one of the newer ones. It opened in 1995. It originally housed women but converted to a men's prison about 3 years ago. Most the equipment like air conditioning is in pretty good shape. Our prison isn't the typical 2 to a room cells. They're designed for 4 double bunks per room, 8 beds. Each room has its own private shower. Almost like a dorm setting.
We're what they call a sensitive needs prison. Everyone here came from protective custody. Gang dropouts, informants, molesters. But don't let the gang dropout thing fool you. Most of these guys pissed off their own gang and became a target. They still have the gang mentality. Some prisons have a yard designated for those inmates but that segment of the population is growing rapidly. So they converted our whole prison to SNY.
As far as the amenities, they don't have weights any more, but they still work out with what they have. They take a garbage bag and put water in it for arm curls and other things. Don't ask me why, but they now have punching bags for the gym. They were donated but I had to buy the mounting brackets.
The male inmates are much more active than the females were during their free time. I used to work inside the prison and the women always laid out on the grass using their jackets like a picnic blankets. I walk on the yard now and just about every inmate is exercising doing push ups, pull ups on the bars built for them or playing basketball. I don't work inside the secured perimeter any more. I'm in the admin building and warehouse. But I go in a couple times a week.
There's a lot of differences between the men and women aside from the obvious ones. Men are much more quiet and don't complain about working as much as the women do. Women complain about their work environment all the time, like they're put into slavery or something. Men just do the work. But they're more involved in things like sneaking contraband in.
The inmates that work in my area are lower level offenders who qualify for a gate pass to work outside the gate. The old term for those guys was Trustees. Those are the ones that can sneak in contraband when they go back in at the end of the day. We've found cell phones, tobacco, even drugs in the supplies orders that we deliver to all areas of the prison. I couldn't imagine how much got through. Its always been problem, even with the women. Men work much better than women but they're also more creative when it comes to the extra curricular activities.
