Was the food adequate?
How was the prison library?
What did you learn from the experience?
My passenger [0] says the Maricopa jail wouldn't be so bad, if the food was better than 2 inedible meals a day.
How was the prison library?
What did you learn from the experience?
My passenger [0] says the Maricopa jail wouldn't be so bad, if the food was better than 2 inedible meals a day.
Unlike public facilities the food there is much worse, but the guards are paid much lower and have significantly less training. The result is that they more-or-less don't want to get involved in anything and the facility as a whole goes out of their way to keep inmates occupied with things. The result is that they have up-to-date gaming consoles like Playstation 4 with a decent selection of games and because their guard staff is underpaid a much larger amount of drugs make it into the prison on a regular basis. The story from most who rotated through these facilities told me it was more or less just a "party pod".
In Federal the food is fine. All of the prisons in the entire country follow the same basic meal schedule, the highlights of which are usually every Wednesday is hamburger day and every Thursday is chicken day where each inmate gets a large baked chicken breast. I was told by almost every inmate that had ever been to State facilities that the food there is virtually inedible while they were happily scarfing down lunch.
> How was the prison library?
The facility I was at had a different library than what most people think of when they see prison in the movies. There was no big room with large isles of books or any tables to sit at while reading. It was a very small room where inmates could enter and browse the various catalogs (mostly in binders) and then ask the inmate working as the librarian to rent a book. Access to books was simple and there was a decent selection. Many books were more readily available if they were more popular since inmates often leave their books with the library when they are released. I found something on most every subject I was interested as long as it didn't get too niche and we even had a decent selection of Dungeons & Dragons books ranging back to 2E.
> What did you learn from the experience?
I learned that literally 85% of people are there for drug related crimes. Most "repeat offenders" are there because they had access to a firearm while on supervision. The result is that if you ask another inmate why they are there, almost every time you literally just get the sentence "drugs and guns" which is a catch-all statement inmates use because their story isn't interesting and just involves the usual "sold drugs, got caught eventually" stuff.
I learned that in Southern California (where many inmates originate) their legal system is so taxed that some of these offenders for drug crimes spent a total of 45 minutes with their court appointed public defender before being sentenced to an average of 7 years in prison. Some of them didn't even know the actual charges they ended up pleading guilty to. To be clear: they did sell drugs, and they are guilty of breaking the law - but they were also completely denied an adequate defense and in many cases English isn't their first language. Contrast that with my case and the dozens of hours I spent with my team of (public defense) lawyers and it seems unfair. Legally they either deem a case "complex" or not and mine was considered complex, whereas the drug offenders usually just get thrown to the least experienced public defenders most of which see no point in arguing against their potential future boss or judges they have to interact with daily to advocate for a client. (My public defenders were amazing, but I'm not from Southern California)