Scudworth posted:

Ask me about prison, just did 2 years for selling drugs on the net

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3676982

Doorknob Slobber posted:

was anyone ever able to confirm whether this dude was dead/alive

Ornithology posted:

Can we ban the people that joke about prisoners getting raped and murdered? It doesn't seem that funny regardless if someone is in prison or not.. can't believe the lack of empathy some people have. Good luck if you ever make a mistake in life, I'm guessing you won't be joking about getting sexually abused at that point. To wish forced oral sex on a guy for drug possession is straight up hosed up in my mind. Sadism is suddenly cool if someone is charged with a crime?

empty whippet box posted:

Christoph posted:

Mine was blatantly evil and threatened to call the marshals on me if I ever postponed a meeting. But I hear there are good ones.

Of course if you're in prison talking to other people in prison, it's obvious that the lawyer did not achieve the level of success for his or her client that would guarantee a glowing review.

Christoph posted:

Mine was blatantly evil and threatened to call the marshals on me if I ever postponed a meeting. But I hear there are good ones.

Of course if you're in prison talking to other people in prison, it's obvious that the lawyer did not achieve the level of success for his or her client that would guarantee a glowing review.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Lawyers may be evil but they can do poo poo.

PT6A posted:

How are lawyers evil?

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Yeah gently caress the kind yours was.

My point is everyone deserves a PD who is competent, available, and anti-police. Lawyers may be evil but they can do poo poo.

No more “one PD has 500 cases”

And lock up ones that collaborate with the prosecution

BrandorKP posted:

Ever been subpoenaed or deposed? Ever testify?

PT6A posted:

How are lawyers evil? Especially with defence attorneys, they provide an absolutely crucial service. It may contribute to distasteful things happening, but if a guilty person goes free, why do we blame the defence attorney (the only person with the actual responsibility to achieve that outcome) rather than the police, the prosecutor, the jurors, etc.? Getting someone out "on a technicality," for example, is a vital part of making sure law enforcement and prosecutors do their job legally and properly.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

...because PDs are hilariously overworked, to the point where it would be physically impossible to perform on each case even if they were 24/7 lawyer automatons.

empty whippet box posted:

I just spent ten nights and nine days in county jail in south mississippi. I posted about this elsewhere in tcc; but this seems like a good place to talk about what county jail was like.

Let me start by listing the two worst things: the food, and the toilets. I will explain in a moment, but for now, some context.

Lights on is at 6 am, well before the sun is actually up. The harsh, too-bright fluorescent light pops on and obliterates any chance of falling asleep again for a while regardless of how tired you are. They don't give you a pillow, though you can try to make one out of old food trays or some poo poo. Or you can ball up the thin sheet that doesn't even cover you all the way and use it - this is frequently what I did, unless it was too cold at night, which it frequently was. You can also take your clothes off - baggy, gigantic striped poo poo with '___________ COUNTY INMATE' on the back, that is clearly literally decades old and has been worn by untold thousands of people and has holes in it, and ball it up as a pillow, but again, it is frequently too cold. The bunk you are sleeping on is metal, bolted to the wall, and they give you not a mat, but literally the inside foam of a mat, with no covering. Because if you had an actual mat you could use it to hide poo poo in. So you just get the less than one inch thick sheet of foam. Sleeping in these conditions is very difficult, very uncomfortable, and does not make you feel rested. Lights out is at 10 pm, and usually people yell conversations to each other from cell to cell for at least an hour after that, making it impossible to fall asleep. The room you are in - because you are in one room for your entire stay there, barring a few minutes walking down the hall to talk to your lawyer and MAYBE visitation once a week and MAYBE one hour of exercise in an enclosed concrete and brick courtyard open to the sky with metal grating above you. Otherwise - it is concrete room with pale green walls. There are no other colors except maybe the faded red and black of the uniforms, and whatever is on the TV, which is 20 feet in the air, and the audio of which is indecipherable due to how insanely echoey the room is, since the ceilings are also high and there is no padding. The showers are cubicles in this room with absolutely no privacy at all - just dudes taking showers with 20 other dudes wandering around mingling and playing cards 10 feet away. It's just how it is. There's more poo poo to complain about with the showers, but I'm digressing.

Anyway, at 6 am lights come on. You have to blearily get up and stand by your cell door waiting for the buzz that means you have one second - literally - to slightly open your cell door so that you aren't stuck in there until they bring trays at 7, at which point you might miss your awful, inedible tray of food. So, you stand there for however long - there's no way to tell, you're not allowed to have watches or clocks or any type of time telling device at all - and wait. Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes it's nearly immediate once lights come on. Then you either come out and start milling around, or you go try to find a way to fall asleep with these awful fluorescent lights that are just too loving bright but also the light is too loving soft.

At 7, the breakfast tray comes. You never see them - they're faceless CO's behind the wall, handing trays in through a metal slot. They just count the prisoners and put the right number of trays in, often stacked on top of one another carelessly 7-8 at a time and handed to one prisoner, trusting that it'll get divvied up correctly, because they do not give a gently caress. They will not help you if someone takes your food. They will not come give you another tray. You have to be there, and be ready, both to grab your tray and to argue with someone if they try to take it. Luckily I never had any problems with this, but in other blocks, it is a problem.

I was on P block, and everyone got along. We were all very friendly with one another, commiserating, talking about our cases and giving each other encouragement. I was lucky. This jail is known for its violence and gang problems. I simply got lucky and wasn't near anything like that. In the morning,w hen we get our breakfast tray, the open air bullshit food market immediately fires up. "I GOT GRITS FOR MILK," "I GOT HASH FOR SAUSAGE!". Every day of the week is the same as it was last week - each monday tray is the same every monday, et cetera. But I'll inventory one tray quickly for an example:

-grits - literally a solid sheet of grits that you can pick up and wiggle around without it breaking. It was also always over salted. I don't even like good grits, and I always traded these. They were the most substantial portion of the tray, so this was actually easy. I traded for sausage or milk, whatever had protein.
-biscuit - a sad, squat little flat biscuit that broke apart too easily and was dry in a way that nobody would do on purpose, unless they hate the intended recipient, which they do. Very little flavor, but I always made sure to eat it. You just kind of have to.
-cake - the only way you can tell this apart from the biscuit is that it is ever so slightly softer and barely sweeter. Most people viewed these as interchangeable and wouldn't even bother checking which one they were trading when they said 'I GOT CAKE FOR ______ ' or 'I GOT BISCUIT FOR ______'. The difference was simply negligible.
-milk - the breakfast tray's saving grace: a little milk carton. It was the only thing in there that for me was genuinely enjoyable, because it's loving milk, it's hard to gently caress that up.
-sausage - two sad little one inch breakfast sausages. I traded for these as much as I could for the protein.

I would estimate that if you ate all of this at once, it would be around 600 calories, maybe less, maybe slightly more depending on how your portions shook out.

The prisoners all have the meal schedule precisely memorized and usually have their trades figured out well ahead of time, sometimes days in advance. Some people are so far in the hole that they sometimes have to skip trays for a day to pay back another person. Sometimes they bet their trays in card games(when I say card games, I mean games with cards made out of the milk boxes - taken apart and painstakingly made to be equal in size and inscribed with suites and numbers. They were constantly making these, because they fell apart a lot and the guards sometimes just came in and took them for no reason.) Sometimes they traded trays for whatever drugs people got at med call, which they just handed to prisoners, not giving a gently caress. These would be poo poo like seroquil and other antidepressants or antipsychotics.

Mostly, you just sit around all day. Maybe play cards, talk to the other guys, watch tv. One day the entire block sat without talking or making sound for around 5 hours watching two lord of the rings movies on TV, which was actually kind of nice. But mostly, you do nothing. You can only watch 'naked and afraid' so many times before it's old hat. They'd look for whatever on TV was the closest to porn, because most of these guys have literally not seen a human female in person in at 6 months or more. But like I said, tv wasn't great because you couldn't really understand anything because the room was so echoey and any conversation at all meant the tv was drowned out completely. I passed the time by bullshitting with people, calling my wife and my mom on the phone(which was like a dollar a minute and my amazing parents let me run up several hundred dollars in the 9 days I was there), and reading the criminal legal newsletter full of case studies from around the country. As an aside, I cut this out of the newsletter and brought it home:





My wife also overnighted me a copy of the entire Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series in one paperback, which I got for the last couple days I was there and read about 450 pages of in those two days. You can have a book in there but it must be paperback, inoffensive, and shipped straight from the manufacturer or they won't accept it. I left the book there in the care of one of the guys I met in there. His name is Nicolas, and he's in there for a murder one charge. The story of what happened to him, as he told it(and I believe him), is this: he works construction, pouring concrete for job sites. He lives in this city but was far enough away that his job had him in a hotel room near the site for a while while they did it. He was on the first floor, in the row of rooms not visible from the street, near the corner of the building. He was smoking a cigarette outside his room, not drunk, not on anything. Two men charged around the corner and attacked him, injuring him pretty badly in the process. He had a pocket knife on him, and stabbed one of them in the chest one time. The guy died. He called the police, stayed in his room, and supplied them with the weapon and told them what happen. The other guy was caught, and claimed that he had attacked them randomly outside his room for no reason and they defended themselves against him, which was why he was hurt so badly. The police arrested him on murder 1 charges. He has now been in county lockup without seeing a public defender for 9 months.

I know a lot of peoples' inclination is to say, well of course he's lying. Of course he'd have a version of the story where he was acting in self defense. I wish those people could meet nick. I wish they could see this person for themselves. He is telling the truth. The reason they do this to people is because the jail gets a per diem for every day each body is in a bed. The state knows that he will probably either beat these charges or plead to a lower charge just to have it be over - but there is no statute of limitations on murder, so they can move as slowly as they "need" to. Since he can't bond out - it would cost 15,000 dollars of money you do not get back - he has to sit there until he is indicted, which also has not happened yet. He is simply stuck waiting for them to feel like moving it forward, and until then, they get paid every day he's there. He will probably be there at least another year unless a miracle happens.

Stories like this are common, but more common are dudes who are like, 'yeah, I hosed up, they got me.' Most people are surprisingly frank about what they did, and at least some seem remorseful. Moreso about putting their families through this than anything, but that's remorse too. There was a guy in for a string of auto burglaries; a homeless veteran who someone pulled a gun on, shot himself in the leg on accident, and then told the cops the vet assaulted him, causing him to shoot himself in the leg; a homeless guy who claimed he was just panhandling and totally didn't try to rob anyone, but whose story was obviously bullshit. A couple guys who had weird stories and talked poo poo on people trying to call them snitches a lot, but who everyone just ignored. Everyone got along with everyone, which is not what I expected. Maybe they wouldn't on the outside, but when you're in the same room with people for months on end, you learn to co-exist, or something bad happens. Catching more charges in there is easy, and would prolong your stay possibly indefinitely, so most people aren't on their bullshit.

I had my bond set a couple days before I got out. The jail claimed not to have my paperwork, and said my bail bondsman(who was amazing) hadn't done her job. this was simply a lie - they wanted to keep me there for more per diems. My charges actually got unexpectedly dropped before they did the paperwork, though - but they still refused to release me. They had a piece of paper which literally said that all charges had been dropped and that I was to be set free immediately. They refused to process it until my lawyer - who was expensive - came to the jail personally and spent an hour demanding they process it, or he'd call the DA and judge. Only then was I finally able to get out. I spent an entire day there with them refusing to acknowledge this paperwork. It was just sitting on a desk while they watched TV - literally, they watched TV all day in holding/administration, we'd see them watching COPS and poo poo like that any time we were there.

County jail sucks dude. Don't ever go there. And be aware - the cops can do anything they want. They literally are above the law in most of the ways that matter. Don't forget it, and don't ever trust a cop, and don't ever think they're on your side. They aren't.

Volmarias posted:

You never talked about the toilets.

Stairmaster posted:

we are the future old man

the great deceiver posted:

I did 3 years in federal prison, lemme know if you've got any questions on federal prison life. I have an A/T thread somewhere.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

PDs are shamefully overworked and underpaid.

It’s lovely how they end up seeming like lovely lawyers because they have so much on their plates that they literally can’t focus on any one case, and then keeping them useless and underpaid and overworked seems “justifiable” because they suck at their jobs.

Of course in reality they are critically important in our legal system. I’ve heard it’s one of those “everyone goes in idealistic and comes out a cynical alcoholic” jobs.

19 o'clock posted:

I would like to see the thread if you can dig it up?

the great deceiver posted:

I found it

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3693917

19 o'clock posted:

Thanks!

the great deceiver posted:

no problem man, lemme know if youve got anymore questions i can answer