Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in the California state prison system. His reports run on Mondays and Thursdays; you can read earlier pieces here and here. It’s not easy to communicate from inside a state prison, so if it takes a while for him to respond to comments, be patient.
By Just A Guy
While there are many things and topics to be discussed about prison, I would like to talk about the little things that are de-humanizing or just plain silly and disrespectful. I don’t want this to be construed as whining, but want it to be understood that these are things we deal with every day, that the culmination of these things can be overwhelming, frustrating, and the wrong way to treat human beings.
Let’s start with laundry. We are allowed to buy our own sweatpants, shorts, shirts, socks, t-shirts, and undergarments, and are supplied with clothes as well. We are also allowed to buy our own laundry soap like Tide, so we can wash our clothes — but then then but we’re not allowed to hang our laundry so that it obscures a guard’s vision of us.
Now, remember that some of us live in dorms and there is no privacy whatsoever. A lot of us used to hang our towels up to dry after taking a shower, but if that towel is preventing an officer from seeing a one-and-a-half foot area of your bed, the guards will come and take it down or tell you to take it down. The same is often true of our just-washed-by-hand laundry; we are told we can hang it from our locker doors — which are a foot wide by two and a half feet long. So basically, there is no where to hang our laundry to dry.
The funny thing is that they say it’s a security issue because they can’t “see” us. The problem with this is that unless you are on a top bunk, the guards can’t see in your bunk anyway; how is it a security issue?