Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. You can read some of his earlier blogs here and here and here. He’s trying to give the taxpayers — who are forking over huge sums of money every year to keep 170,000 Californians behind bars — a sense of what prison life is really like. He welcomes comments and questions, and tries to answer all of them, although sometimes it takes a while because he has to reach us from prison, where it’s often hard to communicate with the outside. His blog posts run Mondays and Thursdays. Today he takes on the difficult topic of race in prison, and explains how prison customs and a lack of state programs lead to a type of segregation that’s damaging and harmful to everyone.
By Just A Guy
Well, it seems as if the initial excitement over this blog has waned a little bit, but I am okay with that. What I am really looking for from my audience (sounds kind of arrogant, sorry) is questions and potential topics to discuss. So, lay your fingers to the keyboard and start typing. You with loved ones in prison, ask them for topics to discuss too.
So far I have touched on quite a few things like health care, rehabilitation, education, vocations, and all the little things that make prison prison, but I have just scratched the surface of this drama called prison life. I would like to get into how a lot of this stuff makes me feel, how it makes my fellow prisoners feel, our families, the staff, the public. Maybe we can generate a big group hug! (Lol).
Prison life is really a trip, there are all these little rules that make up the politics of prison, and are the rules of survival among my fellow inmates. I don’t think the general public really knows about this stuff, but it’s fascinating and discouraging, so I will blog a bit about the despair we create for ourselves.
I certainly don’t want it to be said that I didn’t present both sides of the picture, it’s easy to rail against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, but I said I will keep it real, so I will, to the best of my ability anyway.
The most ironic thing to me about being in prison is that we come to prison and have all sorts of freedoms taken away from us based on our actions, then we make up all sorts of our own rules — and imprison ourselves even more. The creation of these rules, groups, standards, and ideologies separate us even further from normal mores, thus, further reducing our already limited freedoms.
Nowhere it that more obvious than in race relations.