I think going to prison has to be one of the most terrifying things a person can go through.
But hopefully you and I will never have to worry about dealing with that…so keep your nose clean and I’ll do the same, okay?
AskReddit users who have spent time in prison either as inmates or workers shared their interesting stories.
Let’s have a look, shall we?
1. Wow.
“I was a college instructor teaching in state prisons for several years.
At first, I was a bit anxious about being in that environment. After all, I was in a room with about two dozen convicted m**derers, ra**ists, child m**esters, and drug dealers. It wasn’t exactly a welcoming place.
But, after about a month, I realized that I had nothing to worry about. I was surprised to find that these guys were willing to put themselves in harm’s way to protect the teachers.
I had just started my lecture one day when a lockdown was called. Our room was locked (from the outside) and we could not move until it was over. We heard, coming from upstairs, what sounded like a riot breaking out.
“Teach, get in the corner,” one of my guys said, practically pulling me off my feet and pushing me into the corner furthest from the classroom door.
The guys then proceeded, without saying a word to each other, to pile all of the classroom desks in front of the door and stand between me and said desks. They were creating a barrier to keep me safe.
It turns out that the riot we heard was not as big as we feared, so the lockdown only lasted about an hour. Afterward, once we got the okay and the room was put back in order, I asked the guys why they did what they did.
“Some motherf**ker hurts you,” one of the guys said, “all the teachers will leave. We don’t want to lose our education because some a**holes can’t control themselves.””
2. Brutal.
“The most gross story I have is a guy who smuggled in a razor blade, and managed to cut himself.
Deep cuts, could see the bone and tendons. I remember holding his arm closed so the bleeding would slow.
The guy ended up d**ng on the ward. The smell of iron in the air stayed for the next two days.”
3. This was county jail?!
“My time to shine. In my younger days, I may or may not have spent some time in a county jail (time served, never actually went to prison).
Now, this country jail was SEVERELY over capacity. So much so that the mess area was used as overflow, and about 40 of us had to sleep on bunk beds they’d plopped down in the middle of this big room. Unfortunately, this area had no toilets of it’s own, so they left ONE cell open and unoccupied for a toilet for all of us. Bad jail food, 40 dudes, one toilet.
Not a movie anyone wants to see. Well I dropped approximately 1/5th of my bodyweight into that poor toilet, in one extremely dense log. This, much to the chagrin of the guys on the bottom floor cells, caused ALL of their toilets to back up somehow, flooding their cells with s**t water.
The guards made us wait outside in the exercise area while plumbers came in. This all happened at like 11:30 at night, in January. No one knows it was me that clogged it all up, which is probably a good thing.”
4. No thanks.
“Did 60 days a few times.
While locked in the bathroom awaiting pill handouts a dude with a full face octopus tattoo asked us if we’ve ever seen someone receive a “fruit basket”. He proceeded to pull his pants down and tuck his nut**ck in between his legs.
When the poor soul came and unlocked the door to handout pills, he greated them by bending over and displaying his fruit basket. While gross, it was honestly pretty f**king funny.”
5. Kind of scary.
“I don’t know if this story is ‘interesting’, ‘funny’ or ‘scary’, depends on your perspective, but I was in a pod once where we had a regular CO who was a complete piece of s**t.
He used to try to provoke inmates into starting a fight so that he and his buddies could kick the s**t out of the inmate. He would destroy inmates’ belongings for no reason. He ripped up a letter from my dad during a search one time and then bragged to me that he did it. He would f**k with inmate’s food. He was complete trash. He thought he was a big, tough dude.
So anyway, there were a lot of young gang guys in the pod. Gangs are really good at communicating within facilities. So the gang managed to somehow find out the names of the CO’s kids. And communicate that to the pod. So one day the CO came to do his shift and the pod spent the whole time casually namedropping the kids’ names into their general conversation while he was walking by.
And that was the last day the CO worked in our pod.
Aren’t jails just great for reform?”
6. Awful.
“Corrections Deputy.
You see a whole lot of gruesome stuff. 1.) A guy tucked his arms in his shirt and jumped off the top tier. Fell head first and brain matter splattered all over the day-room.
2.) Guy beat up another dude so hard, you could see the tendons in his knuckles from scraping the victim’s teeth with every punch.
3.) Guy punched another guy during breakfast. Hit him so hard he k**led him.”
7. Down Under.
“I worked as a guard in a prison in Ravenhall ( in Melbourne, Australia ).
The unit was divided between Pacific islanders , Muslims , Asians and Whites. One day a new young Asian man entered the facility and decided it would be a good idea to play basketball with the islanders. The other Asians couldn’t believe this and wouldn’t stand for it and decided to educate this young buck about who and who you cannot fraternise with during yard time.
The next day I clocked on for my shift at 3 pm (afternoon to evening shift) and went outside just as the prisoners were coming in from doing their domestic duties ( gardening , etc). Well as I passed the basketball court I saw this young man hanging upside down feet tied to the basketball ring. At first I thought no biggie I’ll just help him down.
When I got closer I saw his bottoms had been torn off and he had slash marks all over his butt. Kind of like when someone takes a razor blade to you. What’s even worse is that once we got him down he asked to go to medical because he had a sore stomach. Not wanting to rat out the other Asians he said it was because he wasn’t use to the prison food.
Well it turns out the Asian gang also stuck some items up his a** ; items they had obviously collected from around the yard. You can imagine my horror when the medic told me that he had said to them ” I think they shoved a bird up my a**.”
After 3 days he spent in the medical Ward…can confirm a d**d sparrow was jammed right up his a** and had to be fished out….in bits…”
8. Disgusting.
“One of the C.Os told us a story of the time they performed a bunk search of a block of twelve girls.
Inside a Dorito bag, she found a nasty old bratwurst. The girl whose bunk it was acted extremely nervous, and the rest of the girls were acting strange, too.
It turns out, all twelve of them were using the sausage as a community dildo.”
9. Contraband.
“My dad worked in the prisons in New Zealand for 17 years and he’s told me plenty of great stories.
For example a new prisoner that was coming in, they got him to strip down naked and got him to squat and they noticed there was something sticking out his rear end. It was a bag of weed.
They mentioned it to him and he pulled it out and started yelling at them and then tried to swallow the bag that had just been pulled out of his a**.”
10. A veteran.
“I’ve been out of prison for a decade as of Jul 5, 2021.
Once was enough for me, even if it took five years to realize it. I was young, barely eighteen, and ended up on one of the gladiator camps in Texas, the Roach Unit. From there, I ended up in administrative segregation om the Allred unit for close to three years, until I discharged my entire sentence (A riot against the guards.)
Seg is nuts. On a best case scenario, you spend twenty three hours a day completely alone, and an hour in a small cage that is open to the sky. That rarely happens, because staying out of trouble with the guards is.. hard. Realistically, you just spend twenty four hours a day a lone for years on end.
The craziest things I saw in my time in segregation: The guards are often corrupt and malicious. With the rate of illegal contraband alone, you can’t really argue it. One of the sergeants decided not to feed two black guys. At first he skipped them for a meal; then a full day.
Both of these guys had life sentences, one for a robbery that lead to someone d**ng, one for murdering his children. They were all out of f**ks. They coordinated with the rest of the people on our run (Each run had fourteen cells, seven below, seven on the second floor) to make noise all night. So, we all pounded on our doors, yelled, whatever, basically all night.
The guards can’t really do much to stop something like that other than yell. While we all made noise, these two guys jumped on the steel tables bolted to their walls til they busted off. Then, they used the tables to hammer on their door frames at the bottom, breaking them off the tracks.
Nobody noticed, because again, the guards basically just ignore your existence back there. So, lunch time comes! The sergeant shows up with two COs. An inmate on the second floor called them to his cell door; while they talked to him, the other two guys pushed their doors open.
The sergeant saw them coming up the stairs, and must have realized how close to d**ng he was, because he jumped over these two guys and tumbled down the stairs and ran out of the run, and slammed the door shut. He locked his two men in with these guys, and it went bad. The guards didn’t d**, since they weren’t who they were after, but they got f**ked up bad.
Eventually the teams showed up and shot so many grenades into our run that the nurses couldn’t come into it for two weeks from the residue. The sergeant got fired for abandoning his guys, the two guys got beat half to d**th, and the rest of us choked on tear gas for two weeks.”
11. Unexpected.
“I was in jail for only a few days and was in a pod with about 30 other women.
On my first day, a fellow inmate announced that it was time for arts and crafts and taught the new girls how to make homemade tampons.
Not very sanitary but man was it entertaining. The things they came up with to pass the time, very creative.
Honestly not many dull moments. Just sh**ty food and unsanitary living conditions.”
How about you?
Have you ever spent any time behind bars?
If so, please talk to us in the comments. Thanks a lot!
