• Casual everyday rudeness like cutting in the sandwich line doesn’t often get more than nasty looks if you’re at the Safeway. On the inside, it can get you beaten into something that looks like a mixed-berry Jell-O salad. Prison can be tough on the pushy and ill-mannered; Mr. Everest and Señor Brigada can find a lot of common ground in agreeing that you’re an asshole and you need to be disciplined.
I am not equipped to be cellblock six’s own Emily Post, but hopefully these etiquette tips give you an idea of how to stay on the good side of the great minds behind the world’s fastest nickname generator before someone dubs you “Cheezy Puffs” and takes away your toothbrush privileges.
In way too many correctional institutions, the people you most don’t want to cross are the proud high school graduates wielding the Tasers and the clubs—your unfriendly neighborhood prison guards.
They are a uniformed minority doing a nasty job, doing their best to keep an orange-clad mass of pent-up muscle from rolling right over them and through the walls.
Fact is, though, they have the power to make their charges’ lives miserable nine days a week.
• Being friendly with the guards is a bad idea. Other inmates peg you as a suck-up, and so do the guards. Worse than a suck-up—they might think you’re a snitch. There are times when, in spite of the immovable “no snitching” code cemented in the foundation of almost any form of criminal community, snitching might be the right thing to do. No one in prison seems to agree with this, and even guards who see you this way might like you even less than they already do.
• A good baseline rule for being incarcerated is to not trust a single person, and this goes for the guards as well. Say a prayer to your preferred saint and throw those feel-good-isms you learned from the nuns about trusting your neighbor out the window. Because here, your neighbor might want to shiv you. As hard as this revelation can be on the first-time innocent awaiting trial—someone accustomed to trusting authority—here, the authority sees you as just another chunk of wood in the Jenga stack.
• In the metaphorical card game of prison life, don’t play against guards. They hold the ace of all aces: solitary confinement. They will slap it down like a Wild in a heated Uno stand-off, and you’ll be irreversibly screwed and completely alone. Unless you’re Dr. David Bowman (and, actually, he had HAL 9000 to keep him company), nothing good comes of complete isolation. Twenty-three hours a day in an itty-bitty room with just your own thoughts? No, thank you. I’m guessing you could fill a book of Mad Libs with more enjoyable forms of agony.
The best way to keep choosing your own wardrobe on a daily basis is to have a winning defense strategy. Every attorney is going to look for this first, above all else. We’ll look for alibis, look for proof of innocence. We’ll pick apart every piece of the prosecution’s case we can. We want to see you walking freely into your bank of choice to pick up a cashier’s check for our reasonable fees.
Due to cosmic imbalance or whatever causes shitty things to happen to good people, the things we want to happen don’t always come to pass. Let’s assume, hypothetically, that you get convicted. If the state mandates some kind of prison time, we’ll fight to get the least amount possible at the least restrictive kind of facility. We want you to be rehabilitating comfortably in a cell that looks like a freshman dorm room, mini-fridge and all. You can take some horticulture classes, maybe drop a new album from the recording studio—we’ll make your six months feel like a summer vacation in Ojai. Ideally.
But sometimes, you don’t have to go to jail at all! If there isn’t mandated time behind bars, we might explore some of the following:
• Diversion. We couldn’t convince the jury you were fully innocent? The prosecution’s case was too strong? I’m damn sure going to try another avenue, one called “Diversion Boulevard.” This is most often a young person’s penalty, or a first-time offender’s. What happens is the case is diverted from the prosecution moving forward. It just stops at a certain point. However, diversion doesn’t let anyone off the hook. You’d still be required to show some responsibility, under no less than the direct supervision of the police. Someone who gets into a diversion program might have to participate in one or more of the following:
• School. If the offender was arrested for some kind of drug crime, especially drug use, they might be put in an antidrug education program. The good folks who run the program hope it will illustrate where you went wrong and encourage you to never do it again. There are court-ordered classes for just about every misdemeanor-level crime you can imagine, and you can sometimes take them online through the power of Wi-Fi and Web cameras. So, this option isn’t so bad—you grab a six-pack, put your copy of “Wild Things” on mute in the background, and learn about anger management from the comfort of your own La-Z-Boy.
• Community Service. This is a pretty common diversion and it’s not bad. It feels so easy, you might be tempted to skip out on it—but you best follow through if you’re committed to a life away from Brutalist architecture. Community service can offer a pleasantly wide variety of activities, from a breezy day spearing trash by the roadside to visiting schools in an effort to ensure the kids don’t end up knee-deep in shit like you did. You’ll get some vitamin D, work your quads, become your neighborhood’s Dudley Do-Right—not too shabby!
• Court-Ordered Abstention. This is basically the court saying, “If you don’t do this particular thing,” (or) “If you avoid these people” for a specific period of time, you won’t have to go to jail. Say your kid hacked into his school’s grading software and gave himself a perfect four-point-oh. Instead of adding a jail sentence to the kid’s tenuous future, a judge might order that the kid doesn’t use computers with Internet connections unsupervised for the rest of his formative years.
• Restitution. Pay what you owe. If the thing that put you in court in the first place caused damages in any way, sometimes agreeing to restitution can keep you out of jail. Unfortunately, restitution often gets ordered along with jail time, too. If you are going to be required to pay it, you obviously want the no jail time restitution. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself behind bars with barely enough money in your jail account to buy beanie-weenies, and you’ll also owe a few thousand to whomever you wronged on the outside. Not to mention, you’ll probably owe attorney fees and court costs.
• Withheld adjudication. This option is different from diversion. It’s the court saying, “Let’s see what you do to fix some stuff before we pass sentence.” It isn’t necessarily available for a lot of things, but when it is, it’s a handy way to stay free to fight another day. Or to not fight, if that’s why you were arrested, Rocky. Withheld adjudication is exactly what it sounds like: the court will agree to withhold judgment. Then, if you successfully complete probation, remain a fully upstanding citizen who demonstrates no further inclination to commit a crime, a conviction is never entered on your record. It’s the closest you’re going to get to time-travel.
These options may not seem like a bowl of fresh Michigan cherries to you, but they are infinitely more easy to swallow than the version of events that has you spotting reps for a convicted murderer named Bubba who outweighs you by two hundred pounds. Perspective, my friend.