Hi WS'ers,
I haven't posted in years but this situation has drawn me in. In 2001 I got married in Clinton Correctional Facility. I married my childhood sweetheart (turned out to be a mistake, but that's neither here nor there and one of many mistakes I have made along the way! :facepalm: ) Anyway, in the 10 years that I was visiting him in prisons all over NYS I learned a whole lot.
1. Inmates with good behavior get special privileges. This can be anything from time watching TV while they are "working" their assigned job to receiving contraband. While you could still smoke inside the prison, there was a CO that gave certain inmates cigarettes.
2. Some CO's will take a liking to a certain inmate and treat them like a regular person and not just an inmate. My husband was asked by CO to work fast at a certain job so that the CO could leave early that day. If my husband finished the job, he would go back to his cell, allowing the CO to leave because he didn't have to continue to supervise my husband. My husband finished up early and the next day, the CO brought him a plate of food. The CO's wife cooked deer for dinner the night before and sent the CO with a plate for my husband to thank him for getting the job done quickly.
3. Contraband, especially drugs run rampant even with security procedures in place. I met several women over the years that brought drugs on visits to give to their husbands or boyfriends to sell or use.
4. Some CO's just look at it as a job to do and go home. They don't go above and beyond. I met a CO on a visit in an upstate NY prison who told a room full of visitor's that he really doesn't care what we did on visits. His exact words were "I sit back and relax while you are on your visit and make my $55,000 a year, I'm not stressing out over it."
5. When I was visiting Clinton Correctional Facility, there were always guards standing at attention with guns, watching from those watch towers on top of the outside wall. From what I read, those towers are no longer manned 24/7 like they used to be.
People tend to think of max security prison as what it was meant to be instead of what it's become. Sweat and Matt were there for years. They were model prisoners to make it to the honor block. They were probably polite, friendly, helpful and well mannered towards the CO's and after years they probably weren't paid too much attention or looked at as a threat any longer.
While my husband was in max prisons he became cool with many CO's. They would crack jokes with him, talk about sports, wives, etc. My husband was a night porter and at night he would get his work done and the CO he worked with during those hours would unlock and let him go into an official room that had a TV with cable. He would grab a snack and watch movies for the rest of the night.
Once he was moved to medium security and minimum security prisons, it was even more lax. He wasn't in a cell anymore. He was in an open dorm (similar to OITNB) he had a hot plate and access to a microwave and cooking utensils. He was able to call me whenever he wanted to and he was even made the administrator of some programs where he taught other inmates. Being a model prisoner leads to many, many privileges in prison.
Inmates on visits wear state green pants and whatever solid colored shirts they want to as long as they are not blue, black, orange or gray. They are also allowed to wear sweat pants and other clothing in the jail. My husband used to ask for Old Navy sweatpants. They can also wear sneakers without an air bubble and boots without a metal plate in the sole and no steel toes.
