[00:00] thank you okay calm down as someone who obviously served prison um time what what do you want people to know about that experience especially as we're talking about people who are facing prison time now wow where do you even begin the the U.S uh prison system at every level at the federal level the state level and local levels is utterly and completely broken I did a piece just a week ago for Consortium news in which I went over
[00:32] um just as a a random sampling um uh 15 or 20 prison guards that have been arrested in the last two years about a third of them have been arrested for raping prisoners both female and male the other two-thirds have been arrested for smuggling into prisons cell phones and Drugs in many cases hard drugs that ended up killing prisoners that they were selling the drugs to uh the system is completely broken you know there's a book that was written
[01:02] by Dr Peter moskos of um John Jay College school of uh criminal justice it's called in defense of flogging which is kind of a tongue-in-cheek title but he makes a conclusion that I think is very very important in this book he says that at the federal level the Federal Bureau of Prisons really is nothing more than an employment agency for otherwise unemployable undereducated rural white men
[01:32] these are guys who couldn't make it in the military these are guys who were flunkies from the local police academy and just couldn't make a career out of law enforcement and in the United States our prisons are almost entirely in rural areas and they serve as the only sources of um of jobs and thus of income for a lot of rural white men well do you know what the qualifications are
[02:03] for a prison guard in America and I mean this quite literally you need a GED and no felony convictions and that's it it's no wonder that they turn to corruption and drugs and smuggling and rape and end up committing suicide and and beating people and abusing people and standing by while they commit suicide and again the the entire
[02:33] the entire system is broken it needs to be scrapped and rebuilt all right let me get still standing on my soapbox here until Ronald Reagan was elected president you could go to prison in the United States and uh with good behavior you could get out on federal parole there is no federal parole anymore thanks to the so-called prison reform Act of 1986. now you get five years or you get 10 years you're doing five years
[03:03] or ten years uh time also used to be where you could go to prison and learn a skill you could learn to be a plumber or an electrician or you could fix engines or you know whatever learn how to do whatever Landscaping well they don't do any of that anymore so let's say as an example you're doing five years or ten years on a drug charge they don't teach you how to read and write they don't uh they don't give you
[03:34] classes so you can pass the time they don't give you a skill that you can then adopt as a vocation when you get out they send you straight back to the neighborhood that you came from and you are not only no better off than you were when you went to prison but now you have PTSD and you're pissed off right and so what are you gonna do you're gonna do the only thing you know how to do and that is to sell drugs again when I was released
[04:06] um I was released first to a halfway house called Hope Village in Washington it is now defunct for good reason we used to call it abandon all hope Village there were 220 men in this uh in this facility there was one count it there was one job that was posted on the bulletin board and it was to be a dishwasher at Fuddruckers and there were 220 guys
[04:36] beating the hell out of each other to get that one dishwasher job because once you had the job you could then transfer to your home and then have permission to leave home to go to the dishwasher job broken with a capital B and then of course our uh it's also broken in terms of who is uh convicted in the first place because you had the honor of being sent to prison the only person sent to prison over the CIA
[05:06] torture program was not the person who not a person who tortured people but it was someone who exposed it yeah my first couple days in prison were were eye-opening uh as I would walk past the guards they would whisper traitor which I'm sure they had all been sort of prompted to do sure and you know how did they want me to react did they want me to like take a swing at them right so that they could send me to solitary I the first couple times I just
[05:37] kind of chuckled like whatever dope um and then after that I just ignored them until they stopped doing it um but yeah you're right you know there there were a lot of things that I had to learn very quickly in prison number one was that it's like walking into 1950s America in that literally everything is divided along racial lines everything um there are blacks whites and Hispanics and if you don't fit neatly into one of those categories then you better squeeze yourself into one of those categories
[06:08] where is it where do the Greek Americans go yeah I sat with the Italians which were an extension of the the whites which really were the Aryans so um what you have to do on your very first day is you have to show your paperwork which colloquially means you have to prove that you're not a pedophile so I showed my paperwork I'm not in on a child sex charge so I was allowed to sit with the Aryans and the Aryan section in the cafeteria was divided between honest
[06:39] to God Nazis and then what were called good guys that is white guys um who are not pedophiles next to them were the Italians the Italians of course all sat together and my second year in prison I was invited to sit with the Italians so I moved over there and I mean Italians named Gambino banano Lucchesi Genovese you get the idea and then there was a table of um Native Americans
[07:10] and then on the white side all the other tables were pedophiles and rats the rats had to sit with pedophiles the other half of the cafeteria was all black and whites couldn't sit over there and blacks couldn't sit on the white side well in the TV room the day room I was one of the people who chose to ignore uh those those racial uh divisions they just never made sense to me and so um I was lucky not realizing it at the
[07:40] time I was lucky in the very beginning of my my prison sentence that I was in a cell with both um uh black guys and Mexican guys and when I showed that I wasn't a rat and I wasn't a pedophile and I was educated so I'm happy to help you uh write your appeal which you're gonna lose anyway but I'm happy to help you write it then I got the thumbs up from all the different racial groups and everything was cool wow
[08:10] wow that's insane it was it was hard wow and you were there two years three years yeah 23 months so just under just barely under two years