Prison Life (A small snapshot of a Modern Prison) by Geo (#3)
Drugs are all over the place. That’s the main reason guys check in, asking for protection. K-2 or “Touchie” as it’s called, is the most common drug on the compound. A gram sells for about fifty dollars, and contains about twenty-to-twenty five dollar sacks. A five dollar sack is just enough to stretch across a rolling paper, what we used to call a pin joint. But K-2 makers are selling such potent stuff that one sack will get two people tremendously high. Some “twack-out” meaning they seize up or start behaving in very bizarre ways; some scream all the way to an isolation cell. K-2 is supposedly a synthetic THC but they add stuff to it much more potent than THC ever was, and highly addictive chemicals to get you addicted to the stuff. Prisoners twacked-out everyday on every compound in the State. In the dorms, everyone is getting high on the stuff.
I admit, I even used K-2 for a while, and then I quit once I figured out that it was poison. I also quit for Spiritual reasons, but that was tied to its poisonous nature. Its evil and destroys whatever it touches.
If you are reading this, and you smoke K-2, let me tell you a story about a roach. When I smoked I used to save my roaches. One day I smoked with a friend and put the roach in my sock, then forgot about it. That night I peeled my sock off preparing to shower and I saw the roach stuck to my skin, I took it off, and noticed that where it had been stuck, my skin was bright red. Touching it, it was tender and stung. Over the next two days that spot abscessed and turned into a sore. It took two weeks to heal and left a scar. That’s what you are inhaling into your lungs. Stop.
When the Florida Department of Corrections took tobacco out of the Canteen in 2009 it opened the door to corruption, because of the black market it created. A two dollar pack of cigarettes goes for fifty on most compounds, and individual cigarettes, called Cadillac’s, sell for eight to ten dollars in Canteen items. Guys will cut a Cadillac into five pieces, and each piece becomes a cigarette rolled in some kind of thin paper.
All this means is there is a lot of opportunity for the hustling a dollar in Prison. A lot of guys get no money on their Canteen accounts at all, and have to “Live off the land”, this is called hustling, and in Prison there are a thousand hustles. Gambling is one arena where many get their hustle on. You have several “Ticket” men on the compound who put out pick tickets, for example, using the NFL games, he will put out a ticket listing 12 or so games. Each game will have the point spread as close to Las Vegas as possible, and if you can pick four winners from the list, you win 12 to 1 odds. Put up a dollar to win twelve. But if you get one wrong, your ticket is dead. Ticket men need ticket writers, who collect the money (Canteen items), take the bets, and give receipts. Writers keep a quarter of every dollar they collect. A good writer will make $50-$75 a week in Canteen for himself. There are also poker games in just about every dorm or on the Rec Yard. Whoever is running a game, being the “Houseman”, holding the bank, issuing chips and supervising the deal, cuts ten percent of every pot. I used to be a poker head, playing or putting my own game down every day. I gave up gambling when I saw a man brutally stabbed to death over a few dollars worth of chips. In the dorms, other guys will run square boards and pools on a specific games scores or who picks the most winners out of the weeks lineup. Gambling provides a hustle for a lot of guys who would otherwise have nothing. Of course, any form of gambling is against the rules. But in any compound, what isn’t against the rules?
Until next time…
Lynie Tru Vinyard with Bring In Light’s Inmate Art, Stories and Issues
https://www.gofundme.com/bringinlight
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