This past weekend, a guy on our unit in a single-man room, took the time to strip out all the old floor tiles in his room and replaced them with two different colors of tiles in a checkerboard pattern. It took him nearly all day to do it. There are parts of me that understand why you would take the time do try to improve the looks & quality of your room, but parts of me wonder if you have started to become institutionalized when you are spending your own time & money to improve a room that does not belong to you, you can be moved from at any time and that you could have spent that time bettering yourself with exercise, self-improvement, education, etc. instead of constantly engaging in some type of prison hustle.
On a slightly connected note, there is another individual getting out in the next few days. He has been in & out of prison (mostly in) for the past twenty years. He acts like he is happy to go home, but I am quite certain that he liked being in prison — free food that he doesn’t have to cook, laundry done once a week, free TV, lay in bed half the day reading anime or comic books, etc. I question whether prison is the appropriate punishment for someone like this. If you are giving something to them that they want & like, is it really a punishment?
I can say with 100% certainty that I do not want to be in prison and I use every waking hour (when I am not at work) to read books (typically they are non-fiction, classics or historical) or exercise, trying to become a healthier, better educated and a better version of myself than when I came to prison.
