I have been in prison a little over a month and here are my thoughts thus far:
1) I have dropped from 195 to 186 pounds. This is healthy for me as I am replacing fat around my waist with muscle in my arms, chest and stomach area – mostly by doing ~50 push-ups per day and ~10 pull-ups/day. It is hard to find a clean place where I feel comfortable doing sit-ups.
2) It is interesting to know that overweight prisoners receive Ozempic shots on Tuesdays. I met one individual who lost 90 pounds in four months. My cellmate has lost 40 pounds thus far. Still, there are some prisoners who do not receive Ozempic and are very overweight. I am assuming they are buying lots of chips and soda from commissary as I think it would be difficult to get fat on the food provided by the chow hall, which I assume has been designed and approved to be properly balanced for the average prisoner’s needs.
3) Since I arrived on January 3, I have spent $150 on TruLinks. These are like points that you use for emails, phone calls and movies/music that you can download onto a small tablet. Of this total, about $15 of it was used to watch movies when I would wake up at 2 or 3 am and could not get back to sleep. The remaining $135 was used primarily for emails (which you pay $0.05/minute for) and about $1/day for phone calls.
Unfortunately, I did not properly calculate the amount that I could allocate to phone calls and used up my limit on February 6th the amount that should have taken me to February 16th. As a result, I cannot make any phone calls out until the 16th. I spent $375 for new tennis shoes, food & pharmacy from commissary. I am now fairly well stocked up with instant oatmeal, Poptarts (I treat myself if I hit certain daily goals), protein shake powder, ramen soups, crackers, salami, cheese, soap, toothpaste, cough drops and Aleve. I don’t anticipate needing more than about $100 or less/month going forward.
4) I no longer go to breakfast. About 90% of the time, they serve grits and I have now eaten more grits in one month than I probably ate in my whole life prior. I now just eat a packet of instant oatmeal prepared in my room. When you don’t get grits, you get fake Fruit Loops or Bran cereal. The fake Fruit Loops are still hard after 20 minutes soaking in milk. One guy broke a tooth on them about a week ago. It was ironic on the day that the USG outlawed colorful dyes in food that we had Fruit Loops (which contain that dye) for breakfast.
5) There are eight units in FMC Lexington. They are as follows:
Bluegrass – one of the largest units and the one that I am in. There are about 200 people in this unit.
Cardinal – the other largest unit that seems to get in a fair amount of trouble with shakedowns for drugs/contraband.
Antias
Veritas (RDAP),
Unity (DDRDAP – dual disability Residential Drug)
Commonwealth
Healthcare – transit area for surgery & where most wheelchair inmates are placed.
F4 – Basically this is the Hospice unit where people are waiting to die.
6) I am currently in a room with five sex offenders. The prison is unofficially segregated into three areas -White, Blacks & SO”s (commonly called ChoMos, which means Child Molesters). Because I am living in a unit with ChoMos, the leaders of the Whites came to visit me & said it was a bad look for me to be living with them and that I should move. The recommended destination for me was a large dormitory style room known as the bus-stop with approximately 15 people in it. They make a lot of noise at night there and there are several current drug-users there. My cellmates mostly read and two of them leave during the day to work at Unicor, so I have a quiet room where I can read & work. I intend to hold out for as long as possible to stay in the smaller room. I don’t feel like “jumping out of the fire and into the frying pan.”
7) When you are an early riser, you don’t get to turn on the lights in the room if 3-4 of the other guys are sleeping. Likewise, if you go to bed early, you don’t get to ask for the lights to be turned off until a majority of the people are trying to sleep. Fortunately, 5 of the 6 of us go to bed between 9:30 & 10:00, the latter of which is lights out.
8) With First Step Act (FSA) and Good Time Credits (GTC), I should be out in approximately two years. In essence, 1 month down and 23 to go. I am taking as many ACE (Adult Cooperative Education) & other programming classes as possible. I am signed up for 2 of the former and am on the list for seven of the latter. As long as you are on the list, you are getting FSA credits for early release, even if you have not yet taken the class.
9) I don’t know the exact number of books I have read & completed book reports on, but it is over 20. I think that 20 books per month is not too bad. At that rate, I will have completed almost 500 books by the time I get out. Whenever I go to the library, the librarian always notes that I am reading the classics and not just fiction word-trash from Ken Follett or Louis Lamour. I think that is a good approach. For ever 2 of the books I read on my list, I tend to add another classic book to my list.
10) I have effectively reached my goal of no longer cursing. This is a real challenge in prison and I may let a word slip out from time to time, but I am 95% of where I want to be in this regard.
11) I am up to about 60 words in Spanish and am signed up for a Spanish 2 class (ACE Class) that will start in 3-4 weeks. That is another goal of mine – to speak Spanish by the time I get out.
12) Here is a funny story – a couple days ago I was in the library. There was a guy in a wheelchair in the library toilet. There was a guy banging on the door who kept repeatedly saying, “Hurry up, I gotta go.” A moment later, I hear some water running and he was peeing in the mop bucket outside the bathroom door. Some guys were a little miffed by it. Being the “glass-is-half-full” type of guy I am, I said “Well at least he peed in the bucket & not on the floor.” When the bathroom door was opened a few seconds later, the guy took the bucket into the bathroom and dumped it into the toilet.
