On the way to work last Tuesday, I asked a guy from my unit what we were having for lunch. A guy behind me said, “You must be new to the BOP (Bureau of Prisons). Everyone knows we have chicken patties on Tuesday.” After looking into it, I learned something about how food is served to us:
1) First, the lunch menus are as follows:
Monday – Wild Card – anything goes
Tuesday – chicken patties
Wednesday – hamburgers
Thursday – fried/baked chicken halves or quarters
Friday – fish
2) Dinners are on a 5-week schedule. When done with Week 1, you roll to Week 2, and you keep rolling until you are done with Week 5 and then you start back on Week 1. This is how it is done throughout the entire BOP system. I cannot say that they stick to it religiously as there are hiccups that occur from time to time, but in general, that is how it works.
3) As you may have already read, I started working at Unicor two weeks ago. Several others started working the same day as me. On the third day, one of the new guys said, “I am only working here for tickets and deuce.” Since I assume you are not fluent in prison lingo, this basically means he will use his 23-46 cents per hour pay (paid monthly) to gamble and do drugs.
a) Tickets are run by a bookie on basketball games during the winter. The bookie gets his numbers from someone on the outside, creates the sheets with the spreads and has sub-bookies under him who run each unit. Unlike the futures market, the bookie is the one taking the opposing bet, so he has to make sure the spreads work in his favor – at least in the long run. All bets are settled with books of 25 stamps worth about $10. Flats of stamps like you get at the post office would have a value of$8. The bookie collects the stamps up front and then pays back the winnings so that he doesn’t have any credit risk. I don’t gamble and knew very little about this “industry,” but started asking around and learning about it after I heard the “tickets & deuce” statement. Getting information about something like this is difficult, but I finally got it all put together after asking around for about a week.
b) Deuce is a drug that is sprayed on paper and then smoked in prison. I don’t know what is in it, but it sounds like it has wasp spray, other household chemicals, maybe some TCH and who knows what else blended in with it. When people smoke it, they get high and can get “stuck,” which means they literally freeze in place and don’t move for a period of time between 30 seconds and several minutes. They may even lean against a wall during this time period. A couple weeks ago, a guy got stuck on the stairs – it looked like he was a kid who was playing freeze tag. About a week ago, a big deucehead finally got sent to the SHU for consistently getting caught smoking it. I heard yesterday that he supposedly got some in the SHU and swallowed it, causing him to have a huge overdose and it took several cops and about 5 hours for him to come off his high. Who knows if the last statement is correct – there are lots of stories & outright lies in prison — that is just what heard.
4) Speaking of drugs,when I was leaving the chow hall last night, I heard a well-known deucehead talking to himself. I thought he was a bit out of it until I got closer and heard him saying “Sarboxin for sale. Sarboxin for sale.” I then realized that he was advertising that he had a different drug (I think Sarboxin is something like methadone. Hard to say since I don’t have access to Google in prison) for sale.
5) Speaking of lies, some of them are so prevalent it is beyond laughable. There is one guy I know and I am going to list out his stories/lies — all heard first-hand from him & about him alone:
a) He was in Marine Force Recon – the Marine’s version of Special Forces. That is how he hurt his hip & arm. For reference purposes, he wears an arm brace and carries a cane – but only when walking outside the unit where the CO’s can see him. Otherwise, he somehow magically doesn’t need the cane or arm brace.
b) He hurt his leg & arm falling out of bed (obviously this story was told at a different time than the above statement).
c) When he was younger, he played in the Junior Augusta National Golf championship.
d) He has his PhD & Doctorate.
e) He recently sold a warehouse in Nevada for $1 billion dollars (not a million, but a billion).
f) He has lied about his age so much, no one really knows how old he is – somewhere between 45 & 60.
His one main buddy, who also lies, told me that he shot his first deer when he was 12. As he stepped across a small ditch, he fell and dropped his gun & it went off. When he got up, his gun had shot a deer. Funny that the deer did not hear him coming or that I know lots of good hunters/shooters who miss when taking good shots while his just magically shot a deer when he dropped his gun. There are lots of other lying stories, but you get the idea.
The important lesson here is that when you are in prison, you need to surround yourself with positive people who don’t have bad vices like drugs or gambling and are focused on improving their lives in prison to be ready for the future – not gamblers or druggies focused on their next hit or high. I am fortunate that I have some friends like that here & none of my cellmates fall into this category.
