June 24

Jail politics. I’m learning about all the intricacies of jail and how people get along. At first the idea of “politics” seemed silly to me, and it still kind of does at least in county jail where we are all working off time on our sentence. If you refuse to work your time will be served at 75% rather than 50%. So no one wants to get rolled out (kicked out).

It works like this: you have 4 cars. Cars are the races/groups to which each person belongs. Woods (whites), homies (mexican american), Paisanos (mexicans), and asians, brothers, and others roll together. The politics maintain order, for instance, if somebody in the wood car fucks up in the kitchen and gets out double taken away he is disciplined among the whites. That is for the peace as much as discipline really.

Every race lost their privilege as well and if we let it slide it’s a disrespect to them. The problems happen when because of the fuck-up in the kitchen the cubes get tossed at the house… fuck I’m using the jail slang, lol, it’s a different culture and you have to adapt. Anyway, this happened the other day and there was a disagreement between the homies and woods as to what should happen. The wood had already been disciplined in the kitchen but the homies wanted that to happen again after the cube was tossed, eventually punishing him twice for the same crime. This is where I got interested. There was a tense two hour period where we were about to fight (and woods are greatly outnumbered) but no one wants to change their release date so that’s not really going to happen. That’s why it’s strange in workers. And this is why politics are strange to me. There are clear ways to fix it such as having the reps meet and discuss what their expectations are; and something should be done about disciplining prisoners after the cops harass them but these folks aren’t so open minded. Lol, go figure. Anyway, I just saw someone put a chair down in the pathway where the cops walk and I gotta tell them to move before our day room gets shut down.