There were two pieces of advice I received from former inmates when I was getting ready to report to prison.  I hadn’t spoken to anybody I knew personally, although my sister knew a guy who had spent a few years at the same facility I was due to surrender to and he’d told her it wasn’t as bad as a lot of other places.  Instead, I went to an orientation sponsored by the Pre-Trial Services office, which is the division of the Department of Justice which oversees anybody who has been indicted and not yet seen trial, or who has pled guilty or been convicted but not yet been incarcerated.  Some of the people under Pre-Trial’s supervision are flight risks, or violent, or still involved in criminal activities.  So not surprisingly, non-violent first-time offenders like myself who don’t appear to be a problem (who have been released under their own recognizance without posting any bail) are pretty much left on our own, reporting in by phone once a week.  When my Pre-Trial Officer mentioned a free orientation was offered every few months, I asked that he let me know when the next one was being held.   I didn’t know whether to expect Club Fed or something more like Oz or Shawshank Redemption, so I was anxious to hear from people who had been through the system already. 

The orientation included a film about the various Bureau of Prisons facilities, as well as an outline of the general rules (there are no conjugal visits, for example).  After the government people said what they wanted to, and answered a few questions, it was time for the star attractions: a male and a female who had both served sentences in the Federal system, and who were currently on probation.  The female spoke first.  She had started out in a very violent Medium Security facility, and eventually worked her way down to less-dangerous locations.  From how she described it, the female prisons were worse than the male ones in many ways.  She had seen plenty of fights, stabbings, rapes, and other horror stories.  She spent a bit too much of her time trying to explain how she’d been screwed by the government on her conviction, but I tuned that out.  I figured I’d hear enough of that kind of complaining once I started serving my time (surprisingly, there was less of that in prison than I imagined, but that’s another story). 

The man spoke last, and for him prison didn’t sound all that terrible.  He gained lots of weight (having been a crystal meth addict before he was arrested) and then lost most of it.  He learned to appreciate reading.  He tried to live peacefully, kept mainly to himself, and made it through his four years without too much turmoil.  He did mention that his wife had left him, as many of them do, and warned that the most dangerous time for the “Dear John” letters to arrive was about six months before an inmate was to be released.  That’s when the reality of the person coming back finally hits home, and the wives or girlfriends start to remember what life was like before.  Often in included drugs, alcohol, abuse, infidelity, lies, and seedy friends and cohorts.  Faced with the choice of moving on with their own lives, or the possibility of falling right back into the old nightmare, at six months to go a lot of them get the courage to finally wash their hands of the whole affair and look to the future.

Anyway, he rambled on about his relationship problems, and about the struggles of seeing his children now as often as he would like to.  But then he stopped, and gave the four or five of us in attendance what he said were the two most important pieces if advice for making it through a prison sentence.  First: mind your own business.  Don’t ask people about what they are doing, what they are involved in, what scams and hustles they are running, and even if you happen to see something or hear something, pretend you didn’t.  (He added a corollary to that advice, which was not to get involved in any gambling in prison, because the risks were great and the rewards were both small and unreliable).  More important, he said, was his second piece of advice.  Speaking from experience, he said this was without question the most crucial piece of advice anybody entering the Federal prison system could hear, learn, and understand.  The advice was simply this:

Don’t get sick.

It seemed silly to me at the time, especially since I couldn’t really see a way to avoid getting sick.  You could try to eat healthy, exercise, dress warmly in the winter, and keep as far away from other sick people as possible.  Besides that, what could you do?  And anyway, if you did get sick, the prison system would have to take care of you, free of charge.  Wouldn’t they?

As it turned out, he was wrong to suggest “don’t get sick” was a piece of advice.  Instead, he should have told us to use it as a mantra, day after day.  Or, maybe, as a prayer three times a day: “Please, please, please, don’t let me get sick in here.”

(To be continued...watch for Part 2 in the next few days)