one time i bought this bottle of 151 rum and woke up the next day in jail. stupid 151 rum.

oooh. ouch. I've had some of that. aiaiaiii.

No, but I did have a friend spend over a year in jail while I got to be the "friend on the outside," keeping him supplied with books, managing financial stuff, accepting all those collect phone calls, etc etc. It was almost a full time job.

I go to prison sometimes to talk to inmates as part of my job. Most are just regular guys. Many are aging/frail. Some are pathetic. Lots and lots of psychiatric disabilities and learning disabilities and all kinds of other disabilities.

Hey, which prison, Claudia_SF? I go to Quentin once a week to tutor algebra.

I only did community service, riding on the van with the bars on the windows to weed with a scythe at the side of the freeway with the assault and battery crowd. We also cleaned out city buses. That was a fun way to spend my spring break. Yep, I was once quite the shoplifter, ethical rationalizations, and all. I never took from mom and pops places, etc. But my car was full of merch for me and my friends, and I sold it at yard sales, unabashed. When I got caught, at Robinsons-May, I got in my car and drove off even though the security guard was actually grabbing at me. Unfortunately, she went to high school with me, looked me up, and my mother got a phone call from the police that night while I was out partying in stolen socks.

In the end, you could say I profited from the whole era in dollar terms, but it was how I finally hit bottom, and addressing the anxiety that drove me to such compulsions was painful, my biggest life setback, and a shameful, guilty secret for this overachiever that made sure I don't reflect fondly on my stealer days.

I'm the only person in my immediate family (parents, siblings, husband) who hasn't been in jail. Except for my father, each person was in only for a night or two. Dear ol' dad was in for non-payment of child support. He should still be there.

Many of my closest friends have been (for a night). They are all productive members of society and the violations were minor.

I have not been, but I did once spend three nights in the kind of hospital that does the strip search and the total lock down and no contact and rotating roomies of various stripes and the community meals and it was very, very unpleasant and frightening, and I have no wish to go back. And while there were some scary people in there (and co-ed! WTF!), there were some very nice folks too. Of both genders. But still, WTF?

I got an hour in a drunk tank once, with a drunk inclusive.

I wasn't drunk, though, I just had some unfinished paperwork with my license, which is not a good time to breeze past a state patrolman by 7 mph over the limit. As it turned out.

Yep, for a couple of hours a few years back. We had a massive snowstorm on New Year's Eve and I was stuck at a friend's apartment for two days while Evanston dug itself out. Driving home on Jan. 2, exhausted and stinky from being holed up in party clothes, eating cold pizza, and shoveling in borrowed boots, a cop pulled me over plates that had expired on Jan. 1. Turns out my license had expired in November and I hadn't noticed, so I got cuffed and stuffed. Spent all of three hours in a holding room until my friends picked me up.

Of course, they impounded my truck, which had all the A/V equipment I'd brought to the party, including a $4,000 projector I'd borrowed from work. When I picked up the truck from the impound yard, all of it was gone. Good times.

Well, I'm not too comfortable talking about it, but I will say it was easily one of the most painful, regrettable, frustrating 20 hours of my life. One thing I hate about it is that I won't be given the benefit of the doubt anymore. So there's that deep down constant fear not to rock the boat. And the cops lied - they said I did horrible horrible things I didn't do that made the judge look at me sideways and throw me back in instead of letting me out on my own recognizance, they said there were witnesses that didn't exist, and they held me extra hours in the wee hours of the morning just to get some overtime. And because of the whole thing, I took a good friend with me and cost him thousands of dollars, which I still feel terrible about. Fortunately, we are still good friends.

But it really changed me. I starting taking things more seriously, and generally learned to respect people more and appreciate the things I have - mainly my family and friends. I'm pretty certain I wouldn't have proposed to my wife without this experience. And I have a scar that I have to look at every day to remind of that bad place I was in. In the end, though, I suppose I should be thankful that it wasn't worse. I'm sure, given America's system, it could have been.

Not yet.
I'll get back to you though.

I did a month on a possession charge. Evidently, pot is illegal because it is bad, and pot is bad because it is illegal. Go figure.

Jail's no fun.

But they have Jell-O.

And if you get on the road crew, you get to pick up trash on the roadside in the sunshine and fresh air. And you can smoke cigarettes. Plum job. Plus, if you make the work crew, you get moved to a pod that isn't locked down at night, so you can sit in the common area and watch TV. The hacks turn the TV volume all the way up at night, just because they can, so you might as well watch it -- you sure aren't getting any sleep.

Most of the guys in there were either short-timers like me or were awaiting transfer to prison. In the month I was in, I saw one guy stabbed (barely -- more like "nicked"), two guys jumped and beat up, and I read more Tom Clancy than I ever thought possible. I saw a guy freaking out on some intoxicant ram his head into a wall until he left a bloody spot and knocked himself out. That was in booking -- he hadn't even made it into real jail yet.

I never felt threatened, because I'm not big enough to be a threat but not small enough to be an easy target.

Having done it, I can honestly say I never, ever want to go back. But I also learned that I could handle it, so that's something.

I will say, danf, that it really depresses me how often the commenters on my local newspaper's website to crime stories is, "gee, we should punish people like this more". Many of them have already been extensively "punished". Duh, it's not working.

On the bright side, my county has a drug court (where you get to try to reform yourself with the threat of jail/prison) and is expanding its ankle bracelet program. Wisconsin was one of the first states to have a work release law -- here, the "Huber law", after the legislator who proposed it -- and after a century is starting to wind it down in favor of home detention.

I was arrested for riding my bike through a public park past curfew.

Really.

I know...

-t, you are now officially my hero.

I got a speeding ticket on my bike once. Closest I ever got to jail was back in the mists of prehistory when my young and heedless tribe of miscreant gothy friends beat the tar out of some redneck assmonkeys one night after bar close... in our defence, the idiots totally provoked it (long story, but seriously we didn't do squat to them beyond look weird).

Word: do not, EVER, piss off a carload of gay goth guys and their skinny punker fag-hags. I mean for starters, none of us was gonna even _try_ to fight fair.

Lock up is not jail and jail is not prison.

Yeah, I spent a night and a day in the local Watchhouse once (not really jail or prison, I know, but the best I can do). The mother-of-my-eldest-child decided that she was tired of me and wanted to get with some guy who lived two doors down. Due perhaps to her constant state of intoxication, she decided the best way to make the point that she didn't want me around clear was to call the cops and tell them I had hit her. Quite rightly, they came around to see what was going on and informed me that I had an overdue fine for late payment of taxes, so I was to be incarcerated until I either paid the fine (Saturday night - pre-ATM days) or did my 28 days. My mother managed to scrape together the money for the fine and I got out late Sunday.

In my darkest thoughts for some time, I took some grim satisfaction in knowing that said guy ended up beating the crap out of her several times. I'm now ashamed of those thoughts, but couldn't shake them for a while.

While there was nothing particularly bad about the experience itself, the feeling of despair I felt at that time was nothing short of awful. I just felt so completely lost and the lack of any kind of control over anything happening to me was devastating. I can see why people commit suicide rather than face long-term incarceration.

One of the scariest moments of my life was when I started to protest my innocence to the cops at my front door and one of them unsnapped his gun holster. Such a small gesture to send such horrible thoughts through my mind all at once.