Little Rules (#35)

As one begins to become more acclimated to prison one starts to pick up on more of the subtle rules. There are rules as innocuous as how to make one’s bed. The prison handbook says your bed has to be made by 8 am. The dorm orderly, an inmate, determines what the correctly made bad should look like. The reason an inmate determines this is based on the weekly inspection. Either our dorm, or the dorm orderly, looks better to the guards if all the beds are made the same way. The guards who inspect the beds call this look “clean.” I was not making my bed correctly and I was subtly told to fix that. I wasn’t told how to make my bed “correctly” but I figured I should make it look like everyone else’s bed. For those who are curious to know how the prison bed should be made, you basically take the blanket that substitutes for a comforter and stuff it in the metal frame. The blanket then wraps around your mattress nice and snug with no ends hanging out. I think this is how they make beds in the military, but I wouldn’t know. Actually, if you go to a hotel an take the comforter off, that is what the prison bed would look like, except much smaller.

Another little rule I discovered was where to take a shower. I know, you think this would be obvious. But there are rules for this simple task as well just about everything we do. Our shower room has 8 shower stalls on each side. The stalls are lined up perfectly across from each other. If you stand with the water hitting your back, you would be looking directly into the stall across from you. We do have chest high doors, but I’m 5’6”, so the door isn’t higher than my chest than for most. Needless to say, it’s very annoying when someone is in a shower stall directly across from you. To avoid this, the rule is to take showers only on one side. Typically, new guys learn this in two ways, either by observation, like I did, or from various belligerent comments like, “Hey pervert, why are you watching me take a shower.”

There are a lot of rules about personal hygiene. The whole process of washing one’s clothes has rules. Keeping one’s cubicle clean has a set of guidelines. I typically don’t mop my cubicle as much as some other guys, but as a generic rule you should mop at least once a week.

The subtle little rules aren’t limited to hygiene. One good rule to follow is “don’t be the first person out of the door and the last person back in.” Obviously, someone has to be first, and someone has to be last. But, you don’t have to be that someone, or at least regularly. The guys know the system. Most of us don’t want to know when the yard is open because we are on a first name basis with the guard. The majority of inmates, if they want to avoid trouble, should wait until someone else goes out and get back to the dorm before a guard notices that you are last.

Another dorm rule that is of extreme importance is to never change the television channel. Again, leave this for the guys who have been around a while. Oddly, you can sit in someone’s chair (I wrote about how you get assigned chairs in an earlier blog), at least at our camp, anyway, unless they want to use it. Every inmate gets a chair. These are usually in your cube. The tv rooms have no chairs. If you want to watch tv, you have to bring your chair. The chairs are marked with your bunk assignment. Lots of guys leave their chairs in the tv rooms for several days. So, if a chair is empty, you can use it. However, don’t try putting your chair in a reserved tv room during movie night. That will get you in trouble just like changing the channel will. Strangely, with this fascination with tv rules, one would think that talking during a movie or tv show would be taboo. It’s not. I don’t get that one.

Most of these little rules seem petty, and they are. But, the bigger rule that encompasses all of these petty rules is that the little things matter. I’ve mentioned this a few times, and I think it’s because it’s a lesson I didn’t learn that got me here, and once I got here, I learned that people watch how you respond to the little things. Following even the most ridiculous of rules still shows what kind of person you are and how other inmates view you. One of the things the inmates here hate the most (besides a rat) is an inmate who thinks he is above the system, because he is better than the other inmates, or doesn’t believe that he is a criminal. By not following the simple, but oftentimes, petty and silly rules, the inmate portrays a self-righteous attitude that such pettiness does not apply to him. Such an inmate doesn’t get too many friends.

So, the little things matter in life and in prison. The little rules I discussed are handy for interpersonal relationships with other inmates. There are other rules that the institution places on us that are important to follow too. I’ll discuss these in the next installment.

Jeff