So you end up behind bars, you, the reasonable
man, the cool operator, a person who doesn’t need to solve problems with his fists. You’re an intelligent being, not an animal. You’re a lover, not a thug. But here’s your prison predicament Mr. Moderate,
your penitentiary problem, the confinement Catch 22. You have to fight in this place. If you let people push you around, you’re
gonna get picked on, you might end up a punk. Don’t fight, you’ll have problems, and
fight, you’ll have problems, too. You can’t win, and that’s prison. This is what you tell the staff after you
hit a guy back. They didn’t care about this prison paradox. You got time in solitary. After the next time you defended yourself
you lost your prison job, and after your next scuffle you were charged with assault. Welcome to the vicious cycle of the American
prison system. Let’s face it, in the end everyone in prison
is a loser, a punk to the system. You can try and beat that system, but it will
break you in the end. A lot of people doing hard time at some point
realize this and they try to settle down, do the time, not let the time do them. But if you’ve seen the podcasts, read the
books, watched the documentaries, you’ll know that even the most intelligent and calmest
types will tell you that in prison you might have to let that Homo Sapien rage show at
some point. Inside those prison walls that reptilian part
of the brain might have to override your fleshy reasoning machine now and again. We are not saying you can’t do your time
and stay out of trouble. We are not saying that you will definitely
have to fight. But we are saying that it’s a very real
possibility. And as we said, if you don’t fight back,
other predators will see this as a weakness. They might later try and exploit you. That’s why you’ll hear a lot of former
prisoners saying just hit back, lose your mind a bit, show them that even if they beat
the hell out of you, they’ll have to work for it and get hurt doing so. Those predators will think twice about trying
to take advantage of you after that. You don’t have to be a jujitsu black belt
or trained boxer to smack someone in the face, to gouge their eyes. We all have some of that violent DNA. Before we were social animals, we were warriors,
each of and every one of us. Ask any Neanderthal. Oh you can’t, we killed them all. With early humans it was fight or die. And in some respects the prison system brings
out the early human in people, the tribal thug, the atavistic ape man. Fight or die, like the bad old days. You can choose to be separated from other
prisoners, but the isolation will hurt after a while. You can choose not to fight back as we said,
and you will get exploited for your weakness, just like the weak member of a tribe. The prison system WILL make an animal out
of you. Don’t you ever forget that. The best thing is to not be there in the first
place, but hey, some folks have ended up on the inside for not paying parking tickets,
or deciding to eat a psychedelic mushroom and be at one with nature. As we said, once inside those walls you might
be presented with the prison Catch 22. Fight and get in trouble and don’t fight
and get in trouble. Even if you didn’t start it you can’t
tell the staff the truth because prisoners take a dim view of informers, rats or snitches
are about as popular as chomos. You keep quiet, and you get time in solitary,
or at least receive some kind of punishment such as not being able to get things from
the prison store, the commissary. As we said, fight again and get in more trouble
even if it wasn’t you that started it. Really hurt a guy that might want to even
kill you and find your small sentence turning into a big one. The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote a play
called “No Exit” with the common catchphrase from that being “Hell is other People”,
and prison is about as close to this as is possible in this world. You can go inside a good man and end up metamorphosizing
into a person you never knew existed. The authorities know you are stuck in this
paradox where you are told to be good and behave yet the system itself denies you the
possibility of doing this, but they either don’t care or can’t do anything about
it. Rules are rules, even when they make no sense. Prison is irrational. Those words should be written above every
prison entrance. So, there you are. This is what you can expect inside. We don’t want to sound hyperbolic and say
prison will present you with fights every day. Some people do indeed manage to keep their
head down. Some prisons are less violent than others. But in the USA and many other countries, violence
is a part of prison life. Ok, so let’s now take you through a fight. Here’s the scene. You’ve not been inside long and some guy
pushes you out of the queue in the canteen. You push yourself back in. You need to eat. He then just lashes out. You have to defend this, otherwise you’ll
be seriously injured. What he doesn’t know is that you can box. You catch him right on the chin and knock
him clean out. You get back in the queue, but the guards
are now on you. We should say that in some U.S. prisons you
might just be expected to fight right away to see what you are made of. You might hear prisoners calling this a heart
check. So you’ve gotten into this fight, what now? If the guards didn’t get there or somehow
didn’t see it the guy might get picked up and be asked if he wants to go again. You might even get jumped by his friends. You might not have heard the end of it. But let’s just say you’ve been seen by
the staff. They are likely going to surround you, tell
the others to stand back, tell you to get on your knees and put your hands behind your
head. Usually people don’t get just knocked out
and so you might have been pounding this guy for like 30 seconds or a minute. If you don’t do what the prison officer
says you might get pepper spray in your eyes, which if you’ve ever experienced that you’ll
know is rather unpleasant to say the least. Most prison too have something called an emergency
response unit, too. Pepper spray or not, you are bleeding and
he is in a terrible state. You are now going to be escorted to the prison
hospital and a nurse is going to clean you up. You’ll be in restraints of course. Something one former officer also wrote online
is that it’s not just the prisoners taking notes on how well you fight, how your heart
stands up, but officers will be watching new officers and prisoners will also be seeing
how an officer deals with two powerful, or at least enraged, men. A fight inside means much more than a fight
on the outside. Ok, so you have broken prison rules. You can’t do this and not get punished in
some way, or at least have to explain yourself. We must say here that how you’ll be punished
depends on a few things. Did cameras show that you certainly didn’t
start the fight? As you know, you shouldn’t inform on the
other guy, so you can’t give all the details. As senseless as that may be, especially given
you were defending yourself, it’s the inmate code. That code wasn’t written by sensible men. Something else you must understand is the
extent of damage you have caused. If you have knocked out three of this guy’s
teeth; headbutted him so hard his nose shattered, and punched him with such ferocity you split
his cheek and it had to be sown up, well, that’s a crime on the inside as it is on
the outside. You can be charged with assault. You might get many more years. Your also now a dangerous man, with fists
like weapons. You might need to be separated from the prison
population either because you are a danger to others or that dude’s buddies are planning
to cut your throat. The staff are going to weigh all this up. Some staff in prisons have also been known
to purposefully create Gladiator environments either for entertainment or they want someone
dead. We don’t think this happens often. You are going to be in solitary confinement
while the prison staff are working out why this violence happened. Was it premeditated, was it a gang attack
on you, or was it just expressive and unplanned? If you’ve been set on by a gang in a premeditated
attack the officers are going to have to make sure that doesn’t happen again. But let’s say it was what it was, just a
reaction to an action in that queue. First of all, you might have to fight this
guy again behind closed doors. Prisoners also know blind spots where fights
take place. But you’re still in solitary so you can
forget about that for a while. If that guy was in a gang, which is highly
likely, he might get punished for getting whooped or you might have to tackle someone
else from that gang at some point, or join it, or do something else. At some point soon, you’ll be told what
offense you have committed and maybe a likely outcome. In the UK it’s written that within 48 hours
this happens. By the way, while you are in solitary that
other guy is in the prison hospital. You are uninjured. Let’s say you’ve beaten this man within
an inch of his life. That’s serious, and the prison might be
put into lockdown. One process you’ll have to go through is
called an adjudication or hearing. If you’ve watched the prison shows you’ll
know this means sitting in front of people and being told what you did and what’s gonna
happen to you. You can add to this or just say yes, I did
that. Guilty as charged. Whether guilty or not, you are guilty because
most of the time you won’t claim self defense and blame it on the other guy. Remember, prisoners don’t snitch. You can be sure no one else saw the fight,
too. Even if you’ve been beaten almost to death,
physically abused in the worst way, some guys that quite like you won’t even snitch. This is another example of the craziness of
prison. You can’t be good even if you want to be. The system ensures you lose every sense of
your personal ethics. If you want to check if you’ve been treated
fairly and actually broken a rule you can head to the library where you should find
a Prison Discipline Manual. You’ve been found guilty and you should
be given a written notice about this. In the UK the prisoners call this a “nicking
sheet.” It should be the same in the USA after you’ve
had a hearing with officials or sometimes the warden. You’ll be told what you’ve done and what
it going to happen to you. It might just be your privileges taken away
from you. But you’ve done some damage, so as we said,
you might be charged with an offense. You might have to do time in the hole. You might lose that cushy prison job. You could have your "good behavior" time removed,
or have time added onto your sentence. The guards might decide to ransack your cell,
making a huge mess and perhaps finding some contraband. You might lose some of your cherished cell
items, and perhaps the worst, you might get transferred to a prison known as a hellhole
full of maniacs. All because you defended yourself and all
because some moron was in a bad mood. This is real life No Exit. It’s not easy to get out in one piece. Just be glad he didn’t bang his head when
he fell and it killed him. Then you’d likely be doing life and you
only went in for selling your buddy a handful of those mushrooms. But let’s change this a little and say it
ended up being a minor scuffle and no one really got hurt. In that case you might just get what’s called
a shot, rather like a blemish on your prison record, a little slap on the legs. Maybe it was a one off and the staff go easy
on you. But if you want something in the future: new
job, more items, your shot, or shots, will be taken into account. So, there you go. A 101 of prison fighting. We don’t need to tell you that the U.S prison
system is brutal, and you now know it brings out the animal in a person. So, as former inmates will tell you over and
over again, just try not to get sent there. Use your head and try and stay out of trouble,
be good, be safe, and tell us what you think about this story in the contents. Also, be sure to check out our other video
Why A Prisoner Proven Innocent Can't Be Released. Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t
forget to like, share and subscribe. See you next time.
