Category prison lingo

Prison Trivia
Those of us who worked in prison, or out on the street managing parole or probation caseloads, know a few things. Things we took for granted as we went about our daily grind. Some things, we try to forget. Others are simply hard to explain. But, having left that world of bars, walls, and wire, […]

Prison to the Page Newsletter
I know secretly, deep down in your lizard brain, you’ve always wanted to belong. You want to be part of something bigger. Something where you are among people just like you. Something like a prison gang. Wut? We’re starting our own little gang here and unlike the versions behind the walls, this one doesn’t require […]

Who’s On The Gun?
Little things on the inside If you haven’t worked deep in the bowels of a prison, you might not know there a whole host of things that occur everyday that determine how your shift will unfold–uneventful, a grind, or worse. Some take it for granted, but if you’ve worked there–you know better. Most seasoned prison folks […]

R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Respect, and I’m not talking about the Aretha Franklin classic, but something just as deadly. Outside of drug deals, there are more stabbings in prison over respect, or more precisely the lack of respect, than nearly any other motivation. This very unscientific finding is based upon years of “picking up the pieces” after a stabbing […]

Prison Lingo
Every culture has a language unto itself, phrases or words that mean something completely different because of where they are spoken. Prison is one of those places. The world on the inside has a culture and language driven by life in confined spaces, honed by decades of control and restricted freedoms. I’ve mentioned before that time […]