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It's an excellent view of prison life, from notorious Prince of Pot, Marc Emery.
You might recall him as the Canadian who sold pot seeds through the mail.
You might reall him making millions doing it, and donating most of it to organizations who were trying to legalize it. You might also even remember the $600,000 he paid in taxes as a "marijuana seed distributor."
He got 5 years.
The link is a truly fascinating, detailed expose on (many aspects of) prison life.
A few excerpts...
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Each inmate within 3 weeks of arrival gets assigned a job. When you are not reporting to your job, you are free to go to the yard, the barbershop, the commissary, etc. during the 10-minute move.
The most demanding job is to work in kitchen services. Kitchen services makes all the food for the inmates, 3 times daily, 7 days a week, for 1,500+ people. It requires a work force of 170 inmates working either a morning shift from 4:30am to 7:30am, 10am to noon, or an afternoon shift from noon to 2pm, 3:30 to 7pm over a 5-day period.
Jobs here at the prison can pay as little as $5 or $10 a month, light jobs that require only a few hours a day, like my clerking job for the Recreation area. I keep track of the inmates (currently 75) assigned to the afternoon and evening shifts in the Recreation Building and Yard. I note new additions and transfers, and keep track of their attendance for the purposes of their pay sheets. This includes the inmates who teach music, look after the instrument room, the practice studio, the leathercraft studio, the art studio, clean the washroom, maintain the pool tables & equipment, sweep the area, mow the massive lawn area in the rec yard (with push handmowers I haven't seen since I was a kid in the 1960's doing lawns at $1 each), maintain and store the basketballs, volleyballs, soccer balls, act as umpires or referees during baseball, soccer, football games outside, and basketball games in the gymnasium, cleaning of the gymnasium, picking up of litter and maintaining the trash containers.
The highest paying job is to work for Unicor, Federal Prison Industries, Inc. Many inmates want to work at the Unicor plant here and there is a waiting list. Unicor is the Bureau of Prison's industrial manufacturing that goes on in most B.O.P. prisons. It pays workers, depending on seniority and rate of production by each inmate, $66 per month at one month experience, to $100 per month after 4 months, then $133 per month after 7 months, and $166 per month after 10 months, up to $200 a month. After 85 months at Unicor, an inmate could earn $240 a month plus overtime of $2.80 an hour. For the machine operators who make the clothes, there is a minimum quota, and then any additional output is extra pay. Unicor is like a serious factory job, from 7:45 am to 11am, with 40 minutes for lunch and a bathroom break, and then resumes from 11:45 am to 3:30pm.
Unicor employs 350 people here. It is a huge concern! Here they make uniforms and vests for all branches of the US armed forces. A lot of uniforms! Most jobs are in sewing together these uniforms, but like any factory, there are inmate accountants, clerks, computer data inputters, but machine operators mostly. Attendance and performance here are required to keep these desirable jobs, as many inmates have no outside source of income and rely on their Unicor job to give them $75 - $200 a month to spend at the commissary or order a book or magazine subscription by mail.
Location: Georgia, on the Florida line, right above Tallahassee
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He explains how the meal times works in the link, it's based on a teamwork related reward system.
In other words, if everyone doesn't pull their weight, then everyone might not get to eat.
The cleanest area gets picked to eat first, the least cleanest goes last, and depending on what your chores are for the day, you may miss breakfast.
I find it funny that he paid $600,000 dollars in taxes and they threw him in jail. Think about if Americans paid taxes on drugs. No, we'd rather pay taxes to fight the drugs, and let the criminals make all the profit. Then incarcerate them for years at even more expense to taxpayers.
WTF, LOL.
America imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. The war on drugs is a joke. I could care less how easy some nonviolent drug offenders have it in prison. Most of them should never have been locked up in the first place. We've got big pharma growing pot for research yet we are sending citizens off to jail for doing the same thing. Yeah America! Land of the free! More like land of the feeble minded idiots.
Oh and the prison system is just one more example of the US tax paying public subsidizing corporate America and doling out corporate welfare. Many US companies couldn't survive without US prison labor to do their dirty work. From assembling computers and being exposed to toxic chemicals that cause cancer to building furniture and doing data entry work.
Oh and the prison system is just one more example of the US tax paying public subsidizing corporate America and doling out corporate welfare. Many US companies couldn't survive without US prison labor to do their dirty work. From assembling computers and being exposed to toxic chemicals that cause cancer to building furniture and doing data entry work.
Why do you doubt it? It is true. Our government abolished slavery everywhere EXCEPT in prison.
Amendment 13 - Slavery Abolished
1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
This is the basis for paying prison labor pennies per hour. No minimum wage law there, or other emplyment protections.
He was not a Drug Kingpin. He sold seeds. The seeds contain no drugs, it's the plants that do. He was a businessman, paying taxes and complying with the laws of his country. He made the mistake of selling seeds to people in the US and being a wealthy individual who spent his money working to change the laws in Canada and the US, so the DEA decided to make an example of him, the same way they made an example of Tommy Chong. It was all political. Canada allowed the extradition to the US because they caved in to US threats.
Yes, he got 5 years in Federal Prison. He was denied the ability to serve his time in a Canadian prison.
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Then incarcerate them for years at even more expense to taxpayers. 
Really?
