Clue

It’s been over four weeks since I arrived at the ADC, and I’m sorry to say that I’m still here. With no radio, 23-hour lockdowns and garbage for food, my time seems to be at a standstill. To make matters worse, I found myself listening to the optimistic little voice inside my head that was telling me not to bother with filling out a commissary sheet since I would be leaving this week. I won’t make that mistake again. My personal food stores ran out, and I had to go all week without my daily ration of potato chips and Tang. Bummer.

We had fish for lunch, and a bean burrito for dinner today, so I almost had to go hungry since neither meal contains any actual quantities of food. Fortunately, I befriended an inmate who is headed to the same destination as I am, and I was able to trade 20 packets of the instant coffee we get in the morning (I don’t drink coffee in prison) for a jumbo-sized honey bun. I haven’t had a honey bun in probably 15 years, so I had forgotten what they tasted like. That pastry was 560 calories of sugary, hunger-killing deliciousness.

Normally, I would try to keep to myself at a place like this, but when I looked at this guy, I could tell that he was a fellow s.o. I hate to go along with prison stereotypes, but this one has a bit of truth to it. If you’re middle-aged, white, have no tattoos or gang affiliations, and you speak like someone who has been to college, you are a sex offender. Are there exceptions to the rule? Yes, but they are few and far between. You could be a white-collar criminal, but then you’d be going to a minimum security camp instead of the same medium security prison that I’m headed to.

Anytime I hear gremlins talking about my destination, I always hear them complain that it’s full of chomos. Looking at all of these middle-aged white guys headed to the same destination pretty much confirms that notion. I’m starting to feel better about being sent to this prison, even though it’s a higher security place than I’m used to.

So anyway, I felt like I could talk to this guy without a problem. I was right. Once we started conversing, we talked about the different types of people that you meet in prison. When he mentioned that he doesn’t care about what a person’s crime is and prefers not to ask about why other people are here, gave me the last piece to the puzzle to determine whether he’s an s.o. or not.

He doesn’t ask other inmates about THEIR crimes because he doesn’t want them to ask about HIS crime. The less an s.o. uses his cover story, the better. Gremlins tend to act like detectives when it comes to finding chomos in the general population, and they will put your story under a microscope to determine whether you’re telling the truth or not.

Making your cover story common knowledge to the general population is a bad idea. It’s like I was playing the s.o. version of Clue, and I had everything I needed.

Colonel Mustard in the study with the laptop and the bottle of hand lotion. Game over, people, I win.

When he told me that he has 17 years left on his 20-year sentence, he basically TOLD me what his crime was. All I had to do was look at the chart.*

	% of s.o.’s who committed this offense	typical sentence
Failure to register as a sex offender	5%	1 – 3 years
Possession / receipt of c.p.	80%	5 – 10 years
Trying to meet a minor over the Internet for sex	10%	10+ years
Manufacture of c.p.	5%	LIFE

A life sentence is 25 years, so after factoring in his good time, he’s got 20 years left. GOTCHA.

(*My best guesstimates. Probably somewhat accurate. Note that most other s.o. offenses are STATE cases, not federal.)