45 Former Inmates Share Secrets About What Being Incarcerated Is Really Like

We’ve already touched on the fact that when you turn on Orange Is the New Black or Shawshank Redemption, you’re getting a dramatized version of jail or prison on screen.

As for this person, they said that those movies and TV shows really didn’t line up with their experience when they were in High Desert State Prison in Nevada. It seems like nothing is quite like it seems on the silver screen.

When you go to prison or jail, you’re going somewhere that’s housing you for the duration of your stay. After all, the whole point is that you aren’t allowed to leave.

This person shared that during their time in a holding cell, they learned that while it might be built for housing people, the jail was far from comfortable. Even the temperature stood out to them as nearly unbearable to the point of huddling for warmth.

One thing about going to jail or prison that can be incredibly difficult is that you don’t have much of your own. In fact, your personal belongings are confiscated when you walk in the door.

This person’s former fiancé was incarcerated for a time and noted how he had to start over with nothing once all of his personal belongings were confiscated, including the literal shirt off of his back. Clearly, that’s not something this person agrees with.

Aside from your belongings, there’s a lot more that you lose when you’re incarcerated. For example, you aren’t going to find a lot of privacy either.

When this person described the monotony that the days can take while incarcerated, it was a few notes here that most of us would especially find difficult. Most people want a little privacy when they head to the bathroom or shower — which isn’t something that many jails and prisons offer their inmates.

30 years is a long time to do anything. For this person’s brother, they were six years into a 30-year sentence when their sibling posted this on Reddit.

They noted that they try to keep him entertained as much as they can. However, he still finds it hard not to be around his family, especially his growing nieces and nephews. There are a lot of people you can lose contact with when you’re incarcerated.

That problem we just described isn’t just for lack of effort either. We’re sure that plenty of inmates would spend more time on the phone if they were offered the access they wanted.

In reality, this person found that during their time incarcerated, those phone calls home didn’t come cheap. So, that makes it even harder to keep in touch with people the way you’d like to.

When you turn on the TV, shows about jail, naturally, tend to stress the drama that can happen while someone is incarcerated. How accurate is that really, though?

In this person’s experience, it wasn’t nearly that dramatic at all. If anything, it was a rather boring place to be most of the time. However, she also said that she and other inmates watched out for each other more than she had expected.

We’ve used the terms prison and jail thus far. So, it’s important to highlight that, at least in the United States, there’s a difference between the two terms.

This person says that it’s pretty easy to keep your head down. Don’t get involved in a few key things and don’t get involved if you see something happen. As long as you do this, this person found that the stay wasn’t as dramatic as the movies say.

If you move out of your home and into a new one, you might feel a sense of anxiety when you’re settling in. After all, there’s a lot of change to get used to.

As this person seems to put it, that feeling of anxiety never goes away when you’re incarcerated. As a matter of fact, we’d guess that it’s a degree of anxiety most of us can’t imagine. As we’ve covered, being incarcerated isn’t nearly the same as moving to a new place.

You meet a lot of people when you’re incarcerated. As we said, there’s not always a lot of time to yourself, and chatting can help pass the time.

This person said that they noticed a lot of people they’d met had made really bad choices or circumstances put them in an unfortunate position. They said that violence does exist but that they still found their own ways to make fun… given the circumstances they were in.

It’s hard to put into words exactly what it’s like to be incarcerated. After all, it’s not an easy thing to experience, so it wouldn’t be an easy thing to describe either.

Plus, how do you paint a picture of that experience to someone who has never experienced it? You definitely can’t make them understand it but this woman put it into terms that this person might understand. If you had a job you hated and couldn’t leave for years on end, then you might get the idea.

Of course, she’s not the only person who has tried to communicate what it’s like to be incarcerated to someone who hadn’t been. This guy had another way to put it.

Think about hanging out with a bunch of people you don’t really like and spending all your time with them doing things you don’t enjoy and eating food together that you all hate. This would really wear on you day after day.

What do you think would be the hardest thing to handle about being incarcerated? This person had a few answers from their 128 days incarcerated. One of the hardest things that they said was handling the boredom paired with a lack of freedom.

Most of us don’t think about all the freedoms we have in daily life but losing them all can really make you appreciate them more. All of this would be so much harder not knowing what’s going on with your case.

Earlier, we talked about how hard it is to lose pretty much all of your possessions when you enter incarceration. This person knew how difficult things were for their loved one.

This person was very familiar with the rules of what inmates could have because they made sure they knew the rules before getting things for their mom. Still, it seems that the guards would make up their own rules, so they were still left to see whether they could leave things that day or they’d have to try again.

What do you do when you don’t have a lot to work with? Well, as this person explains it, you learn how to make a lot with just a little at your disposal.

They advise that you’ll never meet anyone that’s honed their crafting skills more than someone who has been incarcerated. They said they actually met some of the smartest people in prison and while it wasn’t a good time by any means, it changed their life.

First and foremost, this person wanted to get out of the way that there wasn’t anything “fun” about being incarcerated. All in all, it just really isn’t a great time.

Like we’ve said, you have a lot of downtime to try and fill, so what can you do? This person found that books were the things that really kept them and many other inmates busy. In fact, they had their own value to the people there.

This OP shared a similar sentiment from someone they knew who’d been to prison more than once. Once again, the mind-numbing amount of downtime stood out.

When you don’t have the freedom to choose your activities as freely as you would at home, what do you do to fill the time? This guy managed to teach himself a rather niche and complicated skill during his time in prison. Not many people know Ancient Greek.

When you go out to lunch right now, the options available to you are nearly endless. Even if you just walk to your fridge, you probably have a few favorites stocked up.

When you’re incarcerated, you don’t have this freedom. Unless you have the money to buy your own food with a commissary, you’re stuck with what they offer. Even if you had commissary money, we’re sure the options were still limited.

It’s easy to say that the food isn’t good but it doesn’t quite get the point across. As this person puts it, the food is so bland and gray that it’s dehumanizing.

On top of that, they said the smell wasn’t that great. As a matter of fact, they could place exactly what it smelled like all the time — dog poop. Without basic cleaning products, it’d be all the more impossible to avoid.

Claustrophobia is an incredibly common fear as far as phobias go. Most people start to get uneasy when they’re stuck in one spot for too long, even without this intense fear.

If you want to work on a case of claustrophobia, it’s best to work closely with a mental health professional. From a first-person account, this person can verify that if you have claustrophobia, being incarcerated is about as bad as it gets.

In the movies, you’re led to believe that there’s a fight almost every day. That wasn’t really the experience that this Reddit user shared.

During their time incarcerated, they said they saw fewer fights than you might expect but, then again, that makes a lot of sense. After all, no one really wants to stay there longer than they need to, so people weren’t keen on getting into fights that could get them into trouble.

Not everyone’s experience is the same when you’re incarcerated. In fact, you can really see differences in how different facilities are when you go from one place to another.

This person said that during their time in jail, it was overcrowded, unfair, inhumane, and about as hot as it gets. It seems like this level of overcrowding wouldn’t help you cool off when you got back to your cell either. These conditions are nothing short of intolerable.

As we said, different places do things differently but if you turn on the TV, you likely see no privacy and crude jokes about showering. That wasn’t actually the case for this person.

They said that they actually did get their own space to shower and that these thoughtless jokes didn’t have any basis in their experience. Although it seems that there’s an important difference here between “private” didn’t equate to “personal.”

When you have a lot of people stuck together in one place, they might start to form their own cliques and groups amongst the crowd. It’s a common effect that’s stronger in some places than others.

This person said that in their time incarcerated, they saw a lot of cliques and groups form amongst other people who were incarcerated with them. However, they did note that there were differences in everyone’s experience, though.

If you put a large group of people together, as we just covered, there are some patterns that you can see. In the most recent example, we looked at cliques and what they can do. Another effect that you run into is bullies.

This person found that the same held true when they were incarcerated. While most people were just there to do what they needed to do and kept their heads down, they did run into the occasional bully intent on making some miserable.

As we said before, there’s a difference between prison and jail. While this person couldn’t speak to an experience in prison, they said their time in jail was unspeakably boring.

However, it seems like it wasn’t quiet, even if there was a lot of time alone with your thoughts. Not to mention, if you build a hallway out of cinderblock or brick and use tile or linoleum flooring, all of those sounds are going to create an environment where sound echoes and travels far.

To start, this person really needed to point out how bad the food is. From its many mentions here, it’s clear that this is worse than just an off day in a cafeteria.

On top of that, the sheer volume of their experience was heightened by the televisions. Not only were they all on different channels but each one had the volume maxed out. This would make the overlapping layers of dialogue nearly impossible to escape.

As we’ve covered more than once here, there are parts of everyone’s experience that can vary depending on where someone is incarcerated. For this person, that was Mississippi State Penitentiary.

They shared that during their time there, it was boring but more than that, it was absolutely disgusting as well. The sheer filth would really wear on you day after day as well as probably make you more susceptible to falling ill.

When you’re watching TV, there are certain things that you just can’t get across. The sound design can be eerily accurate and the visuals can be scarily reminiscent of the real thing.

However, no one has quite nailed the idea of your TV giving off a smell. So, there’s no way a TV show or movie could really communicate how much jail smells. That’s one thing that this person wasn’t going to forget anytime soon.

If you’re in jail or prison, we’ve already said that you don’t have the freedom you do to choose what you do throughout the day as you would if you weren’t incarcerated.

While this person wasn’t in jail or prison, their father had spent time in both. He stressed how boring it was and how important contact with people on the outside. They shared how important letters and phone calls became to him.

As we’ve said time and time again now, there are only a few things that you have to fill your time when you’re incarcerated because your freedom is vastly limited.

This person found themselves lifting a lot of weights to pass the time because, well, working out was one of the few options available to them while they were incarcerated. Other than that, they used their time to watch TV, take a while in the shower, and work on appeals.

There were a few things that stood out to this person while they were incarcerated. They said there was a lot of drama — not always from their fellow inmates either.

One of the things that they couldn’t quite wrap their head around was the reasons why some of the women they met were in there. They found in many cases, they were engaging in self-defense, not something premeditated or vicious. They learned a lot about the people they were incarcerated with.

This person said that in prison, you can really choose one of three paths. You can use your time to learn something new, do just about nothing, or find trouble.

They point out that the decisions that you make when you’re incarcerated still have effects. So, they say that there’s an opportunity to ask yourself — if you want to take the chance to start over or find yourself in even more trouble than where you started out.

We already talked about how you don’t really get a choice of who you spend time with when you’re incarcerated. So, you get to know some people you probably wouldn’t.

As this person puts it, you aren’t really going to always kick a conversation off with, “What are you in for?” like it’s a movie trying to move the plot along. This person found that they caught themselves thinking someone was really great before learning how they got there.

This perspective actually doesn’t come from someone who was incarcerated. Instead, this person was familiar with these settings from the other side as a correctional officer.

Still, they shared, like the person who was incarcerated before, that this was where they met some of the most creative people they’d ever met. From their position, they hope that the people they meet get out to lead a better life with their talent.

We’ve heard quite a few times at this point how boring it can be to be in jail or prison. This person wasn’t about to argue that point at all.

On that matter, though, they did have something to add. While it was boring, it didn’t take long for things to get far too exciting either. If things were going to get violent, they didn’t notice a whole lot of warning when it happened.

We’ve said more than once now how boring things can get when you’re incarcerated. We aren’t talking about the boredom that comes with not deciding on a show to stream either.

According to this person’s husband, that boredom is mind-numbing and, once again, that connection to the outside was crucial. Plus, the anxieties you build in prison aren’t ones that will go away the minute you’re out. The hypervigilance stayed with him for a while.

There are a lot of little things in the shower that are luxuries that you might take for granted if you’ve never lived without them.

We aren’t just talking about your choice of shampoos, conditioners, body washes, and any other products you might use. Even a hot shower is a luxury not everyone has. TV can’t account for how cold the showers are. After all, we haven’t quite gotten to 4D television in our homes yet.

Not having your freedom can really take a toll on you mentally. The lack of freedom really gave this person anxiety and we’re sure they’re not the only one. The promise of getting that anxiety back also added anxiety of its own.

This wasn’t because they were anxious about living outside of incarceration but because it felt like the promise of that freedom was always threatened, leaving them walking on eggshells the whole time in the hopes of avoiding adding any time to their sentence.

We’ve already touched on it but this person wanted to stress that your experience when you’re incarcerated can vary a lot depending on where you’re serving your sentence.

It sounds like they speak from experience at more than one facility too, so they have an idea of what they’re talking about. Some of them feel like a story ripped straight from a movie and others aren’t as bad as you might expect. It all depends on what you’re dealing with and where you are.

If there’s one thing you also don’t have when you’re serving a sentence in prison or jail is a lot of space, whether you’re dealing with severe overcrowding or not.

This person once heard a rather apt description of what it was like to live in a prison or jail cell. All you have to do is take a few things into your bathroom and then imagine living there for anywhere from a few months to a few decades.

Different places can evoke different emotions. For example, when you come home at the end of the day, you might feel a sense of comfort and relaxation.

This person tried to stress the emotions that being in prison can really evoke in a person. To start, they said to try to imagine somewhere without any love. Then, imagine that you’re sad and afraid all of the time. Only now, you might have an idea of what prison can make you feel like.

When it came to comparisons to TV and movies, this person didn’t actually have too many notes compared to what they saw at the facility they were incarcerated in.

However, there was one thing that they said that TV would never really be able to portray to an audience. While going to jail is physical relocation, there’s a severe mental toll that the whole thing takes on a person. Even after leaving, the memory of that feeling is still very much there for them.

We’ve talked about how if you have claustrophobia, jail or prison isn’t the best place to put it to the test. As this person puts it, it can make anyone feel claustrophobic.

Compared to a years-long sentence, a month might seem short but for this person, it was enough to start to drive them up a wall after a while. Almost anyone would start to feel claustrophobic and stir-crazy under these conditions.

By now, it’s no surprise to say that putting the experience of being in prison or jail into words isn’t easy. How can you possibly make someone who hasn’t experienced it even start to understand?

Like many, this person couldn’t quite come up with enough negative adjectives to describe their time there, even if they described it as brief. Especially at such a young age, they were scared, alone, and upset with the system.