If you want to do your time harder than it already is, lose your privileges, phone calls, buy-ups, contact visits, parole, home detention, get into fights, get bashed, get stabbed or killed, end up on protection, maybe catch hep C or HIV/AIDS, it’s easy! — just do drugs while you’re in gaol.
And I’m pretty sure that one of the above will end up happening to you. Maybe more than one. I’m talking from personal experience here. I did just over four years’ gaol. Most of the bashings, stabbings, and killings that I saw in gaol were over drugs. I saw guys who came into gaol with only a few months to do end up doing a couple of years for bashing the living shit out of some poor bastard — all over drugs and gaol fucking politics. A couple of guys who came in doing only a couple of months are now doing life: all because they got pilled off their faces and bashed a guy to death over pills. And when these guys weren’t on pills they were really nice blokes. It spins me out how ten little white pills and 60 minutes can turn two small-time crims into killers and change their lives forever.
Another guy I knew, who turned into a standover bully when he took drugs and pills, had a shiv [blade] stuck straight through him, killing him instantly. I saw guys that had scored a cap of hammer but didn’t have their fits and were hanging out that bad for their hit they would end up using an old fit that a quarter of the gaol had used over and over again.
I knew guys that would risk losing their contact visits with the people that meant the most to them — girlfriends, wives, lovers, family, and friends — by getting them to bring in drugs. They would cut down 30ml fits, swallow them, or shove them up their arses, to avoid being caught on the strip search. They’d either throw it up or go to the toilet to retrieve their stash.
I knew guys, otherwise (sexually) straight, who were hanging out so bad for a whack of hammer they’d let other guys fuck them without condoms so they could get a cap without having to pay cash. Or they’d end up sucking someone’s cock to save themselves from being bashed because they couldn’t pay for drugs they’d got on credit.
Blokes with no money or visitors who could bring in stuff, blokes who hated doing their time straight, would suck some guy off so they could get a couple of pills, or a cone, and get off their faces for while. Other guys who didn’t pay their credit ending up singing themselves on protection, being put on weak cunt and dog by the mainstream population and having to do the rest of their time in the boneyard with all the kiddy tamperers.
Another bloke, who thought of himself as some sort of mafia godfather, thought that every half good-looking young guy that came into the unit was there as his personal toy-boy. He would try to win them over with drugs and standover tactics. Try to convince them that they needed him to protect them from everyone else . . . the only person they really needed protection from was him. He used to con quite a lot of young guys and treated them like his property. He tried the same stuff on me.
After he’d had me three or four times, I got some advice from other guys in the unit. I put an orange from my lunch into the freezer. After lunchtime lockup, and we’d gone back into the rec area, I put the orange into a sock. When the screws had gone back into their box, I caved the guys face in. The godfather was rushed off to hospital, where he stayed for quite some time. I never saw him again. But the whole unit rallied around me and backed me up. The screws couldn’t charge anyone with the bashing.
When I was on the outside, I was doing drugs and doing crime to pay for the drugs. After a while inside I got to thinking. Gaol sucks. Really sucks. But I figured I had to make the best of a fucked up situation. I’d always thought about trying to get off — going straight, doing some studies so I could get a job, making something of my life. So I tried to use my time well. To get fit and healthy, learn to read and write, study something I’d always been interested in. I found a good mate who wanted to get out without doing extra time, got a job in the kitchen, did a computer course. After I got out I did a cooking course at TAFE, and ended up with a pretty good job in a restaurant.
I reckon that keeping away from drugs and trying to stay out of gaol politics helped me stay out of trouble. I can’t say that it stopped anything bad from happening to me, but it did minimise the chances.
- CC
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