15 Ex-Prisoners Reveal The Most Disturbing Thing They Saw During Their Sentence
"This guy walks in and is immediately jumped by 4 dudes. One guy takes out the metal strip to a safety razor and precedes to cut this dude's fucking ear off."
Answers found on Ask Reddit
1.
“In some county jails they have 190° water taps. They’re there so inmates can make oatmeal, soup, or coffee without a microwave or any kitchen appliances. Well sometimes when there were fights, you would see an inmate fill a cup with 190° water and a glob full of Vaseline. Then he would throw it on his opponent. Watching that will stick with me for a while. Mainly the terrible scream the man made as the Vaseline stuck to his face. He was taken to medical right after that. He had 3rd degree burns all over his face and hands.”
2.
“I did a couple years when I was young and dumb. The craziest shit I saw was actually in the county jail and not the state prison. The county jail was right on the Texas/Mexico border so there were a lot of Hispanics. What was weird was the Hispanics born in America and the Mexicans from Mexico absolutely hated each other. I saw a Hispanic from Texas heat up a bowl of water until it was boiling in the microwave (we had microwaves in the tank) and he then proceeded to throw the boiling water on a Mexican from Mexico’s face and then beat the ever loving shit out of him. That dudes screams will haunt me forever. I also saw a guy take a blade from a small pencil sharpener, tie it to a toothbrush and then slice a guys face from ear to ear while he was sleeping. The guy lived but it looked like a fucking murder scene.”
3.
“Not me, but my husband was in prison as a young adult. He said that they had a way of ‘checking your ego’ in the spot he was at. The toughest guys would come up to you on your first day and ask how many push ups you could do. If you were smart you would just sorta blow it off or laugh it off and move on. If you were a stupid show off or had something to prove you would claim a large number or talk your self up. If you did that then they would be all friendly and be like ‘oh? let’s see it!’ So the poor guy would do as many push ups as they could. The tough guys would gas the new guy up, acting friendly, pushing him to do more. They acted impressed and joked around. Then as soon as the new guy had done as many push ups as possible they would jump him and beat him up. He would be helpless to resist because he had maxed himself out on push ups. Afterwards any guy with an ego was normally really quiet for the remainder of their stay.”
4.
“I have a friend who used to work in corrections. They had an inmate who had a habit of assaulting and raping other inmates. This guy was serving a life sentence for murdering his grandparents, raping grandma before and after the murder, and mutilating the corpses. He had been in since the 1980’s and nobody had been able to live with him because he was such a dangerous maniac. They decided to bunk him with a huge guy who was in for a ton a gang-related, violent offences. My friend said that Dept. of Corrections figured that since the new cell mate was 30 years younger and covered in muscles he would be able to handle himself.
Within the first few days the big cell mate asked for protective custody and claimed he had been raped. It seems that this old rapey murderer had made a bet with his new cell mate that whoever could do the most push-ups would get the better bunk in the cell. After our young gang member cranked out a ton of push-ups he was so tired that he couldn’t stop the beating a rape that followed. Last I heard old rapey murderer had a room to himself. The rape was never prosecuted because the gang member was unwilling to testify because he ‘couldn’t risk people finding out.'”
5.
“A friend of mine did a short stint. From what he told me… He was supposed to get paperwork detailing his charges before he got to prison, but did not. This made the other prisoners suspicious as they believed he was a snitch, was trying to hide that fact from them, and they threatened to beat him. An old acquaintance of his was in there and assured my friend that he had nothing to worry about as they had been threatening him for months and nothing had happened. That night while my friend was making his bed a few prisoners ran into his acquaintance’s cell and beat him to within inches of his life. They were bouncing the guys head off of the concrete to the point that my friend could hear it. My buddy says that’s the moment that scared him straight.”
6.
“I was in jail once waiting to see a judge. They’d moved me to 3 different jails in 3 days for some reason (I wasn’t a troublemaker and was only in for driving on a suspended license), but I am big and ‘scary’ looking. Anyways, when they transferred me to court, I was handcuffed to someone serving life and he was Aryan Brotherhood. I’m Hispanic, but look completely white and have a shaved head. He told me blacks were ‘greenlit’ and that I had to ‘swing on sight’. If I saw a black man within reach, I was ‘required’ to fight him, or they would beat or kill me later. It was a scary, and luckily the COs were aware and kept everyone separate until the ‘greenlight’ ended.”
7.
“I spent a couple weeks in county jail. On the first day, when we were all being processed into the facility (strip, bend over, spread your cheeks, and cough) we were told very succinctly to never ever even joke about suicide while in the facility. Kinda like how you just don’t say ‘bomb’ on an airplane anymore. By day three, I had a good understanding of the other guys I was locked up with. I was physically the biggest of the white guys in our ‘pod’ so all the white kids huddled around my table at meals to keep away from the hispanic folks and the black folks (yes, there are three teams in correctional facilities whether you like it or not). There was one kid in the group that seemed underdeveloped mentally, he probably had a learning disability among other things, but he essentially acted like a 12 year old. I knew early on he was going to get himself in trouble because he never stopped talking or moving, and he was rubbing everyone the wrong way. I tried to tell him to chill out and be invisible, but he was not understanding what I was telling him.
I had been there a week, when the ’12 year old’ finally lost his cool completely. He was in the shower, singing and joking around, putting on a performance that went too far, and he pooped on the floor as a joke. After the other guys in the shower grabbed their towels and ran, he proceeded to kick the poop all over the walls and into the other shower stalls (I didn’t shower for the rest of my stay, truth be told). It turned into a big scene, and then when the “trustees” came in to clean up the poop all over the walls it turned into an even bigger scene. The whole time, the ’12 year old’ was locked in a cell near the showers, laughing and joking as other inmates had to clean up his poop and make the shower area sanitary again. State run facilities have standards after all!
The next day, everyone was looking at the ’12 year old’ with hate in their eyes. Kinda like Gomer Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. Everyone missed their showers the day prior due to the poopcident, and then the kid was still up to his antics at breakfast the next day. Everyone got really cold toward him, even openly mean. I’ll admit, I started ignoring him completely after the poop. It took him a day or two to realize he was hated by all, and then his personality changed dramatically. He became sad, despondent, and started talking to the COs because the other inmates wouldn’t talk to him anymore. He fucked up, and told the COs that he should just harm himself and make everyone happy, and that was all it took… they dragged out the Blue Burrito.
This is the scariest thing I had seen in jail. The Blue Burrito was a 10 foot long blue foam mat, like you would use in gym class with two 12 foot long red belts attached. They laid it out on the floor, forced the ’12 year old’ to lay on the mat, and then they rolled him up with his arms at his sides into the blue burrito. The two long red belts clipped together at the top and bottom of the burrito keeping it all nice and tight. This was the suicide protocol at the jail. No counseling, no medical ward. You lose the ability to move. They put that poor bastard in the burrito around 8:00pm, dragged him into his cell and left him laying on the floor, wrapped up tight, until breakfast the next morning, around 8:00am (the child molesters and gang members in protective custody get to eat breakfast first). Imagine being unable to move, barely able to breath, with no end in sight for 12 hours on the floor of your 8 by 8 cell. My cell was up above his, and I heard him weeping and moaning in agony all night. He didn’t say a word to anyone, or look anyone in the eye for that matter for the rest of the time I was there. One night in the blue burrito broke him.”
8.
“Ok, so I got a DUI in a neighboring county. I was going through a rough patch in life so I said fuck it and never showed up to court, I figured catch me if you can. Well fast forward a couple months and I end up getting into some shit and charged in my county. BOOM, extradition. I end up in that neighboring county’s prison. Rough stop to put it lightly. So one night i’m in my cell which was on the second tier (second floor) and they bring some new guy in. Well this guy keeps asking for shit, phone calls, food, and just generally being a pain in the ass. So at one point a CO comes up to talk to him. The CO leaves and this guy is freaking out. He’s screaming and yelling and banging on the door to his cell. ‘He called me a N*****!’ He just keeps screaming this and the banging intensifies. It’s now BOOM BOOM BOOM with him still screaming. Now, when the doors are closed and locked, there’s about a 2 inch gap between the door and the wall, that’s what he was screaming through. I see a CO walk up and hear ‘HE CALLED ME A NI-HUUUUUUUU’ The CO had walked up, waited for him to scream and sprayed mace down the man’s throat through the crack and just walked away. So for the next 45 minutes I can hear this guy gasping for air, it didn’t sound good. They finally came back, drug him out of his cell and down the hall to this little shower. They cuffed him to the shower and ran water on him for a couple hours, gasping the whole time. They finally ended up taking him to the hospital.”
9.
“Saw a girl swan dive off the top tier one stint, and the next time I went, my cellmate swallowed heroin before she was booked in and died. No one noticed for a day. It was a big dorm and I wasn’t next to her, but no one noticed. Everyone thought she was coming off meth and needing to sleep. The girl that jumped off the tier lived luckily.”
10.
“Obligatory not a prisoner but an ex-Correctional Officer. I once had to work overtime in a segregation unit. The first thing that happens upon entering this unit is we get a call that an inmate who was out on a medical trip was coming back in, and was to be placed into a suicide watch cell. This inmate had been taken to an outside hospital for cutting his arm from his wrist to his bicep. We placed him in the suicide watch cell and went to find a bed mat for him, which was hard cause he couldn’t have one with a hole in it while being on suicide watch. He told me that if I didn’t get him a bed mat in 5 minutes, he was going to start “ripping stitches.” I told him to wait, went to find a mat and it had apparently been 6 minutes, cause by the time I got back, he had torn off his bandages and ripped out every single stitch in his arm. The blood was all over the place, we could easily see the muscle and fat in his arm. He agreed to cuff up, and went on his merry way back to the outside hospital. I later found out he had only initially done it cause he “wanted to get out of prison for a while.” That fact alone messed me up.”
11.
“My uncle spent time in and out of prison for most of my life (not a bad guy just makes TERRIBLE decisions).
He told me once that his entire pod went into lockdown and the guy in his cell started to have epileptic seizures due to the stress.
I guess this guy had a history of crying wolf and guards were in no rush to assist him. He ended up choking on his vomit and dying in the cell with my uncle watching. Guy laid on the floor for an entire night before anyone came into check.”
12.
“Where I was, the guard towers were armed with a variety of less than lethal firearms. A fight started on the breezeway (main walkway between units.) You hear the siren and you have about 10 seconds sit on your ass and cover your head (to protect from OC overspray.) Else, the guards start shooting shotguns loaded with rubber balls at you. One of the guards hit one of the guys fighting directly in the sack with a rubber ball round. Turned the front of his jeans red by the time they got him up and to the infirmary. Apparently lost a testicle due to rupture.”
13.
“I was in a minimum and I saw some brutal fights. But the worst thing I ever witnessed was from some idiots. They stole some isopropyl alcohol from the med unit somehow. Brought it back mixed it into drinks and drank it. They were fucked. Throwing up worse then I’ve ever seen and downright sick as fuck, screaming in agony shriveled in a ball on the floor. I’ve heard of people drinking floor stripper for ghb or some shit. But fuck. The things people will do to try and get fucked up is way beyond anything I can comprehend.”
14.
“I was taking a shower in a communal shower. This guy walks in and is immediately jumped by 4 dudes. One guy takes out the metal strip to a safety razor and precedes to cut this dude’s fucking ear off. Good times lol.”
15.
“I saw a mentally challenged person, not able to understand simple commands, be beaten with flashlights until their eyes popped out. We were in release processing and the gates were broken. we were told to stay inside the cells. No one wanted to fuck up because we were about an hour from being let out, which they do in batches.
This guy had someone he knew in the cell across from his, he kept trying to go in there, the guards kept putting him back and getting more and more pissed.
The inmates were getting mad too afraid that he would fuck up the release schedule and several people started threatening the dude. I could see by the glaze in his eyes that he had not a clue what was going on except he wanted to see his friend.
The last time he walked out the cell door inmates were screaming for the guards, because no one wanted the release fucked up. 6 Sheriffs came and beat the fuck out of the guy. He had getting pounded with a flashlight with his head on the concrete, boom, boom, boom, then an eye popped out and everyone started screaming but the pounding continued, boom, boom, boom, other eye flies out.
it definitely fucked up the release and we all stayed another 36 hours while they cleaned it up.” 
