I worked with a guy who said he was one semester from finishing his degree but never finished it. I said "you should go back and finish it!" and he replied "dude, I was working on that degree in prison, I'm not going back to finish it!"

I was working for an HVAC contractor and we did a job at a prison. We would work at night while all the residents were locked up and sleeping. We had a corrections officer escorting us the whole time. The hallways were all on the exterior of the building and lined with large windows. That allowed the guards in the towers outside to watch people moving within the building.

One night, in the wee hours of the morning, we're walking down the hallway when a red laser dot appears on the wall next to us. All of us contractors freeze instantly. We don't know what is happening and we DO NOT want to get shot. Our escort gets on his radio and tells the guys in the tower to stop fucking with us. The little red dot disappears and we go on with our night.

We were briefly afraid for our lives because some bored asshole prison guard couldn't resist flagging us with the muzzle of his rifle and teasing us with the laser sight.

I was connecting network ports in a psychiatric ward hub room when a patient out in the hall started aggressively humping the door. I paused to watch, though to myself "this is still better than talking to doctors" and went back to what I was doing.

For what it's worth, most guys who've been in prison have little to no interest in revisiting their time inside for obvious reasons. There's of course some (relatively) happy times but they're largely outweighed by the bad, often traumatic times that many former inmates understandably downplay because they're used to the "suck it up" attitude.

Also, talking about prison with people who've been in prison is one thing but talking about prison to people who have never been in prison often just results in the same tired old questions, many of which come with a very morbid but almost gleeful curiosity. That said, most people who've been in prison aren't too thrilled about talking about it even with other formerly incarcerated people.

Obviously there's some former inmates who love talking about prison but I think guys like that just want someone to listen to them more than anything. Those are also the types of guys who lie their asses off about their prison experience and were probably known inside as a bullshitter.

There's other exceptions, like inmates who are outspoken about their experiences specifically to open peoples' eyes about how the supposedly "correctional" system is nothing but a sick form of traumatic retribution that only increases the rate of recidivism (and likelihood of people becoming victims of crime, I'll add). So even if a person doesn't give a fuck about inmates, they kind of should because the crueller and inmate is treated, the more likely he is to offend or re-offend in the future.

Things like AMAs are rare because that requires verification which for a million opsec reasons is a horrible idea.

Working in corrections requires NDA signatures. You’re not going to get much.

Edit: referencing The States