Visitation is 15 minutes behind a glass screen depending on which building or prison you are housed in, the days and times that your loved ones can come may be a shift they would normally be working. Like Wednesday 2-4 PM.

In DOC and IDOC the Correctional Supervisors all wear white shirts and have body cameras and sometimes pepper spray. They are who you get when you have a complaint.

“Rolled” means to get jumped or beat up in jail. Because resources are scarce, and hope is even more scarce many fights are started over stupid things like who is on the phone longest or items like a honey bun.

The jail system has replaced the mental health system and the drug treatment centers in most of the country. Many of them now have Opioid and detox programs where inmates maybe given supplemental drugs. They also may have access to pain pills, some of which can be horded by inmates, crushed, snorted, and used to get high or traded for other items.

The story of Meek Mill is very familiar in the jail. He represents a Hip-Hop icon who had everything taken away from him for a minor probation violation. Dreams and Nightmares is also the name of one of his most popular songs

I’ve had some of the most powerful religious conversations with people while they are incarcerated. They often ask me what I believe. I tell them that Religion is man made and that if you pray to a tree and the tree gives you peace, then that’s all that matters to me. All hail the tree. For our narrator this is his first time contemplating Religion and only because of his cell mate.

He is realizing he failed as a father and has failed in many ways at becoming a productive person. He realizes not being educated may have been part of how he got here, but now due to being locked up he is starting to realize how all his choices got him to this point.

Kid is almost 24 months old plus the 9 months she would have been pregnant (about 33 months) . He has been there 3 different years which means he likely got her pregnant and got locked up around the end of the year (calendar) and baby is born the following year. He has never met his son. It’s also important to know the judge gives out the sentence in months and you divide for the years.

Most people in jail don’t have the money to afford their cash bail which may be 10’s of thousands of dollars even for non violent offensive. They also don’t have many people willing to send them money via the Currency Exchange, Western Union, or J-Pay. Therefore they have to trade items they have or borrow from others in order to get basics. The pic below are among the few items they are given in the Cook County jail when they arrive besides their uniform, shoes, and a blanket. This is not a googled image btw I have these in my possession as a reminder.

These are the type of things my dad used to say, he was incarcerated for most my life. This is inspired by our story and my day job working at the Cook County Jail overseeing different education programs…the largest single site jail in the country. A few years back taking some 8th grade boys there to visit