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>>22791
I don't remember his name; he was my very first cellie.
He was probably in his early seventies, thin, tall, and in excellent shape. His bunk looked ready for military inspection at all times — not a wrinkle anywhere — crisp, sharp folds.
He arrived just a few hours behind me. After making his bed up, he launched into an exercise routine.
I learned later that he had spent forty-seven years behind bars, more time incarcerated than I had been alive at that point. He started off with some minor infraction while in the military, and was sentenced to the brig. When he got out, his dishonorable discharge made it hard to fit back in. He would commit offense after offense and be sent back for increasingly long periods of time.
Life on the installment plan they call it.
He was institutionalized. He couldn't survive out in “the real world.” Nothing in forty-seven years of prison had ever taught him how to hold down a job or make ends meet on a paycheck.
I suspect he had never known a woman's love.
He missed the structure, and the… freedom of prison. He didn't have to work in prison, didn't have to worry about money or where his next meal would come from.
For this older man, it was a no-brainer. He would just catch a ride in a cop car back to prison. But, how to do that? What would be the quickest and best way back to his cold comfort of bars and bunks?
This man was an expert in that area. If your intent is to catch a charge that will land you in the stony lonesome, I suggest you follow his lead. His method is the answer to this question:
He walked into a bank (federally insured by the FDIC) and presented a note to the teller, “This is a robbery. Please place money in a bag.”
The teller handed him a bag of money, and I can imagine him smiling and giving a wink as he calmly walked out.
Outside, he sat down on the curb, money bag in his lap, and waited for the cops.
By robbing a bank covered by the FDIC, he knows he's going to a federal prison. These are generally better run than state prisons. By using just a note with no weapon whatsoever, he knows that he'll go to a lower custody facility.
This is the reality of what prison does. Anyone who believes that a couple decades behind bars will “teach someone a lesson” is right. The lesson is that the world is a dangerous place full of people who don't want you in it. And, once you've been to prison, you might just as well stay there.