Do inmates experience boredom in jail? Can you provide an example of something an inmate might do for fun if they were bored?

Last Updated: 01.07.2025 00:54

Do inmates experience boredom in jail? Can you provide an example of something an inmate might do for fun if they were bored?

Take a bunch of prisoners, lock them in a pen, make them as uncomfortable as possible and feed them shitty food, and if you're VERY VERY lucky, they'll only manage to take it out on each other.

That's where you watch The Price is Right;

Because it's hard enough to pass the nighttime lockdown in jail without having to deal with sleeplessness, what with the dusk-til-dawn florescent bulb over your burnished chrome shaving mirror shining in your eyes, and the CO’s slamming armored doors throughout the graveyard shift.

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That's where you eat your meals;

That's where you typically shoot the shit with your fellow inmates.

See those stainless steel stools?

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And if you're not…well….

The perpetually tired don't think straight.

And a lot of this has to do with common comfort.

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And that's where you've fucked right on up, since now you're inevitably going to nap, and nothing's more dangerous in jail than an intermittent sleep cycle.

They lash out under circumstances where they would normally just let things slide.

Spartan circumstances only build character when you're allowed to maintain a certain level of self respect and esprit de corps.

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That's where you play cards and board games;

And as the seconds, minutes, and hours tick by, your ass starts to ache, your eyes cloud over, and your brain begins firing on one single cylinder.

Time to break out the CS canisters.

Is anyone up to have a little conversation?

You can only watch so many hours of basic cable on the shitty day room TV…play so many tricks of Spades…read so many chapters of Michael Crichton…listen to so much Top 40 radio over your earbuds, before it all just becomes too fucking much.

Some eventually relent and escape to their cells and those welded sheet metal bunks…really no more comfortable than the day room furnishings, but at least you can get horizonal.