“For the next sixty days, you are to address any officer who speaks to you as ‘sir,’” said the pig driving the van, as we arrived at our destination.
“I’m in prison,” I defiantly replied, “not the army.”
“I hope Inmate Goldstein mouths off this way to the officers in the Special Housing Unit,” revealed Sergeant Hash. “This way, the sixty days will turn into a hundred and twenty.”
“Yeah,” agreed my chauffeur. “You clothe and feed them, and this is the gratitude you get.”
Even though I had to accept that all of this prison nonsense was part of my life for another five years, barring any success on my criminal appeal, I also realized that I would never have known Hash, Santos, Weston, LaPlante, Pruckno, Leuenberger, or any other officer from Oneida, and the other places I had been to thus far, had I not broken the law and gotten arrested.
Therefore, since I saw how the Department of Correctional Services operates, with respect to its holier-than-thou officers who are adept at twisting things around in order to suit their needs, a valid argument could be made that I should have been better equipped to sift through all of the bullshit and steer clear of any possible trouble by simply conforming to the status quo.
However, as a Jew in jail, I was required to live by what my conscience told me, and could not sell out my values and principles if it meant behaving differently from the way I was raised and knew to be right, even at the cost of subjecting myself to harassment and a trip to the box.
Two officers were outside the box awaiting my arrival and wasted little time getting into character, as Hash turned me over to them after bringing me inside.
“From now until you leave here, you will do exactly as I say,” demanded the shorter of the two, in what must have been the millionth or so time he had said those exact same words in his illustrious career working for the DOCS.
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