It's a crime, the way they treated this man

I am a big fan of old movies, and I like the ones set in old prisons, such as "Angels With Dirty Faces," starring James Cagney, Pat O'Brien and the Dead End Kids. That's the one where Cagney is a big mobster and O'Brien is his childhood friend from the streets who, rather turn to a life of crime, went into the priesthood. He tries to get Cagney to "turn yellow" to set an example for the urchins among the great unwashed of his parish. While Cagney is in prison, the men are not allowed to talk, and they work about 22 hours a day in a jute mill, and the meals consist of a harsh gruel (possibly Krusty© Brand Imitation Gruel, for all we know.) There are lots of other old prison films in which some guy in the mess hall suddenly breaks the silence and screams, "I ain't eatin' this slop!" and throws his tin plate and the contents thereof toward the closest guard, who deals with the infraction by getting about 27 other guards to pummel the man until the next commercial. Or the one where Victor Mature gets out of jail, and they give him the customary five dollars and a new suit, only on Mature, it's a custom-tailored dandy of a suit. Unlikely, unless he made extra money in the jute mill and could pay for alterations.

I just checked - jute is a cheap natural fibre from which man has made twine and burlap. Glad I checked.

What brings all this up is that some former high school teacher from a county just west of here is currently in Maryland's Big House. He would not have had to go there, except he kept talking his students - male and female - into posing for nudie pictures. Clearly, a man who belongs in jail, and for a good long time. But he recently was turned down for modification of sentence. He claimed that the other inmates were really being nasty to him ever since they found out he was a convicted child sexual offender. The nastiness took several forms. Sometimes he was not invited to join in the nightly Faro competition, and sometimes he was shunned for weeks on end. Tonight's segment here on American Jurisprudence concludes with this entreaty: prison is a tough, tough place. A real hellhole. Considering some of the people you will meet who ought to be there and aren't , think of what the ones who currently are incarcerated must be like. And that should make it easy to want to avoid their ranks.