Life Lessons from an Unlikely Prisoner
By: Red Flags Podcast With Kalie
Tags: Life Lessons, Podcast, Red Flags, Prison, Lifestyle

Red Flags Podcast, Episode 8 Part 1 & 2

Transcribed

Red Flags Podcast with Kalie and Kenna welcome Justin, a well educated father who spent almost a decade in prison. Justin took the time to beautifully document the life lessons he shares on the podcast two- part series. You can listen to Life Lessons from an Unlikely Prisoner featured on Red Flags Podcast, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, iHeart Radio and more!

Practical Life Skills Honed in Prison

Written By Justin

The following list of practical life lessons is by no means earth shattering in its scope or content. It is however derived from an experience that most will never live through. The experience of being stripped of your fundamental freedoms and liberties while being thrust into an environment rife with potential violence, misery, subjugation and hopelessness.

In 2012 I began an 8 year journey through the Nevada Department of Corrections. Until the Automobile accident that resulted in my conviction on DUI resulting in death, I had lived a generally law abiding life. I was not involved in a criminal lifestyle or actively involved with crime. I’m college educated, worked, raised my kids, paid taxes and for the most part, had a normal American life.

I believe my relatively normal life afforded me a perspective on the prison experience that can be useful for people in the free world when navigating their daily lives. Having been forced to live for a long period of time in an oppressive situation I was surprised to have learned that aspects of that oppression when brought into my free life have lead to deep satisfaction and fulfillment. The following are a few of these basic principles.

When Your Fate is Inevitable. Accept it Quickly and Embrace Your New Normal.

From the moment I was sentenced to my 8–20 year sentence I never looked back. I did not dwell on the amount of time I was given, or wallow in resentment. This was my fate. When I returned to my cell from the sentencing hearing, I made verbal declaration to myself. I said aloud, “well this is your life now and it will be for many years to come. I will not allow this to change my fundamental character, but this is my new normal and the extent of my world. I will make the best of it.”

By accepting my fate quickly and not dwelling on what could be I was able to focus solely on the day to day minutia of prison existence and navigate it with the best chance of survival.

So in your own life, recognize when an outcome is inevitable and quickly accept without reservation that outcome. Adjust your thinking to your new normal, work within that new normal and make the most of it. I’m not advocating giving up when things get tough, but rather recognizing fruitless efforts or goals and making sure you don’t get bogged down in failure.

You Can Live with a Lot Less Than You Think and Still Feel Fulfilled

The commercial nature of our capitalistic society and its ubiquitous advertising perpetuates the idea that more and greater variety of choices is better and preferential to the individual. In prison choice becomes extremely limited, from the foods you can buy at the commissary to the non-state issued clothing you can purchase for yourself. You don’t need to have 30 different toothpastes to choose from. Two or three is more than enough. I liked that once I chose an item I needn’t ever revisit that choice again. I wasted no more mental energy on the task of selection and could instead move on to living in the moment. In fact, I found that I consistently ordered the same things, in essence limiting the already limited offerings.

I do this now in my free life. I get virtually the same things at the grocery store every week. It makes shopping quick and easy and I don’t waste a lot of mental energy on making choices that in the end don’t make much difference in the grand scheme of things. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything and my basic needs are met.

So in your life, check yourself when you are feeling inundated with choice. Realize that the need for choice is artificially created by marketers and that it’s not important to the overall satisfaction and effectiveness of your life. Limit your choices so you can spend less time and mental energy on subtle nuance and more on living in the moment.

A Small World Provides a Manageable Reality and Subsequent Peace

In prison your whole world shrinks. Your home becomes a 6 X10 cell you share with another man. What little personal belongings you have must be organized in such a way that you and your cell mate can live comfortably within the confines of your cell. In prison being unkempt and disorganized can be dangerous. While living in such close quarters can take some getting used to, you come to appreciate a Spartan way of life. Lack of clutter and order reduce mental fog and lead to an overall sense of control and manageability of your environment. This affect is heightened when experienced over a long period of time. Years in my case. The longer one lives within a small existence the more peaceful and fulfilling the rest of life becomes. In essence you can extract more fulfillment from new experiences that fall outside of your small world because the novelty of those experiences now present themselves in an almost concentrated form.

So in your own life don’t be a collector of things for things sake. Let go of this tendency of ours to hold onto physical stuff. I’m not advocating living in a Tiny House or a stark cabin in the woods somewhere, but rather minimizing the amount of belongings that occupy your immediate space.

This principle of a small world goes further than just physical stuff. It readily crosses over into life experiences as well. Our society has made one believe that you have to have a lot of novel experiences to have enjoyed life. Things like “traveling the world” and Bucket Lists perpetuate the idea that satisfaction comes from broad and varied experience. This is bullshit. This idea that you have to do a lot of different things fosters the false belief that you are missing out on something. The fact is you’re not missing out on anything. Fulfillment comes from deeply experiencing the moment at hand and the activity you find yourself in. In prison this manifested itself in the absolute joy of going to yard to exercise or getting a gym day. Those things became deeply satisfying and the level of satisfaction derived from them were heightened because it was one of the few experiences outside of our daily living that we could choose to do.

So in your own life, resist the temptation to believe that you are missing out on something when you don’t have vast and varied experiences. Choose a minimal amount of extracurricular activities and do them regularly. Extract the most from limited experience and ignore the false belief that more fulfilling experiences lie somewhere else in another place and time.

Make not Rushing a Priority in your Life

In prison the outside world’s timeline drops away. Everything happens at a slower pace. When artificial schedules are removed from daily living a lot of stress dissipates. We all know the feeling of having to rush around to get somewhere. This stress is totally avoidable in many cases but is highly toxic to enjoyment and a sense of control. This is particularly important in the morning. Make giving yourself plenty of extra time to get ready for the day a priority so you are not in a hurry when starting your day. This goes a long way in establishing a positive mindset that you then carry with you throughout the rest of your daily experience. When we rush we experience stress that directly undermines our ability to recognize fulfillment.

So in your own life, prepare and think ahead so you don’t have to rush in anything you have to do. Resist inflexible artificial timelines or at least take note of when you are faced with one. Recognize rushing for what it is. Poison to a peaceful mindset and a contributor to sense of lack of control. If nothing else, make starting your day a calm and structured event and you’ll be better able to withstand the uncertainties of modern daily living.

Adjust your Expectations and Loosen your Time Frames

This again touches on the idea that in Prison nothing happens quickly. If you need to see a caseworker, you put in a “kite” as it’s called requesting an appointment. You might get a return kite in two weeks notifying you of your appointment in another weeks’ time. So the issue you wanted to address in the moment is something that maybe three weeks from now you’ll be able to take care of. This follows for ordering commissary. You want some Skittles. You order today and next week on your assigned store day you go to commissary to pick up your store and hope that they had Skittles in stock and that they are in your order. If not, it’s another week before you might get your Skittles. You need eye glasses. You put in for an appointment to see the Optometrist. 6 months later you get your appointment and 2 months after that you get your glasses. In prison you learn to wait a long time to for everything and your general expectations change along the way.

In the modern free world the need for companies to set themselves apart from their competition hinges a lot on the level of service provided. This has made the modern consumer expect immediate resolution of an issue. When something is not resolved by the end of a phone call we are dissatisfied. When our package from Amazon is going to take a week instead of three days we are dissatisfied. As a people we are less equipped to deal with delayed gratification. Prison teaches you a level of patience lost on the modern free person.

So in your own life, readjust your timeframe and expectations of resolution. Think in terms of weeks and not days or hours and you’ll always be pleasantly surprised by the rapidness of an outcome. Realize that coveting something now and expecting it immediately can erode the pleasure in acquiring it. Delayed gratification heightens fulfillment and an upwardly adjusted time frame reduces disappointment.

The Importance of Sleep

This is nothing new, but it can’t be underestimated. Anyone who knows someone who has done a long stretch in prison knows that many times the person comes out of prison and looks younger than they are. Prison preserves youth. I have tried to understand the reason for this and the first things that come to mind are lack of stress from the grind of daily living and not drinking and drugging. I don’t believe this is the case. Prison has an underlying level of stress that far exceeds the stress of daily living. After all the threat of potential violence is a constant reality and there are a significant numbers of unstable individuals whom you are housed closely with that don’t think like normal people. Not to mention you have had all your liberties taken from you and you have no immediate control over your broader existence. This is pretty stressful. So lack of stress can’t be it.

With respect to drinking and drugging, while there is not as much opportunity to damage your body with substances, the fact is that substances, especially drugs are accessible in prison and some use regularly. Diet can’t be a consideration in preserving health in prison because the food given to prisoners is not that good. So the one thing that I believe has the most impact on the preservation of youth experienced by inmates is the regular amount of sleep they get. While some take this to an extreme and essentially try and sleep their time away, those more normalized get 8 to 9 hours of sleep a night. Sleep along with regular exercise and simple living is the recipe for maintaining good health and a youthful appearance.

So in your own life make getting 8 hours of sleep a night a priority. I realize that this is in many ways unrealistic but it is something you should strive towards. Since I’ve been out I usually get 6 hours of sleep a night, but in many ways that’s because I’m still so excited to be able to experience life on my own terms that I find myself wanting to wake up just so I can do things. Still I know that I need to eventually get back to good sleep habits because nothing is more important for overall health and wellbeing than adequate sleep.

Adopt and Existentialist Mindset

Perhaps the most important lesson I took from Prison is a lesson that I was well aware of before prison. I understood this philosophically and I thought practically but it was not until I did prison time that I really got to apply it. It was a fundamental tenet of Viktor Frankel in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. It was what allowed certain concentration camp inmates to survive while others perished. Namely the notion that no matter the oppressive condition you find yourself in and the subsequent lack of control, you have the right, because you are ultimately alone in the world by way of your psychology, to think the way you want in any given situation.

Basically, because our whole of experience is filtered through our own mind and no one else can experience our own true reality it follows that no one external can alter your reality unless you let them. Practically speaking you have the ability to think the way you want no matter how bad things are externally. I chose to find happiness and joy even in prison. You are the determining factor in what is important, real, and brings you joy. Those concentration camp inmates that had something they believed in whether it be painting, music, careers…and kept hold of those things and practiced them in any way possible were less likely to succumb to sickness and death.

So in your own life, remember that you’re ultimately alone and that your happiness is not dependent on external forces. Embrace the powerful idea that you choose happiness and fulfillment regardless of your immediate situation. Shift your locus of control internally, select from a limited number of life pursuits and choices, practice a more simple existence and declutter your life, adjust your time frames upwards, don’t rush wherever possible and get more sleep.

Episode 8, Part 1 & 2 Life Lessons from an Unlikely Prisoner