Most folks I've met in prison are indistinguishable from those in the free world.
The primary difference is whether it was a bug or a rock that smacked into their windshield of circumstance and how they handled the ensuing mess. Many of us started out with a few cracks to begin with and oversteered straight into the nearest ditch upon impact. Some of us hit the gas, flipped the car, and slid to a smoking stop. Then there were the few who lit the tank with a stick of burning dynamite and rode the ensuing blast into the aether, laughing all the way.
However we got here, there comes a sort of... settling. It doesn't happen overnight, and some get there faster than others, but the ashes assemble into roughly two piles.
The first pile, and largest by far, begins to accrete into something resembling a societal norm. People just trying to figure out life and how to move forward sans wreckage, injury, or scars. People doing their best to make amends, do their time, and muscle through the experience of slow-motion trauma that is the justice system. They're just people trying to be people.
The second, smaller batch, however, are more ember than ash and continue to smolder and burn with old habits. They trigger all sorts of smoke alarms, schoolyard fires, and occasionally, even engender dangerous conflagrations. They're people who aren't interested in another way aside from the one they know. The one that landed them in prison in the first place. Chaos and struggle is their accepted norm.
A lot of these people operate chiefly on learned experience and instinct. They're largely reactionary and plan no more than a few hours, or at best, a few days ahead. They live in the only now they know. But then you have the ones who know damn well what they're doing, and they're the worst...
Scammers.
Many of you in the free world have met these parasites already. They slide into your DMs with tales of diamonds and gold unfairly detained in customs, love-bomb you with sweet nothings and lascivious pics no serious person sends in an intro, or hit you with weird requests to pay a tiny fee to turn your art into an NFT so they can buy it.
It's just an evolvement of the old snake oil pitch peddled by the same old snaky people. It's likely no surprise prison has its fair share of scammers and the scammed alike.
A few years ago, I was visited by a dear friend. While she was here, she met other people with incarcerated loved ones. Most were, as expected, normal folks, with some less savory than others, but one stood out in the lowbrow crowd: a woman who was scamming other women. We'll call her Jane.
At first, Jane seemed nice. She offered a ride to the facility a few times (the bus took a while, and it only got you so far), an act of kindness with no red flags in sight. But she liked to talk, and the more she spoke, the more she revealed, and as any good investigator knows, when someone wants to talk, you let them. They'll tell you exactly who they are.
Jane's boyfriend, who we'll call John, is a decent-looking older man. I never really paid the guy any mind, but once I learned what he was up to, I steered clear, as anyone with even a slightly functioning moral compass would. John and Jane were romance scammers.
Here's how it went...
Setup: Jane takes pictures with John during visits and uploads them to dating sites, pretending to be John (who “used to” be in prison). If anyone asks who Jane is in the pictures, John identifies her as his sister and provides her Facebook name. When contacted, Jane, posing as the sister, confirms the story, adding a layer of validity to the whole scam.
Preferred Targets: Jane seeks out single moms, older women, and even married women she can blackmail later when the squeeze is producing less juice. Yeah, she's a really nasty kind of heartworm.
Engagement: Jane, posing as John, flirts and builds a connection with multiple women, using pet names to avoid keeping track of individual details. Not only is she a horrible person, she's lazy.
Confession: After approximately a month, John played by Jane reveals he's in prison and has limited access to the phone, claiming the contact is risky, but he just can't stay away from his newfound love. He apologizes for not texting more often, saying he could get in serious trouble and be sent to the hole, but he just can't resist.
The Dossier: Jane sends John a dossier about each mark, including their phone numbers, personal details, and all their text messages so he can know what nicknames to use. If you use pet names like "Babe" or "Hon," there's no need to waste time learning people's names. She actually said that!
Hook: John then calls the women, reinforcing the connection and suggesting they can talk more often if the mark puts money on his phone account. Then he'd routinely cut the calls short, citing a unit emergency or that the call he traded for cost him all his commissary. If only she could put some money on his phone!
The Exploit: Fundamentally, the money these poor women were sending was being mostly repurposed for use by Jane and John. At the time Jane bragged about this, the parasitic couple had more than a dozen women funding their phone, visits, gas money, and commissary.
The kicker? Jane invited my friend to do the same thing with me, stating I was younger and better looking than John and, as such, stood to make more than the $1,000-$1,200 a month they were. Needless to say, my friend has infinitely more class than that. She politely disengaged from Jane and reported the scam to the authorities at HQ in Olympia.
I'm not sure if anything was done about it at the state level, but I do know John ended up single and without a dime. My belief is an investigation was instigated, and Jane stomped on the gas, taking all their ill-gotten gains with her before she could get pulled over. She'll eventually catch a rock through the windshield, but who knows if she'll land in the ditch or burst into flame? One could almost hope it's a cliff she finds.
So that's a little peek beneath the hood of prison life. It's not just the people out there scamming and getting scammed; it's in here too. So stay vigilant, stay informed, and keep your eyes on the road, my friends. There's always someone looking to spoil your Sunday drive.