Today is June 14th and on the agenda for today is to go have lunch at clink prison. Here I am going to experience what life inside a prison is like as I will have servers who are inmates, and I will get to ask them questions and get to know them. I have about 4 days left on my trip, and this has been something I’ve looked forward to since the beginning. I have always set my goal of going into the FBI, but I’ve also always had a strong interest in corrections. We arrived at the prison, and we had to leave our passports phones and all other personal items at the front desk before entering. We were then led through the courtyard of the prison to the restaurant. Here we were seated and assigned name tags that included our names and our pre-ordered meals. My server was a man who has been in prison since he was 17 years old. I got to ask him several questions about not only prison life but also himself. I asked his likes his dislikes who his favorite singer was and so on. While I was interested in the educational side of the experience, I also wanted to get to know him as a person rather than just observing him. We had a three-course meal with French onion soup as the starter, pasta as the main, and sorbet as the dessert. I decided to go with “safe” food options that I knew I would like (I’m very picky). All the food was amazing and was very well presented. As I was talking to my server, he told me how certain inmates cooks are, certain ones are servers, and certain ones are bussers. Each person had a different job they could participate in which in turn gives them an advantage for when they get out of prison. Prisons in the US are quite different from those in the UK. For example, the UK focuses on rehabilitation rather than punishment resulting in amazing recidivism rates. I was also able to talk to other inmates working at the restaurant and hear their stories and experiences. I was surprised that they were so willing to talk about their experiences and I was so grateful to hear about them. This experience has by far been one of my favorites so far. It gave me a new outlook on corrections and inmates. Going forward I want to investigate corrections more as a career and see if that’s something I would seriously be interested in. I also want to see if there is anything like this in the US. Since our prison systems are so different, I’m not sure if there is but I would love to do this repeatedly. I think my interest in corrections has gone up after this and when choosing my career path, I might want to consider corrections. I can’t wait to see what else this trip teaches me about myself and my interests going forward.
