The Ann Arbor Chronicle has been running a serialized memoir from a man who spent a few months incarcerated in the Washtenaw County Jail in Michigan. It’s pretty compelling stuff, and definitely worth reading if you’re curious what the experience is like. It doesn’t speak for everyone, and the Washtenaw experience sounds a bit different from what the Travis County one is like, from what I know, but it’s still a decent resource regarding what to expect in jail, some tips on behavior, and fostering maybe a bit of compassion.

(To that end, as is often true on the Internet, avoid the Comments section, which is full of the standard “anything that happens to a person in jail is totally justified because they’re the ones who got themselves put in there” – which is especially egregious in this case, because the anonymous author was detained awaiting trial, not actually convicted of anything.)

Labels: jail

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