As part of the camp we got to head a little way up the road to visit
our local penitentiary for those men in Utah that we in need of
maximum security supervision so as not to harm themselves or even
others. We got a tour which convinced me further that I was far too
pretty for prison and was in no way cut out for the rigors of
resisting the amorous propositions of men not very good at impulse
control. It was scary for me and more so for the girls in our group
who were getting quite explicit offers for companionship. One of the
girls in our group had on some tiny white shorts and they had
attracted more than her fair share of cat calls and propositions.
They were yelling out 'white shorts' and then saying some sort of
thing that they would like to do with or to her. She was trying to
hide among a circle of boys but it was not working. It only stopped
when we went into a conference room to talk with a few prisoners one
on one. We were briefed about how charismatic and manipulative the
prisoners could be and told not to believe them or talk to them
alone. Three guys came out and told us how they were misunderstood,
sorry and changed. One guy said he was in prison because he
accidentally killed his friend with a brick. When he was pressed for
details it turns out that we had very different ideas about what
constitutes an 'accident'. He had hit his friend in the head with a
brick 43 times but he swore he didn't intend to kill him. Yeah, bad
luck. I came away from prison with that lesson stored firmly in my
rules of thumb: never more than twenty hits with a brick if I didn't
want to kill my friend.
