re: if you went to prison, would you want cell block or segregation?

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I'm 6'8 278 lbs. I think I'd manage.

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Even in an interaction with an officer, the violence often has a transactional root. In my first year, a dreadful incident shut down my prison: A convict with a sentence commonly called "lights out" (his parole date was beyond his life expectancy) threw boiling oil in an officer's face. This melts the skin right off. The place went into lockdown mode, which means that no one leaves his cell for any reason. Food came in pre-made Styrofoam meal boxes; every cell was searched, every yard, every convict down to his anus. All the little extras that prisoners acquire, sundry items like coffee mugs and soup spoons that are valuable inside simply due to their scarcity, were confiscated. The cops were obviously not looking for the oil or its wielder, who was in the hospital himself after "resisting."

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But why did that particular prisoner find it necessary to attack an officer in such a terrible way? Money, of course. In gambling operations—and sports tickets are very common inside—there needs to be a "bank," a cell in which hundreds of packs of cigarettes are concealed for paying out potential winners. The officer who got splashed ("190'd," in common parlance, for the temperature necessary to boil oil; not to be confused with "buck-80'd," which means a scar requiring 180 stitches) had found the bank and confiscated it, costing a complex organization a lot of money and undermining their ability to make good on bets. The flow of capitalism needed to be restored. They weren't getting their Newports back, but if they were still going to be taken seriously as a gambling operation, the crew had to commit this dreadful act of violence. The man who threw the pot of oil was chosen because he was never getting out anyway. Nothing to lose, and a reputation to gain. He didn't even try to get away with it. Rather different from the explosions of temper that the ART programs intends to cure.

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es and know how I know you've never been to (real) prison?

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 request segregation 

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The worst one I heard was a guy had a long piece of yarn or some sort or thread. He places one end of it under someone's pillow while they were sleeping. He lit one end on fire and walked off. It burned like a fuse and eventually caught his pillow on fire, which caught his hair on fire. My friend said he was literally 10 feet away and saw the guys face melting off of his skull.

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