Yep. Again, not like we haven’t seen this a thousand times already. I watched that video, though I really didn’t need to. I already knew about prison politics. He didn’t say much, that I didn’t already know.
You are right, the inmates love to watch cop shows. I was in the California prison system for 25 years and 2 months, and I used to chuckle when I saw it.
Now, the dude can PC up. I don’t know about New York, but in the California joints I was in, the Lieutenant is going to ask him for names. So, if some guy gets surrounded by staff, and is rolled up and shipped to Pelican Bay, he will know someone gave him up. Now, the vetting process is not quite as simple as that, but it can get it started.
Also, AD/SEG is no picnic. Those guys get absolutely nothing. No TV, no radio, no books to read, NOTHING. Those were the days.
In NY State, inmates in SEG can request books from the library. They can receive mail, and write letters. All inmates get a set number of letters they can mail out for free each month. When I started the job, all letters were opened and checked for contraband. Mail to and from lawyers was never opened. At some point they stopped checking the mail, but an inmate, if he was writing someone other than his lawyer, would have to leave the letter unsealed, and it would be sent upfront and processed from there.
SEG inmates can also get one non-legal visit a week. A SEG inmate would be escorted from the SEG building in cuffs to and back from the visiting room. He would be processed in and out of the visiting room separately from general population inmates. All visits were assigned to a specific table in the visiting room, by the officers working there that day. All inmates were strip searched on their way out of the visiting room.
When I started back in 1980, the State allowed visits every day, then they changed it at some point to weekends only. Lawyers could visit during the week, and the visiting room would be opened so they could use a glass enclosed room to meet. An officer or two would be on duty outside to do the processing of the inmate, and the lawyer on his way in, and out.
Another thing officers did when I first started at Auburn prison was hand out medications to the inmates with prescriptions. Back then we worked 1 to 9 p.m. When we went down the gallery for the count, we'd dispense their medications, many of which were psychotropic drugs, then on the way back we'd take the count. The psychotropic drugs came in huge bottles that you would have to dispense with an eyedropper. Each bottle gave the number of drops you had to give. Some officers had so many bottles of medications, they needed a cart to wheel them down the gallery. I was at Auburn for a little over 3 years until I could transfer closer to home. Sometime within those 3 years, the Union filed a complaint about the fact that we were being required to hand out meds to inmates, even though we weren't medical staff. That's when that task was taken away from us, and inmates were put on callouts to the infirmary to get their meds each day.