
In prison, power is invisible until it isn’t. It doesn’t arrive in the form of a punch or a shank—it arrives through the erosion of choice. Most people think being “turned out” is just a violent act, a sudden taking. But that’s only the surface. The real story happens slowly, through subtle transactions where one person stops being a person and starts being a commodity.
There are no official rules for how this works. The administration writes one set of laws, but the inmates write another. The second set is the one that matters.









