You Run This Place Unlike a F$%*ing Prison

You know that old joke that every inmate makes whenever someone asks them how prison is treating them? “It ain’t the Ritz,” they say, and then go back to mentally counting how many cigarettes it’s going to take to keep Bogs off their asses.

In Mexico, however, prison kind of is like the Ritz, if you’re an incarcerated drug dealer. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not speaking from experience. Rather, this NYT article illuminates just how many amenities a federal criminal can enjoy.

It isn’t that prisons in Mexico are club meds for federal criminals. Rather, the affluence of the drug dealers who are incarcerated can be employed in various ways, and can be used towards the purchase of sundry items that can make you feel more at home. As the article says:

Some well-heeled prisoners pay to have keys to their cells. When life inside, with its pizza deliveries, prostitutes and binges on drugs and alcohol, becomes too confining, prisoners sometimes pay off the guards for a furlough or an outright jailbreak.

That’s right! Door privileges are but a few of the amenities a druglord can obtain in prison. Its convenience, however, cannot be overlooked. Why, just a couple of months ago, a few dozen prisoners were able to literally walk out of the penitentiary. The guards, I guess, were too figuring out where their new plasma HDTVs would be going to notice that most of their inmates were casually strolling through freedom.

The Shawshank Redemption it ain’t. Boy, if Brooks had been in a Mexican prison, he wouldn’t have lasted two weeks on the outside before institutionalizing himself. I mean, how can you return to the world outside when the prison has its own house band?

The situation there is so bad, according to a local lawyer, Uriel Márquez Valerio, that inmates managed to invite a musical group into the prison in 2005 to celebrate the birthday of a drug trafficker, who several weeks later found a way to escape.

That’s it. Hookers, blow, whiskey, pizza, and a band? Sign me up, warden. Prison sounds like the best time ever. At the very least, it has to be better than work.

In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank Prison. Andy crawled to freedom through 500 yards of shit-smelling foulness I can't even begin to imagine, or maybe I don’t want to.

Now we don’t even need to imagine. Who knew that walking out the front door would be a dirtier enterprise than crawling through a sewer pipe?