First question!

Gentle Reader ExGeeEye asks: “What does it mean ‘working out with a water bag’?”

Excellent question.

Bugscuffle County does not supply our inmates with weight equipment.

Matter-of-fact, we don’t supply much more than a basketball and a couple of racquet balls.

Inmates, however, are nothing if not adaptable. Given half a chance they steal garbage bags, fill them full of water from the showers, and use those in improvised weight routines.

Given that one gallon of water weights eight pounds, a 33-gallon garbage bag can be a fairly significant amount of weight.

Voila! “Water bag”.

LawDog

This seems to be going well.
Well, maybe one a day.

11 thoughts on “First question!”

  1. How do ink and needles get in? Never mind tobacco or other intoxicants.

    Explains why the drug 'war' isn't going so well if a jail can't keep that stuff out.

    Jesse J. in South Texas

  2. I do not know about Lawdog's Facility But they can buy Sewing kits and pens in our Facility Viola Tattoo material

  3. I saw a show on prison tattoos a few years ago and they showed an improvised tattoo gun. It was made from a cassette player motor, an eraser from a pencil, a piece of guitar string, some wood scraps, and a few bits of tape to hold it together.

    I don't remember what kind of facility it was though. Might have been a federal pen, but it seemed strange to me that a guest could have a cassette player or a guitar. I suppose they could have been smuggled in.

  4. Jail tat pens can be made out of such things as already mentioned, but can also be as simple as a staple stuck through a pencil's eraser and another pencil to 'strike' the pinned one and Bic ballpoint pen ink.

    Most of the tatkits my husband and I saw in our Lock-up, babysitter, careers were staples that were melted or tied (pesky loose threads came in handy somewhere) into the non-bristle end of jail issue toothbrushes.

    After that, all you really needed was a ballpoint pen (ink), spit (water, if trying to be sanitary), and a little bit of ash – any type would do – and a "artist" and a willingness to sit through hours of rather painful "tapping" and – BINGO!

    "Look, ma! I gots me a new Tat! Ain't it purty?"

  5. Thanks.

    Seems to me push-ups, pull-ups (given a proper horizontal support), sit-ups , and variations thereof would be more effective, safer, and less likely to cause official interference than mucking about with non-standard equipment.

    However, I suppose this in one more instance of there not being a surfeit of common sense among the population described.

  6. I'm fortunate to work in a "newer" jail facility, and we don't allow the inmates to own any electronics. So in order to make tattoos, they use staples as the needles and they will attach them to the end of an ink pen barrel in some fashion.

    The ink can be made of many items. I have seen inmates use melted checker pieces, charcoal from something burnt to a crisp in the microwave, and even the actual ink from an ink pen. (They are only allowed blue ink pens for this reason.)

  7. To the previous anonymous, the Dog's recollection is better than yours. Water is 0.9979955 g/mL at 21 C (70 degrees F). You can do the unit conversions on your own, but the answer is 8.328676 lb./gal. at 70F.

    Even at 100C, water weighs ~7.9lb/gal.

  8. I'm surprised garbage bags can hold the weight of 33 gallons of water.

  9. Most agencies get the industrial pack of "cheap" trash bags. Thus, they don't always successfully carry 33 pounds of water.

    But inmates have a way of getting around this.

    At my agency, inmates will often place their water bag inside of their laundry bag or their property bag (we replaced their property bins with cloth net bags) in order to make it last longer.

    On top of that, inmates can get creative in making handles using rolled up newspaper or magazines, and some of those handles are even given finished grips by using socks.

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