Who am I doing time with? A lot of people ask about that. I’m in a small, isolated group of inmates (here it’s called a “detachment”) in a section completely cut off from the rest of the prison camp. A prison within a prison, with an utterly insane and barely tolerable regime. I’ll write more about that later. But the inmates are good people. Calm, friendly. When I first arrived, I immediately thought: murderers. And that turned out to be right. Almost all of them are murderers. The sentences are huge. My 9 years is the shortest sentence here, so I’m like a preschooler. The average here is 13 to 15 years. Some have 19 or 20. Those are double murderers. It’s easier to do time with people serving long sentences. Less pointless bustle, fewer petty conflicts. Though of course they are very, very dependent on the administration. If your sentence is “fifteen years,” then parole, which can knock 5 years off, becomes your top priority. And of course—this is a bonus for me personally, I like this sort of thing—you could write a book about each one. Every person has a drama, a tragedy involving a victim, a personal tragedy. Lives shattered by passion, or by simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s all interesting. And frightening too. Really, please don’t kill anyone. You’ll have to sit in prison for a long time afterward, and there’s no point in it anyway. By the way, here’s a life hack for you: when you’re drinking, stay away from knives 😉