Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm Andrew Heaton, your host, and junior Wharton, for the rest of the hour. Several years ago, right after I graduated college,

I drove down to southeastern Oklahoma to visit the McAllister Prison Rodeo, which I hasten to add,

before you get worked up, I add it was a voluntary rodeo. Not the prison bit, but the rodeo bit. You didn't get to

choose if you were in prison, but if you were in prison, you could go to the rodeo. And in fact,

it was only available to felons that were on good behavior. It was something of a reward to

incentivize good behavior. Because was something of a reward to incentivize good behavior.

Because as it turns out, prison is very, very boring, possibly interspersed with terrifying violence,

but that, as I understand it, is a punctuated moment against a broader backdrop of mind-numbing tedium.

So once a year, approved inmates could go into a special arena in McAllister.

It had barbed wire around the top.

It was part of the prison complex.

And they would participate in the rodeo as a team against a team of rodeo professionals who were not in prison.

Bull riding, calf roping, normal rodeo stuff.

There was an event called Money the Hard Way, which in retrospect I think might have been a tad tasteless.

At the end of the rodeo, somebody would clip a hundred-dollar bill to a string tied between a bull's horns and then slap the bull and shout,

Oh!

And all the inmates who wanted to could try to lunge and weave in and out of the bull that was trying to kill him to snatch that hundred dollar bill, which is a lot of capital at the prison commissary.

The thing is, the bull really wanted to kill them, or at least kill somebody in general.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with rodeos, but what they do is they put this little device on bulls that squeezes their testes to piss them off.

That's the explicit purpose of whatever that, I'm sure it has a name, but whatever it, it's like a little

rubber tube that they affixed to the testicles and it squeezes them and that really

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