I've been working on the Stragview Work Squad for about a year.

Working is the best way to make the time go by.

At least, that's what I thought.

Before I'd been arrested for aggravated assault I was a landscapers assistant. I ran the mowers, cut the bushes and moved mulch and sard in the hot sun for fat cat clients that had the money to pay for landscapers.

If it hadn't been for that bar fight, I'd have probably gone right on doing that for the next

20 years until I finally blew my brains out. Now I get to do it for the next five years

until I'm up for parole. If I live that long. Stragview is a big, a whole prison that's been around since the early 40s.

It's split into two sections, the outer ward and the inner ward.

The two are separated by a gate called the middle gate and

traffic between is heavily monitored. The outer ward is for housing.

It holds six open bay dorms that are like big summer camp cabins.

They house around 100 guys and hold a series of bunk beds for them to sleep on.

Next are three big concrete block buildings that house the close management guys,

two-man cells in a series of 40-man squads.

Amongst it all, sits the foreboding concrete and steel edifice that sits behind barbed wire fences

and has the unfortunate luck of being the Stragview confinement unit.

Aside from some offices and the Canteen building that serves as our source of junk food.

The rest is just grass and sand and concrete paths.

That's a lot of grass to cut in the summer and a lot of places for the snow to blow in the winter.

The inner ward, what lies beyond the middle gate, are the buildings that often serve as

job sites.

The Chow Hall, the Medical Pavilion, the Classrooms, the Library, and Visitation area are mostly concrete and sidewalk and don't require much work for my squad of me.

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