Today I ask a friend and felon, all of the random stuff I've always wanted to know about prison,

but haven't been able to find out. Like, what's prison wine taste like? How does trade work

behind bars? Where do people get the ink for their tattoos? If somebody sees you cry in the

slammer, do you get beaten up?

And if you do, can you whittle your toothbrush down and shank them later?

And crucially, how is prison debate different than high school debate, if at all?

Welcome to part four of Prison Week, right here on the political orphanage.

My guest today is Chandler Dougal. He is the Director of Operations for the National

Debate League. He is a former

model prisoner for Maine Corrections Department and one of the voices that you hear throughout my

journey in the main penitentiary. And he is the author of the Daily Prisoner on Substack,

which I subscribe to and recommend and think that you should check out, particularly if you've enjoyed any of the exploration of prison that we've been doing. Hello, Chandler. Hi, Andrew. Thanks so much for having me. I've been a big fan of yours for a long time. And just for all the listeners, I want to emphasize that model prisoner is not hyphenated. That means that I was well-behaved, not that I was modeling from inside. That's, but at but at the same time probably got prison sculpted, at least as a little, a little, a bit of a consolation prize while you were in the clink. Probably did a lot of push-ups. Yeah, lost 90 pounds, actually. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, you know, look for silver lining wherever it is. So almost worth it. Yeah. So I was thinking that we would kind of go through your substack because in addition to having you, I should thank you, you facilitated the trip to Maine.

That all happened because you initially invited me to participate in the prison debate league.

And it kind of spiraled out to me meeting the warden

and going through an entire day at the penitentiary, so I'm very indebted to you for that.

I'm grateful for that.

But kind of the journey keeps going because you apparently kept the journal the entire time you were in prison

and are now releasing one day at a time on substack. So I've been

able to kind of do, for lack of a better term, academic research in addition to the travelogue

that I did. And I was thinking we just kind of talk about some of the things I've learned through

your substack to supplement the prison travelogue. Yeah, that sounds great. And you're right. I, um, I wrote a page

every day that I was inside. Um, my sort of goal for it was, um, initially as like a companion

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