Thursday, May 8, 2008

Oh yeah, one more thing

Can anyone recommend a good resource on, for lack of a better term, "How to write believable characters who've been in prison"?

3 comments:

  1. Timmy says: go to prison.

    That being said, I encounter people who have been to prison every day. You can too, at your local courthouse. They come in two varieties - the young punk who wants to project that prison did not have an effect on him by being tougher, and the veteran who simply answers questions in "sir, yes, sir" or "sir, no, sir" format, showing that, at a minimum, he has adapted to the rgidity of confinement and adapted to the system, even if he has not changed his ways.

    And, yes, I used all male pronouns. I can't tell when women have done hard time.

    - JV, crime correspondent

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  2. Your best bet is to talk to me. Most of my family has done serious prison time (some of them having been on the FBI's most wanted list, and are considered a "crime family." My Uncle Bob is currently there for the shotgun murder of an informant at a police safehouse. I've spent my whole life with such folks, so I can at the very least tell you when it doesn't sound...er...legit.

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  3. A sort of sideways way to look at it would be to peruse something like prisontalk.com.

    ReplyDelete

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