CZ talked in detail about his experiences in U.S. prisons on the podcast:
The process of entering prison is already torturous enough; you have to strip down for a search, show your butt, and then get locked up. My first roommate was a 'double murderer.' Yes, on my very first day in prison, I was assigned to someone who had killed two people.
In prison, no one cares who you are; they won't treat you specially just because you're CZ or wealthy. I was told I was under 'central monitoring,' which means some upper-level unit would keep a special eye on me. That's probably the only difference. But basically, the guards and inmates in the prison don't know who I am; they just follow the procedures.
According to the rules, I belong to white-collar crime, and even if I were guilty, I should have been assigned to a minimum security prison. However, because I am not a U.S. citizen, even if I voluntarily flew over to cooperate with the investigation, I could only be placed in a 'low security' prison, and this level of prison has murderers.
My roommate has a 30-year sentence for two murders. Because he behaved well, after serving 12 years, he was transferred from medium security to low security, which is the lowest level he could reach. He can never be transferred to the lowest security prison. And I was assigned there too. Additionally, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans are grouped into one 'racial category,' so I ended up sharing a cell with a Native American. Although I was very scared at first, we got along okay later.
The environment is really scary. When you first enter the prison, there's registration, photography, changing clothes, and searching before you are taken into the cell block. The cell block is a three-story building, with two symmetrical corridors lined with cells, housing about 240 inmates in total. The moment you step in there, you see big guys with facial and head tattoos shouting loudly, which is very intimidating.
As soon as I walked in, I was assigned to cell number five on the first floor. I tried to open the door but couldn't. A few seconds later, a big guy walked over and said to me, 'That's not how the door opens, you have to let the guard do it.' At that moment, I realized: everyone knew I was the 'newbie.' In fact, they could tell from my outfit right away.
The most torturous part is actually the psychological pressure. I was always worried they would make me serve longer than the originally planned four months. In the U.S. prison system, this kind of 'unexpected extension' is very common; they might suddenly add a new charge, turning it into the 'California hotel mode': you can come in, but you can never get out.
If someone had told me from the beginning, '100% guarantee you'll be out in four months,' I could have accepted that. But reality is not like that; there were too many ups and downs in between. Even when I was transferred to the 'halfway house' (a semi-open management for the end of the sentence), I was eventually picked up by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for the last month and a half because they said my visa had expired.
But the problem is, they asked me to stay to deal with legal matters, and we also applied for a visa extension. They were forcing me to stay in the U.S. while using my expired visa as a reason to put me in a detention center. Three days later, my lawyer helped me get the detention order revoked, but they still didn't let me return to the halfway house. This series of absurd experiences will be detailed in my book later.
