You wake up one morning with a cough and body aches. Great. The last thing you need in this shithole is a damn cold. You know that by morning, your throat is going to be sore as shit, and you're not even going to want to get out of bed. So you tell the guard, who hands you a slip of paper. It's a request to see the prison doctor. You fill it out, put it in the request box, and then ... nothing. Two weeks later, you get a letter, telling you that you'll be able to see the doctor when he frees up in two more weeks. They didn't even bother to draw a middle finger on the response. No worries; your cold cleared up five days ago, anyw- hey, wait a minute!

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I've heard that story from every single ex con I've ever talked to. It doesn't matter what security level the prison is, how many inmates are in it, what state it's from. All of them have been through this exact system, which leads me to believe it's done that way on purpose -- not because they're understaffed or underfunded (they are), but because if you make someone wait a month to see the doctor, by the time their appointment rolls around, their body will have taken care of anything minor on its own. I may be totally wrong about this, but that's the feeling I get.

The same thing happens with the dentist. If you feel yourself getting the slightest of toothaches, your ass had better find a time machine and drop that shit in the request box two months ago. Because by the time you get to the dentist, it's going to be abscessed clear down to your goddamn liver.

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If you've been busted for meth, there's a pretty good chance that half of your teeth will be coming out anyway. So after waiting two months to see the doctor, it's often a case of, "Hey, while you're in there ..." More than one of my friends did exactly that: They went in to get a single tooth pulled, but then realized if they had to come back, it was going to be another long wait. So the dentist just jerked out the other ones that looked like they'd eventually be a problem.