I came across a list of prison slang from an article in Mother Jones magazine and one term caught my eye:

“diesel therapy”: a lengthy bus trip used as a punishment.

I remember my father’s story. He spent many years in US prisons for drugs and acting out violently against the Vietnam war. But that’s another story.

Regarding this slang term, he never mentioned it to me but his stories clearly reflected the practice.

Guards would chain him face up on the corrugated metal floor of a van with his arms and legs outstretched. Then they would drive for hours on end from one prison facility to another. Sometimes it would be over 12 hours he said.

It wasn’t like he needed to be transferred because often they would just turn around and go back to where they started. And they weren’t tying to get information from him or punish him. They just did this kind of stuff to inmates they didn’t like because they had the power to.

He suffered from migraines anyway, so this torture was beyond painful for him. Early in the trip a migraine would set in and it would just get worse and worse with each rumbling bump in the road.

So now I know what its called: diesel therapy. Another service provided by our tax funded prison system.

It sure taught my dad a lesson! It taught him that authority is corrupt and cruel. It is best to be servile to it, like an abused dog who loves its owner. And it made him angrier. It increased the amount of pain in the world.

He is a great example of how prisons waste money and help nobody (except for the corporations that run them and make huge amounts of tax funded money from them).

Tags: diesel therapy, prison, wasted money

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.