Jail is a scary place. I know, I’ve been there (luckily only 5 days, but it was hell because of my charges!) The general public often does not know the differences between jail and prison. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics , jails are locally-operated, short term facilities that hold inmates awaiting trial or sentencing or both, and inmates sentenced to a term of less than 1 year, typically misdemeanors. Prisons are long term facilities run by the state or the federal government and typically hold felons and inmates with sentences of more than 1 year. This means that in local jails, there’s a HUGE mixture of inmates with a wide variety of low and high level offenses all together in the same pod! For example, to the left of you is an inmate with twenty-five unpaid parking tickets; to the right is an inmate with armed-robbery charges. I think of Tom Hanks famous line in the film, Forest Gump , “Mama always said life was li...