Member-only story

Boredom Is a Hope Killer in Prison

I’ll never understand why the system keeps people down

Damian Delune
3 min readJan 2, 2025

Boredom is dangerous when you’re in prison. Other inmates being bored can often translate to them doing stupid shit, such as fighting, taking drugs, and just generally behaving like idiots. All those things are dangerous, but for me, what’s the most dangerous is the loss of hope.

I even struggle to stay on the right side of things when consistently faced with so much nothing day after day. Your nerves become frayed. Every little grievance becomes intentional, whether it is or not. You search for meaning, for purpose. Fuck, you just search for something to do that isn’t sleeping, eating, rinse and repeat.

This camp was not meant to hold inmates long-term. It’s what is known as a CRV camp, confinement in response to violation. When you’re held under CRV charges, your sentence is for 90 days. Most folks can do that standing on their head. There’s nothing much to do in CRV camps because of this. In NC there were two camps like this, now there’s only one. Because no, this camp doesn’t count as technically, it’s still considered to be closed.

After Hurricane Helene, we’ve been bounced around playing musical prisons. The state of NC requires once you have minimum custody (green clothes) you can not be housed in a medium…

--

--

Damian Delune
Damian Delune

Written by Damian Delune

Incarcerated writer sharing real stories about life on the inside, through my wife, Demeter Delune (editor, publisher, promoter, responder)

Responses (12)