Have you ever sat on the toilet while carrying on a conversation with a guy who’s looming over you drinking Kool-Aid and eating chocolate-chip cookies?

Have you ever felt the need to tape National Geographic magazines around your torso as makeshift body armor?

How about having someone peer up your anus with a flashlight after you visit with your family?

Or what about being addressed by a number instead of your name?

I have and do experience most of these things on a regular basis. You see, prison is all about "normalizing" abnormal behavior, to use a word popularized in the Trump era. Nothing about life inside prison is normal.

Prison is the very absence of normal.

When I first entered prison, almost everything seemed alien and disgusting. On day one, I was stripped of my clothes alongside a bunch of other men, marched around naked, and issued an ID number.

Let’s examine that for a minute. I’d been methodically shamed and humiliated, assigned a new form of identification, and then informed that not only was I no longer free, I was effectively the property of the state of Michigan — all in the course of a few minutes.

Read the full article about the daily chaos of incarceration at The Marshall Project.