You get strip-searched and shackled. You can't choose what to eat, when to turn out the lights, how to dress. You risk being raped, stabbed or beaten. And you might have to languish in hellish conditions for years or decades.
This, as a dozen teens and younger children heard yesterday in Annapolis, is the harsh reality of life at the Eastern Correctional Institution outside Salisbury - Maryland's largest prison with 3,200 inmates.
"I think you guys are a bunch of good kids," said Capt. Walter Holmes, a burly correctional officer. "But if you start messing up, you're coming here."
Numerous photos illustrated why he thought they should avoid that outcome: tiny jail cells, coiled razor wire, heavily armed tower guards.
Holmes and two prison colleagues visited the community center at the Eastport Terrace public housing project to drive home the need for youth to make smart decisions before they land behind bars. They call it CHOICES - Children Having Obstacles Involving Choices Eventually Succeed.
Holmes and Capt. Kevin King launched the program in 2005 and have presented it on their off-hours some 30 times at churches, schools and community centers up and down the Delmarva peninsula.
Yesterday was their first session west of the Chesapeake Bay, thanks to an invitation from an Annapolis youth advocate named Raynaldo Brown.
While Holmes said it's not a "scared straight" approach, he certainly hopes participants leave with a healthy fear of prison. "We do want to wake them up, so to speak," he said before yesterday's event. But, he added, "We don't want to scare them to the point they don't want to listen."
Two grandmothers were in attendance along with 11 boys and a 6-year-old girl.
Devera Pounds brought her two grandsons so they could hear the message. Three of their older brothers have been locked up; one, who's 17, just got out of juvenile detention for a drug charge.
And their uncle, 15-year-old Malachi McFarland - Pounds' son - is serving a 10-year sentence for shooting a 20-year-old man in late April. McFarland, who was charged as an adult, told police he felt threatened by his victim.
As the two boys and her 10-year-old grand-nephew sat beside her on metal chairs, Pounds said: "I'm hoping they see a picture, see one word that may click in those teeny brains of theirs - 'Oh, man, this one choice may leave me locked up the rest of my life.' "
