Maintaining Outside Contacts from Jail

"What's up? My name is Natural and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village to discuss how to survive in prison. In this clip I will be discussing how maintaining outside affiliations helps you to survive prison. It is absolutely imperative that if you have connections to healthy and well people outside of the prison environment that you maintain those connections. It is important to keep communication lines open. It's important to continue to be honest and open with the people that you care about outside of the prison and to hope that they will do the same thing for you. It is definitely a big part of what helps you to survive day to day living. Everything changes once you're in the prison environment and you find yourself subjective to things that just aren't common to the day to day basis outside of the prison environment. The only people that can help you keep your sanity are those that are grounded in reality outside of this very constructive world that you're living in. They can also help to inspire you and keep you in the right path so that you don't end up back in the same situation again. Another thing about that is that you have to respect those peoples lives. You have to respect that for the most part people aren't sitting down writing letters, they don't have money to be accepting, you know expensive phone calls on a regular basis. So try not to let those outside affiliations not necessarily being as strong as they would usually be, keep you down. Use them as much as you can and try not to violate peoples personal space regarding those matters. But otherwise it's very necessary that you keep those affiliations, otherwise you might lose yourself in the system and begin to think that this is the land of normal when in all naturality it just isn't. The outside world is what you're striving to get to and so you have to keep the connections to the people that are out there living it."