#prison stripes | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

male-us-prison-experience · 4 months

Text

THE SPECIAL SHACKLE-SHUFFLE IN PRISON STRIPES (PART II)

A new prisoner who is placed in full restraints for the first time in a way has to learn to walk again, because he is not yet used to wearing leg irons. And walking in leg-irons isn’t easy, regardless of the length of the connecting chain. You have to get used to that. This results in the famous shackle shuffle, which can be admired in many video clips. About that special kind of shackle-enforced shuffling I will talk in this blog another time. In this episode I would like to briefly focus on an aspect that mostly receives less attention. That is the rest of the prisoner's body position, as a result of being forced to wear the special leather restraining-belt with handcuffs.

Take a good look at this photo; I give a detail-view of it below. If you look closely, you will first see that the inmate, already clad in prison stripes, has slumped shoulders and holds his handcuffed hands in the middle of his crotch. That is of course a rather unnatural position, but the cuffs leave him no choice. Thanks to being attached to the belt, his hands not only pull his arms tightly down, but also tightly inwards, where you would normally let them hang relaxed at the side. You can of course hold them up, but that quickly becomes quite tiring. Especially those with relatively short arms have little room for maneuver, their arms will be just stretched from shoulders to belt.

Holding the hands far forward is also not possible due to the D-Ring. You perhaps can bend them a little forward on both its sides until the chain is taut against the arch of the D, but you can't keep that up indefinitely either. Result: you quickly just let them hang down.

However, in that case they will constantly press against your crotch and rub with every footstep. To avoid that, as this can quickly become irritating, you unconsciously adjust your posture. You pull in your stomach to make a bit room for your cuffed hands and you also bend your upper body slightly forward to make even more room below, and therefore you automatically stick your butt out back.

That is what you can see in this photo: as a result of the full restraints, the prisoner walks slightly bent forward all the time, and therefore automatically with his butt clearly pushed back and up. That is a very humiliating position to have to move around in or to enter the courthouse, especially if there are also many spectators or even photographers from the press present during such a prep walk to capture your arrival. Such a constantly visibly raised butt then gives you an extra feeling of great vulnerability, because in that case it is inevitably captured forever for a large audience in their pics too.

The leg-irons obviously will make that gait even more uncomfortable for the prisoner, as they force him to take careful steps and often look at the ground, which of course causes his butt to stick out in this humiliating way even further.

If you pay attention, you can also see it in many other prisoners walking in full restraints, this position that expresses powerlessness: the stomach drawn in, the upper body leaning slightly forward, the butt back and up. Sometimes more, sometimes less - a prisoner will always try to minimize the attention his bottom might attract, but the discomfort of his restraints often leaves him little choice. Here are a few examples, with the same psychologically uncomfortable body position as that of our main hero.

In the pic above, the protruding butt is somewhat hidden by the swinging end of the belt, but you can see from the prisoner's body position that all in all it is sticking out considerably. The triptych of the next photo is actually even more telling. Right from the front, in the right photo, at first sight nothing seems to be 'wrong'.

But in the middle photo, straight from the side, where the shackled inmate is taking long strides (the chain between his ankle cuffs is stretched to its maximum length), you can see, as a result of the tight fastening of the belt, a slightly rounded upper back above that, and below that the prominent arched bulge of his protruding buttocks. The jumpsuit accentuates that extra. The buttocks also look good in the photo on the left, from the back.

When wearing this kind of restraint-belt, the tendency to raise the butt is probably stronger in average than when wearing a belly chain, because the latter allows just a little more freedom of movement. As a rule, it is easier to slide it up a little further, unless it’s applied in an idiotic tight way, but then it will pinch you, and carrying it thus can become very painful and even unhealthy.

That risk is much lower with such a leather belt. It quickly becomes stuck. It can actually always be quite tight without causing any danger, and if it is placed exactly at the narrowest zone of the waist as tight as possible, it is virtually immobile due to its width.

This tightly applied belt also contributes to accentuating the inmates bum itself, because it firmly constricts the prisoner's abdomen and back from all sides. Due to that pressure, it forces the wearer to both hold in his stomach and arch his back slightly, and thus it creates automatically a concave lower back directly above the buttocks, thanks to which the already prominently protruding butt is even further accentuated. In most cases it therefore will be very difficult, or at least fatiguing, for an inmate shackled like this to prevent his bum from extending backward and upward.

You can also study that effect very well in this group photo - all four inmates of course wearing the same prison uniform (a black-and-white striped two-piece, with open plastic sandals, although not all in the same color!), and restrained in the same way , including leg-irons (recognizable in case of the second man from the right).

The enforced protruding butt is clearly visible on the leftmost prisoner, who looks back. The belt with the cuffs clearly pulls in his stomach. His shirt hides the effect a little, because it naturally stands out a bit wider, thereby partly concealing the butt part of the trousers that protrudes towards the back. If he would wear a jumpsuit, his literally outstanding butt would come in full view.

The second guy stands almost still, then it is easier to keep your back straight again. The third struggles to take the step up, and holds his hands very convulsively against his chest, as if he indeed wants to hold his butt at all costs, with that bloody photographer nearby. The fourth also just steps up, automatically straightening his back slightly.

The effect is also visible in this video-clip, during the regrettably rather short moments the inmate going to court is shown from the side. You can see his buttocks moving in a slightly unnatural position.

As mentioned: whether or not there is an effect probably depends largely on the arm length - and possibly also on the prisoner's own choice: to tolerate the discomfort of hands pressing against the crotch rather than the humiliating position of the helplessly pronounced buttocks raised up.

Here is a tableau of a whole series of prisoners who have all been strapped with the belt and the handcuffs. They all struggle with the question of what the best posture is. As a result, they all walk slightly differently than they would without the belt, with their butts further back - some more, some less. Some inmates are better at preventing this than others.

The two outer prisoners in the bottom row, seen from the front, are clearly making an effort to suppress the natural tendency to just stick their butts out in this situation. The two next to it, on either side of the large square detail shot in the middle, are equipped with a belly chain instead of a belt; for them the effect is less strong, but still present.

However in the case of the inmate on the pic we started with, that ass must really stick out very, very humiliatingly far to the rear. Comparing his posture to that of many others, in his case it must result in an extra pronounced upward standing bum. He struggles more than the others with finding the least awkward and embarrassing position while walking. In the photo at the top right, he has just gotten off the car and is still trying to walk upright and not give in to the natural tendency to bend over because of the belt. Walking like that isn't easy, as his concentrated, pained look shows. In the photo above left he therefore actually lets it all go, and his butt promptly shoots back and up.

At the same time he still seems to be trying frantically to suppress this with all force while climbing the steps - his gaze is still very tense - because such an emphatic presentation of your bottom in the context of the homosocial environment of a male prison quickly has a connotation of sexual submissiveness and sexual availability. His deeply felt degrading posture, and this is rather exceptional, for that reason is even noticeable from the front.

Finally: have a look again on the clip i gave a link to at the last entry ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vzE4JSmzLw) . Between 6:00 and 6:15 you see the inmate entering court from the side (see the technically bad, but clear video-still inserted here). This makes his buttocks stand out well - and because his upper body has been pulled forward by the belt and handcuffs, it is now clearly visible how he cannot prevent them from protruding very vulnerable far back, and how he is forced to emphatically present them in this humiliating situation to the already waiting photographer.

To be continued......

#prisoner #jail #inmate #prison uniform #shackles #prison #handcuffs #handcuffed inmate #prison stripes #full restraints #shackled walk #shackled #shackle shuffle #leg irons #waist belt

228 notes · View notes