Seasoned convicts will give you a handful of tips during your first stay in county jail. They will tell you how to navigate prison gangs, overzealous guards and basic prison politics. They will tell you about the importance of being emotionless. 

And they will tell you about the toilets. 

Too many times, I’ve heard the expression, “They’ll suck your a—— right out of you,” a reference to the toilet’s flushing power. I’ve stopped questioning how that makes any anatomical sense. 

These tips also apply to your stay in prison, if you are sent there to serve out a sentence.

The best description I’ve ever read about what a prison toilet can feel like came from the late David Foster Wallce. In a 1996 essay he wrote for Harper’s Magazine, Wallace shared his experiences on a weeklong Caribbean cruise. 

Foster Wallace wrote this of a cruise ship’s flushing toilet: “Along with this sound comes a concussive suction so awesomely powerful that it’s both scary and strangely comforting — your waste seems less removed than hurled from you, and hurled with a velocity that lets you feel as though the waste is going to end up someplace so far away from you that it will have become an abstraction.”   

After their warning, the jail’s older heads will offer you further toilet advice. First they will say you can only flush twice every 30 minutes; in some places, every 15 minutes. Administration insists on this to prevent people from flooding their cells or using the toilet for ulterior purposes. One must time their excretions accordingly. 

You are also taught the importance of courtesy flushing. The courtesy flush is designed to eliminate anyone hearing, smelling or imagining another person pooping. I have seen fights damn near break out when someone neglected the courtesy flush. 

You are also expected to wipe the toilet rim and sink down after each use to keep things clean.

If you share a cell, it is also expected that you will poop when your cellie is out of the cell, ideally. And if you have to fart, it is expected you will do so on the toilet — and that you will not forget to use a courtesy flush to mask the sound. 

If all of this seems overly fastidious, it is. But it is also used as a measuring stick of another person’s intelligence and social learning abilities. If we can trust you to shit in the accepted manner, then most other things tend to take care of themselves. 

But when someone can’t even poop right, other problems invariably ensue. Having a bowel movement, in this way, becomes a barometer of one’s reasonableness. One of the worst things you can hear being yelled across a tier is: “Put some water on it!” A reminder to courtesy flush is usually a prelude to a confrontation.

Personally, I can’t think of a worse sound than the echoed acoustics of another man taking a dump. Here lies one difference between the toilets Wallace described on the cruise ship and the toilets found in most medium and maximum security U.S. prisons. 

Whereas the cruise ship’s toilets are probably porcelain or some other civilized material, the small toilets in prison are stainless steel, Swiss Army knife-like contraptions with a sink attached to the top, a hole on the side for toilet paper, and a towel rack on the opposite side. 

They serve several purposes, but the steel design is most important here because, acoustically speaking, steel is much bassier and louder than porcelain toilets. It amplifies the worst sound waves produced by bodily functions. 

For me, the sounds are far worse than the smells. Bad smells are quickly forgotten — they don’t have a Proustian mnemonic linger. But bad sounds, I have never forgotten. Bad sounds immediately zap me into the present and remind me that I could have gone my whole life without hearing them. 

Prison is a violent place, but not exclusively in the ways one would typically expect. Here, even your waste is treated with cold, calculating and violent indifference. Things happen quickly and violently behind bars, and the toilets serve as a reminder that even when you let down your guard (and your pants), mysterious forces are working behind your back. In short, you learn to protect your ass. 

Therein lies another difference between Wallace’s depiction and what we have experienced in jail and prison. For us, this isn’t an abstraction.