Farting can be quite serious in prison. When you’re locked in a small cell with another person for extended periods of time, breaking wind is no laughing matter.
Indeed, I have known fights to break out when one prisoner has broken wind near another. For this reason, cellmates often come to an understanding around proper etiquette when gas must be passed.
Some common rules: Sit on the toilet and flush to muffle the sound of your fart; stand with your rear end pressed against the side of the cell door to mask the sound and smell; and don’t fart on the bottom bunk, because warm air rises. It’s not as serious a faux pas when the person on the upper bunk has to toot his own horn. Upper bunk farts are usually excusable and politely overlooked so the person on top doesn’t have to clamber down each time they feel gaseous.
“I had a cellmate who got down from his top bunk, sat on the commode and flushed it when he had to fart,” a fellow prisoner who goes by Too-Tall told me. “That happened multiple times a day. But another one of my cellies would just fart whenever he wanted to, with no warning and no shame.”
There are other exceptions to the social norms associated with flatulence behind bars. Nocturnal emissions, aka sleep farts, when one is under a blanket, are generally acceptable. But some people take advantage of that loophole by pretending to sleep so they can pass copious amounts of gas without complaints from their cellmate.
One of the simple joys of being in a single-man cell is the ability to fart at will. During a period when I didn’t have a cellie, the freedom to let one rip at any given moment was, in a word, liberating — a rare feeling when one is locked up.
People on the outside know it’s impolite to break wind in enclosed spaces such as elevators. The same applies in prison sally ports — small hallways or corridors between two locked doors, where prisoners have to congregate while waiting to be let in or out of their housing units.
When you see guys pulling their shirts over their noses and mouths and moving toward the back of the sally port, you know someone in front couldn’t hold it in. And as we learned in grade school, the person who first announced they smelt it is usually the one who dealt it.
Another reason why flatus is such an important consideration in prison settings is because of its prevalence — due in no small part to the nature of most institutional menus. At the facility where I’m incarcerated, for example, beans are served four to five times a week: pinto beans, chili beans, white beans, and refried beans. The consequences of this steady diet of legumes are so predictable that a generic form of Beano is sold in the prison commissary, and it’s not unusual for people to purchase it for cellies who are especially gassy. I’ve done so myself, and it was a worthwhile investment.
Like many seemingly innocuous items in prison — toothbrushes that can be sharpened into shanks and bars of soap that can be put into socks and used as bludgeons — flatulence (and worse) can also be weaponized.
For example, some prisoners favor holding their farts until a guard performs a pat-down search and stoops behind them to check their legs. In turn, guards have been known to issue disciplinary reports against those who play such odious pranks, for the catch-all offense of “defiance” or even the more specific “olfactory assault.”
