So, you have already committed a crime, or you are someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Police officers surround you, and you found yourself in jail. What happens next? You can read more about what happens during an arrest when you click here.
When you suddenly find yourself behind bars, your body undergoes several changes that can affect you for life.
There are consultants such as Dr. Jaime Blandino that say your body does some reliable things when you found yourself with other inmates in prison.
He says that you are first flooded with adrenaline and stress hormones. Hormones such as cortisol allow the brain to kick a fight or flight response. This is the body’s way of dealing with emergency and stressful situations.
Here are other things to expect from your body when you are behind a jail cell.
Setting Off the Alarm
You suddenly hear unfamiliar noises, see too bright lights, and follows stringent rules. You know that you are the person in this story, but everything you see and hear is scary. It suddenly sinks in that you are in a new environment where family and loved ones are not there.
This information is immediately sent to a part of the brain called the amygdala. You can read more about this here: https://www.neuroscientificallychallenged.com/blog/know-your-brain-amygdala. This is the part that interprets and processes your emotions. You are in a noisy cell where annoying people suddenly begin to gang on you. They can either be afraid of you, or they suddenly seem pretty menacing. The smell is more than you can bear, either.
Help!
The hypothalamus receives a distress call from the amygdala. The command center of the brain communicates to the nervous system, and this alters breathing, heartbeat, digestion, and a lot of other bodily functions. In short, your heart is racing pretty fast.
Since you are somewhere where you can’t fight or flight, you find yourself with nowhere to go. These reactions are typical to people who were not affected by drugs or fighting mental illness.
The rise of the stress hormones makes you unhappy, and you might experience several physiological changes in the process. The respiration increases, and the blood pressure heightens. You must find a way of surviving.
Ways to Survive
How jail affects a person depends on many factors. Some create habits and thinking patterns to help them cope. Some develop changes in personality due to a lack of privacy, stigma from other inmates, loss of freedom, and constant fear. Some inmates develop emotional flatness to help themselves cope with punishing guards and exploitation of other prisoners.
Some become so distrusting, hard, and cold because of their inability to trust other inmates. There’s a perpetual paranoia that’s going on, especially if one is incarcerated for a very long time. It can make a person more distant because they have to suppress their emotions frequently. Some say that they don’t even feel anything at all, and they begin to be harsh because of their environment.
Some might suffer from emotional deprivation, pain, and even psychological disorders. One factor why these things happen is that nutrition is limited. If you are incarcerated, you have to eat what others are eating, even if the food is not enough for your nutritional requirements. Harsh appearance is typical, and women can’t wear makeup inside.
What to Do Next?
When a person lands in jail, the next course of action is searching for ways on how to get out – fast! The usual way to do this is by posting bail
Bails are cash bonds that an arrested person gives to the court. This is a kind of assurance that the person will appear in the trial. If there’s no trial presence, the court will keep the posted bond, and, in some cases, the judge issues a warrant of arrest to the defendant.
If you have the money, but you don’t know what the process is, you can search for bail bonds near you to assist you further in the process. Most people don’t want to stay incarcerated for more than 24 hours, and seeing a judge can take time. Therefore, there are jail standard procedures that post amounts of specific bails that are for ordinary crimes.
The primary reason why bail is present is to make sure that the arrested party can remain free from incarceration until he is convicted in court. This is good news for a lot of people, especially the innocent ones. They can be free from paranoia, harassment, and other forms of psychological and physical abuse while waiting for trial.
Note that there are conditions of release that a suspect must follow. There are times when judges revoke bails because of misconduct or violation of other laws. The main requirement is to obey all laws. If the suspect is proven innocent, bails will help him out and prevent him from suffering the injustices in the prison system while showing to the world that he has done nothing wrong.