11/08/2025
Life Behind Bars: Why Prison Is a World of Its Own
When you first get locked up, the hardest pill to swallow isn’t the food, the cold nights, or the cell walls — it’s accepting that you’re no longer free. That realization takes time, and until it sinks in, you’re just going through the motions.
Prison isn’t just a big building full of inmates. It’s a system with its own rules, unspoken laws, and territories. Everyone has a place — and knowing your place is the first rule of survival. Cells are often divided into “sides,” or what inmates call camps. In many South African prisons, these camps are shaped by the infamous prison gangs: the 26s and the 28s.
Not everyone belongs to a gang, though. If you’re not part of the numbers (meaning you don’t “carry” or live by gang rules), you’ll likely be placed in a neutral spot — usually a bed in the middle of the cell. Why? Because the beds along the walls belong to the gang members, and those spaces are fiercely guarded. If you like 26's you sleep on their side right hand side and if you like 28's you sleep on the left hand side that's means you will not join the number but you will sleep there because you like that camp and you will be doing everything for that camp like washing clothes of the camp members and doing everything for them they can pay you little they have like ci******es or food but when they talk their gang language they don't want you near them because they can't discuss that with you since you are not their member you are just like an extra or an ice boy or messenger or whatever you can call it a person who stay with people who impress him in order to get little things and people like that are also available even outside they stay with people who have everything just to get a little from them in sizulu they call it (ukubamba ibhantsi) but in prison language they call it (ukuthanda amateki olova) in English it's means you like shoe's of gangsters meaning you like the life they live or path they take.
If you end up in a gang’s section, your every move is watched. You can’t just wander around or talk to anyone you want — that could be seen as “crossing over” into enemy territory. Even casual conversation can be risky. Sharing the wrong story with the wrong side could be viewed as spying, and in prison, misunderstandings can turn deadly.
This is why prison veterans say: “Mind your place, mind your words, and mind your moves.” In here, even silence is a form of protection. Stay safe, avoid prison, don't do crime.
