In the winter months, we got oranges as our fruit in Durango, and at evening chow time they were delivered first in green crates long before the chow carts came into the house. Whoever saw them first through the glass pod windows would loudly announce "oranges in the house". We were always excited as food is the number one pastime in jail. The DOs would come to each of the pod doors in whichever order they deemed appropriate, usually depending on our pod's overall behavior that day, and hand out our trays with the oranges too. Any leftover oranges were put back into the green crates and left by the DO bubble. After we were done eating, we stacked our trays up and once the cart came back, we would have a few people take the stacked trays out the door to the cart to load up. One particular night, we decided we were going to try and steal the leftover oranges because the DO had left them right outside our POD instead of taking them back to in front of the bubble. We got a group of guys each with assigned roles in the heist, one really tall guy stood in front of the camera, two guys carried stacked trays out to the cart in the common area and took turns kicking the crates back into the pod. My role was to carry the crates from the main door as quickly as possible into the first cell, where I met my cellie Bishop, who picked up the crates and dumped them on his bed and then covered them up with a blanket. Then we basically had other guys do all the same steps in reverse. It was like a well oiled machine, an assembly line. The orange heist was executed flawlessly and we were then rich with oranges. We divided up the rewards among all who participated. The piasas had an orange raffle that night and I ate one orange and spent the rest of them on raffle tickets to win a couple of honey buns. I lost.
Today I am grateful that I'm no longer incarcerated. I'm grateful that I can buy and eat as many quality (not donated produce-rejected) oranges as I want, whenever I want.
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