What alternatives to prison exist for people who crave high structure but don’t want to commit crimes?

I’ve often thought that I wished I could go to prison. Full disclosure: I have never been to prison. I have never been to jail. Maybe if I went, I would find out that I wouldn’t actually like it. I don’t know. That said, I crave the idea of having a cell. A small place assigned to me to live in. No ambiguity. No need to try to decide where I wanted to live. I’m horrible at that. If that could be decided for me? By someone else? I would LOVE that.

Standardized meals provided for all inmates. No need to try to decide what to eat. A fixed schedule with no deviations allowed. I’d love to not have to think about what to do at each time of my day. I was in Job Corps 12 years ago. It wasn’t prison, by any means, but it did have many of the characteristics of a lifestyle that I’d love to find in the adult world. Living arrangements were provided for. There was some room for individual choice, but not a lot. I ended up in the “Independent Living” dorms after construction was completed on the regular dorms. Let me briefly describe what that meant. When I first arrived at the job corps campus, everybody was housed in converted warehouses. Bunkbeds crammed into rooms, kinda like a hostel or something. After I’d been there a couple months, they opened up some apartment-like dorms that had been under construction when I first arrived. These were much nicer. No bunk beds. Just four people to a room. I stayed in those for a couple months. After that, the converted warehouses became available again, under the name, “Independent Living”. This was considered a privilege for those who followed the rules. The bunk beds were gone, and we had six people assigned per room, but we didn’t have to follow certain restrictions, such as a strict bed time. I stayed up late many nights in the computer room listening to Jimi Hendrix’ Electric Ladyland album while playing the psychedelic computer game, Spheres of Chaos.

In Job Corps, we weren’t actually employed. We attended training programs from about eight in the morning until about five in the evening. My training specialty was plumbing. I enjoyed the work and I wish I could have found employment doing plumbing after I was out of Job Corps. Today, I am employed as an SDET, but I am not fully satisfied with my job. For one thing, I have to deal with mandatory remote work. I can’t stand it. The other problem is a substantial quitting fee. ($36,500). If it weren’t for the quitting fee, I would have quit a long time ago to avoid the stupid remote work.

What I’m thinking is that remote work wouldn’t be so bad if somebody else provided the facilities and the discipline. At Job Corps we were required to show up for training. There was no question of where exactly to go. There was no question of what exactly to do. There was no question of how to arrange for space. Those things were taken care of by the people who ran the program. How incredible would it be to have living arrangements and working space taken care of and provided for by an organization running a program? I would love to be able to stop having to worry about “where will I sleep?” “where will I work?” “how will I connect to the internet?” “what will I eat?” “how the fuck will I pay for all of these arrangements on an SDET salary?” ($60,000 per year, in my case). What if there were a program where you could sign up to work, and they would take the money and you would just live your life and do your work without having to worry about income and expenses? I’d love that.