Today the City Paper profiled imprisoned tagger Borf, who by all indicators is comfortably riding out his month-long jail sentence. And while the article contains a number of interesting tokens (Borf trades drawings for vegetable servings, for one), we were most taken aback by the D.C. Jail’s early morning wake up calls:

Sitting in a cage behind a glass wall wearing an orange jumpsuit, Tsombikos looks defiant, not shaken. He smiles easily. His eyes are a little puffy from sleep deprivation, because, he says, breakfast is served at 4 a.m. The early wake-up call is a tactic to keep inmates lethargic so they will obey guards, Tsombikos says. (Actually, says Department of Corrections spokesperson Beverly Young, breakfast starts as early as 3 a.m. “Because the overwhelming majority of inmates will reenter society as aspiring productive members,” she wrote in an e-mail, “they are discouraged from sleeping all day.”)

Really? Hell, we’re fully productive members of society and we don’t even wake up that early. Worse yet, that’s about the time some productive members of society go to bed after a long night on the town.