Confinements

Punishment is a tricky thing to dish out here at the Air Force Academy. During my freshmen year the system was undefined and punishment mainly consisted of paperwork. With new leadership comes new ideas, and one of the recent ones is sitting "confinements". One confinement consists of coming into a biology room in service dress and being "productive" for one hour and fifty minutes. No music, video games, sleeping, standing, talking, tobacco, eating, or anything that could be deemed "fun". Two unfortunate cadets are tasked to monitor the scum of the earth and make sure no funny business goes down. I have sympathy for these cadets, similar to how I feel about intramural referees. Every once in a while the officer of the day will stop in and ream the monitors for allowing the dirtbags to wear headphones and eat, and the monitors will then be forced to care and tell everyone to lock it up.

So for your average discrepency (parking ticket, missing a briefing, showing up late to class, driving your roommate to the hospital in the middle of the night for an emergency, going to someone else's room to finish up a group project after Taps, being outside the gate after Top Off is revoked and not wanting to drive back drunk, etc.) punishment usually starts at 20 hours of confinements, and can go all the way up to 200 hours. In this leadership laboratory where logic is supposed to be king, for some reason the best thing we could come up with to teach cadets a lesson and turn them into officers of character is dressing them up and making them sit quietly. But does the institution limit this experience to only USAFA cadets? No! If you decide to visit us from another Academy we have no problem dishing you out some cold hard justice: Air Force style!

Even though it is taboo to talk about why you got sent to the slammer, I will risk my life by telling you I was late to formation. The punishment? Unknown so far . . . the incident happened five weeks ago but the paperwork has been so slow going through the system I am sitting confinements now so that when my punishment actually does come down it won't be as harsh. So as I sit here repaying my debt to society, I'm sad to report that I am not being filled with pure respect and awe for this institution, but rather a bitter taste in my mouth only a few days before graduation.