Prison is like a microcosm of a society under dictatorship. The experiences of prisoners, therefore, can be informative, and what we faced and learned inside can be applied on the streets, in my opinion.
Living literally under constant monitoring, severe restrictions, brutality, and being so close to the security apparatus forced us to develop skills, instincts, and insights about the power structure, and this is relevant even to activists outside the prisons. We are graduate students in the science of how totalitarian regimes work. We have studied it in depth 24 hours a day. And these regimes work the same way on both sides of the prison walls.