Restrictive Zone

RA 5 - Secret

Completing Jiang Chijing's words, the accurate answer should be—of course not.

Over the next few days, Zheng Mingyi would find that the showers and the toilets didn't have security monitoring, and in a little, while more he would find that even for places with surveillance installed, there existed blind spots and broken cameras.

This wasn't any confidential secret. The reason that improvements were not made was that there were guards everywhere in the prison as well as a patrol team standing by twenty-four-seven. As such, it wasn't as necessary to have video surveillance.

Southside Prison's guards seldom relied on surveillance, but Jiang Chijing was the only one with a secret unknown to anyone.

The library was located in a corner of the second floor. Further inside, there was a storeroom appropriated by inmates.

The room used to store mops, pushcarts, and other cleaning agents. But from an unknown point in time, the inmates on cleaning duty had moved these items elsewhere, leaving only two cabinets and emptying out the rest of the room.

During the harsh winters and the hot summers, some inmates were reluctant to shiver in the wind or melt under the sun. Also unwilling to read books in the library, they would go to chat in the storeroom.

Later on, picnic mats were spread across the ground. Some inmates brought in snacks, thoroughly transforming this place into a recreation room for inmates to relax.

When Jiang Chijing first started working at Southside Prison, he reported this problem to the warden. The lack of monitoring installed in the recreation room had essentially turned it into a haven for the inmates.

However, this recreation room had already existed for several years without anything serious arising from it. The warden didn't want to sow dissent among the inmates, and thus didn't bother taking action on Jiang Chijing's report.

So Jiang Chijing privately bought a pinhole camera and installed it in the recreation room for the sole purpose of catching inmates breaking prison rules.

While he did catch several people smoking inside, this minor infraction wasn't sufficient to warrant action against this recreation room.

Over time, Jiang Chijing eventually let go of his nosiness, but the pinhole camera remained in the recreation room. Every time he wanted to blow off steam, he would turn on his computer and watch what inmates in the recreation room were doing.

This could be said to be voyeurism, it could also be said to be surveillance. Jiang Chijing wouldn't feel any guilt over it; those people were convicts anyway, it wasn't as if it was his neighbour...

Oh, right. His neighbour was now a convict too.

Returning from the small meeting room to his work area in the library, Jiang Chijing collapsed into the office chair, rubbing his temples with a headache.

The pent-up shock that he had earlier received now burst forth all at once. Mr. Zheng in an immaculate suit and Mr. Zheng in prison uniform flickered back and forth in his mind over and over again, causing him to be unable to tell for a moment who his neighbour really was.

Why would a good man commit a crime?

Jiang Chijing abruptly sat up straight and picked up the dossier he had tossed onto the table, flipping to the file containing Zheng Mingyi's information.

The height and weight were rather close to what he had predicted, but under the education section, the words 'High School Diploma' were written in plain sight.