I do some of my best thinking at night. Maybe because that’s the time of day when most people are headed to bed and have already called it “another day down.” I always say that it’s one more day they can’t take away.
You know, they call it the Department of Corrections, but there’s nothing corrective about any of this. If anything, D.O.C. has become a monster lab that takes amateur criminals and turns them into embittered psychopaths. You can come into the system with progress in your heart and redemption in your plans yet come out of these places about a shade away from hating every human being on earth.
If it wasn’t for my faith in Christ, that’s exactly where I would be right now. If it wasn’t for Christ’s commands to love God and love people, I would have completely given up on all people because of what I see in the D.O.C.
When you come in places like this, you learn to live around dross of society. And sometimes the dross is the leaving and impurities of other collections of dross. The lowest of the least.
In a prison setting like this one, everyone seems to want to be remembered as some fucked up form of top-dog. I’ve heard more than one glorified gang member claim that they run shit (while yet another, from a whole different set, says the same thing, so it’s either a perception thing or complete egotistical bullshit). What are you bragging for? Does it make you feel like you’re really doing something for your “hood” by trying to be Lord of the Flies? Is “King of the Shitpile” something you need etched on your headstone to make you feel like you’ve accomplished something in your life? Because that’s what it looks like when you say incompetent shit like, “I run this shit” when referencing the mound of concrete and plexiglass around you. That’s like the cockroach that’s the last one to die on the trap telling all the dead ones, “I run this shit,” just before it too succumbs to the deadly poison that it’s being fed. Why not avoid the trap altogether? It doesn’t make you cool to be dead.
There are certain kinds of people here that would watch everything they love burn to the very foundations just so they can be King of the Ashes. And much of the people that think like this aren’t even inmates, but the staff. There’s something about having “control” over another group of human beings that poisons even the purest intentions. It makes even the cockroach feel as though he were the superior.
It’s like a contagious disease when you are surrounded by so much evil, but I’ve been vaccinated by God, so even as I see it, I don’t have to be a part of it.
I try to connect with like-minded individuals who have managed to keep a hold on their humanity. Birds of a feather must flock together, even jailbirds. But there are getting to be less and less people in here who’s soul is still intact or even think this way anymore. It’s like watching a facility of three-hundred cancer victims give up and choose death instead of fighting to regain whatever life they may have left. These people actually thrive in prison more than they ever will on the street because most have given up on the possibility of living any other way. They are basically doing a life sentence on the installment plan (10-15 years at a time).
I honestly believe that the people who run the U.S. prison system actually want to keep it this way. To them, recidivism is job security and a paycheck they no longer have to work for. There’s no money in the small-time criminals that actually get out and never return. There’s no free money in the ones that succeed. The rest are cattle, a cash crop that will never wither. I guess I’m not really sold on the whole “public safety” line.
You always see prison authorities talking about how they’re doing everything they can to rehabilitate these men and women and turn them into functional members of society. If that’s true, then there must really be something in the water.
Every prison I’ve been housed in over the past 14 years has had overcrowding issues, this facility being the smallest.
I’m about to give you an unwanted dose of reality: they’re literally making recidivism rates skyrocket. And they’re doing it on purpose.
I have literally jumped through their hoops by completing TPC training, anger management, signed up for pod jobs, took an assortment of their classes that didn’t even apply to my situation, tried their version of counseling, and completed every courage-to-change journal they have but one. The parole board didn’t even care. I jumped through every hoop they could provide, and it was not even acknowledged as progress.
Correctional facilities aren’t here to correct anyone. They are here to make money off of other people’s broken lives in the form of legalized human trafficking. They’re not here to help you, they’re here to profit from you.
Think about this the next time someone wants to talk about U.S. recidivism rates. You shouldn’t blindly trust someone else’s words just because they are running things. That’s what sheep do. They will follow the leader right off the edge of a cliff without even thinking twice about it. And in 2024, a lot of the public are just poor, dumb sheep, consuming whatever trash is feed to them. A prison will feed you shit while, at the same time, convincing you it tastes good.
On the flip side of this lead coin, if I had never been arrested for a charge I never committed, I might not have paused in my life long enough to find God, I would have never, never met the people that I have along the way, and I would not be sitting at my desk writing to you my experience in the pen as well as explaining our need to change what we see happening in our so-called correctional system.
Below I have outlined some possible remedies along with the arguments supporting those remedies.
Remedies and Reformation:
A) Quit allowing violent STG validated members back into units with those of the inmate population that are simply trying to do their time and go home. During my incarceration at Wyoming State Pen, I have seen these STG members cause more issues with lower-level convicts than they are even worth having on the GP yard. If their return to general population was halted altogether, greenlighting would-be non-existent, there would be less extortion, housing issues concerning places like solitary would go down significantly, riots would almost never be a thing, (except maybe in parts of the facility that housed validated STG members), race wars would be less potent, drugs would be hindered greatly, and overall facility-based violence would drop below ten percent.
B) Hold staff accountable. Remove every single guard that has been sued for violence against inmates, every guard that has a criminal record of any kind, every guard that has the slightest hint of biased or corruption of any kind within their behavior. As I’ve pointed out in previous writings, the worst kind of evil in the criminal justice system are those in authority over the inmates. In a lot of cases, in fact most cases, giving the people in authority over another human being is like leaving the wolf in charge of the sheep. If you look at the kind of person that is attracted to the occupation of a prison guard, you would find, almost every time, these kinds of people have an unearned and dangerous air of superiority that would make most other cowardly pieces of shit blush.
Most prison guards are the nerds that were picked on pretty much their whole lives and now view the criminal justice system as a chance to get even with who they consider “the bad guys”. Most prison guards in this particular facility seem to think that they’re Batman keeping a lid on Arkham Asylum, instead of the rejects of society they actually are, babysitting and serving the other side of the spectrum.
The reason I say that they are worse than the incarcerated population is because they are the exact same as us, only they hold a position of authority and have every opportunity to get away with their crimes because the public has given them a shield to hide behind called “the greater good”. Because of this shield, prison guards get away with the physical, mental, emotional, and yes, even the sexual abuse of inmates housed all over the United States every single day. They are the actual cause of most drug trafficking issues within facilities, they are the organizers and instigators of a lot of inmate-on-inmate violence, and they’ve been trained to know where all the cameras and loopholes for every situation are.
This happens in every facility in the U.S. to one degree or another, even in female facilities. Just think about how staff are treating brother, son, or father in the name of vengeance for every one of that guard’s failures in life, real or imagined. What is some male guard doing to your wife, sister, or mother right now in the name of sexual gratification and then getting away with it through coercion and/or authority status?
Think about it. There’s a reason they put this kind of stuff in T.V. shows and movies, where do you think they got the ideas from? Because of authority status issues and unpunished corruption, your incarcerated wife or daughter could be getting raped repeatedly by the authority with no way to voice her situation because it’s the same authority who controls her phone, mail, visitation, kite system, and grievance process.
Do you see the issue now?
The only way reform has any meaning or hope for making a difference is by people, like my readers, who refuse to take anything at face value just because those in authority need them to in order to cover corruption, who begin to get involved and research these issues individually and hold the responsible accountable for their actions. The real bad guys are winning while the rest of us are losing our voice.
Get involved!
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