Another American Turkey Day, But This Time It's Behind the Wires.

Hiya, folks.

Last year, I celebrated Thanksgiving in my county jail. Being diabetic, but not an observing Buddhist at the time, the county changed my dietary tray (what they call a 2500 Calorie Regulated Tray) to be a regular dinner tray that day. It provided me with an interesting thought set as I sat in my cell, with a hot and a cold tray on my little table there.

Namely,

How many of these people are here simply to get fed?

There was thick sliced turkey, potatoes, green beans, a bread roll, sweet potatoes, and a few other things that would effectively make up part of a Thanksgiving spread that I might have put together in the free world. It was the closest thing to real food I had eaten since the beginning of August 2022, and in the scope of what I had been eating, it was good.
Compared to what I got when I was in a homeless shelter more than a decade ago, it was roughly on par for quality, but I certainly got more quantity in the free world traveling from street feed to street feed.

What, honestly, prevents these facilities from feeding food approaching half this quality more often?

At that time, we were receiving what were colloquially known as slop trays most days of the week at dinner. Imagine overcooked pasta and ground meat, stirred together into a glue-like goop, poured into a small tray, with the occasional vegetable on the side, and a small cornbread-ish muffin stuck in it somewhere. Bluntly, it looked like someone had been sick in your tray, and someone got the novel idea to call it a meal.
A pretrial detainee should not be fed worse than a ward of the state, whose right to freedom is known revoked. We're fed rather poorly, but county jail food was somehow Next Level Bad; people boarding my prison bus were talking about how prison fed better than county jail, when I was leaving in the following weeks.

Oh! Almost forgot to initialize the bread slice counter as I got into this, y'all -- 2500 Cal trays didn't get that muffin or the cake. We got... white bread.

Total Bread Slice Counter, Dinnertime, County Jail: 8

How many of these folks come back to jail on their own because housing in the free world is increasingly unaffordable?

Even before all of this, I did spend a lot of thought currency on the idea of reusing shipping containers to build homes, or on building an earthship, or figuring on some kind of material that is sturdy, easy to prepare, and capable of making a home. I was even interested in Aircrete for a while, as well -- I still am, but for a different target audience.

Dockerton, Cratesville, Boxton.

To wit, my lovely editor and I have talked a little bit about something we've rather affectionately named Dockerton. For my non-nerd readers, it's a mild joke referring to a piece of software called Docker, which basically takes a program or script package, and everything it depends on, and shoves it into a container.

Dockerton, in my head, is this idealized shipping container community, where everyone I would invite to stay gets the space of at least a couple of shipping containers to themselves for living quarters, designed in an aesthetically pleasing, earth-friendly way.

I intended to have on-site solar power storage, effectively building that storage out of old Nissan Leaf, Toyota Prius, or other EV/PHEV battery packs that have reached the end of their car-usable life, but can certainly withstand the lesser strain of powering homes for a decade or longer before replacement. (+10 years landfill/recycling skip? Check!) We'd still likely be on-grid, but overall dependence would be reduced, with our solar bank offset.

I wanted a graywater system for watering plants, and something to reduce the impact of toilet flushes on fresh water in general. After all, we so-called developed nations take potable water we could have used for drinking, fill a bowl with it, then pass bodily functions into it, rendering it undrinkable without lots of processing, and we think it normal! Then we lament shortages of water and gripe about water restrictions!
Why are we doing so little to change this?
It would be a thing I would focus on changing, as such.

There are a lot of other things that I would do with Dockerton, but as a twist, I am thankful for the time to ponder ideas in relative peace, and for things to have time to advance and improve. Who knows? When I get out, someone smart might have developed a smart BMS for de-carred Leaf/Prius cells, with an easy socket-in system to add batches of cells and deliver power to the home or send it back out to the grid because you have an abundance of clean power! Maybe DC powered appliances will show up more, allowing setups like this to skip the inversion step, meaning more efficient power use!

Prisonsgiving

For Thanksgiving, at mid-day, I received both my lunch and dinner RDP bags. As such, I got beans, more beans, sardines, cabbage, cherry tomatoes, sardines, an apple, two slices of bread, and a few two-packs of saltines.

Others on regular trays seem to have received something approaching a Thanksgiving meal, but I didn't get to see it -- RDP recipients were physically separated from non-RDP, so we would not have a chance to, say, double back in line to get a tray (and a bagged meal) to accompany our Koshered meals.

Thanksgiving day bread slice counter: 5. 👍🏾

Futuresight

Looking to the future, I desire to see changes to the system of incarceration, where sentences are carefully thought out, with rehabilitation and mental health taking driver and shotgun on the journey through the system. More care for the mind, more focus on modern education, more focus on vocational training, more uplifting of those who had a conviction, to boost their return to society.
Likewise, I would also desire similar improvements outside the prison system, before people make it here.

I desire to see better out of my fellow humans, no matter the point in life they are at.

To see improvements? That's what I will be thankful for this season.

Take care of yourselves, and each other. :)