Skip to content

GIGO: Fill In the Acronym

Hey there.
You may have noticed large gaps from me over the last several weeks. This comes from a combination of poorly maintained services designed to surveil an already aggressively surveiled people, and their breakage, which keeps us from accessing content or communicating, and a continued lack of physical postage supplies that are being seemingly aggressively held back, curtailing the ability of those who write actual letters.

To that end, I'd like to give you a snapshot of how people here think when services go awry.

Let's start with the aforementioned...

Digital Mail Service (DMS):

We've had two multi-week service outages (and now another six day outage while I was writing this!) that have rendered these tablets many of us have incapable of communicating with our circles of care. They may work for other things, like spending money on a movie rental, game, or music, but communicating or getting the news is dead out. If eMessages goes down, so does Newsstand (at $5.99/mo) and Podcasts (which are free).

The mindset here becomes: These people here don't give a f about us, or They stealing from us, and don't get punished for it, or This 💩 don't fly in the real world.

Without the abusive, over-surveiled DMS, we cannot receive our mail from people on the outside. Any letter most of you would mail has to go to Tampa, Florida for scanning and destruction, with a digital copy forwarded to us. So when there is an outage, we're largely cut off from this extremely limited pipeline we have to the world. To us, it does feel a lot like stealing -- it's one of our only ways to communicate with those who still love us, and we are forced to curtail it to a 15 minute session on a kiosk when the tablet service is down.
Prisoners of the past at least got their actual letters from their families, friends, and loved ones in their hands, and can spend time with pen and paper, writing back to home.
We lack that: you cannot print from kiosks, and printing a scanned letter costs us $1 per page from the tablet -- I've covered this previously.
Plus, the persistent outage by Keefe Commissary Network on envelopes and postage feels like a thinly veiled attempt to help funnel us into using the digital mail service that's out for weeks at a time! Combine it with the constant shortage of ink pens and pencils, and I think you have a great recipe for suppression of voices.

Also, a thought check: a person with a tablet is probably less likely to need a print, but they're the only one with a print option?
Makes no sense.

Let's move on to...

Count Time!

An Institutional Staple

Nominally speaking, a compound-wide count should be completed in well under an hour's time, allowing inmate-residents to get back to doing whatever it was before count. That could be watching the Olympics, talking with a person who is sharing insights on how to cope in the Free World, calling their loved ones, or making some approximation of a meal from the gas station inconvenience items in our canteen.
Here at this camp, counts may last from two hours until the next day. As example, we have a 15:00 count every day; dinner is usually served after this count clears. Early this month, however, there was a day where we did not clear that count until the next morning. They had to bring our dinner meal in, and we ate in our cells, not at the steel tables bolted to the floor in our dormitories.

So, we think:

  • We're already locked up; there's no logical reason to lock us down further and take away our chances to call our people, check the kiosk (for those without tablets), and shower.
  • What grade of idiots are they hiring for counts to go three hours a pop or longer?
  • Why are they not pulling a Master Roster count at the appropriate time? Or, better still, why aren't they using our biometric hardware (our IDs) on every count, to nail down a targeted list of those who won't comply with count time rules?

Now, contrary to most prisons here in Florida: Our prison is compact. To wit, look on Bing Maps (or your map of choice) at the main unit of Central Florida Reception Center in Orlando, FL. You might see three styles of dormitory in the overhead view, along with things like admin buildings, a chow hall, Medical, etc.
The T-shaped dormitories contain two wings, each with 72 inmates.
The 'Butterfly' shaped dorms contain four wings, each with 54 inmates.
I do not know the headcount of the large candy bar shaped dorm on the south side, but I wager it is low.
Now, the physical footprint of CFRC compared to Blessington makes CFRC MASSIVE in comparison -- we could probably pack all of my camp into CFRC, and still have room for another one of this place.

Yet, our population density is almost equal to a reception center!
Reception is like... The Sorting Hat. You're brought in, forced to strip to your skin in front of other new inmates and security, required to touch your genitals and expose your anus while coughing to prove you're not smuggling in something, given boxers and herded into a holding pen. You get your few belongings rifled through, have officers take stuff because they want to give it to their orderlies (like a radio you may have bought), get identified, shorn bald by an inmate-barber, and sent to the shower.
Now that you're washed, have on your assigned attire of prison blues and Crocs knockoffs, sit on a bench until called, get your picture taken, and go through all the intake crap... and finally, go to your dorm six to eight hours later.
You get to sleep with a strange man (or men, if you're in Open Bay) and develop a tolerance for the systemic physical, emotional, and mental abuse you now live in.
The next two weeks, you're shuffled from department to department, so they can assess where you're going to finally go once a bed opens up for you in their overcrowded system. This can take months.

The thing is, nowhere in all of that charade is there anyone saying "I forgive you. Let me help you to become a better human so I will never see you again."

How do we system residents feel about the situation?

  • "They against us."
  • "They don't really care about us."
  • "We jes a paycheck to um." (We're just a paycheck to them.)
  • "They tryna kill us round herre." (They're trying to kill us around here.)

Sad thing is, the above are all things I have heard these cohorts of incarcerated say, and seeing it from here inside this world, I can't disagree.

How, then, do we fix a system to create better people?

Great question that too few ask.

While I still want the outside world fixed, let's spend this journey fixing this inside world of incarceration.

First, there's the mental health.

Let's actually get someone on this side of the wires to help us in here heal. Surprise, a prisoner needs healing, harm reduction, an introduction to better coping and handling methods for what life throws at them if they're going to get out of this place. Prison teaches NONE of that, at least in Florida.

Is it a wonder why 74.5% of prisoners who actually get an End of Sentence date and leave prison in Florida return to prison in Florida quickly?
The outside world has a lot of moving parts, and if no-one identifies the pinch points, crush zones, high voltage wires, and all the other stuff that can actually harm us, if no-one tells us how to identify these pain zones, how do we expect someone to successfully navigate this world?

They give us tablets; let us have access to a service that is, or is like Talkspace or BetterHelp, where we can write to a specialist, who is actually invested in improving our mental health outcomes.

Put actual behavior health specialists in the prisons, and let us all talk to them as we need them, for those who prefer the in-person approach.

Remove the Psych Level limiters that artificially block us from accessing mental health. To wit, I am at the lowest Psych level possible, which means that I can't even see Mental Health in prison. I must counsel myself, and so too must others like me.

Stop doping everything: while I am irked about my lack of mental health access, it's sadly better than the prison standard of drug 'em all, let someone else sort 'em out. Address the issues, help the person. Stop drugging them through prison.

Next is skills:

You might be surprised at this, but there are a lot of people here who lack a workable tradeskill, having never worked an honest day. They might be super good at slinging Flaps of No-No Brand Booger Sugar, 10,000¢/flap, but have never learned how to apply that skill working in a retail setting. There are people who do not have training to work any job, be it sorting widgets, stocking shelves, counting people, taking calls, milking butterflies or nibbling piggies. Though it seems I wax whimsical, I illustrate the next problem:
We spend months, years, or even decades here behind fences, wires, and steel doors, listening for the shouts of COUNT TIME, CHOW TIME (and its accompanying TRAYS, TRAYS, TRAYS here at Blessington), PILL LINE ON STANDBY, INSULIN TO THE SALLY PORT.

Only a lucky few are in a vocational class.
Here, we are offered Horticulture, Barbering, or Technology Support Systems.
Of the three, the last class gets the least support of them all, with 14 workstations -- older Hewlett-Packard minitowers with mini padlocks securing them closed. Three machines are nonfunctional, with this bit of amusement: this is a tech support class that has never seen inside a computer, and cannot troubleshoot the issue or effect repairs. Two of us have support experience and can diagnose the issue by eye or ear, but cannot effect the actual repair of either reseating the CPU, RAM, or disconnecting the Optical Drive because we are prisoners.

Here, it gets 'better': At full class load, we have twenty students and one teacher's assistant (TA). 21-11=10, yes? So what can ten people without a computer do each day with no physical books, when they have a desire to learn something?

The kind heart in me would have figured out costs for twenty computers of some kind, and donated them with the full expectation that the machines are to be issued to the TSS class with the software I've offered.

Oh, software, right: We have a few programs, and that's it. Gimp, Inkscape, Apache Open Office 4.1.10, Blender 2.79 (but underpowered hardware to run on), and an old copy of TypingMaster Pro. How are students to learn something with nothing when they do get PC access?
We can't even get IT to install Free, Open Source Software.

Invest something into all of the skills. We have an Inmate Welfare Trust Fund, which is fueled by inmate canteen purchases; use that money for inmate welfare! Every $2.80 sleeve of saltines contributes something!

Last, but not least, there's hope.

Lots of the folks I live with are out of hope. They are given to believe that they're here, they're stuck, they're alone; no-one really cares about them.

If we change the narrative?
You're here for a while. Let's do maintenance for your heart, your mind, your views, so you can leave with and in good conditions.

Narrative drives a person. Narrative shifts shift a dynamic. Narrative is transmission; let's find a gear and go for it.

I leave you with this final quote as I thank you for reading:

Apathy makes excuses.
Obsession finds a way.

~ Craig Groeschel, during the Global Leadership Summit 2024

Take care of yourselves, of each other, and work together for better.
Until the next! :)