Service Announcement to the Public: Florida Prisoners Cannot Add You as a Contact on Securus/Jpay Messaging.

It's late March.

I was working my way through the EDWINS Leadership and Restaurant Institute course on Edovo, and reached a point where I can apply for reentry assistance (or for their in-person program).

While I would like to do the in-person program, I have a number of concerns and worries, and I fret that unless something drastically changes about my sentence (a commutation, clemency, pardon, overturn, something), it will not only be a while until I end my sentence behind fences, I'll also be on paper for another restrictively long period, making an in-person program like Edwins' inconceivable to me (I'd love to be wrong on all counts, friends).

To that end, I started on filling in the reentry assistance form instead, tabling it to write this post.

One thing I cannot do as a Florida prisoner is add a contact by their email address. Oh goodness, do I wish I could, because I would be able to readily contact more people I care about, as well as work on my networking for reentry. I may be someone who brings a vision to a small business that unites people who were once separated, or the one message someone needed that day to save their life.

Be prepared to go through tech heck when you use Securus' website to find us by our committed names and registered numbers. The website times out, losing messages that you've spent time writing: I recommend writing the message in a different program, copying it to the clipboard, logging in to the Securus website, and pasting it in to make sure your message makes it.

And now, I need to get back to writing up that vision.