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Answers to Ask Me Something

Hi, folks. :)

I actually have a few questions that were provided to me from my Ask Me Something post, which both surprised and delighted me.

I'm going to start with one from Alethea Draws on BlueSky.

They ask, in part as a response to my blogs on our Horticulture program:

Are you allowed to grow your own fruits or vegetables to supplement the not-so-healthy [...] food?

The answer to that is, quite gratefully, Yes.
Our gardening program includes us learning how to grow many plants from seed: we do not get plant starts here because of the nature of the beast that is Corrections. I spent the day Friday sorting through seeds that were left behind when Mr. B, our facility's previous Horticulture instructor, moved on to work at a state-run camp. If these seeds are still viable after sitting for 19 months or more in questionable conditions, we have a bevy of fruits and vegetables that we can start planting in the coming weeks, although we may be rushing some of these into the ground: some of them are meant for early spring planting, and it is late spring now.
I'm looking forward to growing things, and to the book work we all need to do that explains it all, as it gets into landscape design. There is even a chapter on Xeriscaping, which I learned about back home in Oregon -- the home I lived in employed xeriscaping instead of wasting water on a "pretty lawn" that serves no other function than eye candy. That's what I want to learn about, though it makes me wonder how much learning material we get on green roofs and green walls as well: those can be pretty and serve a special, essential function as well. :)
For now, I plan on growing some herbs, and maybe a summer vegetable if one or two make me happy, along with flowers. These folks forget that having pollinators around means happy, productive plants; Lavender and hyssop are my targets if we can get them.

Next some questions from my Discord family

from ILikePie3:

Is life in prison just as bad as media makes it out to be, or are they over exaggerating how bad it is in there?

Hard question, bud, hard question!
So. Without knowing what media sources you are consuming, I have to make a few plausible assumptions to give an answer base:

  • You may be watching Vice Media and their horrifically graphic videos of prison brutality in the CDCR (California) system
  • You may be seeing movies with prison settings in the USA, generally a Federal prison
  • You may only be hearing about brutalities visited upon people in prison in whatever news feed you sip from.

I am pleased to say that lots of American media outlets are masters of negative spin, of obscuring real events and news with curtains of blood and violence. They do not often present everyday prison life, nor the struggles of those of us inside the system, nor our positive milestones as we work toward betterment.

In that vein, we have a program here called a Faith and Character Based Program; It's a two year program that challenges the way you think, gives you a chance to understand the impact of your decisions on others, presents you with the opportunities to improve, and earns a certificate upon completion.
It takes some people a few tries to get through the whole program, honestly, but you can see meritorious changes in so many of them when they do.

We also have a program here at our camp which trains dogs for future jobs, like bomb sniffing, drug detection, and the like. Their handlers only do the initial handling after the pups are reared, getting the young dogs socialized, used to noisy environments (ahem, prisons) and also understanding commands. The people in this program earn credit hours that can be taken to a specific university upon release; with a little additional work, they can become certified in Canine Sciences.

Speaking of education, I'm housed in a dorm wing with dozens of university students who are working toward their AA and BA in several fields, thanks to the return of the Second Chance Pell Grants. These are people who may have earned their GED behind the wires here, and saw a chance to keep growing, because someone saw a chance to water the plant of knowledge, fertilizing it with chances to become stronger. For the ones who may be here for the rest of their lives, they still want to grow. They see their growth as a chance to heal others, to inspire someone who may come in with less time to reach for it, to get it by their own hands.

Do your news sources ever mention programs like these in prisons? Unless you are reading News Inside, or perhaps a few other choice prison-centric news sources, the only picture the outside gets is the gloom, doom, violence, and gore that makes up Ameristan today. If you're in Florida, you're actually more likely to hear about Gov. Ron Desantis' push to execute more and more prisoners than you are to hear any positive news.

They also don't talk about the three guys in my day room here doing burpees and walking laps together, the other guy doing pull ups on the pull up bar we have, the group of people gathered watching college softball on one television, or David Blaine DO NOT ATTEMPT on the other side. There's absolutely no mention of the extortionate pricing paid to the Keefe Commissary Network by the five people who just went out the wing to our dorm's canteen window to buy gas station snacks, or people losing upwards of six hours a day stuck in their cells for census counts as officers have to borrow someone else's toes to count to 96 instead of just using a damned clicker or a biometric scan to ensure count's done right the first time.

So in summary, much of prison is less hellscape than media makes it out to be, while simultaneously being pure hellscape. Just a different kind of hell than pictured.

HectecFennec asks,

When you get out and settled in, what will be the first thing you do for yourself? Eat something you missed? See specific people or places?

Haha, this is a tricky one to answer for many reasons.
Having been gone from the free world for about four years, I have to determine what the threshold of 'settled in' is. :) It is to my understanding, as I've spoken with people who've been stuck in the revolving door of Florida's prison system and corroborated with stories from across the nation from returners that getting adjusted to the outside life can be jarring for some. Settling might take a while: getting out of the cadence of waking up when you hear an electronic lock roll your door, getting brainstuck when you walk into a fast food place because they have an entire colorful menu of food, figuring out the buses... We'll go from one state of overwhelm to multiple, chaotic states of overwhelm all at once.

I can tell you, however, that very high on my list of things to do?
Acquire a mildly scented, exfoliating body wash and a loofah.
Acquire at least half a dozen candles, probably sandalwood, vanilla, or some other pleasant scent.
Big. Fluffy. Towels. Plural.
Waterproof Bluetooth speakers.
Hospital Records or Jamendo streaming music.
Make sure the bathroom door locks. Seriously.
Come back in an hour, folks.
You may have no idea what it feels like to have to shower in what amounts to a public venue; I have not had true privacy since my arrest, and sometimes, you just want to know you are well and truly scrubbed clean with soap that wasn't made out of... whatever the heck prison soap is made out of, and minus an audience.
Officers, for the record, have a relative line of sight into the showers in each wing from the officer station. It is partly obscured by a solid piece of metal that covers the midsection of the user, but still, you are on display. I can't stand it. :|

So, The Longest Shower would have to be my answer. :'3

I have a two-fer from Flare, as well. :)

They ask:

How has life been?

All my kvetching about the injustices of this place aside, I am actually not doing too badly.
I do not appreciate how the system unfairly and illicitly taxes my loved ones on the outside (those of you who have helped to put money in my commissary fund, or toward shoes, glasses, books, and clothing to supply me with things I can no longer supply myself, or even for the digital 'stamps' that make my messages possible), but I appreciate having my eyes opened to what people are going through across the country that I live in. It's a suffering that I was blind to, and had chosen blindness instead of compassion -- I had never listened to the stories of the people who went to jail, to prison, survived the broken systems of incarceration, and returned to a world that treated them as the broken part to be thrown away.

It gives me pause to reframe things, and make more helpful, compassionate choices going forward.

Will you be able to get out soon?

That... is the 64¢ question! I don't have a short answer, so grab a Snickers, this'll take a while.

Let's assume that absolutely nothing changes about my current prison sentence to give you the long view. In this scenario, I am currently eligible for gain time, which 'shortens' my sentence by up to 15%. Based on when and how I was sentenced, coupled with my jail time credit (days I stayed in jail before coming to prison), if I earn and keep all of my gain time, I leave the prison fences sometime in 2035, but still have to be nannied and nagged by the carceral system for quite some time after that.
That nanny state can put me back behind the fences if I break a rule and my probation officer chooses to violate me on it: as example, an undeclared Dutch Bros (or Starbucks, if you must) stop can send me back to prison for the rest of my sentence.

This ignores the potential legal changes that come with new government officials, new bills signed into law that open up legal challenges to sentencing guidelines, etc. Those changes can only shrink, not lengthen my sentence: so if a new law shows up and puts a cap on some aspect of my sentence, I can challenge this if my sentence is outside those guidelines. :)

Now, for the better parts of the answer: I am due back in the courts regarding my sentence. I have zero idea what could happen. It could be reduced to time served, could be overturned, or I could just be offered something short that is close to what I have already done. I won't know anytime soon, though it is my fervent wish that the Courts decide to show kindness and mercy, allowing me to take the last train home.

So in short, I don't really know, but I am fervently working to make it an answer of Soon™.

At the moment, this wraps up all the questions I've received. It's possible there are others in the pipeline, waiting for a moderator to moderatorize them, but I actually enjoyed these and hope to receive others.

Until the next time, be kind. :)