How will your actions over the past week contribute to your positive path?
Let me start by saying that in order to be able to focus on creating a better future for oneself you have to actually be offered a path or opportunities to do so. Here at the facility I am in there is very little in the way of opportunity that is offered so a great deal of your focus has to go on creating the opportunities yourself. For instance, here at Thomson, it is supposed to have been re-missioned to a “LOW” security facility. Let me tell you that this is completely a false statement. Even the warden ourwardly tells people during A&O that “this was a USP facility and it will continue to run as a USP.” The staff here have created an environment in which they are writing shots for incidents and scenarios that never happened. I have just been made victim of this myself in which during yet ANOTHER lock-down in which the inmate population did nothing wrong and we were locked down for 5 weeks again. This being the 5th time in 18 months that we were locked down, totaling nearly 5 months of lockdown time in 18 months time that this place has been redesignated at a “LOW.” The reports in the news are completely made up by this new administration. We have a “new” captain that was fired from the recently closed facility in California under multiple rape indictments. He has come to our facility and we immediately went on a lock-down under his order for supposedly having exposure to drugs to staff. The thing is, staff are the ones using drugs and claiming these exposures to get time off and give further use of illegal lock-downs. This has happened 5 times all spaced out quarterly almost to the day. I personally have been a victim of a sexual abuse situation in the visiting room while having to strip out BEFORE my visit, TWICE BY THE SAME OFFICER. And as soon as I went to excersize my right to administrative remedy and report the situation I was told by my counselor that I would be retaliated against.
So, let me explain my positivity, or how over the past week, my actions to contribute to a positive path… So, during our last lock-down I was accused of being insolent with a staff member, who is my counselor, who has a long jacket against him for abuse of inmates. I was given a report stating that I cursed at him. I never did, my celly did and even admitted to it. I was never given a UDC hearing, I was never informed of my sanctions and I was never given my sanction paperwork. But yet, 25 days later when I went to inquire about my FINALLY being able to transfer out of here to a camp to my unit manager I happened to notice on her computer that I had ALREADY recieved points against my custody classification page that will preclude me from being able to transfer to a camp now. I was found guilty of this shot without ever even being made aware that I was guilty, been sanctioned, been informed of my santions or been served the paperwork after a “UDC” hearing in which NEVER even occurred. So, after filing a BP-8 and it being denied due to it not being able to be “handled at that level.” I have to move to a BP-9 where it will be seen by the warden who is clearly pro-staff and absolutely will deny and all the way up I will go to regional just like everyone else where it will be denied the entire way. How do you stay positive in an environment where the staff and the administration refuse to offer classes to the mass of the population because there simply is not any facilities in which they can? That have closed down an entire unit to use for classes that now Grand Prarie is now sending people to fill up anyway, so now classes will be non-existant here all together. Denying the AIC population the right to FSA classes. They do not have anywhere to have classes here. This was a USP with less than half the population that is now has and the infrastructure is not here to implement the required classes by law.
Since being here now for 19 months, I have taken every class I have been offered or could sign up for. I have worked the entire time I have been here, I was the FIRST PERSON TO GET A JOB ON THIS COMPOUND SINCE IT OPENED AS A LOW. I hired many of the other orderlies that still work in my unit as directed by the same person who never even conducted my UDC hearing and then lied to my face when I asked him 26 days after the supposed hearing why he did not give me a hearing. B-Unit Counselor Mr. Graham. Our other Unit Counselor Mr. Stringer is the hot-head steriod infused loose canon that wrote me up after I did nothing wrong, but yet he wanted to call me the “F’ing coward yelling behind the door” when we were already locked down for having done nothing wrong… Staying positive… I am working on writing a book about what landed me in prison, doing fraud and being a drug addict. I have been clean and sober now for 5 years, from the day of my arrest I have been sober and I am very proud of that. I am very fortunate that I get visits every week from my family and they too are very proud of me. I am doing everything I can while faced with every card being purposely stacked against me.. That being said; even when you do nothing wrong, in prison, sometimes no matter what you do trouble will rear its ugly head and you can do nothing to do avoid it. So, I am asking… What do I do when I am faced with these problems? I am now going to be stopped from being able to go to a camp FOR ANOTHER YEAR… I was already supposed to be at a camp. This is the 2nd shot that they gave me to stop me from going to the camp. I am trying to find colleges to enroll in college and get a degree. I need help. Thank you for reading this..
