Good morning from FMC Lexington,
I have been really busy lately assisting my fellow inmates with writing their remedies, Compassionate Releases, 2255 (Ineffective Counsel) and more. It always warms my heart when I see these efforts actually make a difference. Yesterday, an inmate I assisted left the prison, when she was due to be released in December per the Case Manager. When calculating her FSA and SCA credits, however, she was due to be released in May. If she hadn’t gotten out this month, she would have lost custody of her 4 year old daughter, so I wrote a letter to the Assistant Warden on her behalf expressing the issue of her credits not being loaded properly, and risking her being reunited with her daughter. The letter worked, and I was so happy to see her go yesterday afternoon. 🙂
Also, advocacy does work when your family writes on your behalf- case in point Julie Chrisley. Julie got the call last night that her pardon was finalized, and I am incredibly happy for her and her husband. Savannah did a lot of work trying to help her parents on her podcast and more, and her hard work paid off. When I first arrived at this prison camp, Julie is one of the first people I met in the phone line. I never watched her reality TV show, so I didn’t know who she was when I was sitting next to her. She looked over at me, and asked if I was doing ok. Being my first week- no, in fact, I was not. I told her that I don’t know if I would ever get over seeing my husband sobbing when I walked away from him up to the prison. She shared that she hadn’t seen, nor spoken to her husband in three years. That broke my heart. It was a heartfelt conversation, and I have had a few more since that time while she was here. She, like many women in this prison camp, are kind, humble, hard working and intelligent people who made a mistake. I am sincerely happy for her and her husband to be able to be reunited again, and thankful our paths crossed in here.
The advocacy work I plan on doing when I am released from here will focus on post-prison release for inmates. The Re-entry process for inmates is severely lacking. I have prepared a three-tiered approach to tackle this issue once I am released, and have sent out letters to various agencies to network with as well. One out of four Americans have a felony on their record. Women being incarcerated has risen drastically- one statistic I read stated it has gone up 700%. The cases of the women I have been helping in this prison camp break my heart. They are not my stories to tell, and I am respecting their privacy, but let’s just say, more often than not, they are being charged with crimes that are excessive, and sometimes, unwarranted. I am hoping that one day, the justice system is reevaluated and restructured. For the most part, people in prison are not career criminals, particularly in prison camps, and are not a “threat to society”. Placing people in prison away from their families and giving them a lifetime record barring most from gainful employment is cruel. Perhaps I am biased because of my own circumstance, but I have seen persons found guilty of crimes not spend a day in prison because they have the means to buy their way out of it, or because and judge didn’t want to “ruin their lives”. I have seen cases of rape, where the offender gets probation, yet a woman in an abusive relationship get 20 years for a conspiracy charge because her husband sold meth. One day, I hope our justice system is fixed. And I sincerely hope that I am alive to see it when it is.
