I work at Unicor in Customer Service – specifically working with furniture contracts. The furniture is produced at prisons in Florida, Kentucky and Arkansas. The Customer Service, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and Procurement are centralized here in Lexington and handle all of the accounting for all of the Unicor facilities in the US. Downstairs from us is a Unicor facility that makes wire harnesses for the military – employing an estimated 120 inmates. Yesterday when I was walking to work, I saw a man who was dressed neither as an inmate or as a C.O. – he was wearing jeans and a collared shirt. I thought that was a bit weird as I think it was the first time that ever happened. After lunch, all of the production people who returned to work were told to return back to their units. As you can imagine, the rumor mill was running hard last night with many saying that the wire harness facility would be closed. I did not know and had no information to judge it on. Sure enough, when they reported to work this morning, they were told they would finish out their contracts and materials in inventory and would be closed in 3-6 months. Many of the workers there are very concerned as they only money they have access to (no support from outside) is what they earn at Unicor. There are lots of guys talking today about trying to get transferred out to another prison with an attached Unicor facility. I don’t think it will be that easy for them.
One of my cellmates went for a colonoscopy today. He left Sunday night because when you go for an outside medical procedure like that, they put you in there and give you the cleansing laxative (and nothing else) to make sure you are ready for the procedure. After 2.5 days of that, it turns out that the hospital did not want to do the procedure and he came back to our unit – hungry for food and mad that they didn’t do the procedure. Understandable from my point of view.
I have my fourth Spanish class tomorrow. I counted up how many words I know and I am over 200 words. I need to focus more on my verb conjugation now and just start repeating sentences out loud as much as I can to get it internalized into my memory so that I can then start learning even more words. I found a Christian comic book in the chapel today – the same one, only one is in Spanish & one is in English. I will start reading that tomorrow to see if that helps me.
All over here, on the walls and just about everywhere you go, you hear about PREA (Prison Rape Elimination Act). This is a program sponsored by the BOP to allow anyone attacked or even threatened to get help. Since I have been here, I have not heard of any rapes or even anything remotely close to it. I finally heard of one on Monday and the suspected perpetrator was picked up in the library and taken to the SHU. All of the inmates knew that he was gay and the CO’s were shocked as they did not know (if they had known, they probably would not have hired him). Anyways, I just present this information to show that, at least at this facility, rape is not-very-common occurrence and when it happens, it is addressed by the prison very quickly.
