On Wednesday evening, the FBOP issued a press release entitled “FBOP Issues Directive to Expand Home Confinement, Advance First Step Act (You can find it on the BOP website).
As you can imagine, there was a great amount of discussion at Unicor on Thursday morning where people were more carefully reading it when they first got to work & discussing with their colleagues. In a nutshell and based on my interpretation, the new FBOP Director is encouraging the following:
- If someone has a stable life, home, job, etc. – then prisons should release them directly to home confinement – bypassing the halfway house. They should get 1-year of SCA credit applied to their home confinement.
- For those who need to go to a halfway house, they should be released to it with full count of their FSA points and 1-year of Second Chance Act time, getting them out of the prison sooner.
- In either case, most prisoners will probably be able to get out about 6-12 months sooner than previously predicted. Of course, this will take time to work its way down to the Case Managers and it all depends on the ultimate interpretation of the Director’s new mission. Thus, no one knows how it will ultimately impact them until they have a Unit Team meeting and see the updated information on their paperwork.
On Friday morning, some prisoners came to work with a new email from a legal firm that consistently communicates with inmates. I don’t normally read the emails from these law firms because I choose to see how things will develop based on actions, not on some law firm’s conjecture. Still, it was stating that low-level, non-violent drug offenders & those in a camp might have an opportunity to get clemency at some point in the near future. Again, lots of hubbub in the office as inmates always want to be hopeful and believe in the best – even if it is only a rumor or may not happen. I do not believe that anything will impact me, so my life will be the same and there is no reason to get excited and then get disappointed when it doesn’t happen. The best course of action is to continue “working the plan” by reading books, doing book reports, journaling, programming and focusing on the foreseeable future. The next few paragraph explains what I did in that regard.
- This morning, I got up and got all of the paperwork stored under my bed, in my locker and in various folders and consolidated it into a much larger folder with ~10 pockets. I put it into different categories, sorted by time and it is now very organized. I started a book report and worked until I couldn’t work on it any longer; then I worked on my homework for the Threshold class. When I could no longer work on that, I quit to read the latest issue of the Wall Street Journal.
- Yesterday, I had a great work-out day with 300 sit-ups, 300 push-ups, 33 pull-ups, 100 squats and jogged/walked about 2.5 miles.
- Later today, I will go out to lift weights for an hour. I will then come in, shower and finish my Threshold homework and start reading a new book. We don’t work on Monday, so if all goes well, I will finish the book by Monday afternoon and start on a book report.
- Lastly, Wednesday night I moved into Mark’s old room with Gino as my new cellmate. We are going to make a “prison pizza” tomorrow using tortillas, pizza sauce, cheese, pepperoni and Carnitas (a bag of meat you can purchase at commissary). We will “cook” it with an iron and eat it. This is my first experience to make more complicated food with someone else. My normal go-to item is just tuna with some relish added in. I am excited to try it.
Five months down, seventeen to go!
