PREFACE
The following entries were written during my incarceration. I have edited them as minimally as possible to preserve the raw nature of the entries. These are just a few excerpts, in all I wrote hundreds of emails documenting my time at Dublin.
Sent Date: Tuesday, June 21, 2016 4:33 PM
Subject: Pacific Islander Day
On Saturday there was a special performance for Pacific Islander Day. The first thing I noticed was how many Pacific Islanders are incarcerated here. They are drastically over-represented. As an opening, The Lord's Prayer was read in the Hawaiian language. That's about where they lost me and I started seeing the whole thing as very ironic. Island nations had beautiful religions and cultures for thousands and thousands of years before white people came along. We imposed Christianity on them by force and violence, their recent ancestors resisted. But that's essentially forgotten now. This also applies to black people and Native Americans, and I never fail to see the irony of it.
The last two books I read discussed the history of white people invading native islands. "In a Sunburnt Country" by Bill Bryson where he goes into the history of the British genocide of Australian Aboriginals. In "Lies My Teacher Told Me" it discusses in detail the genocide committed upon the Arawaks of Haiti by Columbus, among his many other atrocities. And how in American education they are never discussed and history books propagate outright lies to ensure we never realize our "heroes" were anything but. And yet on Saturday the American Federal government sponsored a celebration of various island cultures. Like the wrongs committed by our government or its immediate predecessors are some distant and disconnected past. Like we didn't systematically try to oppress and destroy native cultures for hundreds of years. Like you can't draw a DIRECT LINE between our oppression of their people and why they are in Federal prison! Colonization, oppression, poverty. One led directly into the other. The whole event made me incredibly sad. So much about prison is so incredibly saddening. I will never view the world or our government in the same way again. I ended up leaving halfway through.
Otherwise, things are well in Dublin! Just graduated Music Theory, taking a Basic Computers course... We literally defined monitor, click, and mouse. There are typos all over and its taught by an inmate using ancient computers. There is a huge section of the packet dedicated to floppy disks. Everything is written to what I'd approximate is a 5th grade reading level.
Love,
Morgan Elizabeth
Sent Date: Wednesday, September 21, 2016 1:49 PM
Subject: Plog: National Heroin Awareness Week
For those of you new to my email contacts plog is a prison plog! So I guess this week is a presidentially mandated National Heroin/Opiate Awareness Week. We had a special presentation about it during RDAP this morning. Here is an inmate/heroin addict's perspective on it!
We need more realistic drug education in schools. I vividly remember being told how dangerous extasy was, that one pill could kill you. Then I saw dozens of high schoolers use it and never did I see anyone suffer ill effects. This is the first time I remember thinking that all my public school drug education had been fear-mongering propaganda and exaggeration. I immediately discounted everything I'd ever been taught. "Just say no!" and "one time kills" are too simple, its like teaching abstinence only for sex ed. It just doesn't work.
Parents need to be educated about the signs of opiate addiction. This could easily be accomplished with billboards. What does it mean when your teenager is suddenly sleepy all the time? Or they have constricted pupils? Why are the suddenly so many rolls of aluminum foil in the house? Why are there black smear marks/finger prints on everything? Why are all the spoons missing out of the silverware drawer? Recognize the signs.
Shame kills and stigma kills. Heroin is everywhere. We need to bring it out of the shadows.
Drug treatment needs to be EVIDENCE BASED as opposed to faith based.
Medical opiate replacement therapies are valid alternatives to a life spent addicted to illegal narcotics. Methadone is especially stigmatized and that prevents many people from every trying it, even if they are otherwise perfect candidates. Arbitrary DEA patient caps on suboxone make it hard to obtain. Vivitrol, NOT a narcotic in any way, isn't even covered by many insurance companies and is over $1,000 per monthly shot. It shows incredibly high success rates.
Cures aren't profitable. Prescribing medication is. Big Pharma has far too much control over our politics. The DEA just declined to remove Marijuana from the list of Schedule 1 substances, meaning it has "no accepted medical use". Drug treatment is under-funded, alternatives to medication and surgeries are frequently rejected. Follow the money. Purdue made millions with OxyContin, they marketed it as less or non-addictive alternative to morphine. They created the heroin epidemic in this country and got filthy rich while doing it. Welcome to America.
Simple drug possession is a felony. You are branded a felon for the rest of your life. This limits your job options and severely restricts where you are able to rent an apartment, essentially forcing you into the ghetto. Drug possession should never be a felony. Addicts shouldn't be treated as criminals unless they are actually committing crime, and not just ingesting a substance.
Decades of terrible police policy that arrested people who called for help during a friend's overdose has created the current situation where people are terrified of calling for help when someone overdoses. This is how people die, someone goes unconcious and everyone runs for fear of arrest or being held responsible for the death.
Oregon and a few other states have new laws that protect people who call 911 during an overdose, so that no one will be arrested. This is amazing progress and seems like common sense. The problem is no one knows of these changes. We need to educate. The county jails would be a good place to start.
Overdose prevention and Narcan certification classes should be brought into the county jails. Narcan is the opiate overdose reversal medication and can be carried by civilians if they take a short certification class for it. Addicts have a hard time actually making it to the classes, that's why bringing them into county jails would be so perfect. Narcan saves countless lives, we just need to get it into more people's hands. Basic overdose prevention classes could save lives. Increased access to needle exchanges reduces rates of infectious disease and infection. There are high levels of ignorance among addicts, and I still hear outlandish myths about how Hep C is spread. People need to know its OK to go to the hospital if they are suffering a complication of injection drug use. Its very common for addicts to attempt to "lance" their own abscesses. People feel to ashamed to go to the hospital. EDUCATION SAVES LIVES. SHAME KILLS, STIGMA KILLS.
Sent Date: Sunday, April 2, 2017 3:20 AM
Subject: Life at Dublin
Since I got to prison I've been trying to figure out how to describe it with my words. That is much harder than it sounds, I assure you. Everything is so nuanced and complex, it's its own world here; its own society. It's like trying to explain what it's live to live in America to someone who has no concept of Western civilization... where do you even begin? But the recurring theme that I've wanted to describe is the chaos and disorder that is ever present here. I always fall short in my attempts, but I'll try again now, as recently the staff have given me some good material. I will provide terminology definitions and back-story as required. Here it goes. It's long.
I got here in February and was led to a room that had two bunk beds in it, with about 18 inches inbetween them, a sink, and toilet. I was told that the next morning at 6:30am I would need to go to orderly closet which was across the hallway, a room that was full of brooms, mops, and dust pans, to check in and I'd be given a cleaning assignment. Breakfast is at 5:30, someone told me. At some point all the new arrivals were led to a woman's room and the woman gave us all a welcome pack that included shampoo, soap, conditioner, an envelope, a pencil, a hair tie, and a stamp, courtesy of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior (a few months after this, the woman that officiated this makeshift Christian ministry would be granted clemency by President Obama, she had been serving life since 1992).
I woke up and had no idea what time it was. I had to climb down off of my upper bunk and wander into the lobby to find a clock. It was almost 5am. At breakfast that morning, I expectantly looked around for the coffee. "Coffee maker's down, been down for weeks. No clue when it will get fixed. There's no coffee." For the first time in my life, jail had me addicted to coffee. This was devastating news. I was immediately horrified at the crowded cafeteria, that held many more people than it seemed it could or should. Sitting elbow to elbow with strangers and navigating currents of foot traffic, weaving in and out of people. My anxiety flared but everyone seemed to navigate it so easily as if it didn't even faze them, to constantly be in someone else's personal space, surrounded by commotion. As if it was normal occurrence. Because it was, and it is.
I went back to my room and waited for 6:30, when I needed to check in at the janitor's closet. At 6:30 I walked to the closet and said, "I'm here to check in." The inmate running the show asked me, "Are you an A&O or an orderly?" "Umm... I don't know. I was told I need to help clean." "Well are you a unit orderly, you know, one of the people that cleans things on a certain schedule, or an A&O?" "Um... I don't know. I got here yesterday." "Oh! OK. Sign your name here, grab a rag, and go wipe down the tables." Upon arrival to the prison you are given "R&D clothes" until you can get to laundry for your permanent clothing issue. We slept in our clothes, having no other option. We wore them all that next day, a Friday. Then it was a 3 day weekend thanks to a Federal holiday. Laundry would not be open until Tuesday. We were stuck in our R&D clothes for 4 days. (Except not really, thanks to the kindness of strangers.) On Tuesday I heard "ALL A&Os REPORT TO THE OFFICER STATION" being repeated over the PA system. I don't know what A&O is, so it must not apply to me. Well that was my assumption. When I didn't move someone informed me "that means YOU!" "What is an A&O?" I asked. "YOU are an A&O. It means someone on admission/orientation." OH. OK then, got it... So finally that Tuesday we went to laundry and in an anxiety-inducing flurry of questions and activity, we were issued our clothes. 2 khaki shirts, 2 khaki pants, 3 brown t-shirts, and heavy black boots. I remember being in a perpetual state of confusion. Eventually you acclimate to it. The confusion, not Dublin. One never stops being confused here, you just get used to it, roll with it.
When I first got here, I remember looking around at everyone's clothing and being taken with all the options and variety. For a prison, it seemed strange. There are gray t shirts, long sleeve gray t shirts, grays of either the light or dark variety, light brown and dark brown, white, and even teal. There are gray sweats of varying cuts and shades, as well as green sweats. There are no less than a dozen different styles of shoes, probably more, mostly Nikes. In addition to all the base variety, people had different things done to their clothes. Perhaps a V-neck sewn in, or the sides taken in to make the shirt more flattering, a hood stitched onto a pullover sweatshirt, a design cross-stitched into a t-shirt. The opportunities seemed endless, so I began making a mental inventory of what I would want done. Then randomly one day at lunch, the officer was confiscating things. I didn't understand what was going on so I asked someone. "They're taking altered clothes." "What do you mean altered clothes?" "You know, stuff that has been sewn." "Why are they taking it?" "Because you aren't allowed to have it." I looked around... about half of everyone I saw had on something that appeared "altered". Yet randomly, that day, an officer was saying it wasn't allowed. And yes, that's a real rule in the handbook. And as for the colorful variety, it is clothing items that were sold once upon a time or at a different prison. These things get sold amongst the inmates and passed down over the years, their value increasing with their scarcity, a basic law of economics. Again, for weeks I thought that was allowed, since it was everywhere and obvious. Much later it was brought to my attention that TECHNICALLY you are not allowed to wear or have in your possession anything which you did not personally purchase off of commissary, that TECHNICALLY you could be forced to show a receipt for the item, and if you could not produce a receipt, it could be confiscated.
Fast forward 6 months. I was standing in line for lunch, with my salt and pepper and hot sauce in my hand, like I'd done every lunch and dinner for months and months. But that day, all of a sudden, we aren't allowed to bring condiments into food service. "No condiments allowed!" So I put them in my pocket, out of sight. The very next day, ignoring yesterday's random rule, I walked out of food service after my meal with my salt in one hand and pepper in the other. A lieutenant said, "Only one condiment allowed in food service!" And never since that day have I heard a single word about condiments in food service, and I continue to bring salt and pepper and hot sauce to every meal.
One day while waiting for lunch, the officer was checking what undershirt people had on underneath their khaki shirt. If it was not one of the brown shirts you are issued from laundry, she wasn't letting you into food service, saying you weren't in proper uniform. Ever since I bought gray shirts off commissary, I'd never worn those brown shirts again, they're ill fitting. We only wash laundry every 4 days. Yet this officer, on that particular day, was saying that "full uniform" meant a brown t-shirt, not a gray one purchased off of commissary. Everyone was sent back to the unit to change, if they wanted to eat. A few enterprising inmates located their A&O Handbook and found the page where it described uniform as "a t-shirt and khaki shirt and pants". The D-Unit/RDAP counselor, who is revered for doing her job very well and with compassion, cited the ambiguous language of the handbook and put a stop to the ridiculous enforcement of the non-existent brown t-shirt rule. Never again before or since have I heard anything about our t-shirts.
You forget how absurdly chaotic and disordered it is here. From the class offerings to movement schedule, it's constant. The inconsistencies can make you crazy. I'd forgotten myself until this past week reminded me and gave me a shining example that I've been wanting to share with everyone.
So in every room here at Dublin there is a bunk bed, a single bed, two lockers stacked on top of each other, a single locker, a toilet, and a sink, and two gray plastic tote boxes under the bunk bed, and one gray tote under the single bed. I've always struggled to fit all of my of my stuff into the locker and box. I mean we have food, hygiene, paperwork, books, clothes, and miscellaneous crap. Since arriving at Dublin I've been in 4 different rooms. Some of the gray boxes had "legal mail" written on them in Sharpie, and some didn't. We got new Associate Wardens. During a town hall, he informed us that they will be turning Dublin into a "real prison". The first order of business is removing the gray boxes. Because TECHNICALLY they are only supposed to contain legal mail. That hasn't been enforced in so long that no one even knew it was ever a rule. "LEGAL MAIL", barely visible in faded sharpie, was like a hieroglyphic, a leftover of a bygone era. Removing the gray boxes removed about 30% of our storage space. As if I didn't have organizational issues to begin with. So during the town hall where we were informed Dublin was to become a "real prison", everyone was asking about the procedure to mail property home. Here it is:
Take your stuff to the mail room to be weighed. (The mail room is only accessible during open house hours, Tuesday and Thursday from 11am to Noon). Bring a cop-out (BOP lingo for a paper form that is an inmate request to staff). The mail room will weigh it and write on the cop-out how much postage is required. You then take the cop-out to your unit manager who will approve you to buy extra stamps (maximum is one book per week usually). The unit manager will then email commissary, stating you've been approved to buy X amount of stamps. Then you shop at your designated time for commissary and get the pre-arranged value of stamps. You then place those stamps on your box and go through your counselor to mail out your property. Simple, right?
So on Thursday I brought three manila envelopes to the mail room to be weighed. I arrived to a line that quickly grew behind me. Everyone was trying to mail out their property, lest it be confiscated for being "excessive". I watched the first girl go in with her box and come back out. "She kept my stuff. I just wanted it weighed and she kept it. Said we weren't allowed to have boxes." Strange... She better not keep my stuff, I haven't organized it within the envelopes yet. I just need to know how many stamps I'll need. The next girl went in with her stuff in abox and came back out with it in a garbage bag. "She said I couldn't have the box." OK fine, the prison doesn't want us walking around with boxes. The next girl went in with her stuff in a box, and came out with the box still in hand. "I bought this box off of commissary." OK so we can't have boxes... unless we bought them off of commissary. The next girl goes in with a box and stamps, and wants to actually mail out her property. She already has the stamps. She comes back out and says "she won't let me mail it out because I don't have a property mail-out form authorized by my counselor." One girl asks if there's anyway the prison can just charge her account for the stamps, since commissary is closed all week for inventory. No, she's told. She must buy stamps. $80 worth of stamps? Yes. At this point the yard closed there were over 20 people standing in a line, still waiting for the mail room. Then it was my turn so I went in to find the mail room clerk very frazzled. "No one warned me this was going on." Usually the mail room open house is a quiet affair. The line was moving very slowly. Then one of the administrators walked into the room and they tried to find a better way to deal with the mail room chaos. One of the unit managers came in and was quickly trained by the clerk how to weigh packages. I was asked to step out and suddenly we were told to "GET IN UNDERCOVER REC! GO INTO THE CORNER!" So all 20 of us walk into the nearest corner. "NOT THAT CORNER, THE OTHER CORNER!" So all of us, packages in hand, walk to the opposite corner. Still no one knows what's going on. When we go back to the mail room, the unit manager turned mail clerk is now telling us different things. For hobby craft mail out, go to rec. No, you have to go through your counselor. No, you can mail it out through the mail room but you must have the form. No, you don't need a form because the prison just needs people to mail their stuff out since the boxes have been taken. No one can get on the same page. We just wanted to mail property home. It still hasn't been worked out. It's so typically Dublin, and is reminiscent of the educational and vocational opportunities here, topics for another day.
Sent Date: Sunday, June 4, 2017 11:19 PM
Subject: Malcolm Gladwell Inspired Me
I wasn't going to do this. I really wasn't. But then yesterday I found Malcolm Gladwell's book "David and Goliath" on top of a trash can and I ended up staying up well past midnight to finish the book. Finding it was rather serendipitous. I'm going to share with you a passage out of the book. But first, some back story, as condensed as possible.
In early May institution pay posted on inmate's accounts and no one received the bonus pay they had come to rely on, to expect. CMS workers were very upset. By pure coincidence, I'm sure, 46 CMS employees suddenly contracted an ailment and all went to sick call on the same day. The prison wasn't pleased and silenced the dissent pretty quickly, told people to go work at Unicor doing telemarketing if they want to make more money. And that was the end of the it.
The week before ACA came was the 2017 GED Graduation ceremony, which I attended to support the people whom I had tutored. I sat in the back corner nearest the exit. At the end of the ceremony, 5 minutes before the movement, the new associate warden got up to give a version of a commencement speech. Dozens of inmates got up and walked towards the exit instead of listening. Booing was also reported, but it wasn't audible from where I was sitting.
Then it was ACA week. Everything ran smoothly. Until that Friday evening when the ACA had left the building. Then someone was taken to the SHU under investigation for leading either or both of those "group demonstrations". That was the night I was spoken to by a lieutenant about what I write in emails, primarily.
This past Tuesday night, 3 people attempted suicide in the SHU. Which does sound like more of a statement than a widespread mental health crisis.
Wednesday there was an emergency yard recall at 8:30am. We were all instructed to wait in our rooms. It was hours before I realized what was happening. We were being taken out of our rooms, one by one, and interviewed by staff at various stations. They had a paper titled, "MASS INTERVIEW QUESTIONNAIRE". The questions surrounded group demonstrations and hostilities. We were locked down until noon and then released for lunch. But at 2:45, we were recalled again, and then locked down for the rest of the night. We got our dinner on Styrofoam trays and had to bring it back to the unit to eat. Since then, we've been on modified lockdown. Which means that when its convenient to the prison (after business hours and weekends) we eat meals one unit at a time in shifts, and are given 10 minutes to eat. It means that most activities are restricted and there are limited moves. But there is no advanced notice and no consistency, all in very Dublin fashion. I could cite more examples of chaos but it's all getting so fucking played out. Yesterday the yard crew worked, but today they didn't, so there are mounds of goose shit everywhere you have to dodge while walking to food service.
Convenient how the prison waited until after ACA left to begin punishing us for things that occurred 2 and 3 weeks ago.
There was a bulletin posted in about 10 locations today (the 4th) dated June 2nd that cites "increased inmate insolence" and reminds us of our "expectations", though it says nothing about the modified lockdown under which we've been operating. More people go to the SHU in trickles daily.
And now the serendipitous Gladwell passage!
"We often think of authority as a response to disobedience: a child acts up, so a teacher cracks down. Stella's classroom, however, suggest something quite different: disobedience can also be a response to authority. If a teacher doesn't do her job properly, then the child will BECOME disobedient...
When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters--first and foremost--how THEY behave.
This is called the "principle of legitimacy," and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice--that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can't treat one group differently from another.
All good parents understand these principles implicitly."
But the Bureau of Prisons surely does not.
People need to feel the will be heard, not taken directly to SHU, if they speak up. But it's this second element that Dublin has run especially afoul of, consistency. Arbitrary enforcement of the rules. Disorder. Chaos. Unclear expectations. Inconsistent operations and standards. The list goes on.Third, prison life is completely dependent on who you know. It's about favors and connections, favoritism abounds. As prison is just a microcosm of society at large, and that is how our society operates, this shouldn't surprise me... Yet it does.
Someone please get all the staff at Dublin a copy of this book. Page 208. Check it out.
I wasn't going to write about this. But then I read that passage and I just couldn't help myself. My right to free speech is still protected even though I'm in prison, right? My government isn't so callous as to take me to the SHU just because they don't like what I'm writing, right?
.......Right?
Sent Date: Monday, August 7, 2017 3:37 PM
Subject: Plog: Much too much
Lice infestations and fire alarms screeching and strobing at 1am. Staffing crises due to a Federal hiring freeze and the fact the yearly overtime budget has already been exceeded. Crowded rooms, crowded doorways, crowded hallways. No tables and no chairs, no where to sit, no where to be. Guards choosing to enforce the wrong rules and allowing discourtesy and inconsideration to be the norm. Dublin takes decent people, overworks them, under appreciates them, until they become these automaton drones that do the bare minimum of their job description. Apathy is the prevailing emotion among the staff. The disparity between one unit to another is so great as to fundamentally alter your prison experience, much less the disparity between one prison and another. Red tape and the run around.
The fire alarm has started going off again. Never mind the fact the contractors were just here to test them all, and I assume they all passed the test, because I haven't seen them since. The powers that be try to point the finger at inmates, saying we're burning popcorn or frying our hair on the hair straightener, that the fault does not lie with the system itself. But that explanation falters when the alarm goes off during count time, when we're all in our rooms, and last night when it screeched for several minutes just before 1am. The contrast of the darkness to the strobing light actually bothered my brain and I understand now how it causes seizures. It's hard to explain other than it was just deeply disturbing and I had to cover my eyes with my hands and put my headphones over my ears and crank up the music.
The population of Dublin is the highest that I've ever seen it. It has been consistently hovering around 1,050. This is compared to the 950 it used to hover around. There are the fewest staff members that I've ever seen, as well. Most employees eligible for retirement took it, and plenty others have vanished, off to other departments of government, like ICE. With nearly 2 months left of the fiscal year, the overtime budget is not only exhausted but exceeded. But there is a Trump hiring freeze. So the ratio of inmates-to-staff is drastically shifted. I'm lucky that I'm here in A/B unit, we still have staff, case managers and one of our two counselors. Last week our unit manager was acting as the counselor for 3 units as well as her own job as unit manager. One person, no matter how competent, cannot do the work of 4. This is how people burn out. This is how the BOP crushes people's souls and ends up with so many burnt out apathetic employees. And that's a trickle down effect which ends up with devastating consequences on us inmates. Programming here is a joke, there are few resources, plenty of bullshit.
So the consistently high population means that almost weekly we are getting huge shipments of girls. From detention centers and transfer centers. Most state prisons have a delousing procedure, but not here. They're intaking dozens of girls each week and not checking them. Then they get foisted into 90 square foot rooms with two other people. Every day more girls get taken to the SHU for medical isolation, because they have lice or scabies. More property goes out in yellow biohazard bags. Scabies is harder to detect and has a longer incubation period, so while those cases become evident less frequently, I doubt that means they're happening any less frequently. Prison is filthy and disgusting.
Dublin was built to house one person per room. Then one person become two, a single bed replaced by a bunk bed. I just noticed yesterday in the A-side lobby that some of the chairs have stenciled room assignments on them. From the numbers I gather that each room used to have two chairs in it, that belonged in it. I could ask an old timer but I think its a safe assumption to say that when it was still just one bunk bed, each person also had a surface and a chair. But then the desks and chairs were taken out and replaced with another bed and locker, meaning that 3 people live in each room that was designed for one. Some rooms have two bunk beds and 4 lockers. When I clean my floor, when I'm on my hands and knees in between the beds, my pockets catch on the rivets of the bed on each side of me. That's how narrow the space is. All of the doors in the unit are single doors, and only one is unlocked when we are released for meals or moves. This results in over 100 people trying to squeeze out of one single door. Crowding, shoving, pushing. But what worries me the most is the inevitable head to head contact that such crowding presents. Lice transmission…
The fire alarm is going off as I type. It's so regular this morning they're no longer making us evacuate. I just have my headphones on, listening to Mexican radio.
It's evident in all the buildings that we're massively over capacity. The water main breaks typically once a year. Plumbing problems are constant. We only can wash our clothes once every four or five days. The infrastructure simply isn't there to handle the volume. Today a psychologist is working the yard. That's becoming more and more common, higher level staff members being forced to work as low-level correctional officers. I'm pretty sure his base pay is higher than the overtime rate of a standard guard, but somehow that is considered more cost-effective.
Most of the seating at the cafeteria is outside on the patio. People feed the squirrels. They become morbidly obese. Words are not sufficient to describe how fat the squirrels get. So badly I want to take a picture. They must weigh as much as a medium Chihuahua, so round their feet can barely touch the ground. It's a serious violation of nature and I think it's very sad. But the "do not feed the animals" rule is just one of the myriad unenforced rules of Dublin.
There's never anywhere to sit. All of the tables and chairs in the lobby are always taken. There's not enough for as many people as they have crowded in this building. Well perhaps it would be enough if the guards didn't allow people to hoard and hog the tables and chairs. Sometimes a whole table will be "saved", with 6 chairs around it, but no one is there. And there's no where else to sit. But god forbid you sit there, because the goal of prison is to AVOID conflict, not create it. Everyone's so entitled. The vast differences between here and state prisons is simple: Here, inmates are ALLOWED to behave like this. At Dublin essentially they lock us up and throw away the key. While at state prisons, rules are enforced. No saving tables and chairs, no screaming and disturbing everyone around you, no stealing the hallway fans to put them in your room. So there are benefits to the lax environment here, I've began to think the costs far outweigh the benefits. Because we're left to police ourselves, to "work it out amongst ourselves", as the guards tell us to do. But think about the types of people that are in prison. These aren't the most reasonable people, they aren't considerate. So the most aggressive person wins. Wins the tables, the chairs, the ice, and the fans. So while most guards don't give a shit about anything, some care. But about the silliest stuff. Like whether or not someone left a chair on the balcony and didn't stack it against the wall. (If one person leaves a chair out, the whole balcony will get locked for the rest of the night, punishing all the rest of us.) They worry about altered clothes. Whether or not you turn the TV off when you go to cell in for count time. But absolutely no one cares about the people that put their feet up on chairs while others are forced to stand for lack of a chair. It boggles my mind.
I will try to prevent becoming infected with lice or scabies. And I won't let the trickle-down apathy that bleeds from the staff all the way down to inmates infect me, either. Actually, despite all of the above mentioned BS, I've been in a great mood for weeks on end. My Spanish is fluent, truly fluent. I'm in the best shape of my life. And it's a beautiful life. Time is flying by. It's an inevitability and I am therefore no longer anxious or overly excited. Well I'm off to the balcony, which has graciously been unlocked during the week, even though by policy its only supposed to unlocked on the weekend. Why is that? No one can tell me. It's just some extra square footage for which I am very grateful for, but if we get a jerk officer, it will get locked. I just don't get where the BOP expects me to BE. I have no space! Climb up on my perch (upper bunk) and just sit up there to do all I have to do? I just want a chair and a desk. I just want some space. But I make do. I love fresh air!
In so many ways, Dublin is much too much.
Have a wonderful day everyone, I love you, and I'm not in the mood to proofread this so forgive its typos.
Sent Date: Sunday, October 29, 2017 11:20 AM
Subject: 60 Days Left on a 60 Month Sentence
Theoretically, at least. The Trump administration, under the guidance of lock-'em-up tough-on-crime Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has been quietly defunding Federal halfway houses (confirmed by Reuters). The closures are disproportionately affecting female inmates whose halfway houses are more likely to be under-utilized. I have been seeing terrible things. After doing 4, 5, 6 years, women who were finally scheduled to be released this month have been paged to be told "just kidding, you're not getting out next week, you have 6 more months to do". Their year halfway house gets reduced to 6 or 4 months. It's happening all around me and it happens up until mere days before you release. It's so arbitrary and supremely unfair. It will be uncertainty and anxiety up until the moment I walk out of the doors. So far, Portland has been spared.
Songs that I hear on the radio that are my most recent memories of freedom, a song I heard on the radio the last time I drove my car, for example, are now a few years old. I look visibly older than when I was arrested. Which makes perfect sense, since I am a few years older. The passage of time for me is warped and distorted. For all the personal growth prison has provided me with, I am eager for it to be OVER, I've been punished more than enough. I notice subtle ways in which it's changed me and I don't like many of them. I now shout if the situation requires it (calling dibs on the phone or shower after count, looking for someone screaming their name) when before I outright refused, I'll save tables, chairs, the shower, and the phone, for as long as I need it to be saved for, even though once I considered that rude. But you can't be the only one not doing it. You'll lose every time. So to compete in this environment, I've had to start playing by their rules. I do things I once considered unacceptably rude. There's a fine line between being assertive and being inconsiderate/rude and vacillate the two.
They're giving mass flu shots today and if I hear one more person tell me and adamantly advocate to others to not get their flu shot because it makes you sick or they're doing experiments on us, I'm going to lose it. It makes me angry. I break my own "DO NOT ENGAGE" rule and fire back, explain how the flu shot works. Try to convince them. There is no winning with the ignorant masses. At least not without Google to back me up and it's just my word against there's. The prison tolerates this and doesn't so much as post an electronic bulletin with flu shot information to counter all the misinformation.
The directional walking is sporadically enforced and I've never been told again I have to wear boots. As the directional walking isn't anywhere in policy, I heard one girl challenging it with the yard officer when he told her to walk counter-clockwise. "But why do I have to walk that way if it's not actually a written rule?" The yard officer bellowed, "BECAUSE I SAID SO!!!" To which my Mexican friend laughed and said, "Did he really just say that? They would never even tell us that in Mexico. Take a bribe, maybe. But if they were enforcing a rule they'd tell you where it could be found." The same yard officer has spontaneously decided that sitting on the balcony is against the rules, standing only. "Stand up or I'm locking the balcony!" I verified that's not actually a rule and he's just being a dick. But what do I do with that information? Absolutely nothing. There is no recourse, we are powerless, and the guards can enforce anything they fancy. The disorder is constant, with one shift yelling at you for doing something one way and telling you to do it another, and the very next shift yelling at you for doing it the way the previous shift told you to do it.
Headbands used to be sold on commissary but for a long time they were out of stock. So my friend, who has bangs she likes to pin back, used an elastic band out of document folder as a headband. One particular lieutenant would harass her about it every time he saw her in food service. "No decorations! That is contraband!" So upon entering food service, she'd have to check if he was there. If he was, she'd take it off and put it in her pocket to go through the line with her overgrown bangs falling in her face, putting it back once we sat down. This went on for months. Last week commissary finally got headbands back in stock. She put on two just to make it extra-obvious and put her receipt in her pocket before we went to dinner.
He called her over, "You again? I thought I told you. No decorations!" He was going to confiscate her headband.
"But it's a headband. I bought it off commissary," She said, all smiles.
The bald lieutenant was indignant, "No, it's supposed to be worn as a ponytail holder, not like that!"
"No it's a headband, it's meant to worn on the head," More big smiles.
The commissary officer was standing next to the lieutenant and he had to lean over and whisper in his ear, quietly informing him he was wrong, and she was wearing it as intended. That he lost this one. "Move along." He was stern faced and she knows she has a new enemy now.
The victory felt amazing, even for us by-standers. We never win in prison, and we finally won one. We were overjoyed. Over the right to wear a headband.
The A-unit counselor got fired, the B-unit counselor and the A/B secretary both walked out. This leaves us with two case managers and a unit manager, whose already excessive workload has literally doubled. Rec is closed every other day for lack of staff to supervise it. In the midst of this staffing crisis, the prison administration has begun to personally search each unit randomly once a week. (Randomly means Thursday at 9:30am.) So the highest paid personnel at the prison are on their hands and knees searching our rooms throwing fits about magazine clippings tacked to our bulletin boards (Photographs only! No clippings! Another made up rule not found in writing anywhere.) Treating a cache of knitting needles like he'd just found a shank. Their big take each week is fruit and vegetables from food service, showing where our priorities lie. Fighting crime, one apple at a time!
Some officers enforce the "no saving tables and chairs" rule. But only during count time. As soon as the bell chimes for clear count, everyone literally runs out to put a cup on "their" table. Those tables then sit empty but for that cup for the next 4 hours, just in case whoever saved it might need the table at some point. Meanwhile I sit on the ground on the balcony (but only if that one yard officer isn't on shift) to eat my dinner. Saving the tables and chairs like that is acceptable for all the officers. As long as the tables aren't saved DURING count, the foot race and subsequent possessive entitlement are fine.
My shoes are worn out. Completely, to the point where the plastic of the heel is cutting into me. These Under Armours were the first decent shoes the prison sold after finally stopping selling the low grade counterfeit Nikes. And still they wore out in 6 months. The prison is not selling shoes, there is some administrative hang up. When the shoes do go on sale, it will be weeks before they arrive. Meaning the soonest I could get new shoes is a week or two before I release. In the meantime, I can hardly walk much less run. Despite how much money I have on my books I'm physically incapable of procuring a decent pair of shoes. Only in prison.
Federal prison is embarrassing. It is the primary interaction most of these Mexicans have with America and the American Government. They therefore assume it's a representative example. They think our government treats everyone poorly and has "WHAT I SAY GOES/BECAUSE I SAID SO!" policy for rules and laws. They don't realize that in America at large we actually have rights and recourse, a voice. The inefficiencies are sickening and every other day there's a new beautiful example of how ridiculous they are. My jailers are abjectly unreasonable and illogical. Donald Trump is the President of the United States of America. Is this real life or am I stuck in a Saturday Night Live skit? An episode of the Twilight Zone?
Sent Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 2:08 PM
Subject: Plog: Cruel and Unusual Uncertainty
Halfway houses have been an integral part of the Federal prison system since the 1960s. The last few months of a prison sentence are served within your own community, at an institutation that is "halfway" between freedom and prison. This is especially beneficial to Federal inmates because unlike state prisoners, we are housed thousands of miles from home, frequently in completely different states. All social services (DMV, housing, job search assistance, schooling, vocational licensing) are administered locally, by the county or state; very little can be accomplished from Federal prison. That we are imprisoned in a place that cannot prepare us for re-entry is an unfortunate consequence of our bloated Federal criminal justice system. The halfway houses alleviate some of the hardship imposed upon us by the distance by allowing us to return to our home towns while still technically serving our prison sentences. It is our time in the halfway house that allows us to prepare for our release and reintegration into society.
Since time immemorial in Federal prison once you had your halfway house date, that date was fixed and would not change. On that date you would be released from the prison and then report to the halfway house in your area. The date is agreed upon by you, the prison, a regional bureaucracy, and the halfway itself months or years in advance. The prison offers free Greyhound tickets but if you'd like to fly they allow your family to purchase you a plane ticket. A lucky few inmates can even secure jobs for themselves for the day the get to the halfway house. Everything revolves around your halfway house date. On that day, for the first time in years, you will be permitted to step foot back in your own state, your own town. You can see your family, especially important to the vast majority of female inmates who have children. They can come visit without a 12 or 24 hour drive. You can get a job where you make minimum wage, a veritable fortune compared to the 21 cents an hour you can make in prison. Finally you can be a productive member of society and a contributing member of your family again. Most halfway houses even allow you to have a cell phone. We all eagerly await our release to the halfway house.
When I first got to Dublin, if you did RDAP, it was automatic that you got one year in the halfway house. If your sentence was 60 months or greater, there was a very good chance that you could get a year in the halfway house even without RDAP. Once you got your halfway house date, it was concrete. And so it was.
I graduated RDAP in April of 2017, and my case manager there put in for my one year halfway house. It was approved by all parties which put me out on December 28th, 2017. That was my "date". The date which I counted down to, the date which I dreamt about. Home sweet home. Portland, Oregon. My friends and family. Evergreen trees and a smart phone, my car. In June my aunt bought me a plane ticket flying out of SFO that afternoon and landing at PDX that evening.
February was the first time devastating news was delivered. Everyone going to San Diego got reduced to only 6 months halfway house, even if they already had their date. This was said to be due to true overcrowding and lack of bed space at the single San Diego halfway house. By June it had expanded to Los Angeles, then LA's surrounding counties that absorbed the spill over, and by July the Bay Area effectively making it the entire state of California. A year halfway house was getting reduced to 9 months, or in the worst cases, 6 months. We were always told this was due to physical overcrowding and lack of bed space, but the reports coming in from the halfway houses themselves contradicted that tale. Inmates at the halfway houses began to report plenty of open female beds, despite what we were being told. Still at that time the changes were affecting people who's dates were further out, and it was preventing people from securing dates in the first place with extended halfway house times. Anyone whose paperwork was done after this point only got 6 months of halfway house if they were going to California. At least they knew it upfront. These problems affecting Californians were painful to watch but not actually worrisome to me. I didn't think my date could ever be called into question. Portland suffers none of the overpopulated overcrowding that plagues the Californian criminal justice system.
Devastation struck in September. Many women who were scheduled to leave that month or the next month were called in to be informed their halfway house time had been cut--frequently to the RDAP legal bare minimum of 4 months. In October, one girl was notified on Thursday that she would not leave the following Monday as had been scheduled for a year, but instead had 6 more months to spend here in prison. She was releasing to Washington. More reports came in from Seattleites and Tacomans, they had all lost their dates, even though most of them were days or weeks from release. It was all far too close to home. I started to squirm.
Portland has not yet been affected, but there are so few of us here, it's hard to tell. The sample size isn't large enough. A friend of mine left in October with her year intact, bound for the Portland halfway house. Every week more people lose their dates.
When I gave my plane ticket information to my unit manager who was finalizing my travel plans a few weeks ago, she said sincerely, "I hope this ticket is refundable. You're date still might change." Then day before yesterday as I did the final steps of the process, where you sign your halfway house agreement, apply your fingerprint, and fill out your release clothing form, my unit manager again warned me that my date might change. She said that I would be notified immediately, a response to the fact that this past week two girl's dates changed and they weren't even notified, despite one leaving in 10 days. She asked them to look it up in the system, and sure enough, it had been extended 8 months. I've always known my date might change, but as Portland has so far been spared, I remained very optimistic. Everytime I heard someone else had their date taken a small selfish voice in my head, hell bent on self-preservation, cried, "Thank God it's not me."
But still every time the PA goes off and I hear my case manager or my unit manager's voice, I pause and listen. If I'm on the phone I'll tell whomever to hold on. I pray that it's not my name. Please don't be calling me. Galvan, Johnson, and Dodson all sound remarkably like Godvin when said over the PA. It fills me with dread. This it, I always think. They're calling to tell me they've taken my date. Last week I was at rec when my friends came to get me. "Now Morgan don't freak out. But the case manager is calling you." I thought the worst, I ran through all the possible scenarios. I hurried back to the unit only to be asked for a copy of my flight itinerary.
The undercurrent of fear and anxiety is palpable. The crushing uncertainty is causing short tempers in all of us who still have dates to take. Those who get their dates taken suffer devastating disappointment and are expected to keep on behaving like good little inmates, as if the BOP didn't just destroy them emotionally.
Two weeks before your release, you mail all your property home. Your books, photos, letters, mementos. The week before you give away all your clothes, shoes, and commissary. You empty your locker of everything except the bare minimum to sustain you for the next few days. These women who had their dates taken so soon before their supposed release had done just these things. They then had to go around, heads hung low, and try to repossess all their property now that they have 6 or 8 more months to do here. I'm too afraid to send anything home or give anything away. The BOP has proven they can take your date up to 4 days before.
Yesterday, my unit manager called me. I had been on the computer checking my email for the first time since the system crashed. The long line of people waiting behind me started clapping when I got paged. I'm infamous for maxing out my session time and writing novels, and since I got paged it meant I had to log off and give them a turn. I walked into my unit manager's office and joked that everyone appreciated her for paging me. She chuckled and then gave the dreaded opener, "I have some bad news." I knew right away. I sat down, carefully taking off my headphones from around my neck, arranging my water bottle in front of me. I could feel my face flush. My hands immediately ran through my hair. "Your date has changed." I swallowed hard. I knew this was coming. I knew it. I couldn't breath. I could hear my heart beating in my ears. I felt like I was going to pass out. I felt like I was going to puke. "I just got the email at 12:23 this afternoon. I haven't read it yet. Here, I'll open it... Subject line date changes," I tried to compose myself. Now self, you knew this could happen. It's OK. You'll be fine. You'll go to Victorville camp for the last 8 months and everything will be OK. She read the email, "Inmate Godvin, register number 76449-065. Due to a modification in jail credits, her halfway house time exceeded the statutory maximum of 365 days. I had to change her halfway house to January 9th, 2018, to compensate. Be advised this was submitted this morning." I looked up at my unit manager. Did I hear that right? I must have misheard her. January 9th is only two weeks later. She also seemed to have to glance over what she'd read. "Oh, it's only two weeks!" I felt this immense rush of relief like nothing I've ever experienced before. Two more weeks in prison! THANK GOD!!! I was ecstatic over doing two more weeks in prison. I am so lucky, so far.
Women told their kids mommy would be home next weekend, the one after that. Then they had to call and try to explain to innocent children that mommy won't be coming home for months still. The Grandmas and the fathers all ask the same question, have the same accusation. "What did you do? You got in trouble, didn't you?" For someone not living it and seeing it with their own eyes, it seems obscene that your release date could change mere days before it, far-fetched. It is obscene... and it is really happening. It's completely unprecedented, we are the first batch of inmates going through this. There is a now an unspoken "maybe" that hangs heavily in the air with every supposed release date.
I still have my one year halfway house, though I now leave January 9th. The $125 change fee is a small price to pay for some certainty. My paperwork was resubmitted yesterday, with one year halfway house. Perhaps I'm being blinded by hope but I feel like if they were going to take my date, they'd have done it then. It's very unlike the BOP to create extra work for themselves.
The why's of all this are beyond the scope of this email, and are muddled with lies and half-truths courtesy of the Federal government. You'd think a prison would want it's inmates to be content and docile, and yet at every step of the journey it seems they intentionally cause us stress and anxiety. God bless Portland, Oregon. January 9th. I will repeat it like a mantra. If I do escape prison with my year intact, do not underestimate the gratitude I will feel for that fact. The injustice of it all is not lost on me, though. I pray that I am one of the lucky ones, one of the few, as unfair as that is to the rest.
Sent Date: Friday, July 29, 2016 9:36 PM
Subject: Plog: The Drug War's Impact on Race Relations
It used to be so clear, there were good guys and there were bad guys. Cops were good guys and they went after bad guys. Prisons were places those bad guys went after doing bad things. But the War on Drugs led us far astray and now hundreds of thousands of people like me have been sentenced to excessive prison terms for low level non-violent drug offenses. The law lost the distinction between good guy and bad guy, between upstanding citizen and criminal. The War on Drugs blurred the lines and filled up the prisons.
The American prison population has exploded since the Reagan administration's War on Drugs. Yet drug use in America consistently reaches record highs, 30 plus years later. So if our drug laws don't function for their declared aim of stopping drug abuse, to what aim are they functioning? They must successfully be serving some purpose for these laws to have been perpetuated for so long.
What exactly are drug laws meant to criminalize? Surely not intoxication. Our culture still idolizes alcohol. Hemp used to be a staple crop, a commodity. It was grown by Thomas Jefferson (or at least by slaves on his plantation). Cocaine was socially acceptable and used by many, especially the social elite. Sigmund Freud vocally touted its benefits and used it daily. Morphine and hypodermic needles were sold by the Sears mail-order catalog, with thousands of housewives silently addicted to it without much cause for alarm. Heroin was a brand name trademarked by Bayer and was used as a digestive aid and cough suppressant, available over the counter. So what changed?
During the 1880s there was a huge influx of Chinese immigrants who came to work as manual laborers, mostly on the West Coast. These strange looking men that spoke a strange language invoked fear in the hearts of Americans. They were feared simply because they were different. Define: Xenophobia. The American government couldn't exactly criminalize the act of being Chinese (we're America, we're better than that!) so they found a way to criminalize something that they did. They had transported with them the custom of smoking Opium. Fear-mongering in the media told stories of how the "yellow fiends" used opium to lure respectable white women into sexual depravity. Laws against opium went into effect, and Chinese were arrested in droves. Around that time xenophobia won out and the US Government began deporting Chinese under the Expulsion and Exclusion Act.
The next victim of xenophobia was Mexican immigrants. They also looked different and spoke a strange language. They had brought north with them the habit of smoking marijuana. The media purported smoking marijuana incited Mexicans into a frenzy... and caused them to rape white women. Marijuana was outlawed and Mexicans were arrested. (Mexican immigrants and their American born children were later deported during the Great Depression, under accusations they were stealing our jobs). Blacks were the next victims of xenophobia and fear-mongering. The media purported that cocaine incited black men into a frenzy... and, of course, caused them to rape white women. Nothing scares white people more, I suppose, since that is always their favorite line. Cocaine was outlawed and blacks were arrested. American drug laws were never about criminalizing drug use; it was about criminalizing a group of people and encouraging xenophobia. (Fear-mongering and xenophobia; sound familiar?)
The largest affirmative action program of all time was the GI Bill following World War 2. By providing home loans and college educations, the government assisted whole segments of the population to rise into the middle class. A disproportionately high percentage of black soldiers received dishonorable discharges--39%. Those veterans were denied their benefits and therefore entrance into the middle class. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) almost single handedly created the black urban ghettoes by their now infamous practice of red-lining, which concentrated blacks into decrepit neighborhoods. By the 1970s manufacturing had moved out of urban centers and unemployment sky rocketed in black communities. Inferior public schools ensured there was little hope of escape. Modern ghettoes were created.
If you take away a community's opportunity for legitimate economic opportunity, they will look towards illegitimate means of achieving the same result. This attests to the resilience of the human spirit and not the inherent criminality of any one group. Poor black men sell drugs. So do poor white men. Poor people sell drugs when their legitimate opportunities have been constricted.
Then in the 1980s came Ronald Reagan and the War on Drugs. Mandatory minimum sentences of 20, 15, 10, and 5 years were imposed based on a rather arbitrary drug quantity calculation. Life Without Parole became a mandatory sentence for certain repeat drug offenders. Crack cocaine was sentenced 100 times more harshly than powder cocaine, which was still considered a "white" drug. Reagan ramped up civil asset forfeiture where police can confiscate money and property from suspected drug users and dealers without any due process of law. This made going after drug addicts and dealers big business and very lucrative for cash-strapped police departments. The Federal definition of "conspiracy" was expanded to its current ludicrous state where street-level dealers can be charged as members of huge non-existent organizations and held accountable for more drugs than they've ever seen. (This happened to me.) If a drug addict overdosed and died, a law was created to charge the dealer with 2nd degree murder, called the "Len Bias Act". (This also happened to me.) Reagan barred people convicted of drug crimes from receiving public assistance or public housing, leaving them destitute upon release with few options and meager job prospects. (People convicted of welfare fraud can still receive welfare, people convicted of drug offenses cannot. Makes sense, right?) Black men began to disappear out of communities and into the prison system, their absence only further ravaging their neighborhoods and families.
The prison population exploded by 790%. America now incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than ANY OTHER NATION, including communist regimes and oppressive dictatorships. Despite the fact we only have 5% of the world's population, we have 25% of the world's inmates. We also dispense the longest sentences of any Western nation. Yet we have some of the highest crime rates and THE HIGHEST rate of drug abuse. While it can be debated whether or not the laws themselves are racist, their enforcement surely is. The vast majority of prisoners are minority men. The densely concentrated black ghettoes made an easy and highly visible target for police. Police no longer focused on predatory crime or theft, but rather drug use and drug dealing. Budgets depended on arrests on convictions, which police provided en masse. The police became the enemy--no longer there to protect but to prosecute. White children see police as protectors and heroes, while black children are taught to fear police. Police became a harmful presence in black communities.
For the first 25 years of my life, I operated under the assumption that the United States government was fair and just. When I was sentenced to 5 years in prison for one gram of heroin, that illusion was shattered. I began to see the government for what it was; unfair, unjust, and mean. But you see... this something black people have known since childhood. There is no way to create a culture in which the police and government are seen as a positive influence when it is the police and government that are harassing black communities and on any given day INCARCERATING ONE OUT OF EVERY TEN BLACK MEN. Children learn to fear and distrust the police. How would you view your father's kidnapper? Your brother's, or your uncle's? This sort of learned pervasive distrust of police taints every interaction that citizens have with them. If the police are perceived as being hostile, citizens will treat them accordingly. And if police perceive they are being treated with hostility, then they will also respond accordingly. It's a vicious cycle.
Distrust of police has became an intergenerational way of life in black communities due to criminal prosecutions being used to persecute. Since the inception of drug laws in this country, we have used them as a guise to criminalize minorities. If you doubt this, look at the racial make-up of the American prison population. While the vast majority of drug prisoners are minority men, the vast majority of drug users are white people. Drug laws are just the current incarnation of institutionalized government-sponsored racism in this country, an age old practice in America (segregation, Jim Crow laws, slavery...)
We reached this current state that we are in today thanks to the Reagan administration's War on Drugs. Those policies incarcerated unprecedented levels of minorities, which thereby accelerated the demise of relations between police and minority communities. It is an utter fallacy that we are living in a "post-racist" society, have you not seen the news?
This is not some problem confined to the past. It is happening every day. (Today a Federal appeals court struck down a North Carolina voter ID law because it was enacted with "racially discriminatory intent" -- 3 years ago.) In 2015, 79.9% of Federal crack defendants were black, though the majority of crack users are white. With the increasing prevalence of methamphetamine, more and more white people are getting swept into the criminal justice system. I find it funny that only now is Washington DC beginning to discuss criminal justice reform.
The Drug War has been the largest contributing factor to the current state of race relations between citizens and police. If we do not reverse these disastrous policies now, the situation will only continue to get worse. Long simmering hostilities will keep spilling into violence. The violence is a symptom of a much deeper issue, though one with a rather uncomplicated solution. End the Drug War and focus on lifting up the poor in this nation through economic and educational opportunities. Decriminalize addiction. Drug addicts were not criminals until our government made them so. Stop our cultural reliance on pharmaceuticals caused by our viciously capitalistic Big Pharma industries and their lobbying. End direct-to-consumer advertising. Let police return to true police work so that they may be our protectors once again. So that black children may regard police as white children always have; as heroes.