From an informative conversation with a loved one over JPay…
I don’t know what the problem is because it happened on another unit, and I’ve now been locked down for four days. All I know is that our staff don’t want to discuss it, and that by itself indicates that it’s something bad.
Someone will probably explain it to us at some point. Or a team will come through to tear our shit apart, and then we’ll have a better understanding of what it is that they’re concerned with.
Generally speaking, it’s only when intramural violence happens or when staff are assaulted that everyone gets locked down like this. But there are other possibilities as well. If you were to try and make sense of the reaction we are currently seeing, you might first consider that our facility admins have very little to work with; there are zero programs and few incentives to take away from us. All that’s left to strip from us this week are warm breakfasts and dinners, dismal out-of-cell time, family visits, commissary and personal property. [As of 3.16.23, all non-special-circumstance A-Block visits are discontinued until further notice.]
You also have to consider that safety issues vary, and there’s no telling to what degree the current issue presents a problem. It could be something with the potential to affect a lot of people on our unit, and that it is simply safest to keep everyone locked down until management are able to gauge whatever threat they feel they’re dealing with.
Were it a staff issue, I wouldn’t classify their response as a petty retaliation. I say this because our IMSI staff work in the same way our residents live–under the stress of ever-changing volatile conditions. They must feel assured that management has their back, or else they quit in droves and the situation gets worse for everyone.
In terms of how certain incidents are responded to, some facilities are worse than others. For instance, it’s not uncommon for some wardens to have a team of bruisers run through a unit or a facility and trash everyone’s personal items. Maybe some dudes get the shit kicked out of them out of camera view. Maybe others get a similar treatment from residents who staff incentivised in some way . You’ll sometimes see people get pulled from their cells in the middle of the night and moved across the state with all their shit behind them broken…
I would say that, present day at IMSI, our facility’s leadership team are, for the most part, very reasonable. But they are also limited in the ways they’re authorized to interact with our population.
One of the best tools they do have, sad to say, is the political system that prisoners develop to police themselves. If a few individuals are responsible for placing the tribe or its resources at risk, the tribe will take it upon themselves to handle those individuals.
It’s just your typical jungle shit. You have to learn to look at it like that, otherwise you will never make sense of it.
Damn. It’s really nice outside today, too.
I’m working on a satire piece right now. It’s an ad for a contest that awards a writing residency at my prison:
“Open communal setting encourages community building. Friendly collaborations lead to indoctrination.”
“Watch child rapists steal your dinner tray from the open side of your steel door as you sit idly by absorbing the conversation behind you. Take notes as your bunkie, a certified mental patient, aggressively challenges mystic voices in an explorative form of discourse.”
“If you find ‘rotting alone, together’ too much of a distraction, sharpen up a toothbrush and take a trip to isolation…”