it is interesting because I know the USP in Tucson does not limit SO from using what they call Trulinks which I believe is the same as Corrilinks. The prison my husband is in (CA) he is not allowed to have it - I am not sure how they make the determination of what policies to follow at each prison. I am not sure how "our" letters are responded to by the prisons - it may or may not be helpful. It could put a target on your son if it identifies him in any way. I know my husband rarely will file any complaints because the consequences of that are threats to out him ... so he keeps his mouth shut. Its a truly messed up system with no consistancies at all.

i am hoping that respectfully asking the warden to consider corrilinks is not of a threat to anyone, though the asst warden may feel otherwise, if she feels her authority is threatened, you never know how power hungry people are going to react.. but i was thinking that since there are things being brought to the table, this may be a good time to try to slip in this privilege as well, just to see how it flies, it is not like he is staging a protest or any real aggravation. just writing a letters to the warden, they can always say no. and he can respectfully ask again. is there really harm in doing something like that?

thanks. i will get on this and have my friends petition the warden as well. would you, could you, write a respectful letter, oneofthem and send it to my son's new overlord? ...my son is limited in finding higher education without an email. i think he is loosing contact with his friends as they move on (they are only early20something) and with corrilinks they would be much more likely to keep up with each other, which would be really great. i will see if they will write as well...if anyone has anything to say, i will add it in my letters, so you wont even have to waste a stamp or mess with addressing. maybe we can do this for other prisons as well, i know a lot of inmate offenders that can't get corrilinks and by gollygee, they should!

Jackie, I'm so sorry that your son is going through this and applaud your efforts to help him (and the other inmates). It is hard for me to believe that any inmate would put himself in the position of having his privileges taken away over cell size-if they cannot control their lives, then they will control the size of their cells. I imagine they must regret it by now and simply cannot back down.

I hope you don't mind me playing Devil's Advocate for a moment. I would think that the wardens are already pretty angry about the protest and that now might not be the best time to ask for any new privileges. For your son's safety, I wouldn't want him to draw any unwanted attention to himself at this time. Even though Corrilinks may be a privilege that every inmate deserves, I worry that now is not the best time to ask for it. It is certainly about power and anger by now. Also, I wonder if the Town Hall Meetings are authentic, or are they "just for show" so that the prison can say that it is respecting the rights of the inmates.

What do you think? Is my naivite showing?

J

you may be right about that crushed...it would be best to let this blow over a bit. in the meantime i can start researching a little. anyone have any information of offenders getting corrilink privileges?

Googled your question and your topic is on the first page

i am thinking that keeping my relationship between myself and the warden strictly on paper for the moment. as far as the altercation, it seems to be over and he said he expected to be back at work today, so no need to call. as for the corrilinks, i think calling them without appointment is to show disrespect to their busy schedule as this is not a life or death or personal safety situation that needs immediate attention. i am trusting you oneofthem, to show restraint and logic...but i am curious to see what you come up with. would love for you to message me your letter to the warden.
i think i will start off by asking the warden why he is not allowed corrilinks and see what she says...then take it from there...wonder if she will respond?

your right becky, i will have to ask my son if he even wants the help! there are times he wants my help and times he doesnt...i respect that. just in case he does, i want to be prepared...

Oneofthem, although I appreciate your advice not to back down and to stand up for the rights of the inmates in this situation, I feel that encouraging one of the members on our board to place her son's safety at risk through an intimidating phone call is simply not wise. No matter what transpires, there is still no way to guarantee that he will be safe because we cannot control what goes on inside the prison. I think it is more important to save our battles for issues outside of the prison. Jackie's son is very young and it sounds like he is already being forced to participate in something that may be too much for him to handle and we do not know what the outcome will be.

Please read Jackie's last post and you will see that she has decided to wait. It is important that you do not to write that letter so as not to put Jackie's son at risk.

Thank you.

J.

dont worry, i am no fool, i would never do anything to jepordize my son's safety....and i am sure following oneofthems advice would certainly have potential to do so...please everyone...this is not a fucking (f**king, for those with sensitive ears) game...they own your loved one and can make life hell for them...but at the same time, i am one to push the envelope a little and i think this is a good opportunity to do so...it is not like we would go in demanding or threatening anything...it is a simple conversation about the benefits corrilinks has on the rehabilitation of inmates. i want to approach this in the most possitive light as possible...like it is a win win situation. course if my son says he doesnt want my help, this is all null and void anyway. yea, please do not mail the letter! just to make that clear but i would still like to see it.
by the way, he is doing just fine and i want to keep it that way.

I would worry about retaliation, guards don't always deal out retaliation, but 'hire' inmates to do it. So that it can be passed of as something other than what it is. It would also seem that pissing in the wheaties of the person that holds the keys to your son's cell, not really the best way to get their attention either. I guess it really is up to your son as to how far you should go, remember he is the one that will live with the consequences of the decisions you make about this. If he is willing, then I say balls to the walls, if he is apprehensive and is used to someone else deciding what is best for him, then it might be more prudent to lay low for a bit and pick a different battle.

What would be useful is getting a hold of the rules and policies of the prison where he is staying. These should be an Open record at the federal level and most states have an Open records law as well. Once you have their policy manual you can then check to see what the statutes that are governing these policies to see if they would be violating any laws by taking away things like hot water. I don't' believe it is, hot water is still considered a luxury. Now if they were to take away their food, water and bathroom, that is cruel and unusual punishment and don't call the warden, call a lawyer and the press and start screaming about what is going on there.

Oneofthem,

I have been on this forum for a little over six months now, and sometimes you give the parents and wives of offenders advice that could really get some young man hurt in prison. I just don't quite understand at what prison you were incarcerated to come up with some of these ideas you have about prisons and an inmates relationship to staff.

Don't get me wrong---I fully agree with most all your ideas, especially in the area of gay rights, but I fully disagree with the methods you recommend. And as a former sex offender, I would be the first to defend you if needed, but you are really out there in left field on some of your advice.

I was in a medium security prison for almost a decade. I don't know that I ever saw any of your methods work, but I sure did see them backfire.

First you said, "Anyone who has been to prison knows the last thing a jail wants is public exposure of ABUSE." I 100% agree with that, IF the abuse is rampant and a violation of civil or human rights. If the staff was denying the inmates food, water, sexually abusing them, or denying them their mail, then hell yeah, I agree with you 100%.

But surely, Oneofthem, you cannot categorize Jackie's son's situation as ABUSE. Is it abuse just because one person has a few more feet of cell space than another?? Do you really see that as abuse?? And you call it abuse when they are fed through a bean hole rather than at the chow hall?? And abuse in your mind is when they temporarily cut off the commissary privileges??? And denying recreational time is abuse? Surely, oneofthem, you do not think that petty stuff is abuse.

You can respectfully and tactfully ask for certain things in prison, but it is a joke if you think an inmate has enough clout to DEMAND something, and then THREATEN staff if he does not get what he wants. Is this what you did in prison?? Threaten staff??

The fact is, unless there is an egregious violation of basic human rights or civil rights, the inmates ARE not running the show in prison. No, regardless of what I have read on this forum, inmates cannot punch out guards, cuss out guards, be disrespectful to guards, or refuse to work without losing their good time (which means staying in longer) or being shipped to a higher security (and you sure as hell DO NOT want to go to a medium). You may get away with it once or twice, but they ARE in control and the inmate will be the loser in the end.

Oneofthem, you addressed Crushed, and you said, ".............the fact that there are more prisoners than guards would tell a logical person who REALLY runs the prisons". Are you kidding me? You cannot be serious if you think the inmates run the prison system. And, by the way, neither do the family members of those inmates.

Oneofthem, you said, ..."I am willing using tried and true methods to go up against any corrupt/abusive official." I agree, but that is not the case in Jackie's son's case. The inmates here have just had some PRIVELEGES taken away temporarily. This is not corruption. If you want to talk about abuse and corruption, I can tell you some stories that would make your hair stand up.

An outside family will never be able to FORCE any prison official to do anything they do not want to do. Period. Neither will the inmates. I am sorry but that is just the way prison system is.

This nonsense of filing paper on guards or an inmate "running his head" and mouthing off all the time over petty things is just stupid----and counterproductive.

There was an inmate at the medium I was at who thought just like you did. Whenever something trivial happened (like no commissary or phone privileges being taken away), he would reach for the pen and file paper on either the staff or the officer. The older inmates thought he was just downright stupid and laughed at him. But this did backfire. As a result of all his complaints, the COs started shaking down ALL the cells on the top run. And they started taking things like radios, food, TVs., etc. And the COs let it be known why there were all the shake downs----it was in retaliation for the young inmate's paper filing and complaints (most of which were just trivial).

So the older inmates got sick and tired of this guy, a kid really, and they devised a plan. They paid my cellmate and another guy I knew a carton of cigarettes to "take care of the problem" and get this "motherf***er" off the yard. One guy took a home made piece of metal which he had smuggled out of the factory that made beds, tied it to a long mop handle, and made a spear out of it. The other guy, my cellie, put two padlocks in a long tube sock.

Well, they almost killed the kid for BRINGING SO DAMN MUCH HEAT on everyone. They punctured his lung with the spear and knocked holes in his head and scalp. They took him to the hospital and I never saw him again. The COs knew who did the beatings, but they did not care, nor were they ever going to do anything about it.

He was run off the yard not for filing complaints on staff necessarily, but for filing paper over incidents as trivial as the ones Jackie's son experienced.

I always fear that some young impressionable man or his family will take your advice and someone will get hurt. Because I have seen it happen with my own eyes, so don't tell me it does not happen.

As I said, you are a good poster, but it would be best if you would tone it down a little and give some common sense advice rather than the angry drivel that you sometimes come up with.

Inmates have to learn to choose their battles in prison. Losing a few feet of cell space or not eating in the chow hall for a few days is not a battle worth fighting.

rewdiazepam

oneof them,

Obviously you have had some very bad experiences and I know that saying I'm sorry cannot compensate for what you have been through. I'm glad to hear that you were able to get protection for your brother, but you cannot ensure that one of us or our sons would receive that kind of protection if we were to use the same methods you used in another situation and in another place.

I think the following section of Rew's post should end this discussion right now...

"Well, they almost killed the kid for BRINGING SO DAMN MUCH HEAT on everyone. They punctured his lung with the spear and knocked holes in his head and scalp. They took him to the hospital and I never saw him again. The COs knew who did the beatings, but they did not care, nor were they ever going to do anything about it."


What if this was your son?

J

all i really wanted was suggestions on how we can get corrilinks......the lock down had nothing to do with health care, or abusive treatment, or even lousy chow. it HAD to do with stupid cell rotation....in which case my son could give a rats ass if he is in this stinking cell or the one down the row, (he wasnt even going to loose the cell mate that he gets on with). he used the time in lock down to build his deck (for those of you that have done time, he is with the nerds role playing card games, game of choice right now- magic the gathering).
now, trust me, had it had to do with his health or safety, it would be different, i may be needing someone to help me with don the boxing gloves, but i have had experience at county getting him medical care, i emailed the lieutenant, let her know i was concerned with his health and the symptoms he was experiencing, asked what can be done about getting him into a specialist. i even looked into paying for a private doctor, to no avail, within 3-4 days they had him at the local hospital doing tests. it may have helped that the marshals were picking up the tab and not her. i didnt have to threaten her in the least.

i know federal is a whole different kettle of fish, and not so easy to tame. if my son had a fight that he needed me to get behind, you can bet i would be there. all and all, i Do Not see him being a prison rights activist, but what do i know? i am finding a very complex person underneath that 19 year old i once knew. i told him to stay low, do his time, get out as soon as possible and prepare for the real battle....supervised release and registry.

and that brings me to oneofthems method of madness...getting ourselves in deep is not helping anything....think we can punch our way out of this? i dont think so...what kind of strategy is that and who is going to pay my sons bail? no one....but he will be doing the time...bullshit to that! i want him out and i want him to stay out! the conventional way of going through the system may be slow and it may not get us everything we need, but if we dont show up at the gates of our capitals, and show our faces often it will only get worse...if we dont write letters, talk to our families and friends get them to write letters...get them to show up. you think when the committee sees an army of a hundred show up in opposition they dont take notice, and we have no power, than you go ahead and keep swinging away, in the meantime, we have work to do, and we will make a difference. we will not do it at the jeopardy of our families or loved ones....that is just stupid and extremely counter-productive.

Ms. Cook,

After reading your post and some of the replies, I thought it prudent to post my thoughts on the subject. As to the subject of getting corrilinks accepted by the DOC, this is a process that can be successful if handled on a large scale with the help of many families / loved ones of prisoners in the DOC in your state.

I spent five years in the prison system in Pennsylvania, and was very active in prison reform and jailhouse lawyer functions, so I have seen things from the inside and the outside. Advocacy for change in the prison system can mark an inmate as a "trouble maker" if not handled in a professional manner. This is the thing to consider for both the prisoners and the families that are involved.

The people that you and your associates should be contacting is not the warden of the individual institution, but the Office of the Secretary of Corrections for your particular state. This is accomplished by going to the DOC website for your state and getting the contact information, then networking with the other families of prisoners and advocacy groups that you can find for that state to begin writing letters requesting that the DOC consider providing this service to the families of the prisoners.

It is best to research the service and find out what the benefits will be for the prison, and include this in your letter. The DOC will have to negotiate a statewide contract with the provider company and this will have to become part of the state prison budget.

Pennsylvania has a service called JPay (www.jpay.com) that allows you to send money to inmates online and send one-way emails to your incarcerated loved ones. You can check them out to get an Idea of what it is that you are looking for.

If you have ANY questions on organizing this or researching the information needed, please feel free to message me and let me know, and I will gladly help out in any way that I can in pointing you in the right direction.