Category Archives: prisoner exploitation

Have a Little Kidney with that Turkey

Happy Thanksgiving, to those of you in the U.S. I’ve been kind of mired in negativity lately. Here’s a little story that jolted me back into an appreciation of how good I’ve got it.

A woman approached Vince on the train platform to ask if he would sign a petition. For those of you who started reading this blog in the last month or so, Vince is my son who was released from prison a few months ago and who is living with me. He blogs here.

Anyway, on his way home from work, this woman approached and asked if he knew about … wait for it … organ harvesting in China.

I work at a place called the Center for Victims of Torture and had a son in prison. I thought I had heard everything.

Apparently, back in the 90s, the Chinese government gave the stamp of approval to a Buddhism-derived religion called Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa), which promotes truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. I guess the government approved of it because it represented traditional Chinese ways, including meditation.

Falun Gong became wildly popular, and soon people were meditating in public parks by the thousands. The government saw this as a threat and began to crack down. Adherents are now routinely thrown into labor camps and tortured. According to the brochure, captive Falun Gong practitioners are blood-typed and used as a large, live organ donor bank, killed on demand for “transplant tourists”—people who travel from other countries and pay for an organ transplant. Do they know that someone will be killed to save their lives? How can they not? Again, according to this brochure, the wait for a kidney in the U.S. is five years. In China, it’s 15 days. Well that is slightly suspicious, don’t you think?

So why isn’t the west up in arms about this, like they are about the Palestinians or the Syrians? Maybe it’s because China doesn’t have freedom of the press? We know about the plight of the Palestinians because, ironically, Israel has a free press. We know about the horrors Syrians have endured because they’ve managed to escape to other countries where reporters can talk to them and we see them in our Facebook feeds and on Yahoo News every day.

I don’t know who this young woman was who approached Vince on the train platform, but he thought she was Chinese. So apparently Chinese in the U.S. are getting organized. The brochure and their website are pretty basic. If the Chinese can hack into the CIA’s websites, why haven’t they taken down the Falun Gong one? I am very skeptical on a lot of issues, but this woman cared enough to stand on a train platform on a very cold Minnesota day and approach strangers with brochures. If it’s not true, why would there be an organized effort against it?

I’m sorry if I ruined your appetite for turkey and mashed potatoes. This story makes me feel grateful to not be in a gulag waiting to be murdered so my organs can be sold to wealthy transplant tourists. No, wait…that’s kind of extreme. I’m grateful that I can write about this, share the story, spread the word, and maybe contribute in some way to ending it. Here’s a petition you can sign and share with others if you want. Thank you.

Your Art Here

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I received an email from JPay, the company that sells email access to inmates’ families and friends. I wrote a couple posts about them in July. They were the new Department of Corrections vendor with the slick-looking website featuring people who looked totally thrilled! to be overpaying to send emails to their loved ones.

JPay asked me to like them of Facebook. As if! Why would anyone want to broadcast that they had a family member in prison, and give free publicity to a company that was harvesting big profits from their misfortune? There probably is a segment of the population who thinks it’s cool to have someone inside.

And now, JPay is having a holiday art contest. The theme is “Season’s Greetings.” Wow, that’s original. Why not something really crazy like “Happy Holidays”?

Or “I’ll be home for Christmas—not.”

Three winners will be chosen to receive up to $500 worth of prizes. Up to $500 each or $500 total? Let me guess, the prizes will be $10 gift cards for JPay emails. That would work out to about 3 emails.

The contest is only open to JPay customers “that are currently not incarcerated.” I guess that means mothers, wives, kids, and anyone else left on the outside. I can’t bring myself to go look at the contest rules. It doesn’t say what will be done with the artwork, but since the submission email is Facebook@JPay.com, I guess they will be broadcasting that you have a loved one in prison for you, whether you like it or not. Just another happy customer!

You can’t make this stuff up. I was taken aback when I saw this in my in box. I had hoped to never, ever have anything to do with the prison industrial complex again.

I could opt out of receiving future emails from them, but the absurdity of of a coloring contest from a prison vendor–not to mention the poor and vague wording–has provided me with so many laughs that now I’m kind of looking forward to what they’ll do for Martin Luther King Day and Valentine’s Day.

Prison News Roundup, Suspicious Pork Story Edition

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ANNE

Now, having written in my last post about how my guiding principle in life is the pursuit of justice, I have to confess that I have no desire to do anything on prison issues beyond writing the occasional blog post about them. I thought I would take up the prison-industrial complex’s exploitation of prisoners for near-slave labor, or their milking of families with outrageous phone charges, but I don’t want to even think about these things anymore. I no longer want to carry around clippings about prison abuses in my diary for future blog posts. I want to be free. I want to have fun. I want to go to a trampoline park, or race my Mini on a real track, or bake French macaroons, or just hunker down with a good 800-page novel for the winter.

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However, there have been some big developments recently on the prison front that I can’t not note.

In case you have been at a silent retreat in Nova Scotia for the last month, you don’t know that the U.S. Justice Department has begun releasing 6,000 federal prisoners. This is the largest one-time release in history. It’s part of a bipartisan effort led by President Obama to reduce crowding in prisons and free nonviolent offenders who were given harsh sentences in the 80s and 90s. Maximum sentences were reduced in 2014 and the changes were retroactive.

About 2,000 of those released are undocumented individuals who will be deported immediately.

The others will have their challenges, as recently featured on John Oliver Last Week Tonight. Thank you, John.

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In the “I can’t believe I’m reading this” department, the nation’s pork producers are in an uproar after the feds abruptly removed all pork products from the menu for federal prisoners.

I have not eaten pork since I converted to Judaism nearly 40 years ago. I don’t keep kosher; I eat plenty of shrimp. The pork thing is just symbolic. But everyone around me seems obsessed with bacon, so I was very suspicious to read that this pork ban is based on surveys of prisoners which found that they didn’t like pork. Really? When I asked Vince, who loves all forms of pig meat, he said it could actually be true because the “pork” that is served in prison is of such poor quality that it’s nauseating.

Of course there are those who suspect that the Obama Administration is kow-towing to Muslim prisoners (he’s a Muslim, you know).

The story mentions that pork has been getting more expensive, but why ban it completely?

My personal suspicion is that there is some corporate interest at work here, such as the American turkey industry, who took a huge hit this year due to Avian influenza and may be looking to make up for lost profits.

A note: There are 206,000 federal prisoners—er, I guess 200,000 after the aforementioned prisoner release, which still leaves about 2.2 million non-federal prisoners who will be able to pig out on pork.

A Cell is a Cell is a Cell

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ANNE

Is there such a thing as prison-phobia? If so I’ve got it. After nearly two years of thinking, reading, talking, and writing about prison, I have an irrational fear of ending up in inside myself.

Just for the record, I have not broken any state, federal, or international laws.

However, just last night I was reading the novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” by James Baldwin. In it, a character is minding his own business when a two robbers being chased by the police come running along and stand next to him, catching their breath. He is arrested with them and beaten mercilessly in an attempt to get him to confess, which he doesn’t. He is eventually released, but he slits his wrists the next day because he is so traumatized by the experience.

Did I mention he is black and the cops are white? Does this sound familiar? The book was published in 1953. Sadly, some things don’t change.

So that scenario is not likely to happen to me, but phobias are irrational, not rational.

I was also freaked out by the third season of Orange is the New Black. I won’t give away what the last scene of the last episode sets up for the inmates, but it had something to do with crowding/lack of privacy and it really hit a nerve.

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My cousin, Molly, and I have talked over the years about buying a piece of land overlooking the St. Croix River and building a retirement community of tiny houses. You know, these are the 250- to 400-square-foot houses (75-122 square meters) made of beautiful woods and lots of clever features to store stuff and make the most use of the space. The idea is, you can have a paid-off house, live in the country, and feel good about yourself because you aren’t destroying the planet by consuming as much as the average new home built in America, which as of 2013 was nearly 2,500 square feet (762 square meters)!

Then Molly sent me this article, “Dear People Who Live in Fancy Tiny Houses” and it killed my dream:

What if you’re having a shitty day and you just want to be alone? You can’t be alone, right? Because your partner or children are sitting two to ten feet away from you at all times. Don’t you feel like a rat trapped in a cage? Don’t you ever want to turn toward your lover or spawn and shout, “Get out! Get out of my tiny house!”

The condo Vince and I are sharing is 800 some square feet. So it’s not the tiniest, but there are privacy issues. When the other Molly—Vince’s girlfriend—is over, I’m sure he wishes I would disappear. I wish I could kick back on a Friday night and watch my geek-ola shows like the PBS News Hour and Washington Week in Review with a couple glasses of wine, but I can’t.

On the whole, things are going well with us, at least from my perspective. But I have mostly lived alone since Vince left home 20 years ago, so it’s an adjustment.

It’s Been A Good Run

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VINCE

For personal reasons, I have made the decision to move on from this blog and start out on my own. I have no idea where or when I will start back up, but I do promise to make it soon. I just need to figure out how to start a blog, and then start it. I think first I will write in my journal for a while, then begin again independently. Obviously I will keep everybody posted (pun intended) on when and where you can find my new blog. And in the mean time, you can follow me on Facebook. Vincent Maertz is my name if you don’t already know.

Thank you for all of your support over the last 17 months. It has meant a lot to me that people actually like reading what I write. Your comments have not gone unnoticed. You can look forward to reading more about the next phase of my life as soon as I find a new format, and build up a little material. Until then, be good.

Vincent Maertz

A Break from Breaking Free

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ANNE

Vince says he’s hit a wall with the blogging, and I need more than 10 minutes notice to come up with new material. After over a year of blogging and nearly 200 posts, I’d say we’ve earned a break.

We’ll be back. If you haven’t yet binge read the thing from the beginning, start here and click on the right-pointing arrow at the bottom of each post to proceed. Feel free to share with others, and thanks for reading.

YourPillow

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VINCE

I remember the first time I saw a commercial for MyPillow. Toward the end of the ad the announcer guy stated that they were proudly made right here in the U.S.A., with no outsourcing. I can tell you that that is very true because I saw them being made in Moose Lake Prison in the same building that I worked in sewing men’s briefs. Why ship jobs overseas when you can exploit prisoners right here?

I will tell you right now that I don’t have all of the facts pertaining to the MinnCorr industry in Moose Lake penitentiary but I can write about my own experience and what I heard from some of the offenders that worked on the MyPillow line. They were paid minimum wage which I believe is still at 7.25 per hour, much better than the 50 cents per hour that I made less than 200 feet away. The catch is, the prison takes half of the pay right off the top for the cost of confinement. There can be other deductions from F.I.C.A., MN income tax, and federal income tax. The workers are left with just over two dollars per hour, a pretty good amount for prison wages. Our saying on the brief line was that we earned our pay within the first five minutes of work every day. I say that because they sell our briefs back to the inmates at a cost of $3.25. I could sew together 200 pair per day. Not all of them were sold to us. They have big contracts with other facilities like jails and institutions that buy them cheaper in bulk, but, there’s huge profit to be made with cheap labor.

I’m not saying all of this because I’m mad at the prison for what they paid me. I’m actually in shock from looking at the MyPillow website and seeing what they charge for pillows made by people (prisoner or not) that work hard and will never get a raise, a bonus, stock options, or even a free fucking pillow. Just for kicks, and because the website is not at all up front with the pricing, I placed a mock-order that finally took me to the checkout page. It said that for two queen size pillows, my order came to $199.94!! That’s before tax and does not include shipping. It also does not include the pillow cases which can be purchased for…… only ……. $49.97. What a steal! Or maybe rip-off. Now I should mention that they did have some buy-one-get one deals but I would have had to enter a promo code which they had no further information on. I’m sure I could have found it if I was actually interested in buying one. Even so, those are some expensive pillows.

Is there a point I’m trying to make here? Meh. I don’t know. I enjoyed having a job while I was incarcerated. It paid the bills so to speak. And I certainly hope that my work lessened the burden to the taxpayers. But how come the MyPillow commercial shows workers in a factory all happy and smiling when that is not even where they are made? Made in America? Yes. Made proudly in America? No. Actually made most likely by child molesters and murderers. I guess that wouldn’t have been a good advertising slogan.

In other news… Today I learned that I am only 36 years old. For the past 11 and a half months, I thought I was 37. Somehow I just decided to skip a year. Now I only get to be 36 for two weeks, then I actually turn 37, which sounds way older. But not as old as 38 which I thought I would be very soon. Sometimes I think I’m losing my mind. Really, I do. I will stop dead in a sentence and not have a clue what word I was about to say. It sounds like 38 year old problems, not young 37 (or 36). That’s all I have for tonight.

Coming up on the next post: A look back at some of the stranger things I saw in prison. Things that I can’t un-see.