Tag Archives: alcoholism

Visit Denied

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ANNE

I took the day off work to go visit Vince before I left for the Middle East, but I never saw him. I was denied a visit because my shirt was too “low cut.” Here I am out in the parking lot after I was ejected, showing off my slutty, low-cut shirt.

Low Cut

The correctional officer, a guy named Volk, told me I would have to go home and change my shirt.

Go home? I live two hours away. Then he suggested I drive into Moose Lake and buy a T-shirt. I protested that my shirt was not low cut; what was the definition of low cut? If there was one he didn’t know what it was. I pointed out that I was not showing cleavage; in fact I was physically incapable of doing so…. I said several times, “I can’t believe I have to say these things to a strange man in a prison. I’m a 55-year-old woman here to visit my son. I am not wearing a low-cut top!” I felt so shamed. Did I look slutty? I doubted my own judgment.

That’s when he said, “Well ma’am, it’s for your own protection. See, if you bent over, then they could see …”

That’s when I blew it–I kind of called him a pervert.  OKAY I did call him a pervert. Visit Denied.

I asked to talk to his supervisor. He said she was not working that day. I asked to talk to a supervisor. He said there were none working that day. I laughed, incredulous, “So you are running the whole prison?” I asked for his supervisor’s name and phone number. He said, “You can look it up on the website, lady.”

I started bawling and stumbled out the doors. A female CO was coming in and asked me if I was alright. I managed to blubber out my story and then said, “I think it was all a big power trip!” Of course she couldn’t say anything but the look of complicit agreement on her face was clear.

I asked some visitors coming into the prison to snap a picture of me. I called my sister from my car. A group of officers came up to my door and yelled, “You have to leave! You can not sit here in the parking lot.” I rolled down my window, not understanding what could possibly be the problem. “You have to leave right now!” the closest one barked.

I drove out of the facility and called my sister again from the parking lot of the Dollar Store. “Volk’s brother-in-law probably owns the Dollar Store, conveniently located right outside the prison and handily ready to sell overpriced T-shirts!”

“Well I don’t know about that,” she said, “but he sure was on a power trip. Now drive safely; you’ve got another two-hour drive ahead of you—don’t make things worse by veering off the Interstate.”

Vince called me just as I was about to enter the freeway, and I pulled over to take his call. He had been sitting in the visiting room when he was called to the desk and told he would not have a visit due to a “clothing issue.”

“I couldn’t imagine what the hell that would be—my mom?”

“I feel so ashamed! I’m so sorry! I was so looking forward to seeing you!” I kept repeating. It really felt like it was my fault, like I had been trying to sneak in with my low-cut blouse to show all the inmates.

“Mom, this is what we have to put up with every day. If I had called a C.O. a pervert, I’d be back in solitary right now. We have to suck it up all the time. I’m proud of you, mom!”

I wondered, as I drove home, had the guard picked me out at random? Or did he have a big blue-collar chip on his shoulder toward well-dressed yuppies? Or did he sincerely think like a pervert, because after all, one out of four inmates at Moose Lake is there for sexual assault? Is it his job to see every bit of exposed skin as a potential incident?

This is Your Brain on Frozen Hash Browns

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VINCE

Sunday brunch: “Egg bake.” Made with frozen hash browns (not made by a 25 cents per hour employee, shredding whole potatoes), grey ham, and overcooked eggs. Inedible. A packaged blueberry muffin, even though the facility has all equipment necessary for a fully functioning bakery.

Hell, they could even teach people how to bake. Then they could use that knowledge on the outside to be a productive member of society.

Canned “tropical” fruit. A bowl of water (aka oatmeal), a small container of apple juice that was still frozen, and milk. On the container of milk there is a slogan. We use it a lot around here. “You can taste the difference.” It’s true.

—

Please do not buy a pillow from Pillow King (not its real name) based on the commercial you may have seen on TV. Just so you know, they are made here in our prison, by people making roughly $1 an hour. I suppose some could say that’s better than outsourcing…but is it? They pay for slave labor. We get no stock options. The prison gets the money. Money they don’t have to use to pay our cost of confinement. Nope, you are all still paying that. Ugh. I’m sure my information is wrong. I’m done on the subject.

—

Every day getting closer to boot camp scares me. Every day I feel as if I do not want to go. True, it will save me 18 months of prison time. But I don’t think I can make it through all of the physical activity. I’ve not come close to running over a mile. I’ve only run a mile two times in a month and a half. I haven’t done one push up since I arrived. And I have absolutely no desire to do the tape. None.

I also think I’m afraid of what will happen when I’m released. I don’t have a home, a car, any money, no clothes. Nothing. It’s all provided for me here. I hate my brain. I sometimes doubt its decision making.

[ANNE: I checked into Pillow King, and they have a deal going where you pay only $115 for two.  A hundred and fifteen dollars for two pillows?  Are they stuffed with down from the golden goose or what?]

Hot Dog!

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VINCE

Dear Blog:

I decided to take a “mental health” day away from work. Although I have weekends off, everybody else was off too, so I can’t accomplish much. Today is my chance to catch up on laundry, sleep, reading, and yes, writing.

I do not recall where I left off as I have sent everything I have written since my arrival in Moose Lake to my Mother for print.

Not much has changed. I haven’t been running because it’s been too cold for the outside track to be open, and there are only two working treadmills for over 1,000 prisoners. I have been doing the tape more often. And as impossible as I thought it was going to be, I am actually getting better at it.

I’m also active in wolleyball and pickle ball. A friend and I were in the pickle ball tournament this past weekend. We lost all four games and were eliminated on the first day. But we tried.

I also try to lift weights when I can. I don’t even bother most days, as the workout room is full, and I am not the type of person that fits in with that crowd. I will just leave it at that.

I submitted a list of ten puns into a contest for the prison newspaper to see if one of them could win me a little money. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

—

Hot dogs. To quote myself, “All of our meals are hot dogs. It’s just a matter of what shape they’re in today.” Prison food is far worse than any institutional food. I see so much waste. I see huge wastes of your money, our time, and our “food.” Simple things like giving us single-serve packets like ketchup and dressings vs. making a large batch of dressing then paying somebody 25 cents per hour to put individual portions on a tray. Over 1,000 trays, three times a day. That saves a lot of money over time. And that’s just one idea.

Outed

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ANNE

In a previous post I mentioned that Richard Branson, the British airline and media tycoon, has taken on US prison reform as a pet cause. He (one of his PR people, I’m sure) has a blog about it, so I posted a comment thanking him and pointing him to Vince’s and my blog in case he wanted a firsthand account of what prison life is like.

I happened to go to Linked In about 15 minutes later, and there was my comment to Richard Branson, complete with the photo of me with my jailbird son! Linked In? Not exactly the social network I would choose to share such a thing with! I zapped the post.

Little did I know that, during those 15 minutes, a coworker had seen the post and not only shared it on her Linked In page but also on Facebook. She is a super outgoing person; one of those people who has exceeded her maximum number of connections on Linked In. I’m not Facebook friends with coworkers, so I don’t know how many Facebook friends she has, but I think it’s a safe bet that they number in the thousands.

And she is Facebook friends with coworkers. So at work on Monday, coworkers started emailing me and stopping by my cube to say they’d read the blog—including my boss.

All of their feedback has been positive and supportive, and several have confided that they have a brother or son or someone in prison, too.

I figure that for every person who has talked to me about it, there are 2-3 others out there who have seen the blog and for one reason or other are not going to let on that they’ve read it.

I checked the blog stats for the first time ever, and saw a gigantic spike over the weekend. Vince and I had been building a steady readership in the dozens, and suddenly —Kaboom!—there were thousands. And because my coworker and I work for an international organization, Vince and I now have double digit readership in Armenia, the UK, Australia, Senegal, and Kenya.

I loved knowing that strangers in Armenia were reading the blog, but it turned my stomach to think about certain family members reading it.

I talked to a friend whose son has also been in prison. She reminded me that the whole point of the blog is to fight the shame and silence around imprisonment and addiction.

I kept getting overwhelmingly positive feedback. I talked it over with Vince, and he said, “Go for it, Mom. Post it on my Facebook page.” I was okay with that. Then he said, “But you have to post it on yours, too.”

Gulp. It felt like the right thing to do, but also scary. I called my mom to tell her she would see a photo of Vince and me on Facebook, and that the blog it led to contained swear words and unpleasant things. I don’t think she really understood what it was all about but at least she wouldn’t be taken by surprise. My sister already knew Vince and I were blogging because I’d shown her the first post where I mention she has cancer and had asked her if it was ok to publish. I called my cousin and my brother, who both said, “Just go for it.”

I unfriended some people who weren’t really friends, then hit the plunger.

Vince and I don’t have that many FB friends but my niece, for instance, has nearly a thousand and she shared the link immediately, as did a few other people. When I got up the next morning, there were dozens of comments and also texts, emails, and phone messages. The most common themes have been: 1) this is courageous; 2) it’s refreshing to read someone being “real” online; 3) you have important stories to tell; and 4) you made me cry and you made me laugh out loud.

Mission accomplished! Now all we need is a corporate sponsor so I can quit my job and work on this full time. I have a feeling it’s not gonna be Bob Barker, Inc.

110% Solution

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VINCE

Today I was given a pass down to health services for my range of motion test. I had to move my limbs this way and that. I was pulled and pushed, but not prodded and poked. They save that for the physical. It was just another in a series of tests we must pass before we can go to Willow River, where Boot Camp is. I passed.

Without the occasional boost in our spending accounts, it would be really tough to keep up on hygiene supplies, phone time, stationery and envelopes, etc. You see…as I’ve said before, I make 50₵ an hour. I get half of that now, and the other half upon my release. So every two weeks I net roughly $20 for my 80 hours.

The things we buy from canteen here are substantially higher in price than you would find even in a small town grocery store. Here are some examples:

Ramen noodles, 37₵

Tide (16 loads) $6 (and we have to do laundry more than once a week, because they only allow us a certain amount of clothing)

Paper (150 count) $2.25

Briefs (that we make for 50₵ an hour) $3.35 each

So, we are grateful for any extra money because we can spend a little on ourselves. This time I spent $15 on a clip-on reading light and bulb. Probably retail $3 at Walmart. Now I can spend what I would have earned working 60 hours on phone time, envelopes and soap. Enough of that.

Today was great overall. Work was work. But in the gym, I did the tape, of which I can follow along the first eight or nine minutes. That leaves 11 or 12 minutes for me to go. But I’m trying. Then I lifted weights. And I ran/walked. Only a mile combined, but I’m building stamina.

Every day I feel myself changing. Little by little I move away from what I once was, more than once. And I can see that I can be both good and bad. And I want the good. But it’s fucking tough. It’s hard for me to want to be good. Some days I don’t even want to try to better myself. I think it would be easier to sit another 18 months instead of doing boot camp. But more days than not, I walk down to the gym and make myself do the things that make me feel good about going. I make progress. I try to take today into tomorrow, when I won’t want to do anything. I will. I will. I will.

I will write about it tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Well, I lifted weights and walked for half an hour. That’s all I willed myself to do. I failed on all of boot camp’s philosophies, which are:

I have free choice and free will.

I am accountable for my thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Today I commit myself to positive change.

I will give 110% of myself, 100% of the time.

If I do my best, I will succeed.

I’m not sure those are actually philosophies, but that’s what they say they are in the handbook.

Rules are Rules

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VINCE

Well, Mother. I hope you’re proud of me at the peak. I have finally become what I always wanted to be when I grew up. For $2 a day, I sew the crotch flap on the front of men’s briefs for the Minnesota Department of Corrections. I finally made the big time!

Actually, it’s not all that bad. And I’m learning how to do something new. And as far as prison wages are concerned, I’m in a job where I can make $2 per hour if I bust my ass. In comparison, nearly every prison job starts at 25₵ per hour, and peaks at $1 per hour after a year. I started at 50₵.

I should mention that all prison wages are docked 50% to pay fines, fees, and restitution. So I actually get 25₵ per hour on my check, and I’m slowly paying my fine of $135 off. After that’s paid, they will still take out 50% and put it in my gate fee account, which I get upon my release.

This week’s book selections: Michael Crichton, Andromeda Strain; Nelson DeMille, Gold Coast; and Preston Douglas, Blasphemy. I started with Blasphemy. It’s really good thus far. Look it up, maybe you’ll agree.

—

I’ve been a busy boy. Mostly with work. And a fair amount of gym time. I’ve started playing something called pickle ball. It is a lot like tennis but indoor, with a wiffle ball and an oversized ping-pong paddle. It keeps my heart rate up for a good 1½ hours. It’s way more fun than running. I really need to find a way to make running interesting. I can’t stand it. I get bored after a mile and quit.

Tomorrow I get to see my caseworker to find out the actual date for boot camp. And I will explore other early-release options. In all reality, I have no desire to go to boot camp. If I have to sit a couple more months to be released in another way, I will probably go that route. But I’ll go to boot camp, just to get out of my current SRD (Supervised Release Date, or parole) of March 1, 2017.

—

All right. I saw my caseworker. We went through my options. My boot camp date has been moved up. If I can make it through the six month program, I’ll be a free man. That was my best option.

For most of the week at work I have been cutting, then sewing together, the elastic waist bands that will eventually be sewn to the top of all the other completed parts to finish the 5XL briefs. Twelve hundred in all. Everybody else, however, had to take all 1,200 apart to replace one faulty piece of cover tape that was missed upon inspection. It looked like a horrible job. I even had to re-serge a few flys. But another week has passed.

Ten months from now, I’ll be free. If I follow the rules. Participate actively in drug treatment, and keep my mouth shut. I’ll be alright. I will keep in mind I’m saving 18 months of my life by doing this. I look forward to the challenge.

I was talking to a friend just now in the hallway and over the loud speaker the CO yelled, “Close the door in the north!” Referring to my friend and me. I was half way in my room, he was outside. For whatever reason, he came in to the room to continue our conversation. What we didn’t realize is that we could have both lost our boot camp eligibility for it. Because there are no cameras in the rooms, only the people that reside in a room are allowed in it. Because of rape and fighting they are strict about it.

—

I could have been taken to the hole. If you go to the hole for any reason, boot camp goes away. Fortunately, neither of us has had any disciplinary problems (in prison) and we were given written warnings. But now you can see how easy it could be to have to do that 1½ years in prison.

Moose Lake Stats

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ANNE

As I wrote in an earlier post, Moose Lake is the former State Hospital for the Insane, built in 1936. “Early treatments used there included insulin and electroshock, hydrotherapy, and physiotherapy. In the 1950s lobotomies were used on some patients.” As you can probably tell from the stilted writing here, this is taken off a historical document; I always assume things were at least twice as worse as described in historical documents.

“When the Sandstone State Hospital closed in 1959, its program for inebriates [Inebriates! I love it.] was transferred to Moose Lake. By 1961, treatment of alcoholism was a specialization of Moose Lake. In 1966 a program for adolescents was begun, in which some of the participants attended public school and gained high school credits. Also in 1966 all of the hospital’s medical/surgical wards were closed.

“The hospital closed as a psychiatric facility in 1995. It has since been owned and operated by the Minnesota Department of Corrections. The facility maintains a small treatment unit for drug/alcohol problems, as well as a sex offender treatment program.”

The name was nice-ified to Moose Lake Regional Treatment Center at that time.

A “total of 1,060 adult offenders are under the Case Responsibility of Minnesota Correctional Facility – Moose Lake with a total of 1,044 adult offenders currently on-site at this facility.”

I won’t throw all the numbers at you; you can look at them yourself if you have nothing better to do. Moose Lake has a slightly older population than St. Cloud, maybe because it’s where they house a lot of sex offenders who are locked up for life.

At St. Cloud, 126 inmates were in for Criminal Sexual Conduct (let’s just call it what it is: rape), average sentence: 106 months. It’s more than double that number at Moose Lake, 271 rapists with an average sentence of 137 months. In case your math isn’t any good, that’s over 11 years.

425 men are in Moose Lake for drug offenses, and the average sentence is 64 months. That’s Vince.

The next category is domestic assault (120 inmates, serving an average of 24 months). Then there’s just regular assault, with 73 inmates serving an average sentence of 54 months.

Other crimes with interesting nomenclature include Crimes against Government, Escape/Fugitive, Counterfeiting/Fraud, and Harassment/Stalking/Bias.

While there was only one murderer at St. Cloud, there are 70 at Moose Lake. So yeah, it’s a bit more of a serious place.

St. Cloud is somewhat more white and Latino, and with fewer Natives and African Americans. Whatever that means, if anything.

I scanned the religion column and saw that 58% were Christian, 3% Muslim, and a third had no preference.  There are 10 pagans, 7 who called themselves “Eastern,” 4 Atheists, and again, as in St. Cloud, one Jew. That must be scary, given what Vince has told me about the Skinheads and the Nation of Islam members talking about how they’d like to kill them some Jews.

Nothing about dwarfs.

Progress

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VINCE

I saw the doctor today. They told me they have to switch my medication because insurance won’t cover it. I’ll be going on something called Cinnamon, or Sinamet, or some such shit. I was really happy with my Mirapex: no side effects and it did the job. But it would appear as if it is not my choice.

Orientation was boring, but not as boring as sitting in my cell doing nothing. We got to watch the PREA (Prison Rape Elimination Act) video again, which I still find hilarious. I’m sure if ever there was one thing that would completely eliminate prison rape, it would be a half hour video tape from the late 80s, in which men with mustaches talk about blowing their cellies for candy bars. Have some dignity, guys. Hold out for a bag of coffee or something.

In the 10 days that I’ve been in general population, I have learned everything that they spoke on in the orientation. And anything that wasn’t covered could be found in the handbook we received the night before. So for nine days, we had questions that needed answers. We found answers, in one way or another, to questions that all could have been avoided by giving us the God-damned…. Sorry, mounting frustrations.

It would appear that this prison, like St. Cloud, is run by 200 people in 300 different departments. And none of them seem to want to deal with prisoners.

Today I found out I got the one open industry job in the garments factory. Or, garments building, I don’t know. I’ll be making the clothing for inmates in all Minnesota prisons. I’m excited not only because I got the best and highest-paying job out there, but because I will no longer be on room restriction as of Monday. Until now, I’ve been stuck in my room after noon every day. I couldn’t go to the gym except for on weekends. Now I can really begin my training.

I haven’t been able to get on the treadmill since Sunday. So I’m sure when I get back on it Saturday it’ll be just like the first time.

—

Am I just lazy? Mybae. Smotemies I relay dn’t want to erxecise. I have gnoe to the gym ticwe in the past two dyas, walkeld one mlie, then lfet. I couldn’t even stay for an hour. Ugh.

—

Today, I said I would do it.

Today, I said I would not give up.

Today, I succeeded.

I ran a whole mile. In 10 min, 36 secs. Not bad.

Moose Lake and the Dozen Dwarfs

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ANNE

I visited Vince at Moose Lake. It was “not too bad,” as we say in Minnesota to mean, “it was awful.”

IMG_2827

The guard who accompanied me through the clanging locked doors was friendly; too much so. After all, I had seen Orange is the New Black by now and I wondered if he would go home and think about me. That’s a nice way of putting it.

The waiting room was “decorated” in grey and teal, with paintings depicting bucks that would be a hunter’s wet dream, Bald Eagles, and a log cabin in the woods with an American flag flying in its front yard.

Could it be even grimmer than St. Cloud? Yes, because it was built as the State Hospital for the Insane in 1936, during the Great Depression, so austerity was the guiding principle in its design.

IMG_2831

I was directed by a CO sitting on a dais to greet Vince on the “hug rug”, which was pretty much what it sounds like—a two-by-four foot rug where inmates and visitors were allowed their brief hug in front of a CO.

Vince knew it had been an old mental hospital. I explained how Ronald Reagan had emptied out all the mental hospitals in the 80s, under the cover of “helping people live in the community rather than institutions.” Community turned out to mean mentally ill people huddled under bridges and in homeless shelters, because the community programs were so underfunded. I told him how Ronald Reagan had slashed benefits for the widows and orphans of veterans, including me, and how I still held a grudge toward the old bastard who conservatives seemed to hold up as a saint.

“Reagan must have forgotten a few mentally ill guys here, mom. There’s this guy who must have an IQ under 70 who sucks his thumb and tries to hide it by covering it with his sleeve.”

And a guy in the cell next to his had breast implants. His cellie, his lover, had been transferred and Vince could hear him whimpering at night.

He talked about how Moose Lake was the repository for sex offenders, who he referred to as men who are “that way.” He glanced around each time he said this; apparently bad mouthing sex offenders was an offense in itself. Vince claimed there were no statistics posted online for Moose Lake because 75% of the offenders there were chomos. I will cover that in my next post.

Vince leaned forward and looked around the room to see if anyone was listening. “Mom, when you get home, do some research and find out why there are so many dwarfs in here.

“What?” I asked.

“Yeah. There’re at least a dozen. And one midget.”

He moved on to the next topic, how the inmates here had so little privacy that they defecated in the showers, and how he and his two buddies were playing a game of who would find a hair in their food at each meal, because there was always hair in the food.

He asked me to research something about “two-thirds, first offense” legislation, but since neither of us was allowed to have a pen or paper, I can’t recall what it was now. Some great advocate I am!

“The AA group is just a bunch of old timers telling war stories, so my buddies and I started our own group. We’re all above-average intelligence.” I walked him through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and he seemed to pay close attention.

We talked about his health. “They took me off Mirapex to save money, and put me on a new drug, so I was kicking all night with my Restless Legs—you know how it is.” Indeed I do. “They finally told me they’d had me on a child’s dose.”

A Job with Benefits

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VINCE

I am currently in a six-man pod, sort of what I think a dorm room might be like.  Right now, I am the only person in it.  I feel like any moment, a tumble weed will roll on by, just passing through, like all my roommates thus far.

This is the only six-man pod in the unit.  It is where everybody goes their first day.  People move or SRD (Supervised Release Date) all the time, so there is quite a turnover in this room.  No, not the pastry.  I happen to be next in line to move, and there are five people on the way here from Brainerd, but for now, I’m all alone.  I will be moved to a two-man room as soon as one becomes available, probably tomorrow.

—

Ouch!  The ladders on the bunks are on what was the foot side of the bed at St. Cloud.  I hit my head on the sharp steel foot step.

Song list, cont: Rastaman Chant, Busta Rhymes; End of the Line, Traveling Willburys; Love, Reign Over Me, the Who; Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You, Sugarloaf; Flash, Queen; and Flower, by Moby.  That’s the song from the opening credits of Gone in 60 Seconds.  I don’t know any other Moby songs, just to let the ladies know.

—

For about three years, my routine in Lanesboro rarely changed.  I would occasionally leave town and go as far as Fountain, about eight miles, to hang out with my good friend Seth.  We had known each other since I moved to Fountain three years earlier.  We were non-gay soulmates.

I took my excessive drinking farther than anybody in my friend group.  Start early, go late, every penny of my disposable income went to drinking, weed, cigarettes, and gambling.  I had a perfectly good driver’s license but thankfully, no car.  So that was it for that three years, then I got fired from the restaurant, lost my apartment, and pretty much everything like my mom wrote, and eventually had to move in with Seth in Fountain, where I was able to secure jobs at the two restaurants in the town.

I moved out of Seth’s after about a year and got my own place again, right across the street from work. After a while I was full time at the Bent Wrench, where I was allowed to have a tab.  Oops.

—

[ANNE: My organization played a lead role in the release of what’s referred to as “the torture report” on the CIA’s interrogation activities post 9/11, in which they water boarded people, left them soaking wet in cold cells, suspended by shackles, or given “rectal feedings”, which are really just a medieval torture, according to a medical doctor on our board of directors who has literally written the book on physicians’ complicity in torture.

Why do I mention this? Because 50% of the American public still thinks torture was necessary and acceptable. So why would they give a shit about someone like Vince? If they think it’s okay to water board some guy in Gitmo, why would they care one iota about Vince—a self-confessed druggie–rotting in solitary, or being denied family visits, or other minor but repeated indignities?

It seems to me that Conservatives love their families and friends and forgive them anything, but are harshly judgemental of strangers, while Liberals love strangers but can be indifferent to their family and friends.

Rodney King had it right when he asked, during the LA riots following the acquittal of the LAPD officers who had beaten him, “Can’t we all just get along?”]