Love, Justine

May 3, 2024

Muncy State Prison

11:29am

Friday

We just heard over the radio that CPR has been started on someone on J Unit. Jesus Christ. I hope it’s not another suicide. The Unit is silent, waiting to hear what happens. There’s tension in the air. Some people, like me, are eyes-wide, looking around, and others just shake their heads and put them down, as if to say, “Another one bites the dust.” Burgundy says it’s always J Unit. There are rows  of single cells, like S Unit, with automatic doors that are usually closed, only to be opened by an officer in the bubble by pressing a button on J Unit.

11:40am

Ambulance en route. It’s harder to hang yourself on an open Unit, like this one, BB. The walls between the pods only go up to chest level, so if you’re on the top tier and have a top bunk, you have a bird’s eye view of the entire Unit. People on this Unit are mad that lunch is going to be late, because they may not get to “shop” at Commissary. Someone is dying, and they’re made about coffee and e-cigarettes. It’s sad and infuriating that suicides are commonplace here.

11:52am

Ambulance en route (to the Unit?).

Book: “Women Who Love Men Who Kill: 35 True Stories of Prison Passion” by Sheila  Isenberg © 2021

P. 7 “Today, prison phone calls a $1.2 billion industry under the control of two large corporations, Securus and GlobalTel. They claim to reduce the cost os inmate calls up to 90 percent, including local, long distance, and international…Securus and GlobalTel are very profitable. They and some individual states earn huge profits on calls; many states pay legal kickbacks. For example, in 2018, Connecticut state prisoners paid $13.2 million for phone calls, of which Securus returned nearly 60 percent to the state. In 2010, the state of Hawaii profited by  $3.3 million from prisoner phone calls…But today, even our carceral society that penalizes so many, often unfairly, gives us the online revolution a place behind prison walls. The internet allows prisoners to stay in touch with families, and wives and girlfriends. According to experts, this cuts down on recidivism because of the prisoner’s ability to maintain a connection with the outside world.”

P.8

“First, there is JPay, ‘aiming to become the Apple of the U.S. penal system…’ Founded in 2006, JPay’s app can be downloaded on Apple’s App Store or on Google Play. It partners with institutions on all levels–federal, state, and county–in thirty-five states. A million and a half ‘offenders [prisoners],’ parolees, and probationers’ use it for money transfers, emails, and video visitation.”

p.8

“Since 2009, federal prison inmates have been able to send and receive emails through a system used by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons: TRULINCS (Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System). TRULINCS is operated by CORRLINK, a privately owned company that is a subsidiary of Advanced Technologies Group.”

12:15pm 

Count is clear.

12:40pm

Lunch.

1:15pm 

It was Sharon M. who hung herself. No one knows if she’s dead or alive. 

I didn’t go to lunch and called Motorcycle instead. He got my letter and said that he was upset that I think he doesn’t believe I’ll be faithful. He said he believes me. And that, “I love you very much, Jess.”

Sweet.

He also told me that he’s never said that he would “bend his knee” for anyone before, ever. I meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen…he was married once, but whatever. I’ll take it. I love him very much too. I wrote him a letter:

5/3/24

Motorcycle, 

I talked to you earlier today. You were so sweet. I love it when you’re all romantic with me. I mess spending time with you too, and crawling into your lap when I need a break from work. And cooking and eating together. Everything, really. I miss normal things. Shopping and driving around together. Just spending time together. I miss everything. I hate this. I hate being away from you, and not knowing what’s going to happen. I hate not knowing where I’m going live when this is all over.

Ugh.

Anyway, I love you very much too, and I can’t imagine my life without you. 

In other news, another woman here hung herself today. It’s so sad that it’s so normal here that no one really cares. People are just mad that we’re locked down, or they can’t go to Commissary or whatever. 

Terrible.

My worst fear is dying in prison. I haven’t gotten any letters or correspondence from Paul, so I stopped writing him. I give up. If he doesn’t want to be friends anymore, that’s fine. I can’t do anything about it anyway. I talked to Gem this morning. Nothing new with her except for the rumor about the DA and the Judge being under investigation. I sent the letter today to the Public Defender asking him why there was a conflict with the last case and not this one. I also sent a letter to Tabby. She writes huge long messages on the kiosk and I can only write her back a line or two. My mother told me the Maple Festival is this weekend and she’s taking the kids. Stryder has messaged me a few times with jealous bullshit about me choosing you over him. This after he didn’t speak to me for five months. Whatever. I didn’t respond. I can do without his drama just fine. 

Anyway, I love you very, very much and I miss you like crazy.

Love Always, 

Justine

5:47pm 

I have one piece of yellow paper left for writing letters. I’m going to call the boys at 6:30pm. I keep wondering if I should write Tiger. I don’t see why I would. She won’t care anyway, but I think about her a lot. 

Bambi, the Vietnamese lady next door, wants me to ghost write the story of her life for her. Daisy got colored pencils today on Commissary, so she’s happily coloring.

Burgundy asked the young Black lady next door yesterday what her charges were, her name is Momo, and she said that someone put some drug in her drink and she went nuts and stabbed her young daughter. Her daughter survived, but she’s not allowed to have any contact with her. She said she called her mom, where her kids live, and her daughter (the victim) insisted on talking to her She said, “I still love you, Mommy!”

So sad.

She got 6-16 years for felony child endangerment. She’s been down four years so far. I wonder if she’ll get paroled. I would think not. 

In other news, I got a yoga packet from some Activities person I wrote. Daisy says we’ll start tomorrow. I didn’t eat lunch today because it was fish. Dinner was spaghetti, so I ate it. Burgundy is working on an 1,000 piece puzzle. No thank you. I guess I’ll read. Library Monday, thank God.

6:33pm

Lockdown again. I was in the middle of my phone call with King. Jesus God. There’s no telling how long this will take. “Secure your Unit” over the radio. Henry sprained his ankle during soccer. Hopefully I’ll get to talk to Superman tonight. 

Who knows what happened this time.

6:40pm

“Compound is clear” over radio.

6:43pm

“Keep compound secure”

Showers and phone calls only. I’m not going to call Superman for two minutes. Inmate.com says that they found contraband in a shower. Daisy and I were talking about dating Black men, and I recounted a story about the first Black man I dated, when I was 19. He had the whitest name ever–Robert–and he sold a magazine where I worked as a bookstore clerk. He would buy me Boone’s Farm drinks and I would get drunk at his apartment, where there was black shag carpet and an entirely glass coffee table. When I broke up with him, he couldn’t believe it. He looked at me, aghast, and said incredulously, “But I licked your asshole!”

I had no idea that asshole lickery had bonded us for life.

Silly me. 

When Daisy dated her first Black man, they went to see the Exorcist in the theater, and to hear her tell it, the theater was so cold that her nipples were hard, so she tried to cuddle up to this guy, but she couldn’t get too close because his breath was so bad. “He had a turd in his cheek!!” she shrieked, and then fell over on her bed laughing. “NEVER AGAIN,” she said. She saw him later at a party and he said, “What happened to you?” She was like, “What happened to YOU, man?? Like, why would your breath smell that bad?!

Next, my first husband apparently thought I wasn’t very good at blow jobs, because he bought some DVD when I was 20 to teach me the ABCs of giving head. It featured real couples and also featured the least sexy sex I had ever seen. Some of those couples had to be 60 years old, with mom-bods and beer guts galore. “Oh, that’s hot,” I thought, and proceeded to never give him a blow job again. 

Daisy then told me about some porn she saw where a woman had a ton of sex toys up her vagina. She was like, “She had the Mary Poppins of pussies! Like–just when you thought she was done, there comes another one!”

Then she asked her boyfriend, Wizard, to look up Urban Sex Positions for entertainment while she was incarcerated, and he came back with “the minivan.” Sooo….you’ve heard of “the shocker,” right? Two in the pink and one in the stink? Okay, so this one is two in the front and FIVE in the back, like a freakin’ minivan. “What, so you just punch them in the butthole?” I asked, mouth agape. She shrugged and said nonchalantly, “Some people like being fisted.”

Ew.

Then we got into a conversation about men on meth who want to fuck for six hours straight with their “al dente” dicks and do butt stuff, but never get off.

Boy, do I NOT miss those days.

*sigh* 

Good times.

Daisy says that in her county jail, Somerset (not Fayette, it turns out I was wrong), five people have hung themselves in the past five years, and four of them died.

They also make the inmates paint over the black mold before inspections by the state and there are no counselors. Inmates have been known to eat dentures, shoes, and pens, or stick razors up their rectums in order to get a trip to the hospital and get out of the jail for a while. The woman here who hung herself earlier today apparently “did it wrong,” according to the blue shirts in the kitchen, because she lived. Now she has to come back here.

Dear God.

Also, in Somerset County jail, they don’t let ambulances or the coroner into the building, so nobody actually is pronounced dead until they’re in the alley. This way, I’m assuming, they don’t have to count the death as in the prison. How nice of them. I’m sure this skews the statistics of suicides in the Somerset County Jail in their favor.

8:50pm

The women here are discussing how much they get paid. Most of them will get around $30/month. Some of them work six hours per day in the kitchen or doing maintenance for this amount. And that’s IF they don’t get 25% taken out for fines. None of them seem to know or care that this is legal slavery.

There is a Sergeant walking by who is training a new CO with very tight pants on. While they walked by our cell, he told her, “When you leave this place, leave it here. Don’t take it home with you.”

Must be nice.

“We’re going down, down in an earlier round,

And sugar, we’re goin’ down swingin’

I’ll be your number one with the bullet, 

A loaded gun complex

Cock it and pull it.”

“I’ll tell you what you want to hear

Keep my sunglasses on while I shed a tear

It’s never the right time…

I’m unstoppable…

I’m a Porsche with no brakes…”