Love, Justine

Muncy State Prison

August 4th, 2024

Sunday

BLOG #8

Neither Here Nor There: Musings from the Other Side (of the Razor Wire Fence)

Welp, in Muncy news, an ambulance came here because while in the Hole, some lady stuck her finger in a hole in the door, and so a hole had to be cut in the door to get it out. 

Holy crap.

Pun intended.

As Kimberly would say, she must’ve been drinking slow juice. 

In around the Block News, Daisy and Morocco are busy doing prison tattoos. Morocco is getting some woman’s name on her finger covered up with a tiny mustache.

It’s not going well.

Daisy’s also working on making her own dream interpretation book. She’s going to call it, “Bitch, Wake Up!”

In other news, Swiper has finger toes that she used to jerk off a man, and Kimberly has a friend with a toe-thumb that he used to finger her. 

Just kidding. 

But I’m not telling about which part.

It turns out that Swiper has some of the old-style colored pencils that you can use as makeup if you soak them in water, so Daisy did her face up like a clown and then jumped out from behind the wall to scare Swiper. Before this, Daisy was going through all of the pencils and Kimberly was competing with her in the style of, “I see your red pencil and I raise you one clicky pen,” or “half a green pencil,” or “one yellow marker.”

Funny.

So, another Jail Urban Legend is apparently that if someone makes you a bracelet and you wear it, then they have permission to anally rape you.

Swiper just called Kimberly a fat pig because she got ice cream tickets, and Kimberly said, “HEY! That’s MISSUS fat pig to you!”

Swiper says that another Jail Urban Legend is that if you have crocheted rings and you walk around the track three times, you’re married. Kimber then chimed in that if you walk backward, you’re divorced and you can keep the dog.

Kimberly also said recently that there’s a CO in the kitchen who karate-chops your vagina during pat searches for fun.

Another CO walked by Kimberly last night, and she whispered under her breath, “Hey, how’d you get your beard to grow in all White Trash like that?”

Other jail terminology you should know are as follows:

“I’m fucked up ‘boutchoo” = I’m going to love you forever and get your name tattooed on my finger. 

“Bulldaggin” = running out to all the shit to see your boo. Ex.: Pushing Orca all the way to the Infirmary in her wheelchair in a snowstorm for a glimpse of your girlfriend. 

“Battleshits” – when you and your buddy are both in the bathroom taking a poop and your serial courtesy flushing becomes a contest. 

And lastly, Kimberly and Swiper think that I light up when Zuko is around. They think we should be together.

So now I’m gay. 

Again.

Well here’s what I have to say about that: I see your finger toes and raise you a tiny mustache.

August 8th, 2024

Thursday

I signed my open plea agreement today and sent it back to my lawyer. I don’t know if they’re going to accept it because they sent it through Florida, so there’s no original copy. I told them to send it through legal mail next time. Like–they act like they’ve never done this before.

Ridiculous.

Gem says that there are no court dates for me on padockets.com.

Units C, E, and G have COVID. 

August 9th, 2024

Friday

In this book, Drug Use for Grownups,” Dr. Carl L. Hart is comparing heroin related deaths to gun deaths and car accidents. He says that every year forty thousand people die from guns, with over have of these deaths due to suicide, while heroin related deaths, at their peak in 2017, were about fifteen thousand. And additional forty-thousand people each year die in car accidents. 

Hm. 

Then there’s Portugal, where drug use was decriminalized, and heroin use subsequently dropped from 100,000 to 25,000. In 2016, Portugal had six deaths per million from drugs, while the U.S. had 312 deaths per million.

August 10th, 2024

Saturday

Cool isn’t doing well. My parents are going to Vermont to see him, although they don’t know if he’ll actually see them. He’s acting bipolar. He won’t get help. I wonder if I should write him a letter.  I’m so worried about him. My mother seems to think he’s on drugs too. And the police did press charges for that motorcycle accident he had a year ago. I don’t know what the charges are, but he doesn’t want to plead guilty to something he didn’t do. 

Join the club, man. 

Join the fucking club.

August 12th, 2024

Monday

Another woman tried to hang herself on J Unit on Saturday, allegedly in Cell 33, the same cell another woman tried to hang herself in. The story is that a Lieutenant was screaming at her for some reason, and then she went in her cell and hung herself. They cut her down, and she survived. No word on her name or any other details.

August 14th 2024

Wednesday

Modified lockdown today. Daisy’s very worried that this neighbor lady of her mother’s who took three of her kids is going to try to keep them. She wants me to help her write a letter to the judge tonight. I’m afraid this lady is going to go for permanent custody and Daisy will have to fight her when she gets out in a  year with no resources to get them back.

August 15th, 2024

Thursday

We keep getting more and more people in here. There’s somewhere around 80 people on this Block now. 

I’m reading Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” and I can relate. When I was married to Dubya, I just couldn’t believe that THAT was all there was to life, this being a housewife and mother. 

The feelings eventually destroyed me, and my marriage.

August 20th, 2024

Tuesday

COVID continues to spread here. When I was at the Infirmary this morning with Ms. Grumpy Crabass for insulin, a nurse came out and said, “You won yourself a mask,” to the woman directly behind me. When she asked why, he told her she tested COVID positive.

Something else that’s going on here is that there’s a rumor that we’re all getting moved to Coal Township near Pittsburgh while they fix all the asbestos and sewage problems here.

In other news, I’m reading the March 2022 issue of Prison Legal News (Vol. 33 No. 3) published by the Human Rights Defense Center, and one of the articles is called, “Department of Justice Reports on Two Decades of Prisoner Suicides” by Matt Clarke. 

Here are some excerpts:

“Nationwide, prisoners are four times as likely to take their own lives as the average American. The deaths are violent, too, with nine of ten people who’ve killed themselves in lockups dying from suffocation by hanging or self-strangulation. 

Even more cruel: Over three-quarters were pretrial detainees who had not been convicted of a crime.

Those are some of the top-line results of a report published by the U.S. Department of Justice in October 2021, analyzing prisoner suicides from 2000 through 2019. 

From 2001 to 2019, suicides accounted for 5% to 8% of all deaths among those incarcerated in prisons, and 24% to 35% of jail prisoner deaths.

The overall U.S. share of deaths due to suicide, by comparison, was just 1.7%…Jail suicides were concentrated in the largest jails, of those reporting no suicides, the median bed count was 110 beds, while for those reporting one suicide it was 305 beds, and for those with two or more suicides, it was 1,296 beds.

While over half of jail suicides happened within the first 30 days of incarceration, the majority of prison suicides were committed by those who had already served over a year of their sentence.

In both jails and prisons, most suicides occurred in the prisoner’s cell or room during daylight hours…

The predominant demographic to commit suicide behind bars was non-Hispanic White males…

In prisons at both the state and federal level, the highest rates were recorded among the newest prisoners, declining with the length of time served. 

Over the 20-year period covered, the report documents nearly 6,200 prisoner suicides, emphasizing the need for improvement in suicide prevention among the incarcerated. 

This could start with more humane treatment of prisoners in general–especially those newly arriving in local jails.”

Here’s another article from Prison Legal news (same issue) on recidivism:

“Justice Department Releases Ten-Year Recidivism Study”

Follows a half-million state prisoners released in 2008 by Matt Clarke excerpts:

“From 2016 through 2019, the last years for which reliable data are available, about 10.5 million arrests were made in the U.S. annually.

Averaged over a decade, that’s less than one arrest for every three people. But a new study shows how previous incarceration increases those odds many-fold: Ten years after release, 82% of state prisoners had been arrested again–an average of nearly SEVEN ARRESTS EACH.

The majority of those prisoners, 62% had also returned to prison…Around 43% were arrested within a year of release and 66% by the end of the third year…But age was strongly correlated to arrest rate, with the youngest releases being arrested at twice the rate of the oldest.

Drug crimes accounted for 30.3% of the released prisoners’ most serious commitments offenses, compared to 29.6% for property crimes, 24.5% for violent crimes, and 15.7% for crimes against public order…

Males were more likely to be arrested within the first year than females, 44% vs. 34%…

During the first year, Blacks (45%) and Hispanics (44%) were arrested at similar rates which were higher than that of Whites (40%)…

What this study lays out in stark terms is the fact that an arrest is the strongest driver of a future re-arrest. ‘Repeated arrests,’ as noted by the Prison Policy Initiative, are related to race and poverty as well as high rates of mental illness and substance use disorders. There are far better ways to address these social, economic, and health problems than through incarceration.”