Love, Justine

Muncy State Prison

August 20th, 2024

Tuesday

I talked to a woman today who has a crazy story–Lolita. She was sex-trafficked in some trap house and raped repeatedly, and then they sent some guy into the basement where she was being kept, and she started crying and showed him her injuries. He felt bad for her and said he was going to get her out and he came back the next morning with a sawed-off shotgun and demanded her release. The three Black men who had kept her captive beat the man who came to save her to death. Ten years later, she was charged with homicide and abuse of a corpse and got a 7-20 year sentence. She was paroled after seven years at Muncy and went home, but is now back for drinking on parole.

Craziness.

August 26th, 2024

Monday

5:49pm

Daisy and Swiper are fighting. Straight screaming at each other. 

Ridiculous.

They’re making it so crowded in here that all people are doing is fighting. There was a big fight in the Chow Hall yesterday. The rumor is that M Unit has asbestos and sewage problems, so they’re moving everyone from M into BB.

This whole fight started over a chair, because they took all the chairs out of the shower today, so Swiper said she was going to take the chair from the cell and use it to set her stuff on while she takes showers. Daisy freaked out and said it was her chair because she’s on the top bunk, and that’s how it started.

Now they’re both locked in for the night.

Great.

August 27th, 2024

Tuesday

Swiper got seven days of cell restriction for having extra sheets. This is great. Lock the two in together who hate each other. 

Fuck.

I’m stressed. 

There’s a song on the radio that says, “If the world is ending, I wanna be next to you.” 

That’s just great.
The apocalypse has reached mainstream music.

Magazine:

Criminal Legal News–Published by the Human Rights Defense Center–April 2023 Vol. 6 No. 4 p. 42

“Time to Find the Key”

By Jayson Hawkins

Excerpts:

“Senior Research Analysts Nazgol Ghandnoosh and Ashley Nellis at the Sentencing Project released a paper in September 2002 compiling findings from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Corrections Reporting Program, and other public agencies across the country. The paper concluded from this data that long prison sentences are keeping people locked up who are no longer a threat to public safety. This conclusion is even more troubling because the paper also found that prisoners are serving longer sentences than ever.

More than 260,000 prisoners in the U.S. have served at least 10 years behind bars as of 2019, representing 19% of the total prison population. This represents a dramatic increase from 2000 when just 10% had served at least 10 years.

These numbers have an impact on public safety. The U.S. Sentencing Commission found that people who had served at least 10 years in federal prison reoffended at a rate that is 29% lower than those who serve less. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found similar data for state prisoners. Those who served at least six years in a state prison were 25% less likely to return to prison than those who served only one year. 

These figures mirror previous findings that showed most criminals stop committing crimes four to 12 years after they start. This has led the American Bar Association, the Sentencing Project, and other groups to recommend that judges have the ability to reevaluate sentences after 10 to 15 years. 

Despite these recommendations and the data that drives them, more people are serving longer sentences in the U.S. than ever before. Approximately 770,000 American prisoners are serving a sentence of 10 years or more, and 12% increase in the faction of such prisoners since 2000. There are 12 jurisdictions in America where two-thirds of prisoners are serving a sentence of at least a decade.

These numbers are even higher among Black Americans who represent only 14% of the total U.S. population and 46% of those who have served 10 years or more.”

August 28th, 2024

Wednesday

Prison Legal News–Publishied by the Human Rights Defense Center–April 2023, Vol. 34 No. 4 article:

“I Was Scheduled to Die in Solitary Confinement–and May Soon Be Again” by Mark Wilson excerpts:

“Prison and jails have become America’s largest psychiatric facilities. According to a 2014 Treatment Advocacy Center report, over 350,000 individuals with severe mental illnesses were held in U.S. prisons and jails in 2012, while state psychiatric hospitals held just 35,000 patients…

In October 2022 the National Judicial Task Force to Examine State Courts’ Response to Mental Illness issued State Courts Leading Change: Report and Recommendations. In it, the group noted that ‘[m]ore than 70% of people in U.S. jails and prisons have at least one diagnosed mental illness or substance use disorder or both, and up to a third of incarcerated people have a serious mental illness.

‘There’s a tremendous pull toward seeing everything that you’re looking at as bad behavior that needs to be punished, rather than recognizing that it’s actually a response to mental illness,’ explains Dr. Stuart Grassian, M.D. A nationally renowned solitary confinement expert, he says that ‘[t]he paradigm in the prison system is if you punish bad behavior enough it’ll get better. That’s obviously a paradigm that doesn’t work.’

This punishment paradigm inevitably creates a vicious cycle in which mentally ill prisoners quickly end up in solitary confinement. In turn, that causes their mental illness to further deteriorate. 

They then engage in impulsive, uncontrollable behaviors that lead to more punishment, extending their solitary confinement and further aggravating their untreated mental illness. This cycle almost always ends very badly.

The Human Rights Watch, a torture watchdog group, estimated from 2003 data that one-third to one-half of those in solitary confinement suffered from some form of mental illness.’ When I started touring…solitary confinement units in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I found that 50% of [prisoners] suffered from [serious mental illness],’ agreed Terry Kupers, MD, a leading national solitary confinement and mental health expert…

In the late 1700s, William Bradford, who would become America’s second Attorney General, cautioned against exceeding 20 to 30 days at a time in solitary confinement, noting that long-term isolation is more than most humans can bear. The U.S. Supreme Court later agreed. ‘A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane. Others still committed suicide,’ the Court acknowledged in its 1890 decision, In re Medley, 134 vs. 160 (1890)…

David Fathi, executive director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, agrees that, ‘solitary confinement is one of the most damaging things you can do to a human being,’”

August 29th, 2024

Thursday

Prison Legal News–Published by the Human Rights Defense Center April 2023 Vol. 34 No. 4 article: 

“Educating Prisoners: “New Meta-Analysis Reinforces That It Reduces Recidivism” by Keith Sanders

“With the highest incarceration rate in the world–over six out of every 1,000 people–America has long known there is one thing that consistently reduces recidivism: education…Participation in an educational program decreases the odds of recidivism by 17 to 19% on average…Education also increases the overall post-release employment rate by 9.75%…Moreover, since the average length of a prison term is 2.7 years and the average cost per year to house a prisoner was $40,000 in 2022 dollars, ‘the cost savings for every person who is deterred from recidivism due to education is $107,075,’ the report notes.”

Article:

“Report Shows How Perverse Financial Incentives Drive Mass Incarceration and Inequity in Criminal Justice System” by Matt Clarke excerpt:

“A 72-page report by the Brennan Center for Justice published on July 6, 2022, shows how civil asset forfeiture, fines, fees and privatized community supervision shift the costs of the criminal justice system to the accused, removing financial disincentives for prosecutors to seek alternatives to incarceration.

Simultaneously, state and federal contracting for detention bed spaces has created a speculative market that rewards construction of excessive prison and jail capacity. That capacity, once built, drives mass incarceration with contracts that collect for a certain number of beds regardless of whether they are needed. Moreover, when lockups lose contracts, they must seek to fill the empty beds to avoid financial losses.

The report also addresses how performance metrics for police and prosecutors drive mass incarceration. Prosecutor performance is generally measured by conviction rates and police performance by arrest rate. A failure to meet these required metrics can result in punishment in the form of job assignments, docked pay, loss of leave time, or even termination…

The report is extensively documented with 506 footnotes. It also contains specific suggestions for improvements, chiefly by reigning in excessive fees and fines on which criminal justice budgets depend, as well as civil asset forfeiture.

According to the report, the current use of fees to finance parts of the criminal justice system has caused an increase in costs for services such as DNA testing, forensic laboratory, drug testing, the local law library and victim services, even when these specific services are not relevant to a particular case.

Likewise, the use of fines might cause a charge to be upgraded to one carrying a greater fine or one that places the use of a fine under local control. THe idea of using either to finance the judiciary not only disproportionately effects [sic] the poor and racial minorities, it proved to be financial folly when the pandemic shutdown greatly diminished those revenue sources…

The report concludes that cash-strapped agencies and cities see potential windfalls from over-enforcement and overincarceration, giving them ‘little incentive to divert people from arrest and prosecution of to strengthen alternative approaches to public safety’ and thus further driving mass incarceration.”

In other news, they have people working in the kitchen who have tested COVID positive. 

9:12pm

We have a new woman CO who closed the bathrooms at 9pm, fifteen minutes before count. People are freaking out, and the CO’s response was, “If you can’t hold it for 15 minutes, maybe you should put in a sick call and get that checked out.”