Love, Justine

September 1st, 2024

Sunday

They’ve started rationing pads here–you have to ask every time you need them. Soap too. And there are no tampons except regular ones, so if you’re a heavy bleeder, you’re out of luck. And it’s not just on BB. Rumor has it that they’re rationing sanitary supplies on E too. The reason is apparently because people are using pads to clean with, but there really isn’t anything else to use. And other units have super tampons, but not this unit. The population on this unit has doubled, and they expect us to use the same amount of supplies as before. There are 77 of us on BB today. Also, they haven’t been calling evening Common ROom until all of the people at Yard are counted, which is much less out-of-cell time available to us at night.

Prison Legal News–Published by the Human Rights Defense Center–August 2022 Vol. 33 No. 8 

Article:

A First Glance in Rearview Mirror at Pandemic” by Kevin W. Bliss, Matt Clarke, Ashleigh N. Dye and Keith Sanders excerpts:

“As to COVID-19 pandemic recedes from the headlines, its full effect on prisoners and detainees is coming into clearer view. One of the first glimpses was provided in a December 2021 report by the federal Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, which showed startling increases in death rates for the nation’s prisoners and parolees in 2020, compared to the year before. The death rate for those incarcerated in prisons jumped 46%. For people on parole, the hike was 32%…

[Wendy] Sawyer (research director for the Prison Policy Initiative) attributed the sharp increase in part to ‘the fact that correctional populations, by and large, have higher rates of chronic illness that would make them more vulnerable to things like COVID.’ Furthermore, prisoners often receive substandard health care, which may not quickly improve after being released on parole. Previous studies have also shown incarceration has a rapid aging effect, reducing lifespans for prisoners by an average of two years per year served behind bars.

That said, Sawyer called prison officials’ response to the pandemic dismal. Prisoner populations fell, but mostly thanks to fewer prison admissions, not more prisoners being released. In fact, the number of releases went down in 2020, indicating it ‘was not any kind of intentional action taken by prison officials to protect folks,’ Sawyer said…

5:30pm

We haven’t gone to dinner yet. People have been wondering aloud if somebody died. The CO said, “I don’t know yet.” There’s no movement, and 4:30pm count hasn’t cleared. Cinnamon said something happened on M Unit. It’s like we’re always on high alert here–always hypervigilant. Always jumping from one crisis to the next.

5:40pm Dinner

6:13pm We’re back. Dinner took all of 10 minutes. Most units just came and got trays and left. They let us sit down and eat, for reasons unknown, but we were the only ones.

8:23pm 

Shayla tried to commit suicide again on M Unit. No word on whether or not she survived this time. 

September 4th, 2024

Wednesday

8:18pm

There was a fight outside the Chow Hall again, where the wheelchair and canes line up to go to dinner. One woman was pounding on another woman, who would not fight back. They both got pepper sprayed, and then cuffed and led to the Hole, leaving only a clump of black hair behind on the concrete. I have a hard time feeling anything but sad about this development, where in this man-made hellscape of a place, our lives are reduced to scrapping on a sidewalk over petty garbage and meaninglessness.

September 5th, 2024

Thursday

3:48pm

Day three without internet, so nobody’s medications are being filled. I don’t have any Mobic. Today I saw “Trump” with a heart on it posted on Lolita’s locker. Why you would be a woman a person of color and vote for Trump is beyond my comprehension. 

In Sarah Kendzior’s second book, “Hiding in Plain Sight,’ she calls envisioning the future today an “act of mental violence.”

Agreed.

BLOG #9

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

So, in around the Block News, Daisy is learning to crochet, and it took a few tries to get it right, so she had to unravel a whole lot of yarn at first. Instead of telling the truth about the massive pile of yarn on her bed, she said this to Kimberly: “Justine came in and yanked apart my whole blanket like a crazy person, chain by chain, like she was trying to start a lawn mower! Then she shrieked, “Hee Hee Hee!” and jumped up and down on the pile of yarn and called me a White Devil! Finally, her head spun around and she threw up everywhere! When she woke up the next morning, though, she was fine.”

Oh my stars.

In other news, I’m reading, “The Feminine Mystique,” and there’s a whole chapter on Freud and how he thought that all feminists have penis envy. Like–just because I want equal rights does NOT mean that I want a penis, sir, and I mean, I live in a day and age where I could conceivably GET a penis, if that’s what I wanted to do. I wonder what Freud would say about THAT.

Ugh.

I discussed this with Kimberly, and, true to form, her response was, “If I grew a dick, the first thing I would do is helicopter it for an hour.”

Oooooooooooooookay, Kim.

There’s a new woman here that Kimberly and Daisy think looks like an aged, drug-riddled version of me, so now I have an Aunt named Crackhead Chrissy. Her fake back story is that she’s the ‘ole lady of a biker gang who fucked her in, and then she robbed a bank with a plastic gun but got caught.

None of the bikers came to her rescue.

Those bitches.

I owed Zuko some honey, so when I gave it to her, she said she’d been thinking of a song all day– “Bitch Better Have My Money,” except now it goes, “Bitch Better Have My Honey.”

Funny.

Also COVID is going around here, so instead of a “symphony of farts” every night like Daisy says, it’s now a cacophony of combination cough/farts. 

Coffarts?

Ew.

Speaking of farts, every time someone does it, Swiper fairly screams, “I SMELL SHIT!!!” and searches around to see whose butt it belongs to.

WoooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOW.

In other disgusting news, I dropped an entire roll of toilet paper into the toilet that I had already peed in and had to fish it out. 

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Also–this is what passes for fun here–Bambi was sneaking around at 9:30pm with a remote wrapped in a napkin turning off people’s TV’s.

White Devil. 

September 9th, 2024

Monday

Prison Legal News–Published by the Human Rights Defense Center–September 2022 Vol. 33 No. 9

California Sheriff’s Pay-to-Play Scandal Reflects Nationwide Corruption Potential Documented in Watchdog Reports by Jayson Hawkins, excerpts:

“That report, “How Sheriff Campaign Dollars Shape Mass Incarceration, jointly published by Common Cause and Communities for Sheriff Accountability, outlines how sheriffs across the U.S. regularly receive campaign contributions from individuals and firms that subsequently benefit from Sheriff’s department operations…

Examining campaign finance records from a sampling of 48 incumbent Sheriffs in diverse jurisdictions across 11 states over the years 2010 to 2021, researchers discovered that about 43% of all campaign donations these sheriffs received came from companies of individuals that stood to gain financially from operations decisions the sheriffs made. The donation came from a variety of sectors. Construction and real estate firms interested in building new jails supplied nearly 27% of the total hauled in by Sheriff’s campaigns. Companies that contract with jails to provide medical, communication and transportation services added almost another 17%.

In most states there are no conflict-of-interest laws to prevent such donations, nor a system of oversight to monitor who gave what to whom. Instead, America’s roughly 3,000 Sheriffs perform their duties–making two million arrests annually; running county jails where roughly 750,000 people are locked up on any given day, nearly 75% of them pretrial detainees unable to afford bail; and providing ‘civil enforcement’ functions like making evictions and, yes, authorizing gun permits–all largely out of the public eye and unhampered by oversight.

September 10th, 2024

Tuesday

Ethan’s 20th birthday today. Do you ever get sick of being sad? I’m sick of being sad. I’ve been sad for 20 years. The best day of my life turned into the worst nightmare I’d never imagined. 

Couldn’t imagine.

It had never crossed my mind that my baby would die. They talk about “rock bottom” with addiction and how you have to reach it to start going up in your life out of that black hole, but no one talks about the rock bottom of grief. That black hole goes on forever.

No bottom.

9:52pm

I’m reading Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider.” She was a Black lesbian feminist who grew up in the 1930s. She talks a lot about racism and sexism, and it strikes me like a slap in the face that nothing has changed in the past 100 years. Black men and women and boys and girls are still lynched, only now it’s legally, by the police.

Men still get paid more than women for the same work, and all of that, but it seems worse now. It’s worse because everybody knows it and we say it out loud, but it stays exactly the same. Before there was always oppression, but it seems like only the few and the brave talked about it. Now everyone talks about it and yet we elect Donald Trump as our President. He made racism, rape, and misogyny okay. Is there that much hate in the world that we want hate to be normal?

It boggles the mind.

Sarah Kendzior said she could deal with it as an adult and as a woman, but not as a mother. 

I wouldn’t know, never having been given the opportunity to be a mother.

I called Tiger today. She wasn’t home again, but Dubra said she still doesn’t want to talk to me. I don’t know why I called her today, already a sad day, knowing that she would make it sadder for me still. It’s like I’m so used to being sad that I seek it out. I used to get the urge to call my mother when I was crying and couldn’t stop, all the while knowing that she would just make it worse. 

She always did.

Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment. Maybe since it’s all I’ve ever known, it feels like home to me.

That, in and of itself, is profoundly sad.