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There are some friends of my family who were recently busted for selling drugs. Pot and XTC I believe. They are pretty mild drugs compared to the hard stuff like heroin and speed, but they still received some fairly hard jail time. (Not too bad. It could have been worse, a lot more time that is, but they still got some pretty harsh time for their “crime”.)
One of these friends is writing a journal to send out to here friends. She handwrites it and sends it out to another friend so they can type it up for copying and distributing to all of her family and friends on the outside.
Well, it turned out this friend is a pretty slow typist. It took them a long time to work out even a few pages, so our prison pal had the handwritten notes sent to my mother so she could type them up. The thing is, my mother is out of town until the 20th, so I’m typing them up. (I’m a pretty fast typist. More than 60 per…)
I have two of her handwritten pages right in front of me. She’s written on both sides of the page , since I don’t think she’s allotted much writing material in prison. She mentions that she only gets these short little pencils to use, the kind you see in the library… just a couple of inches long. She saves everything she can get her hands on in prison: Plastic bags, tape… It turns out that a lot of the women in her prison smoke hand made cigarettes made from tampon paper. Apparently smoking is not allowed in prison, which I think is taking the no smoking thing too far. They charge 20 dollars just to get lighters in prison.
Her husband is being held in another prison. They will spend several years there, and they never ever even hurt anyone. They haven’t been convicted of so much as bruising another human being, yet they receive the kind of jail time that should be reserved ohnly for people who actually hurt someone, and hurt them bad. There are hundreds of thousands of people like her in this nation’s prisons.
I’ve always been opposed to this senseless practice of locking people up, especially non-violent offenders, in prison for unreasonably long periods of time. The prison system in the United States is barbaric, Draconian, and just a simply foul and wretched institution that has no place in a country that claims to stand for liberty and freedom. Drugs are not a problem of law, but a health problem across the United States. It should be treated as such. We don’t do anyone any favors by locking up drug users in prison. The whole practice is simply sick.
It’s one thing to look at the statistics, it’s quite another thing to read the notes from someone who’s in the inside and actually experiencing the harsh reality that’s all too easy for people on the outside to ignore.
I read part of the letter to my mother over the phone. She wouldn’t admit it, but I could tell she had become quite upset over what she heard. She made up an excuse about having to get off of the phone because what I read to her really rattled her.
Prison walls work two ways; They keep the people they lock up in, and the people who love them out of their lives.
One of these friends is writing a journal to send out to here friends. She handwrites it and sends it out to another friend so they can type it up for copying and distributing to all of her family and friends on the outside.
Well, it turned out this friend is a pretty slow typist. It took them a long time to work out even a few pages, so our prison pal had the handwritten notes sent to my mother so she could type them up. The thing is, my mother is out of town until the 20th, so I’m typing them up. (I’m a pretty fast typist. More than 60 per…)
I have two of her handwritten pages right in front of me. She’s written on both sides of the page , since I don’t think she’s allotted much writing material in prison. She mentions that she only gets these short little pencils to use, the kind you see in the library… just a couple of inches long. She saves everything she can get her hands on in prison: Plastic bags, tape… It turns out that a lot of the women in her prison smoke hand made cigarettes made from tampon paper. Apparently smoking is not allowed in prison, which I think is taking the no smoking thing too far. They charge 20 dollars just to get lighters in prison.
Her husband is being held in another prison. They will spend several years there, and they never ever even hurt anyone. They haven’t been convicted of so much as bruising another human being, yet they receive the kind of jail time that should be reserved ohnly for people who actually hurt someone, and hurt them bad. There are hundreds of thousands of people like her in this nation’s prisons.
I’ve always been opposed to this senseless practice of locking people up, especially non-violent offenders, in prison for unreasonably long periods of time. The prison system in the United States is barbaric, Draconian, and just a simply foul and wretched institution that has no place in a country that claims to stand for liberty and freedom. Drugs are not a problem of law, but a health problem across the United States. It should be treated as such. We don’t do anyone any favors by locking up drug users in prison. The whole practice is simply sick.
It’s one thing to look at the statistics, it’s quite another thing to read the notes from someone who’s in the inside and actually experiencing the harsh reality that’s all too easy for people on the outside to ignore.
I read part of the letter to my mother over the phone. She wouldn’t admit it, but I could tell she had become quite upset over what she heard. She made up an excuse about having to get off of the phone because what I read to her really rattled her.
Prison walls work two ways; They keep the people they lock up in, and the people who love them out of their lives.
