What are you thinking?

It's so frustrating having to show your parents how to work technology over and over again. And it's not new technology they haven't used before. It's stuff they use everyday.

 

Today was supposed to be my day off... >_>

 

I get the feeling you have a rather morbid sense of humour. Thankfully the nightmares seem to have stopped for now, and I'm back to having fairly pleasant dreams for the time being.

 

My neighbors are at it yet again. I’m temped to go out the side door and yell “Shut up and get a divorce! People are trying to sleep in here!”

 

Ugh! I hate loud neighbors. Especially late at night.

 

It’s even worse when your neighbors are doing housework late night and your houses are connected...

 

Just a lonely, rainy day. Watching YouTube videos on visits to the museum.

 

They’ve lived next door for five years now and all they do is fight and scream at each other. Their son is all screwed up and has behavioral problems because of them.

 

Hoping my good luck will hold till the weekend so I can get one of the two new RC trucks I want Saturday.

 

I'm seriously considering living off grid.

 

I’m going on a tour of a state prison today. I can’t wait to go to prison!

 

My visit to prison:

Spoiler

Today I toured Thumb Correctional Facility. The prison is just off Interstate 69 in an industrial park neighborhood in Lapeer, Michigan. It is unique to the Michigan Department of Corrections in that it houses both youthful and adult offenders. Anyone sentenced to prison under the Holmes Youthful Trainee Act, or the law that allows anyone between the age of 17 and 24 to have their record cleared after their sentence, will serve their time at Thumb.

I walked into the lobby of the prison and was handed a locker key by the officer at the front desk. As you walked in, you are greeted by a picture of the governor, the warden, and the director. I had to empty my pockets and everything out of my coat into the locker. I had to leave my wallet and phone in my car, and the only thing we were allowed to bring with us past the lobby was our driver’s licenses.

We were then taken through the security checkpoint, where we had to clear a metal detector. We had our hands marked with invisible ink and were then patted down, and directed to sit down and remove our coats, shoes, and socks, which were then searched. The officers visually examined the soles of our feet before allowing us to proceed into the facility.

Once we made it into the prison, we were taken to a conference room and split up by sex. The ladies in our group were taken by a female corrections officer, and we males were shown around by a Sergeant. The first place we went was the command center. There are over 300 cameras throughout the prison, and the officers in the command center can see almost everything that’s going in in every corner of the prison.

Afterward we went to the medical unit. The medical staff at Thumb can handle most medical situations, right up to low-level trauma. The prison can handle psychiatric issues for youths, but not adults. Adults requiring psychiatric medications are sent to a different prison. We walked right by inmates everywhere we went, and they mostly kept to themselves.

We were then shown the segregation unit, or solitary confinement. It’s known in prison lingo as “the hole” or “the box.” The four of us filed into what’s normally used as the observation cell. Anyone who’s suicidal or out of control gets placed in this cell, which has a camera in the corner and all of the furnishings are bolted down. As we entered the cell, the officer said half-jokingly, “I promise you I won’t close the door.”

The inmates in segregation are there for what’s known in prison lingo as “Level 1 tickets.” A ticket is a write-up for breaking the rules. Level 1 infractions include fighting, assault and battery, escape, or sexual misconduct. Level 2 infractions include creating a disturbance, disobeying an order from staff, possession of money, stealing, or being in another inmate’s cell. Level 3 infractions are the most minor, such as horseplay, being out of bounds, or having non-dangerous contraband.

The inmate will spend 7-14 days in segregation waiting for a hearing on his violation. If the prisoner is found guilty of the violation he is accused of, he can be sentenced to a maximum of an additional 10 days in segregation. Our guide said that you can see the inmate’s mental health breaking down over time the longer he stays in segregation. The longest he ever saw in inmate in the box was 3 months.

We were then led to the chow hall as the cafeteria is called in prison vernacular. We looked down at it from an upper balcony. Our guide said that when he came to Thumb from another facility in 2007, the food was prepared in-house and that most officers came there to eat as well. The prisoners had access to a salad bar, fountain pop, and entrees like chicken wings and cheeseburgers.

When Governor Rick Snyder came into office in 2011, the food service was privatized to a company called Aramark. The food they served prisoners had maggots, mold, and even wood chips in it. Prisoners across the state went on hunger strikes and even rioted over the food. As a result, in August of 2018, the DOC will go back to in-house food service. You may hear this and think that they deserve these conditions being criminals in prison, but the fact is they’re still human and they still deserve basic decency.

We were then led outside across the prison yard and as we walked by the sally port, we were informed that this was the weakest part of a prison for escapes. This is the area where prison buses and delivery trucks come in. In 2015, a murderer escaped from a prison in Ionia, Michigan by getting through a sally port at night. He carjacked a woman, kidnapping her for the ride, and made it to Indiana before being caught.
After the chow hall, we went to the laundry facility. This is one service that the prisoners do as part of a contract that MDOC has with different companies across the state. The prisoners can do skilled trade work for what’s called Michigan State Industries. They do laundry for both the prison itself as well as hospitals in the area. You can go on their website and buy American flags, birdhouses, luggage, and more, all made right here in Michigan by your local convicted felons.

After the laundry unit, we then went to see a youth housing unit. The cells house two inmates with bunk beds. The cells are pretty small, including a small desk, but also a porcelain sink and a porcelain toilet with a plastic toilet seat, basically looking like what you’d find in a public bathroom. We were shown the cell of a young man originally from Belarus. We also spoke with another young guy who came in at 17 and will be up for parole next year.

We then went to the recreation and education building. The prisoners can have 50 minutes of recreation time per day. They can play basketball, ping-pong, the adults can shoot pool, while the youths can play video games, as well as lifting weights. In the warmer months, the prisoners can go out to the rec yard, which includes a softball field, a soccer field, basketball courts, and a greenhouse. The prisoners can earn their GEDs and through an extension of Mott Community College in Flint they can even earn a college degree.

After walking through the education building, we went to the adult unit where the Paws With A Cause program is housed. The prisoners in this program get to train rescue dogs to be service dogs for people with disabilities. The dogs sleep with their humans in their cells and live in this specific wing of the prison. As one prisoner was explaining to us the details of the program, his dog like my ear scritching skills so much that he jumped up on me the instant I took my hand off him.

After this was over, we headed back to the administration building where we went through a bit of a Q&A session with our sergeant. We were handed recruiting packets as we left the prison. As we headed back to the security checkpoint, we had to wave our hands under an infrared light to reveal the invisible ink, and we were given back our driver’s licenses as we headed back out into the lobby.

The prison is considered a Level 2 facility. Each prisoner is given a security classification based on their offense. Level 1 is the lowest, and level 5 is the highest. Even murderers can earn a lower status with good behavior. The prison has 2 housing units for youth and 4 housing units for adults. A few high profile inmates have done time at Thumb. One was Dr. Jack Kevorkian, and another was Jonathan Schmitz, who in 1995 murdered the man who brought him on the Jenny Jones show to profess his love for him.

Thumb is one of the most coveted prisons by both offenders and staff. The prisoners have the freedom of movement and can go to their assigned locations unescorted. Their uniforms are navy blue shirts and pants with orange stripes going down the sides of the sleeves and the pants, and black leather shoes. If it weren’t for the razor wire and the fence, you might think you were on a college campus. Thumb has the lowest staff turnover of any prison in the state, and job openings at Thumb happen once in a blue moon. Compared to the other 30 state prisons throughout the state of Michigan, this is easily one of the best places to do time.

Michigan operates on an indeterminate sentencing system. This means that the judge imposes a minimum and a maximum amount of time that that offender has to serve before becoming eligible for parole. Thanks to a 1998 truth-in-sentencing law, offenders must serve the entire minimum period on their sentence before they can be considered for parole. When a male offender is sentenced to be incarcerated by MDOC, he is first taken to the Charles Egeler Reception and Guidance Center in Jackson. The process there takes about 3 weeks and the prisoner is evaluated and the determination is made on which prison they will serve their sentence at.

The pressure on the parole board in Michigan is quite paradoxical. MDOC is the biggest expenditure in the legislature’s general fund. Here in the Wolverine State, we spend more on prisons than we do on primary education. For this reason, the parole board tends to spit out prisoners after the minimum time on their sentence. Then when one of these offenders goes out into the community and reoffends, the media makes a big thing out of it and people demand that prisoners spend longer sentences. In reality, you can have one or the other but not both.

The COs start out at $17.32 per hour and top out at $26.53 per hour. They work 5 days a week and the two days off you get for your weekend are determined by seniority, as this is a union job where seniority is everything. Would $17.32 an hour be enough for you to be locked up in a prison among murderers and rapists all day long? Not for me. Some of these inmates will spend a few years there, and some will spend the rest of their lives there. The COs’ job is to treat them all the same, no matter what they did or how long they’re in for.

Just like my trip to jail, I didn’t need a tour to convince me not to commit a crime, but it did anyway. If I had to serve a year and got to choose between the Genesee County Jail and Thumb Correctional Facility, I’d take Thumb any day of the week. Prison is easier on the COs because it’s the inmates’ home and they treat it as such. Jail is simply a temporary holding place and the inmates have far less respect for the COs.
No matter where you serve your sentence, prison sucks. I was glad to be out after spending 2 ½ hours in prison, much less 2 years or more. I can promise you that I won’t be committing any crimes after this experience, that’s for sure.

 

This is fascinating. It is always interesting to hear about different kinds of correctional facilities. I have always wanted to tour different ones, but I've never had the chance.

 

Nice to know I made an ENTIRE PAGE'S WORTH OF DETAILED EDITS and they all fucking disappeared. Nice to know I told this damn thing to SAVE the edits and it DIDN'T. Now I have to go back and figure out what the hell I edited. Absolutely brilliant.

 

hmmm..... thinking about how my friend will respond to my text. Also about my friend I met who lives across the country..... um.... several other things too unfortunately.