Idle Minds and the Playgrounds of Chaos
I sit here, eating my midday beans, listening to the tiny bit of Lo-Fi music I have been blessed to afford, and I think of the chaos that surrounds each of us behind the fences.
A thought: there is purportedly a law on the books in Florida that bans inmates/residents from owning and operating a business outside the prison. It's considered by the state of Florida to be unfairly advantageous for a correctional institution resident to manage a business inside, as compared to free world people: we residents have "nothing but time".
I disagree with this assessment, on grounds that upon return to the free world, there are jobs that those who have served time are barred from, whether or not they have probation. Yet, the expectation is that frequently, we must pay some form of restitution and fines upon release, or face punishment in the form of more time in prison or jail for failing to comply with that part of our mandates.
This leaves a person that just returned to the free world to struggle to make ends meet, working 50-60 hours a week without earning overtime as they work two jobs that will never promote them .
I posit that an inmate who can create a successful legal enterprise behind bars, where they are already highly operationally disadvantaged by being here should be allowed to not only have said business, but be allowed to put that money toward said fines, held in a trust until release.
Why a trust?
As I sit here, staring down a half-elapsed window to appeal, with friends on the outside trying desperately to get me legal representation that will actually work with me and my needs (to wit: be non-binary, be a PoC, and be disabled? Good luck getting represented in Florida!), I consider the people who might start or continue their business behind the bars getting heard and vindicated in court. Those fines and restitution should be returned to them, not given to the courts. The funds should, therefore, be held in a trust or escrow until the end.
What's our disadvantage?
As alluded to earlier, people believe we have "nothing but time on our hands", which is true for some.
What we also don't have is access to modern technology.
We don't have the ability to go source products ourselves, relying on those outside to do the research for us, which where it can take a free worlder an hour or less, may take us several days or more than a week as we rely on electronic messaging that has to go through moderation in both directions.
We don't have easy phone access to call around for quotes, either: if we call, recipients get a notification that this call is from a corrections facility, and is subject to monitoring. If you weren't expecting that call out there, you are likely going to hang up. Seriously. Especially so, given that most of Florida DOC's phones require the recipient of the call to set up a phone account to receive more than one call from the caller, and the first call is limited to just a few minutes.
We can't just drive, bike, or walk to a business to get pricing, either. I'm sure you get why. :)
This takes nothing but time to a new level of meaning: we have idle hands, and are barred from doing good with them.
What do we do, then?
As resident wards of state in the Florida Department of Corrup Corrections, we sit in our dorms, day in and day out, going to woefully under-provisioned classrooms filled with inadequate hardware and software, no books (other than Bibles from the Chapel, of which there are PLENTY), and told, "Learn a vocation!" or "Get an education!"
Okay, I would learn a vocation, if there were materials in my classroom from which I could learn!
We inmates aren't given much to work from: A Windows Server 2016 machine which we remote into from unlicensed Windows 10 machines, with a copy of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.10, Gimp 2.10.30, and Inkscape 1.1 installed. Blender is also present, but the hardware we have is extremely nonperformant for its needs, since we only have 32 GB of RAM in that server and an eight core Xeon Silver 4208 CPU onboard; No GPU is present. The server serves more than my class of 15 students, resulting in part of our hardware struggles.
We have had a lot of people join and leave the class, because there is nothing from which they can even learn in that room -- no books; only OpenOffice has its helpdocs installed (Gimp and Inkscape are Learn by Trial and Error); we haven't any kind of internet, so we can't even reach YouTube, StackOverflow, or other sources of educational material.
It is definitely not our instructor's fault. They threw the poor lady in with promises that her Teacher Assistants will handle the day to day running of the class, then proceed to give her absolutely nothing that she can use to even help students who wish to learn.
We can't burn 'em...
Oh, let's bring this round toward home and point fingers at the DOC's Library Review Committee, who will allow or ban books arbitrarily. If the LRC bans a book, no facility will allow it to be mailed in from publishers or retailers. So if a student tries to order a book that could further their vocational learning, it gets confiscated with a reason, such as "does not serve the interests of the facility's rehabilitative efforts or poses a security threat."
Yeah, a job security threat as you try to ensure the student-resident makes their permanent address 1 Prison Lp, Anycity, FL, 33433, USA.
A final parting shot:
Education can make the difference between repeat offender, and returner to society.
I would desperately wish that this mindset spread like wildfire both behind the fences, and outside.
Let's rebuild this mental playground to build stronger, more resilient people, and curb this chaos of animalistic treatment.
I love books. :)