A Moment of Psychosis

Hey, readers. A brief moment:

Trigger Warning

I'm talking a bit about mental health, particularly mine, and I make a generalized reference to sexual abuse behind the wires.
If you're okay with that, ...

So, I was sitting here one night in prison with Hiroshi Kawaguchi's "Passing Breeze" playing on loop, using it to put my mind back on its rails.

For several minutes, I had to convince myself of a number of facts:

I am not in my jail cell back in Hillsborough County, Florida.
I am not alone.
Those of you beyond the wires are not figments, fragments of my imagination being used to stabilize a shattered mind.
I am not alone.
I am still strong, even in this moment, even at this time of my life.
I am not alone.
I will survive this event front.
Prison is but a place, not my life.

Differences of Definition

I want to address Hillsborough County's idea of protective custody, versus what I got in my home state.

In my home state, Oregon, the concept of protective custody put me in a jail module with up to ten others. I was behind a wooden door with plexiglass, by myself in the cell, and allowed two and a half daily hours of time outside my cell in the day room. This time was shared with up to three residents. We had access to a shower stall with privacy barrier, could ask for a (disposable, double-edged) razor to trim facial hair, and were treated humanely.

Everyone in the module was cordial, polite to each other, traded books we grabbed from the aged book cart to make sure we all had something to read, and we generally felt safe. It was quiet and peaceful.

Hillsborough County, Florida, however...
I was locked into a solitary cell, seemingly forgotten beyond having a disposable ketchup cup of pills shoved into a door flap twice a day, three meals (if you can call the garbage Trinity Services Group were serving us "meals"), and the random peekings-in of various staff.
I couldn't even TRY to contact my people for five days: I had no paper, no pencil or pen, no envelopes, no postage, and until they came five days later to ask me (quite rudely) if I'm coming out of my cell that evening, not even a chance to call my people to say I was alive, or hopefully to order a pen or pencil, paper, and envelopes with postage.
When I came out, I was told I have an hour; do I want to shower?

Yes, please, sir.

I got to have my shower, but then could not get the phone to work for calling my people. The officer on duty didn't give a care. It was two weeks before I could get in touch with my people. One of them had been following me online, saw I transferred to Hillsborough County, Florida, and mailed me a postcard. It's all that he was allowed to send me.

A postcard!?

Yes, readers, he could only mail a postcard, and I don't even receive that!
There is a digital mail service that is used by jails and prisons across the USA, under the lie of "curtailing the ingress of drugs".
Your postcard is scanned in, most likely by a high speed scanner, shredded to bits, and the digitized result is then printed on a sheet of US Letter sized paper in full color.
This print is then delivered to the officers of the module who will come and put it under your door. That's mail call in Florida jail.
(Comparison: I got my friend's actual, signed letter in Oregon; not a copy of it.)

Prison is slightly better: That same friend can now mail a proper letter to one of those digital mail services. The letter is then scanned, shredded, and its digital contents are sent to the recipient via our dormitory kiosk. For those of us lucky enough to have tablets, we also receive the scans there, and for $1.00 plus tax per page, can print the letter ourselves.

An interlude, featuring JJ.

JJ has returned to Blessington from his transfer!
He was out for Dental surgery after all.
He tells me he can only see six months previous on the kiosk for messages. Since he does not get a lot of messages, it tells me the limitation is hard-coded into the system. I can also only see six months back, but I communicate almost exclusively in writing; I suspected it was message count, and his response debunked that.

We return you to our pre- and post-shower patdown, already in progress.

To leave my cell in the solitary confinement wing, I was subject to a patdown.
I sat in the day room by myself, with a television blaring on the wall after I've had my shower. There's no table to sit at -- just a plastic chair exists in the room. A single phone on the wall exists.
Once my phone issues were resolved, I could make one free five minute call per week. I called my people, just to hear rational, reasonable people talking. It took some of the edge off solitary confinement.

Abnormality in Neurodivergence

I do not think that being isolated from people part was the hardest part of being in solitary. It's having all of my data and activity streams shut off that hurt me the most.
You cannot have books in Hillsborough County Jail, unless you came in with them in your property: your people cannot order books for you through retail sources (e.g. Thriftbooks, Amazon), and the various book projects do not typically send to jails (nor could they in this case). There is no in-pod library. You do not even see tablets in solitary, while your jailers proudly proclaim in their facility manual that your tablet has all of the books you need or want to read!

I spent FOUR AND A HALF MONTHS in this solitary hell, only to be put on a prison bus and suddenly immersed into chaos!
Going from being by yourself to suddenly surrounded by 55, then 71, then 95 others, when you have trouble in groups of ten or twenty?

Yes, let's disregard the medical and mental health diagnoses we've received, showing this person has an anxiety disorder. Let's put them in the pool with everyone else. If they drown, it's another tally on the board, and no one will care.

SegCon

There is purportedly a segregation of convicts in this state's prison system, but only by a small segment. It is said, if you are confirmed a member of a gang, you are to be sent to specific camps here in Florida.

If you can segregate by that, why not also segregate by crime type?

There are people in this system who are abused, extorted, and otherwise harmed because of the crime they (allegedly) committed. Contrary to how some of us may feel, the criminal is already being punished by the legal system. It's why they are staying here, instead of having an experience on VRBO or Airbnb, watching the moon set into the ocean while kicking around a campfire, making s'mores with the biggest damn smile on their face.

To turn that criminal into a victim of a crime similar to what they may or may not have committed?

That's not karma. That's hatred, hostility at its core.

The Dhammapada, v. 5

Hatred ceases not by hatred.
Hatred ceases by LOVE alone.
This is a universal rule.

I have made acquaintances, perhaps even friends, with people who are genuinely afraid of this carceral system. Some of them have fallen victim to the abuses I have hinted.

These are also people who can, at the stroke of a pen, be committed to a facility from which there is no End of Sentence date, which I briefly discussed in Polygraphs and Probationees. They are people who may have made mistakes in their past, who worry about being prejudged absent any other errors or flaws. They are admixed with the general population of prisons, with those who are not repentant and quite happy to extort them for their canteen funds or for self-gratification, or even forcing them to have their loved ones send money to the extortionist instead of the loved one in dubious exchange for safety.

But what can be done?

Consider how we can better handle pretrial detainment, and make several changes. After all, the saying goes, Innocent Until Proven Guilty.

Even if someone has a public defender or a paid attorney, full access to legal libraries should be a guaranteed right. This allows the detainee the option to look into laws that may affect their case, and even grant them the chance to understand if they're being ineffectively represented.

When a Public Defender is assigned, the first conversation they have with the client needs to be an assessment of how well the Defendant understands their rights, INCLUDING the privilege of dismissing the Public Defender, should they feel underrepresented or unrepresented, and the ramifications of doing so.

If the case in question requires a psychological evaluation, the evaluation needs to be thorough enough to capture contexts of answers, and scoring should be based on full context. Further, a person's preferred pronouns or intimate partnerings should not be a major basis for negative evaluation -- this removes or at least mitigates a negative bias just because the Defendant isn't cisgender or heterosexual.
This is provably an issue when you evaluate people hit with civil commitment in states that bury people in those facilities.

Scoring for a psychological exam needs to be presented to the Defendant, allowing them the opportunity to challenge what may be an inaccurate or biased picture of their persona. This also forcibly reveals any biases in evaluation to the Defendant, such as one related to their gender preferences or abuse they received prior to the allegation they face.

Don't jail a pretrial detainee any longer than is necessary. If the person is clearly not a flight risk, keeping them more than a day is deleterious to their needs. That person could lose their job for missing several days of work, which is harmful to their well-being, and I don't see jails paying people $150 a day for their missed work.

I do see jails charging $35 booking fees, or $3 a day for housing them while they wait for trial. (I was charged $35 by Hillsborough County, but no booking fee back home; The money was taken out of my commissary funds, which were for buying food to fill in gaps when receiving meals that I cannot eat, for paper and postage, and for hygiene needs which were poorly met in Florida.)

And WHY Should It Be Done?

To subvert the current plot in America, of course!
We're busy playing "Guilty Until Proven Otherwise" with lives here in the USA. For those outside the USA, looking in, they see barbarism perpetuated upon her people, by her people. We don't need an invasion to start that behavior; we do this to us until we kill us.

I dreamed one night that people did not have to face these trials and tribulations, that the judicial system was simplified to make it approachable in fairness to all comers, that prisons were actually correctional in their carceral state, and that honesty was the prevailing state across humanity.

Can we make that dream come true?