Imprisoned Souls

Endings Make Way for New Beginnings

lightingthedarkness — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 16:33:47 +0000

SOOOOO MUCH has changed since I was last on here. I began writing my thoughts about the work I was doing in the prison but that job no longer exists due to economic state budget cuts. Looking back, I learned an incredible amount. As it turned out, I became very good at my job once the “behind-the-scenes” yuck from a jealous employee was identified and dealt with. I didn’t realize I was on a fellow-employee’s proverbial hitlist until all was said and done. Truth has a way of prevailing.

I like this site and think I will be changing the dynamics from prison employee to WAKETHEHELLUPAMERICA…lol. I have some things I would like to share…okay, really? A place to compile some interesting tidbits is truly what I’m after.

I am dating a phenominal man….whew. Didn’t believe that would ever happen. Out of the turmoil of my life walked a man whose spirit and soul are more precious than any amount of gold and silver could ever equate to. I thank the Lord above for this gift as it could have ONLY come from Him. No one on this earth has taken such care of me as this man. I adore his “prizes” ). Sometimes it is a simple candy bar. Sometimes a latte’…carmel at that …sometimes, like yesterday, it is a bag of freshly (still warm) roasted coffee beans so I can make my own lattes…uhm, yeah, the machine was given to me by him too. Sometimes, it is a book that I have been interested in reading…lol………..there are so many “prizes”!!! He says I am a “good-girl” and a “good-egg”…I am truly believing it these days . It is through him that I have found my feminity and owned the fact that I ADORE pink!!! He is simply a man of ACTION. No pretty words that are lies. No false promises or intentions…just a realism I’d dreamed about but couldn’t imagine coming to fruition. There is NO “settling” with him. He is PERFECT!

I plan to write more often using this site to add interesting articles, how tos, thoughts, etc…the world as we knew it is gone…and will continue to deteriorate as a way to make a path for one which is new and full of God’s will and promises. Before such time, however…things will get pretty darn ugly…”Put up stores in the good times for the bad”… How many have actually prepared for life to change in the blink of an eye? Not nearly enough.

Shadows…

lightingthedarkness — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:27:27 +0000

I’ve not written in a long while. For the last five weeks, I’ve been in CORE Acedemy. These 8 hour a day classes are packed full of verbal, non-verbal, para-verbal techniques as well as physical type tactics such as self-defense and control. There has been an incredible amount of knowledge given to the 24 of us in the class. Yesterday, we studied the causality of prison take overs. Oh my…it was the first time I actually had second thoughts regarding my job. I am a female working in a male prison.

This new offender management program is such that I am in the mix of them nearly all of my day. It isn’t just a matter of them coming to see me one-on-one as a couselor or during meal time, medical, etc. My day is spent with approx. 15 in a group behind closed doors without a radio or phone. No, there aren’t officers present. There are times when they are in my office which is sandwhiched behind two closed doors in a hallway. There are numerous hallways set-up in dormartory style with oodles of hiding places. Only two officers are in the building and many times, I do not even see them…especially during count. IF these male offenders want to hurt me, they absolutely can. Some are awful people hell bent on making life miserable for others. They are capable of acts that, before yesterday, I could not even fathom. We studied the 15 day seige of the prison in Arizona. There is a book a female officer wrote about how the inmates held her hostage, raped her, beat her, and etc. It is called, “Fifteen Days in Hell”. We saw videos of fights where officers’ necks were broken and tossed over rails, where unprovoked punches to the face to some who were actually trying to help offenders like at medical. And yet, we also saw videos from the prison I work at where gang fights broke out in multiple places and not one officer or staff were touched.

After the intelligence was gathered, the “power” inmates reported that they were especially directed to NOT hurt staff. Why is that? They reported that it had to do with the immense respect and humanism we treat them with. FAIR FIRM & CONSISTENT is the way we are all taught to do our jobs. Communication skills are more effective than power struggles. We talk to them. We listen to them. We hold them accountable. But do so with compassion. I believe in the way AHCC is doing business. After viewing how others do business, our way works. However, I now have a healthy amount of fear. No more walking around as if these men would not hurt me. Some will do whatever they can to brutally kill me if given the chance. Preditors cannot be redirected. I refuse to live in fear…in a shadow of who I am…BUT, I am certainly more aware of not only prison culture/life but out in my own community as well. Afterall, every offender was once IN our community.

I find that I now watch everything. My eyes always moving. I entered an elevator the other day and a man got into the elevator at the last moment before the door closed. Immediately, without thought, I stepped back into the corner adjacent to him in my “ready” stance with my arms up and my hands playing with my rings. No fear…just prepared incase.

My view of life is just now very different

Internal Conflict

lightingthedarkness — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:05:29 +0000

How do you show compassion to one who had no compassion for another? How do you smile with kindness when you KNOW some of those you work with did the most atrocious things to another and would to you if given even the smallest of opportunity? Well, the simpliest answer is that, “IT AIN’T ABOUT ME!” Community as The Agent of Change is much more difficult to wrap your head around than I previously understood. All that I do has to be about THE COMMUNITY we are all trying to create. Yes, it requires working with the individual in order to make changes within themselves so that, collectively, the whole of the community benefits…be whew wee, it is sometimes very tough to not want to councel the individuals. That is the responsibility of the community…or their personal councelors…it is NOT, I repeat NOT, for a simple Right Living Tech to participate in. My job is to run the Right Living meetings and tend to just the Right Living aspects. The inmates understand this MUCH more so than I do and thus them manipulating a “staff-splitting” scenerio is simplier to do with us who come from outside DOC. They know we want to “help” them…that we are soft-hearted. For instance, this happened to me recently:

Inmate: Ms. Nelson, can I talk to you for a moment?

Me: Sure (should have responded with something like, “depends on what it is regarding.)

Inmate: I cannot seem to get this stuff done through my councelor.

Me: Well, I cannot help you with that. You need to see your CC councelor. I have no idea about that kind of stuff. However, if you’d like to have me proof read something for errors, I can do that. (WRONG! I cannot do that and boy did he RUN with that causing all kinds of havok resulting in a “sit-down” with the Unit’s CUS.)

As it turned out, this indivdual has a history of wanting what he wants RIGHT NOW and goes to any lengths to see to it. I was looking at the whole thing as helping him and if the councelor is that busy, then helping her/him too. UHG! I was being manipulated and had no clue. There is an EDUCATION crew in place of inmates (community members) and I could have refered him to them. I was wanting to help him MYSELF. I am not a white night, I am not the agent of change…and in this “community” the best thing I could have done to help this inmate work on his self-defeating behavior would have been to allow HIS community to help him.

“Us Against Them”

lightingthedarkness — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:00:38 +0000

BLUE + YELLOW = GREEN

The blue badges are worn by DOC (Department of Corrections) staff. The yellow badges are worn by all contracted staff. The green badges are worn by community members (inmates).

It is “Us angainst them” is a very common phrase in policing and corrections. The issue is that “Right Living” isn’t. One of the core pieces is “Staff as Community”. I will tell you that this is INCREDIBLY difficult! The criminal mindset is hardcore and those in corrections for such a long time are too. It is always a safety and security thing. Overcoming this mentality is painfully difficult. Some staff are seriously changing their whole thought patterns just as inmates are. To whitness that is absolutely WONDERFUL. People rarely seperate that mindset from home and work and thus it spills over into all aspects of their life. I have seen the burliest of hardened C/Os take a look at this program, work it out themselves and make HUGE changes within their lives. They are the greatest testimony thus far that “Right Living” actually makes a difference. Statistics will likely be the only way to know if it works for inmates as the years go by; if/when residivism rates go down.

Those of us coming from a community background, having never known law enforcement or prison culture struggle to find the balance. All do, really. Inmates are used to “Just do your own time”. Corrections staff are used to having to CONSTANTLY be on watch duty, but it falls on those coming directly out of the community to bridge the gap. The “Us against them” puts up this wall (that surely was/is needed when dealing with hardened criminals) but as Right Living slowly enters in, some of the wall gets chipped away. I am not saying that criminals are “safe”…oh Lord, far from it. But if criminal behavior is learned, then something else can also be learned. There is so much hate in the world anyway. For the most part, more of those locked away from society will re-enter society…shouldn’t we at least TRY to give them more constructive tools so they have a chance at making other choices? Well, even you do not think so…maybe Right Living can stop the criminal who got out and thinks about robbing your house cause he thought about “view-switching” or some other concept, component, core skill.

Principles of WORTH

lightingthedarkness — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:11:54 +0000

W = Willingness
O = Open-mindedness
R = Respect
T = Truthfulness
H = Humility

The principles are the cornerstones for Right Living.

One has to be WILLING to take a look into themselves, willing to admit they may not have all the answers, willing to make a change, willing to grow, willing to accept, willing to own their behaviors.

One has to be OPEN-MINDED to the concepts, to look at something differently than they know, different that they previously understood.

One has to understand RESPECT. For many, it is to give and receive it. For some it is to always come from that place of respect regardless of what others are saying/doing. But there is also another factor…to respect yourself and those you love to learn how to not cause anymore pain.

One has to be TRUTHFUL in all things. Where they are at during any part of their growth process, truthful in what they see and how they feel, truthful in how they affect others and how others affect them.

One has to have HUMILATY. To admit they do not have all the answers, to acknowledge they aren’t truly all that and the bag of chips…but that it’s okay to be human, to have faults, to make mistakes.

Of course, there are other aspects to this acronym but for the most part, to be WORTH “it” to be whole, to become healed from past wounds, to care enough about one’s self to be WORTH the fight it takes to overcome is the gift of these simple five letters. For those stuck in the cyclic yuck of self-defeating, self-destructive behaviors, true WORTH is hard to accept. But broken down into smaller concepts individuals can focus on one aspect at a time and eventually find that they’ve found WORTH when all is said and done.

Living in the lie

lightingthedarkness — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 04:01:46 +0000

So few are willing to look at themselves honestly, truthfully (and no these words do not have the same definitions), deeply and/or openly. For those who are truly authentic and transparent, living in society is hard enough. But try surrounding yourself with fellow co-workers who have their own hidden and very personal agendas as well as inmates whose very nature is to hone the skills of lying, deceiving, and manipulating for their own personal gain. UHG! The real difference is that within the walls of a prison, YOU KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT. The same cannot be said for maneuvering through society. I have been the recipient of debilitating lies, games, hurtful manipulations, individuals willing to do just about anything in order to get what their self-centered selves want. Holding onto tiny shreds of hope…thinking that maybe one day, somehow, people will get a clue, stop hurting themselves and others needlessly. Maybe one day they’ll receive their “release” date to true freedom.

What I am talking about here is that “freedom” is not external but internal. Serving “self” can lots of times come from lies one holds as beliefs…protection mechanisms. People who hurt inside hurt others. If you have others in your life who lie, cheat, manipulate, are so self-centered that they are incapable on focusing on another individual, then they as well as yourself, are wrapped up in the bonds of fears. Therefore, neither party can experience true freedom. Fears of failure, fears of successes, fears of negative evaluation, fears of not being good enough, fears of being alone, fears of not being accepted for who one truly is…all these LIES lead to the self-destructive, self-defeating behaviors. Add either drugs and alcohol to the mix and well, the internal issues and fears become exasserbated. But even without the drugs/alcohol the behavior is cyclic. Living with these lies that have become their truths for such a long time…sometimes as far back as the individual can recall…only makes it more difficult to see and/or admit there is even an issue. You can tell someone a million times they matter, they are accepted, they are valued, they are loved…BUT, they will not believe you until/unless they learn to see it for themselves. They HAVE to WANT to. Period. So here is the hardest part of all with respect to the Right Living program…helping one to get to the place of willingness to find the lies inside themselves. They will fight you, fight against the program, fight to stay in what they know even though it is false, even if it hurts themselves and others. They will attack as if cornered. They will do just about anything in order to continue what they have chosen to believe to be truth. Seeing the lie(s) is painful…excrutiatinly so.

Make no mistake, it isn’t only inmates who have self-destructive, self-defeating behaviors, who live in the lie(s). Their elevated criminal actions/activities just ensured they were caught. But unlike the greater society, at least at Airway Heights, they have little choice but to address this. Some will be successful and others will not, but they surely ALL have the opportunity to do so unlike those in society who walk through life lost and suffering a greater imprisonment than confinement behind locked doors and razor wire.

WHY we need to look at a new way of doing business?

lightingthedarkness — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:10:02 +0000

THOSE RELEASED WILL BE YOURS AND MY NEIGHBORS!!!!!!

Friday, October 2, 2009 – Page updated at 12:01 AM

State may close 2 prisons to cut costs

By Jennifer Sullivan

Seattle Times staff reporter

After cutting loose more than 8,000 offenders from probation in the past two months, the state Department of Corrections is considering an even more drastic cost-reduction measure: closing at least one prison.

Faced with the need to slash millions of dollars from their respective budgets, the Department of Corrections (DOC) and the state Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration are awaiting a report from the governor’s Office of Financial Management that is expected to recommend shuttering one adult and one juvenile prison, a move that would result in massive job cuts and the shuttling of hundreds of inmates to other facilities.

“It’s like a ‘Sophie’s Choice’ situation,” said DOC Secretary Eldon Vail. “Something has to be shut down.”

Vail said consultants working on the report have visited the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, the Monroe Correctional Complex, McNeil Island Corrections Center, Ahtanum View Corrections Center and Pine Lodge Corrections Center for Women in recent weeks to see where cuts can be made. The visits don’t necessarily mean those prisons are being considered for closure, he said.

The DOC budget for the 2009-2011 biennium is nearly $1.8 billion, a roughly $130 million (or 6.7 percent) reduction from the previous two-year period, said agency spokesman Chad Lewis.

Dan Robertson, deputy assistant secretary of the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration (JRA), the juvenile equivalent of DOC which is overseen by the Department of Social and Health Services, said the JRA saw its budget cut by nearly $23 million (9.7 percent) for this biennium to $213 million. He expects that the report will recommend closing one of two medium/maximum-security facilities — Green Hill School in Chehalis or Maple Lane School near Centralia — which could save the state an estimated $12 million.

Closing any facility would result in staff layoffs and the transfer of inmates to other prisons, Vail and Robertson said. However, neither knew how many jobs could potentially be lost.

The DOC and its juvenile-corrections counterpart have been cutting their respective budgets for months through layoffs, by releasing offenders from probation and even by releasing some inmates from custody.

Since July 1, about 8,200 adult offenders deemed to be low risk to reoffend and nonviolent have been cut loose from community custody, this state’s version of probation. Before July, when a new law addressing probation was implemented, the state was supervising about 27,000 offenders outside of prison, Vail said.

The cost-cutting Senate Bill 5288 ordered the reduction in the number of offenders on probation by dropping most low-risk felons and misdemeanor offenders from the program. Sex offenders and violent felons will remain under DOC supervision after their release from prison.

Almost 300 prison jobs and 60 community-corrections positions were cut as a result. An additional 200 community-corrections jobs are expected to be slashed by the end of the year, Vail said.

Governor’s turnabout

The slashing of probation services is a complete change from Gov. Chris Gregoire’s stance three years ago when she ordered tightened supervision of convicted felons who violated the terms of their prison release. The governor’s move came after the 2006 deaths of three Seattle-area police officers were blamed on offenders under DOC supervision.

Lewis, of the DOC, said cuts resulting from the Senate bill will not impact the supervision of violent offenders on probation.

At the JRA, 85 juvenile offenders have been cut from parole over the past three months, leaving about 444 still under supervision, Robertson said.

Robertson said that because of budget cuts about 34 percent of the nearly 700 youths currently incarcerated will not be placed on parole after they serve their terms.

Robertson said this change will likely impact recidivism rates, which he said had been showing promise after the agency revamped its juvenile parole program to include mandatory family counseling.

“If these cuts go through they’ll further deteriorate public safety,” said Tim Welch, spokesman for Washington Federation of State Employees, the union that represents community-corrections officers and administrative staff. “It will probably take a tragedy for the governor and Legislature to realize the grave impact of these cuts.”

Tracey Thompson, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 117, which represents 5,800 DOC employees at 13 prisons, said any closures of prisons or wings inside prisons would be shortsighted.

“Our biggest concern is about closing units and facilities when we’re looking at forecasts that will say that the prison population will start increasing in the next two or three years,” Thompson said, citing figures released by the Washington State Caseload Forecast Council.

The council, which researches potential caseloads in corrections, human-services and public education, actually expects that prison populations will slightly drop between now and early 2011, then begin to slowly grow again, a committee staff member said.

The forecast is based on the average imprisonment rate divided by the projected state population, which is expected to grow.

McNeil Island in play?

While it’s unclear which prison could be recommended for closure, Sen. Jim Hargrove, D-Hoquiam, has long supported a plan to close the McNeil Island Correctional Complex, a medium-security island prison in Pierce County. Hargrove, who chairs the Human Services and Corrections Committee, said he will be briefed on the closure recommendations, but he doesn’t know when.

“We have a very inefficient prison [McNeil Island] and I’m willing to take a look at the consultants’ work,” Hargrove said. “I’m not sure what the recommendations are at this point. We need to look at making our corrections system more efficient in this budget crisis.”

Thompson and other opponents of closure of the McNeil Island prison say that it would push additional costs to the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), which runs the state’s mental-health treatment program for civilly committed sex offenders on a portion of the island. DOC runs vital services for the island, including ferry and fire services. If the prison is closed, DSHS would have to pick up the tab for those services because there is no proposal to close the sex-offender treatment facility.

Washington isn’t the only cash-strapped state trying to save money by slashing prison costs.

In California, there are proposals to release 40,000 inmates, trim $250 million from its prison rehabilitation program and lay off hundreds of corrections workers, according to The Associated Press.

In Oregon, the tough economy has resulted in a delay in implementing a voter initiative mandating stiffer sentences for drug and property crimes, said Jeanine Hohn, spokeswoman for the Oregon Department of Corrections. Another change includes allowing some inmates to receive up to 30 percent off their sentences for good behavior, she added.

“Six million [dollars] has been taken out of our budget for the ’09-11 biennium; certainly it is a chunk of money,” Hohn said. “We haven’t had to do layoffs yet, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have to.”

Jennifer Sullivan: 206-464-8294 or jensullivan@seattletimes.com

Copyright © The Seattle Times Company

Hello world!

lightingthedarkness — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:34:43 +0000

Located just outside Spokane, Washington. A medium/minimum and "camp" facility

Welcome! This site is dedicated to the changing world of Offender Management from the view point of one who had never understood the prison culture world but graduated the local university and “landed” this job within a month of having graduated. No, I am not a Corrections Officer. My job title is: Right Living Tech. With 23+ years as a community volunteer in the “Meth Capitol of WA state” (AKA Felony Flats, The Twighlight Zone) combined with my Social/Behavioral Science BA Degree and minors of Sociology and Criminal Justice, I provide tools to inmates (now refered to as “Community Members”). The purpose is to help with residivism rates and to create a “nicer” environment for those who reside and work in the prison. Hopefully, as statistics allude to, the cost to run such facilities will greatly lessen .