Other essays on this theme

Essay: "On the Edge"

Does anyone out there wonder why the Oklahoma recidivism rate is the 3rd highest in America? Has anyone thought that maybe, just maybe, the people you pay to run your prisons might have a little, tiny bit to do with it? Could it be, possibly, that more crime and recidivism for you might be job security and higher pay for them? You poor taxpayers feed a whole lot of very highly paid persons at every level the citizen who calls the cops and that parole board member who refuses to act on logical, accurate analysis and statistics.

While big government kept you busy working more for less, education and higher learning was thrown out the prison windows in favor of free, church-based, religion-centered programs. The price of prison did not decrease, so there is no guesswork about who pocketed the difference

A prisoner like me, who is innocent by the way, tries to teach himself something over 32 years of prison vacuum by purchasing Scientific American and Science News. Nature and science can't make much headway when the wardens give their mail guards license to steal. They regularly steal a minimum of 10-25% of these magazines; have for 32 years. David Orman and Melvin Campbell stole around 25% of my science magazines during 15 years at McAlester. Orman was so brave and safe in his massive thievery that he once stole my Scientific American every month for 7 months! He took over stealing prisoner's books and magazines from Melvin Campbell, who finally was forced to take his pension and go due to sexual harassment accusations from his coworkers.

The guards at Stringtown took away our college courses in 1981 while I was there. Preventing us from purchasing higher education seemed to sate them from stealing my science magazines for a while. They didn't seem to steal as much from me at the McAlester Trustee Building either, but I of course cancelled all my subscriptions before I escaped to find the actual killer of the porn merchant for them.

Shannon Smith at this hominy prison used to steal 10-25% of my science magazines until finally she got fired after a long career of prisoner mail, money orders, book and magazine thievery. She was superceded by Terrence Bolt, who enjoys stealing our mail now.

Over 3 decades that the Oklahoma Department of "Corrections" has stolen major fractions of our mail we've written hundreds of politicians, judges, legislators, bureaucrats, and supposed "civil rights" agencies about these monumental ongoing flagrant thefts of prisoner mail, and each and every one proved completely worthless in preventing a single theft by these mail guards. Part of the prison mail guard's scam in trying to steal almost as many magazines as he delivers is to cost us money and make it unprofitable for non-prisoner-insider merchants to deal with prisoners. (Prisoncrats have formed corporations to take advantage of their nationwide monopoly on selling to prisoners.) Every magazine or other publication that mail guards kick back to the publisher costs the publisher 50 cents. It costs me a stamp or two to find out what went wrong. It costs the distributor about $3 to re-send a replacement copy by 1st class mail.

Just for September Bolt has stolen all 4 issues of Science News, the October Scientific American, and possibly a "wired." Talking to him is like talking to a robot, or a recording. I've written about him in detail about how every piece of mail fulfilled every one of his many requirements as to address and content. He "answered" with non-sequiturs about the address. I brought him is non-answer and the address labels off the magazines and put my finger under the prisoner number that he said was lacking. He finally agreed that it was in fact not lacking.

Do you think he'll resume delivering 75-90% of my magazines? If you think so, you would need to think again. In prison, trying to correct a problem inevitably makes the problem worse, not better. This mail guard will undoubtedly increase his thievery in direct proportion to how angry I made him for having the gall to complain.

How do I know this? I've been through this exact, same cycle almost every year for 32 years. Setting this problem before the civil rights division of the justice department is a futile waste of time, effort, and stamps. These highly paid lawyer-bureaucrats vend only unsigned form-letter excuses no matter what prison abuses are detailed to them. Their scam for dodging and ducking their jobs is to demand we show a "pattern of abuse." This is not defined and is apparently impossible for prisoners to prove to their satisfaction. This highly secretive agency refuses even to divulge a single name of anyone within its walls. It is no mystery to me why they cannot be made to work.

Trying to get help from the real postal service is another futile waste. Exactly zero mail laws operate in prison. Mail theft is not a federal crime when state employees steal from prisoners. I know because various postmaster generals and this area's inspector A.T. Holmes told me. They deliver mail to the prison guards only, and refuse to make him deliver any to the prisoners.

Obviously the only way to stop some mail theft in prison is to simply cancel all subscriptions and don't order any more. But most prisoners prefer to get some thing and thus simply accept the guard's constant 10% thievery. Guards are like shoplifters and pickpockets, snatching an ever-increasing portion of the money our families send. Oklahoma's guards are particularly greedy. They are now refusing to provide their captives with simple things such as socks and underwear. Prisoners get a raggedy pair that should have been thrown away long ago. They droop down and you have to tie them up so they won't fall off you. But don't use a strip of raggedy sheet to do this! You could get an extra 10 years of your life stolen from you for "destruction of state property." In prison, clothes do not wear out. They are turned in to get a less raggedy item and then they are re-issued to new arrivals.

Prisoners who can afford to buy from the prison guard monopoly pay huge markups, sometimes as much as 125%, to avoid wearing rags, dodge eating gut meats and to watch TV, listen to radios, boil water, etc. The guard's monopoly on sales of clothes and TVs, etc. is very lucrative, and even more so when they periodically create reasons for them to steal it back from you, force you to send it home, force you to "donate" it to "charity" and then re-sell it to you later. Nothing you buy from the guard's monopoly is ever truly yours unless you can eat it quickly.

Jokelahoma prisoncrats also cut costs to the bone by shorting prisoners on medical and dental care. Often the guards create reason to separate you from your property for days at a time. You get nothing, sometimes not even the clothes you are wearing: no soap, no towel, no toothbrush or paste, no stamps, no pencil, envelope, nothing. They also often force prisoners to sleep on plastic pads with no sheets or blankets. This fiendish practice is one reason why prisoners are famous for creating, spreading, and dying from super bacteria.

The most ludicrous part of the prison cost-cutting scam is seeing so many toothless prisoners trying to eat while waiting for dentures that are "on order" but somehow virtually never come. Only lawsuits make standard medical malpractice lessen, and even then not by much. Also, thanks to our extremely expensive, slow and almost completely worthless lawyer system, each case that they are forced to address is treated like an isolated, independent occurrence, thus the deliberate malpractice that cause widespread, serious problems such as creation and spread of deadly mutant microbes that are never fixed.

This is only a very small part of living on the edge. More detailed accounts can be found on my site, www.jamesbauhaus.org. I hope you never have to live on the edge.