Prison Pen Pals - A Letter From an Inmate

"I am writing to you from a very lonely prison cell," he wrote. "Three days ago I lost my mother to cancer. I was thinking about ending my life... But when I found your name and address in a used newspaper I felt as if this was the rejoinder to my cry for help."

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Deeply touched, I put the letter down. I felt genuine empathy for Jack in this, his time of grief and loneliness. It was mid November when received the letter arrived.

He went on to write, "I do hope you are the kind of people my mom all the time spoke so very of. Share my name at church, in hopes of me receiving a extra holiday wish. I would love to have at least one Christmas card...my mom's card would have been the only one I received."

As I continued to be drawn into Jack's loneliness I read further. "It breaks my heart to know that while other men will be occasion up their many Christmas greeting cards and occasion up their J. C. Penny Prison catalog order, I'll be left standing all alone. Mom could never afford a Christmas package, so that won't hurt so bad, but to be able to have a nice Christmas card and fellowship with the people my mom all the time believed in would de facto put a big smile on this sad face."

Stirred to action, I wasted no time. I e-mailed my family and friends a copy of Jack's letter asking them to send him a Christmas greeting. Then I contacted an connect pastor at my church and asked him to have the adult Bible fellowship classes gather signatures and greetings from the members.

I felt good. Affirmed. Prison ministry is leading I reminded myself.
There are thousands of men and women in prison today who are seeing for friendship. Many of these prisoners feel like social outcasts. They are isolated from family and friends. Prisoners love to receive mail.

It is ordinarily difficult and often impossible for prisoners to find friendship among the prison population. Many inmates have registered for pen pals on Internet sites. Yahoo lists about 30,000 and Google has over 35,000 sites listed. One site alone registered one million visits in the year 2001.

Prison Fellowship Ministries have a Pen Pal schedule that matches convicts to Christian volunteers. This is a prison pen pal site for inmates in need of a caring friend.

This site and others like it endeavor to bring friendship and hope to lonely prisoners. The programs try to help ease the loneliness of the incarcerated. I have read that ninety percent of inmates lose all taste with family and friends after 3 years. They soon feel loss of dignity, self-worth and self-respect. A letter or a card from a pen pal can lift their spirits.

Jack's letters continued to come. He told me of the excitement of receiving some cards and letters in response to my becoming his friend. He shared how delighted he was to receive the Bible and some Bible lessons I had sent. Near the end of one of his letters I became disturbed. Jack wrote, "My feet are old and I don't own a coat. These are cold winters in the Cumberland Mountains. They tell me up here to get a pair of Timberland boots." Jack went on give definite information on the cost of the boots and detailed money order instructions.

My niece, Jenny, had written to Jack. "I am so sorry to hear of the loss of your mom. I just lost my Dad one month ago so I think I know at least some of the sorrow you are feeling."
The surmise for my concern about Jack's request was not the cold winter in the Cumberland Mountains, but the sense that I had been used in furthering a "con game". Jenny's letter included the same request as I did for "Timberland Boots, number 31052 C, Size 9, tan, and a warm coat with a hood, number 94271B".

I later learned that a family from the church had received the request as well. I felt both vexed and betrayed. I was embarrassed that I had been taken in. I had been conned by a con...or had I?

When you come to be a prison pen pal it is leading that you be alert to known scams. You should be aware that institutions furnish all the basic needs of an inmate. Even educational programs are often free to prisoners. If an inmate is requesting a donation for something that seems unusual, taste the prison management before sending money.

Many people would never think writing to a prisoner. If you do find person you would like to write to, don't hesitate. Most are honest about what they are seeing for; however, use good judgment and tasteless sense, just as you would with whatever on the outside. The majority of inmates is lonely and desperately need a new friend. Most look send to be transitioned back into a effective life after prison. Your friendship can be a confident influence.

When I didn't rejoinder to Jack's request, he stopped writing. I had learned a good lesson, early. I have since corresponded with many private prisoners. My taste has been good. I trust that I have been a help and encouragement to these convicts. However, I often think of Jack and wonder if he ever bought the Timberland boots and the warm winter coat with the hood, for the cold walks in the yard behind the walls of Cumberland prison, in the state of Maryland.

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Prison Facts That We Need to Know

Life in prison has changed drastically in the past twenty-five years. In 1986, mandatory minimums for drug crimes were put into law. Arrest rates in normal have risen even though prison funding has not risen in concert and crime rates have dropped. Prisons are more crowded, availability to educational programs is being lowered because of financial crises, and inmate on inmate violence is increasing.

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Prisons are defined as either state or federal. Generally, life in federal prison is best than life in state prison. Federal prisons have more white-collar criminals and fewer violent criminals so are less dangerous. Federal prisons have best funding and tend to have best accommodations. In the past, there was less over-crowding; however, even federal prisons are facing overcrowding and violence is rising.

The Federal correctional principles has four levels of inmates and facilities. Federal Prison Camps, or minimum security facilities, are similar to college dormitories. There are no bars on the windows and movement within the camp is not restricted. In some cases, there is no fence and inmates could even walk off the camp if they chose. Low security Federal Correctional Institutions have fences and dormitory-style rooms. Medium security Federal Correctional Institutions often are surrounded by electronic duplicate fences, cells, and higher monitoring of inmates. High security prisons, or United States Penitentiaries, have perimeter walls or reinforced fences, cells, the highest staff-to-inmate ratio, and extremely restricted inmate movement. State prisons have similar levels. Specifics vary by state.

Federal menagerial facilities are special prisons dedicated to inmates with special needs, such as Federal healing Centers, or to special programs or menagerial needs, such as Federal transfer Centers and Federal Detention Centers. A collection of levels of inmates may be housed within these distinct prisons.

Medium and high or maximum level inmates are often housed in distinct parts of the same facility. These have more inmates and more who have been convicted of violent crimes. More inmates there are serving long or life sentences, factors that add to inmate on inmate violence.

On advent to a prison, convicts are registered into the prison principles and receive a registration number. After an orientation, convicts are assigned a counselor or case owner who manages a team of inmates. The counselor or case owner is responsible for overseeing that the inmate is progressing as he or she should. They make sure inmates are paying restitution and court-ordered financial obligations, that they are cooperating with any drug abuse programs, and are receiving essential healing care. Additionally, they make sure the inmate is advancing his or her education if necessary. Inmates are often not allowed to leave prison if they have not earned a high school degree, so Ged courses and diplomas are ready in prison.

Inmates can also work toward technical certificates and college degrees. There are celebrated cases of inmates earning law degrees in prison and representing themselves to get their convictions overturned. Prisons may offer college courses and degrees themselves. If not, inmates might be able to receive materials from face prisons straight through courses paid for by their family. In New York, inmates' way to educational grants has been cut drastically. The majority of inmates cannot afford to pay for college courses so have tiny hope of earning a college degree.

Without the chance to earn a secondary degree, the work an inmate does in prison can become more leading for his or her success after release. The counselors try to assign inmates jobs in positions that fit the skills they might already have. Inmates work to support the functioning of the premise such as in the electrical shop, the plumbing shop, or the library. They might do custodial work, kitchen work, or laundry. Some work in Correctional Industries, creating goods or providing services that are sold to civilians. This provides them a chance to earn skills useful upon reentry and to pay anyone financial responsibilities they have. Jobs are for two to seven hours during the day, five days a week. Inmates make between .15 and .50 an hour.

With the money inmates earn, they can shop at the commissary to buy food, clothing and supplies. Inmates normally bring one outfit to prison, but they might not be allowed to wear it. The commissary sells t-shirts, sweatshirts and sweatpants for inmates to wear.

The commissary offers tiny meals that can be heated in a microwave. The food served in prison, especially in state prison, is notoriously bad. The biggest complaints are that it is bland and, occasionally, unidentifiable. Due to overcrowding and normal increased violence, some facilities serve meals in cells to prevent fights in the dining halls. This leads to food being cold when it is supposed to be hot and hot when it is supposed to be cold. The commissary offers welcome alternatives.

Inmates can receive visitors along with family and friends that have been stylish by the facility's staff. One-and-a-half to three days each week are allotted to each prisoner for visits on a rotating schedule. Higher security prisons offer more time for visits since sentences are normally longer.

As the quality of life in federal prisons has gone down, some inmates look to special state prisons that offer trailers housed face of the actual prison construction for hymeneal and family visits.

Prisoners can call their families for varying amounts of time. Federal prisons allow inmates 300 minutes of call time per month. A tiny estimate of prisons offer way to the Internet and email.

Time allotted to spend face the convicts' cells varies from unlimited to fifteen minutes depending on the level of security. Minimum-security camps can offer unrestricted way to the outdoor prison areas. Maximum-security prisons might prescribe only a few minutes for inmates to spend outdoors. Outside, there is normally some fitness premise and equipment.

Indoors, there are fitness facilities, as well, where inmates can engage in sports along with basketball, touch football and weightlifting. Sports can become incredibly leading for prisoners. Espn reported on McNeil State Correctional Facility, a medium security prison in Washington State that was known for playing against teams of civilians and consistently winning.

When not allowed outside, prisoners can listen to radios and watch television in the television room. State prisons allow prisoners to keep televisions in their cells. Prisoners, of course, can read and write in their cells. Since complicated inmates are housed in small cells, there is tiny possibility for doing other things. Even these activities are only inherent with the consent of one's roommates.

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thinking Illness in the Prison system

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Should the mentally ill be placed in the mainstream citizen of a prison?

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Chances are you've never given much - if any - belief to this question. A paranoid schizophrenic kills man because the voices in his head tell him that man is an alien trying to steal his brain. Is that schizophrenic safe in a prison? Are the other prisoners safe with him (or her) there?

A man suffering with severe bipolar disorder shoplifts an armload of clothing during an strike of acute mania. He or she is sent to prison, to co-exist with gangbangers, rapists, and murderers. Or, perhaps worse, to live in a solitary cell with no human interaction, for 23 out of 24 hours each day. The acute mania shifts to severe depression. What are the chances he or she will survive the prison term?

According to the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1998 roughly 300,000 inmates had some form of mental illness. A decade later, that number rose to 1.25 million.

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (Nami) states that 16 percent of the prison citizen can be classified as severely mentally ill. This means that they fit the psychiatric classification for illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. However, the division skyrockets to as high as 50 percent when altered to consist of other mental illnesses, such as anti-social personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder.

Two major causes attribute to the rise of mentally ill inmates:

In the 1950s, the U.S. Had 600,000 state run hospital beds for those suffering from any form of mental illness. Because of deinstitutionalization and the subsequent cutting of state and federal funding, the U.S. Now has just 40,000 beds for the mentally ill. The inability to get permissible rehabilitation left this segment of our citizen vulnerable and, consequently, many of them now land in prisons.

Deinstitutionalization hasn't worked. All this has managed to do is to shift the mentally ill from hospitals to prisons - one institution to another. We have made it a crime to be mentally ill.

The largest psychiatric facility in the U.S. Isn't a hospital; it's a prison. At any given time, Rikers Island in New York City houses an estimated 3,000 mentally ill prisoners. The average inmate citizen at Rikers Island is 14,000. One out of every 4 to 5 inmates at this prison suffer from mental illness.

Florida judge Steven Leifman, who chairs the mental health Committee for the Eleventh Judicial Circuit, states that, "The sad irony is we did not deinstitutionalize, we have reinstitutionalized-from horrible state mental hospitals to horrible state jails. We don't even furnish rehabilitation for the mentally ill in jail. We're just warehousing them."

What happens to the mentally ill in an overcrowded, violent prison ideas with miniature to no psychological counseling available?

In state prisons, the mentally ill serve an average of 15 months longer than the average inmate. The very nature of most mental illnesses makes it difficult to result prison rules. These inmates are more likely to be involved in prison fights and they tend to fetch more escort violations.

Prison staff often punishes mentally ill inmates for being disruptive, refusing to comply with orders, and even for attempting suicide. In other words, these inmates are punished for exhibiting the symptoms of their illness.

Gaining parole is also more difficult for the mentally ill. Their disciplinary records are often spotty, they may have no family willing or able to help, and community services are ordinarily inadequate.

In October 2003, Human rights Watch released a report entitled Ill Equipped: U.S. Prisons and Offenders with mental Illness. Following two years of in-depth research, this club found that few prisons have enough mental health care services. Furthermore, it found that the prison environment is perilous and debilitating for the mentally ill.

An extract from Ill Equipped:

"Security staff typically view mentally ill prisoners as difficult and disruptive, and place them in barren high-security solitary confinement units. The lack of human interaction and the miniature mental stimulus of twenty-four-hour-a-day life in small, sometimes windowless segregation cells, coupled with the absence of enough mental health services, dramatically aggravates the suffering of the mentally ill. Some deteriorate so severely that they must be removed to hospitals for acute psychiatric care. But after being stabilized, they are then returned to the same segregation conditions where the cycle of decompensation begins again. The penal network is thus not only serving as a storage for the mentally ill, but, by relying on extremely restrictive housing for mentally ill prisoners, it is acting as an incubator for worse illness and psychiatric breakdowns."

According to Fred Osher, M.D., director of the town for Behavioral Health, Justice and public procedure at the University of Maryland, the majority of mentally ill inmates are arrested for misdemeanors and crimes of survival. He states, "That's a whole host of folks who land in the criminal justice ideas because of their behavioral disorders."

Those on the fringe of community are primarily affected. These citizen are roughly always impoverished and disabled by their illness. They have nowhere to turn, no one to help them, and so we toss them in prison. Even minor offenses keep them locked in prisons, since many cannot afford and/or do not know how to bond themselves out.

The recidivism rate among the mentally ill is higher than that among the general prison population. Prison has come to be a revolving door ideas for dealing with mental illness. By default, prisons have come to be the new mental hospitals. However, they lack the funding and the training to deal with these patient-inmates.

Ratan Bhavnani, menagerial director of the Ventura County lesson of the National Alliance on mental Illness, states that, "In general, citizen with mental illness can recover when given the acceptable rehabilitation rather than to be sent off to jail only to come to be more psychotic and come back and reoffend."

Michael Jung of Ventura, California suffers from bipolar and hears voices telling him that he is the devil. Over the past 10 years, Jung has been arrested a minimum of 15 times - all for relatively minor offenses. Earlier this year, Jung spent six weeks confined in G Quad, the unit where mentally ill inmates stay in their cells 23 out of the 24 hours in each day.

Cells such as those in G Quad are referred to as the "rubber rooms" because the walls are padded. There is no furniture in these rooms. The "toilet" is a grate in the floor. They are stripped naked and monitored via video camera. Inmates who are paranoid, delusional, or otherwise difficult to administrate are often placed in this type of cell, either for their own protection, the safety of the other inmates, or just plain convenience.

Susan Abril, a previous inmate who suffers from bipolar disorder, was placed in this type of cell. during her confinement, Abril began hearing voices for the first time. "I didn't sleep," she said. "I mentally went insane being locked down 23 hours of 24."

We are essentially production the mentally ill inmates sicker, as well as ensuring their return to an already massively overcrowded prison system. Obviously our current ideas is not working. We cannot expect prison staff to function as psychiatrists. We also cannot expect the mentally ill to be "rehabilitated" in a mainstream prison system.

The Taxpayer performance Board for Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois cited yearly savings in the tens of millions of dollars that could be gained by releasing thousands of non-violent offenders, closely monitoring them and providing substance abuse treatment, mental health counseling, education, job training, and employment opportunities.

For the most part, the mentally ill do not belong in prison. It would be economy (and smarter) for us as taxpayers to divert funding in order to furnish enough rehabilitation programs to keep them out of prison.

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