It’s Officer Appreciation Week and it basically amounts to the officers not doing their jobs and us being locked in for no disciplinary reason. I really don’t mind being locked in but being down for half a day makes the phone line unmanageable. So, I am unable to call my family. Meanwhile, my emails have not been getting sent. That tells me the personnel assigned to verify outgoing/incoming messages aren’t at work either. Mail is not being delivered. (They post a list of the incoming mail in the evening and it usually has no less than 10 names on it. This week there have only been a max of three. One day there was no mail at all.) We also have been fed bag lunches (bologna, peanut butter, bread, chips) and disciplinary meals (two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a pack of generic cookies) for the past few days.
I submitted an administrative complaint to the warden about pictures being denied and paperwork being forged by mailroom staff on the 30th of March and still haven’t received a receipt to prove it is being processed. I’ve been asking the counselor about it for the past few weeks. (The forged paperwork was an incoming publication form that mailroom officer K. Padilla forged to deny photographs I had coming in. They were coming in from Freeprints and she noted that all 25 photos had sexually explicit content. According to regulations, “sexually explicit” means actual depictions of sex acts. These were admittedly photos of scantily clad women but none showed any nudity and would normally be cleared to come into the prison without an issue. I have a serious issue with government employees who just make up the rules as they go along or those who have some kind of an agenda to fulfill through their duties. Also, this denial form goes into my permanent inmate record and so it appears that I attempted to have 25 photos of pornography sent into the prison, which is not the case. K. Padilla has been denying all of the photos that have been coming in for RHU inmates and so I filed paperwork asking that she be removed from the mailroom and that she be suspended for 30 days per the guard-conduct regulation. I also cited title 18 since what she did is technically a felony.)
And then this: The VA sent $625 to the lockbox on April 24 to replace the payment that was sent in May of 2025 but was lost. It still hasn’t been deposited into my account. (The “lockbox” is where all of our money orders have to be sent. They won’t be processed if they’re sent to our individual prisons so they have to be sent to a separate address. The VA originally sent my payment here and it wasn’t processed or returned according to mailroom policy (surprise, surprise), so I filed a tort claim for it and after almost a year I asked the VA to resend it to the lockbox. It has been almost a month now and it still has not been processed onto my account. I could really use that $625!)
I understand that the guards have a shitty job, dealing with potentially violent idiots all day. But it is a job they signed up for. The majority of the job consists of sitting in an office watching YouTube all day, making a lap once an hour, counting the inmates once or twice a shift, and perhaps handing out and collecting trays. It’s boredom punctuated by momentary excitement if something happens with the inmates. But that is rare in the RU.
I get that they need to build morale but that’s the responsibility of the warden. Making the lives of the inmates more miserable for a week shouldn’t be necessary to do so.