I completely agree that education for inmates is essential!

Good luck with your website and always remember: the tide is rising…

Drugs & Intelligence, or lack of it. The world that they are released into today is not a very friendly place for those that are considered “blue collar” type. This past spring I spent six weeks in MS trying to help my youngest son find a job. He had just been released from the MS DOC after serving four years. He had a previous four years in an IN. prison.

When you speak about training while in prison, he spent more time behind bars than a lawyer spends in college. The website for the MSDOC looked good as to classes he could take while inside. So how many did he take? None. He was not allowed because he had a gun charge 20 years ago when he was 18. When I asked him did he learn anything inside? He thought about it a while and turned his head like the RCA dog, and answered, “I learned close to 300 ways to cook Meth”. So now he is trained. You will learn while inside, I like to call prison as the “College of Crime”.

During the six weeks I was there we had at our disposal, cell phones, my laptop, fax & mail in for applications. We went to job fairs, the MS state Employment Office, Headhunters that I paid $180.00, & Free Temp services. He applied to 134 different places before getting a job that paid $7.50 hr. When I said applied for I mean that we called, went to, faxed a resume to, and went in person. Every one of these he did a follow up within the following seven days.

I left there on 3/30/08 and he quit the job and left there the next day. He is now “In the wind” as they say he violated his parole and he will have to keep looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. When they catch him, he will have to go back and do the rest of his sentence which is18 more years.

In today’s world, and in MS, you need to get a drug test, criminal background search, and I think a full body cavity search in order to get to the $7.50 rate. I met some of his friends and they all worked for the same temp service at $5.50 per hour. This is the same temp service that my son worked for when he first got out. He operated a Bulldozer, a Backhoe, welded and ran a boring machine to tunnel under Interstate 55. He made $5.50 while the temp service charged $17.00 to the contractor for him. The temp service charged my son $5.00 a day for transportation to work.

I don’t think that we should throw open the doors and let all prisoners out of prison. There was a reason they got put in there in the first place. If nothing else, they didn’t play well with others out here. Should they be punished for their behavior? I think so, but just don’t punish them for life for their sins. Don’t punish their families along with them. If your family member calls you from prison it has to be collect, and the charges were in my son’s case $21.00 for a 15 minute collect call. Why so much? The prison gets a kick back from the contractor who does the phone service.

Senator James Webb VA will be starting a bill in the next Senate session to improve prisons. I wish him well, or should I say, I wish him luck. It is hard to make any changes when we are governed by 50 states doing things 50 different ways.

I will be contacting Sen. Webb soon to see if I can help him, or if he can help me as I start a new website to address the conditions in prison. I do not know at this time if I will make it just a blog or a full website. I purchased the domain name yesterday (InsidePrisonWalls) and it was my New Year resolution to get it started.

I have researched and set up a database with the necessary information to contact all 50 of the state DOCs in the US. I will ask them what their goals are in regard to how they handle their prison populations and how do they think they are doing in reaching these goals? I will start that in the next couple of weeks.

When one considers the problems of marijuana use for instance, it is clear that the most dangerous aspect of it’s use is getting caught by law enforcement. If you died from marijuana, you would be the first human to die from THC in it’s 5000+ years of recorded use. There is no lethal dose of this substance. Yet there are many that died from law enforcement of prohibition of marijuana. Bullets are far more dangerous than pot.

We hang on to this destructive policy for many reasons; entrenched beurocracy, religious self-richeousness, and established industry that does not wish to compete with such a versatile product. It can be made into more paper per acre than trees and it grows in 3 months. The paper lasts longer and taxes no toxic chemicals, unlike tree paper. It can be made into boards, extremely durable clothes (the original canvas genes were made with cannibis plants), biodiesel, various household soaps and other chemicals. It can do much of what petroleum can do, but we can’t grow the crop because it is illegal.

The point is: if we are a free country we need to allow people the freedom to make their own mistakes. We can help them be educated about their choices and recover from their choices by doing exactly what crOft suggests and that is legalizing all of it and then taxing the heck out of it while still underselling the illegal distributors. When we put the drug cartels out of business by using simple capitalistic principles (the same way China took away the US ability to manufacture little things) we will be striking a blow for freedom and putting our country on the road to recovery itself.

SPREAD MORE OF THIS INFO. Ask the question: Why are drugs illegal? Why. Let people make mistakes. Drugs don’t kill people. People kill themselves with drugs sometimes. Oh well. They also slip and fall when they run around the edge or a swimming pool. We don’t outlaw pools because some people drown — we just hope people will be good swimmers.

Keep on with this!

I’m ready for action. I’m ready for candlelight vigils or even torches in the streets.