Musings

There wasn’t any mail delivery on Wednesday because of the holiday. Hopefully a letter from Ted will arrive today. I might plant a lawn chair down there by my mailbox.

I called my phone company, Bright House, yesterday. It turns out Bright House does not allow collect calls from prisons. Sure wish I found that out sooner! Ted probably did try to call, but couldn’t get through.

Bright House recommended a pre-paid phone service, Global Tel Link, which services all Florida prisons. I know this service is quite expensive. When Ted was at the Pinellas County Jail, $25 on Global Tel Link funded approximately two 20-minute calls. I found another site online – ConsCallHome.com. I’ll call the CFRC in the morning to see if they use that service. Cons Call Home costs about $25 for 300 minutes.

Another parent emailed me. Her son knew of Brevard and said it was good that Ted was out of there. He said it is widely known what a rat hole that place is and that the guards encouraged fighting and even bet on who the winner would be. Supposedly there is a glass jar there with gold teeth in it that have been knocked out of the prisoners when they fight, he said. I wonder if anyone else has heard that rumor. I wasn’t able to find any mention of it on the Internet.

The mission statement of the Florida Department of Corrections is “To protect the public safety, to ensure the safety of Department personnel, and to provide proper care and supervision of all offenders under our jurisdiction while assisting, as appropriate, their re-entry into society.” I wonder if there is an agency that checks to see if proper care of offenders is being cared out appropriately. There’re plenty of data reports on sentencing, recidivism and such, but are spontaneous spot checks performed to see if abuse is taking place in Florida’s correctional facilities? Are spontaneous spot checks even possible? It seems that the guards would be on the phone immediately to everyone else to let them know someone had arrived to check up on things. Maybe the solution is to install web cams in the prisons!

I still have no idea what happened in the incident in which Ted went to the box at Brevard. It is interesting that he was moved out of there though. The warden had called him into her office and told him she was aware of the blog and to tell me to be careful of what I write in my letters – or his time could possibly be doubled. I had sent him a blank greeting card and suggested that he could sell or trade it. The warden had Ted write to tell me that selling or trading items was prohibited. How I was to know that, I don’t know. Prison rules are not made available to the public on the Internet. I guess I need to hone my ESP.

Incidentally, prison visitation forms are also no longer available on the Internet. Family members must call each prison for a visitation form, wait a week or two for them to arrive in the mail, mail them back and wait three or more weeks for the approval. If visitation forms were available on the Internet, they could be sent to the prison as soon as the inmate arrived and cut several weeks off the wait time.

Someone else also emailed, "There should be a study, maybe there is already - if people go to bad prisons, [with] bad guards, is that an incentive to stay out of prison, or does that make them worse? Like in Texas, that one sheriff who puts guys in tents, makes them wear pink underwear, eat bad food, what is that area's return rate compared to others." Hmmm. Good idea.

I’m wondering if Ted was transferred because there are those who didn’t want certain things about the prison to be publicized. What is happening to those people in Brevard who have no one to look out for their interests? I could be totally off-base though. Maybe he really was transferred strictly to protect his safety. If that’s the case, I’m grateful. When you haven’t heard anything from your loved one at all, you start to imagine all kinds of scenarios.

Next: Continuation of Ted’s family history – A family crisis