In the Second Chance Act, Congress made specific findings about appalling recidivism rates that cost taxpayers billions each year and threaten public safety. The Act cited the prison system’s own metrics suggesting that prisoners who maintained strong family and community ties were the most likely to succeed upon release. Congress charged the Director of the BOP to create programs that would help prisoners nurture family and community ties during the course of imprisonment. Despite the passing of a full year since Congress overwhelmingly passed the legislation, neither prisoners nor their family members have observed changes that would help them nurture family and community ties.

One terrible disruption to the possible nurturing of family and community ties began during the era of former Attorney General John Ashcroft. It concerned changes to the inmate telephone system. The telephone represents one of the essential links prisoners have to society. Prior to John Ashcroft’s leadership over the Department of Justice, inmates could use telephones freely to communicate with family members and friends. Since 2001, however, telephone policies have limited prisoners to 300 minutes of telephone access per month.

Besides restrictive telephone limitations, under Director Lappin’s leadership, the Bureau of Prisons places severe limitations on each federal prisoner’s ability to nurture family and community ties through visits. In the prison where I am held, for example, a rigid point system prohibits prisoners from receiving more than one visit per week. Prisoners who cannot visit during Friday work hours face even more restrictive time limitations; they may visit only two Saturdays per month. Such restrictive policies hinder rather than encourage the nurturing of close family and community ties.

The Director even authorizes policies that restrict federal prisoners from nurturing strong family and community ties through correspondence. In the prison where I am held, for example, policies prohibit inmates from using e-mail, or even typewriters for social correspondence. Those policies threaten disciplinary action against prisoners who use typewriters to nurture family ties; they may not even type letters to open relationships with prospective employers.

I may have only been in prison for 21-plus years, but as far as I know, prisoners have no more than three mechanisms through which they can nurture family and community ties. Those mechanisms include the telephone, visits, and correspondence. Congress published findings indicating that close family and community ties were the most important links that can lead prisoners to post-release success. Under Director Harley Lappin’s leadership of the federal Bureau of Prisons, however, restrictions exist to block rather than nurture those ties.

In this era of government transparency, the incongruity between Director Lappin’s statement to a Congressional committee and the policies he enforces should not go without notice. Telephone, visiting, and correspondence restrictions represent but three of the troubling policies that afflict all federal prisoners. Those policies belie any ostensible mission to assist prisoners with post-release success.

As a prisoner who struggles daily to hold his family together in spite of the Bureau of Prisons stifling restrictions, I found Director Lappin’s misrepresentation to Congress patently offensive. I would have preferred the direct honesty of my former unit manager, Ms. Ortega, who told me point blank: “We don’t care anything about what you’re doing to prepare for release. All we care about is the security of the institution.”

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Thomas and his family during a visit at Taft Prison Camp

Thomas Ross is a fellow prisoner who serves time with me here at Taft Camp. Like millions of American families, his wife and children struggle through these challenging economic times. As a federal prisoner, however, Thomas does not perceive any mechanisms through which he can contribute. The helplessness that comes with confinement really complicates his adjustment.

Thomas began serving a 20-year sentence in 1998. He had grown up in East Palo Alto, a city on the outskirts of Oakland. While growing up, he had been the star athlete of his community. Like many young American males, he hoped for a professional career in baseball or football. During his first semester of college, an injury put an end to those dreams.

With an eagerness to begin a new life, Thomas volunteered for the army. He felt that he needed to get away, and the best opportunity available to him was to serve in the U.S. military. Had he been able, Thomas would have become a career military man. While stationed in Germany, he was trained as a mechanic and also earned certification as a hazardous materials technician. The military issued Thomas an honorable discharge after only three years, however, when he sustained a severe case of frostbite.

Upon his return to the Bay area, Thomas accepted a job as a hazardous material technician with a large pharmaceutical company. Throughout the 1990s, Thomas was responsible for coordinating the removal of the company’s hazardous waste materials. After more than a decade of service, Thomas felt as if he were living the American dream. As a supervisor, he was earning a high five-figure income, he had full insurance and retirement benefits, and he had purchased a brand new home in an upscale subdivision. Then disaster struck.

One of Thomas’ subordinates was arrested in a sting operation by the DEA. The subordinate had been caught stealing chemicals from the pharmaceutical company. Those chemicals were being used criminally to manufacture methamphetamine. As the supervisor, Thomas was charged with knowledge of  the conspiracy and for authorizing it to proceed.

Not knowing anything about criminal law, Thomas put his fate in the hands of an attorney who had impressed him. To retain the lawyer, his family scrambled to raise $50,000. That sum required his parents to take a mortgage on their home and devoured all of Thomas’ savings. He was willing to pay whatever costs were required to vindicate himself from the charges that he insisted were unjustified.

The lawyer that Thomas had retained, however, was a con man. The state of California had disbarred the lawyer before. Thomas was oblivious to the phony lawyer’s troubles, and he moved forward through a criminal trial. Before the trial proceedings had concluded, the trial attorney abandoned Thomas, absconding with the $50,000 retainer Thomas and his family had provided.

Despite Thomas’ having been tried without a licensed attorney, the judge allowed a guilty verdict to stand. He sanctioned Thomas to serve a 20-year sentence. Thomas’ family clung to hopes for a reversal of the criminal conviction on appeal, but as Thomas was hauled into custody, he began to lose his will to live.

Thomas felt as if forces of injustice were conspiring against him. He had been in a committed relationship with Angela. They had children together. As he languished in jail, awaiting his transfer to prison, he contemplated suicide. Angela’s love nursed him through. After administrators transferred Thomas to Lompoc, and locked him inside the fences, he wanted to give up. He could not shake the feeling of having lost so much. Despite the service he had rendered as a soldier, the career he had built, and the family he had nurtured, he felt as if he had been wrongfully charged and incarcerated. He did not even have representation from a bona fide attorney through trial. Thomas felt railroaded.

He tried to abandon his relationship with Angela, thinking that he could make her life easier by encouraging Angela to move on without him. Prison regulations were not family friendly, and Thomas did not want to expose Angela to the hardship through which he was struggling. She would not have any of Thomas’ excuses. Angela was determined to serve Thomas’ sentence alongside him, to persevere through whatever challenges came.

Without Thomas’ consent, Angela moved to the town of Lompoc in order to sustain their prison family. Visiting and phone privileges were limited, and Angela was determined to live as close to Thomas as possible in order to support him and spend all the time together that rules would allow. Together they hoped for relief on appeal. After five years of imprisonment, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals published its decision in volume 338 of the F.3d Federal Reporter on page 338. Despite Thomas’ having proceeded blindly through the justice system without an official attorney, the judges affirmed his conviction. He felt his spirits sinking.

Angela refused to give up. They married in the Lompoc visiting room. Some of the racist guards objected to the mixed marriage. They harassed Thomas, telling him that they couldn’t understand why a white woman would show such devotion to him. They did not see Thomas as a former military man, a family man, a man who had devoted himself to rising from the challenges of an inner-city youth to building an honorable career. To those guards, Thomas was a black prisoner, unworthy of the love and hope that binds our society together. They trumped up disciplinary charges against him and suspended his visiting privileges for a year; it was a transparent effort to break up his family.

In 2007, administrators transferred Thomas from Lompoc to the camp in Taft. We speak frequently. My wife and I met his family in the prison visiting room. As Carole has been doing for so many years, I knew that Angela was serving her own sentence along with her husband. When I spoke with Thomas in the spring of 2009, his spirits were especially low. He had been incarcerated for more than 11 years. A lawyer was making legal maneuvers that offered a glimmer of hope for justice, but Thomas was feeling the burdens that his confinement had brought to so many. His parents had lost their home to foreclosure. Recently, Angela’s job became a casualty of the economic crisis. He felt helpless to contribute, and thought the best option would be to request a transfer to a far-away prison. That way loved ones could move on with their lives and forget about obligations to support him.

As a long-term prisoner, I feel as if I have a duty, and a responsibility to bolster the spirits of my fellow prisoners. This system makes it tremendously difficult for men to keep hope alive, and we need to rely on each other. We must work to find activities that will add meaning to our lives. Even if we cannot find opportunities to make financial contributions to our family members from prison, we have a responsibility to muster the strength necessary to power through.

The Pew Report recently published findings that show 1 in 31 Americans is under criminal justice supervision. For racial and ethnic minorities, those numbers are much more troubling. The Dollars and Sense blog published that 7.3 million people live under the U.S. system of corrections. It is a dismal system under which Thomas and I serve time, and which punishes the women who love us. Prison is hard on prison families, especially during these difficult economic times.

The post Prison is Hard on Prison Families appeared first on Prison News Blog.

As a prison family, Carole and I have had to cope with prison visiting rules since 2002. Our love and commitment to each other is strong, and we have learned to nurture our intimacy through words. Clearly, however, the rules sometimes interfere.

When my wife sits beside me, I feel an urge to wrap her in my arms, to kiss her, to touch her. Prison administrators consider such expressions of love as threats against the security of the institution. Despite Congressional findings as in the Second Chance Act that show close family ties can lower recidivism rates, prison visiting rules reflect the prison culture’s insistence that oppressive regulations serve the interests of society best.

Carole and I cope with the emotional struggle of separation by writing, talking, and taking advantage of whatever opportunities we have to share our lives together. We live as if in continuous preparation for the love we will create, make, and nurture upon my release. This conscious commitment has carried us through the past seven years, and we live in anticipation of our lives together. We’d be kind of like that couple in the 40-year-old virgin.

Not all prison families make it through the paralyzing rules of imprisonment. Many prisoners lose their families as a direct consequence of the physical separation. Administrators are indifferent to the emotional cruelty visiting rules inflict on prison families. Their expressed concern is security of the institution.

Some prisoners push the rules. They look for opportunities to grope or have sexual relationships. Some succeed, others do not. The penalties for being caught, however, are severe. Such sanctions will include a loss of visiting and telephone privileges. It is the threat of such sanctions that keep Carole and I vigilant in following visiting rules. Most prisoners try to do the same, though some cannot resist the human pull of attraction. If caught, they suffer the consequences.

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More than five years have passed since Carole and I married, yet our romance continues to thrive. The reason for our growing love affair, I am convinced, lies in the deep commitment we have made to each other’s life. I am totally into my relationship with Carole, and she demonstrates time and again that she is totally into her relationship with me. Our love affair amazes many, as Carole and I have never shared more physical intimacy than the kisses we exchange at the beginning of every visit, and at the conclusion of each visit.

Both of us understood the challenges of what we were building. I still had more than ten years of prison ahead of me when Carole and I married. That meant Carole would have to accept the continuous upheaval of my life if she wanted to build forever with me. She moved from her comfort zone in Oregon to a new community in Fort Dix, New Jersey, where I was confined so that we could visit regularly. One year after her move to a community where she did not know anyone else, administrators relocated me to a prison in Colorado. Carole packed her belongings and moved to the prison town where I was confined in Florence. After 18 months in Florence, administrators moved me to California. Carole made the transition again. We both placed our marriage as our highest priority, and that meant we had to make every effort to stay as close as possible.

To love each other through all of the complications that come with imprisonment, Carole and I must commit to each other time and again. People who live together fall out of love because they take each other for granted. They fail to communicate their hopes and dreams after a while. Rather than nurturing love through expressions of the heart, couples rely only on sexuality. Although I do not deny that sex should play an integral part of a love affair, when there is nothing more than sex, relationships can wither. Carole and I may not enjoy the privilege of a sexual relationship, yet we have our hopes, dreams, and commitment to each other that powers us through the struggles.

Carole and I have built a history together that ties us ways that other couples lack. She has made it possible for me to reach beyond boundaries to build a career as a writer. Through our work together, we have made meaningful contributions to society. Our work as husband and wife has enabled Carole to earn an income, and with that income, she has been able to earn a degree in nursing. Her nursing degree now enables us to save and make investments toward the future that we are building together. Every day, we create more ties that bind us closer. That is the privilege of our love.

Because of Carole, I have a life that few other long-term prisoners ever know. She is close enough to visit at every opportunity. I am severely restricted to the telephone by prison rules, but I devote every privilege I have to her. Together we are focused on the life we are creating, on the future we will enjoy as husband and wife. Both of us look forward with eager anticipation to my release.

In many ways, freedom came to me with Carole’s love. I may have had to serve an additional decade before we could consummate our marriage physically, yet every day that she has been in my life has been a blessing. I thank God every night before I sleep, and every morning when I wake. My wife has brought an incredible sense of meaning and value to my life, and I am grateful for every breath she has given me. At the same time, I have felt empowered by the love that flows so effortlessly from her to me.

Carole and I are now in our mid-forties. Perhaps an Obama administration will preside over changes that could bring me home sooner. Either way, we know that my release will come no later than our late forties. We are committed to building the rest of our lives together, and we both embrace the joy in knowing that soon we will live together as husband and wife.

For me, the thought of living outside of prison boundaries is surreal, and I cannot imagine the changes that freedom will bring to my life as easily as Carole can. She describes to me how we will share our lives together. After more than 21 years of imprisonment, those thoughts are akin to looking through a magazine of celebrity lifestyles. I know we will build our lives together, but it is sometimes a challenge for me to think of life outside of these boundaries.

Despite the challenges that will come, I feel certain that my commitment to Carole will strengthen with my release. She has been my oxygen, my lifeline to the world. I feel so at one with her, that freedom has no meaning to me if I cannot share my life with Carole.

I am committed to spending every day of my life, in prison and upon my release, working to prove myself worthy of the love she has given to me. Our total commitment to each other’s dreams and hopes is what makes our marriage thrive. In time, Carole and I will work together to help others reach their own highest potential.

Because of my magnificent and beautiful wife, I have no struggles with love, and I am eager to begin living with her upon my release from prison.

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