A Department of Corrections doesn’t exist in the reality of things. I will say over and over, we need a prison system. We need a place to keep people that threaten the physical well being of others until we can figure out if and how to rehabilitate them. And I don’t know what it should be called. We currently have something called ‘Corrections’, as if there is some type of system ‘correcting’ a problem. There isn’t.

We have an entire society of people locked up for, quite simply, absurd sentences. We are actually turning people who, in a different type of system might have hope for a positive future, into criminals.   We are destroying their faith in humanity, cutting them off from their loved ones and putting them in the care of understaffed and often undertrained institutions. That is a fact. It is irrefutable. It’s a system built from the bottom up on misery.

It reaches beyond the walls we can’t see through. I read someone else’s thoughts the other day and asked if I could copy and paste it here. This is what Dotty had to say.

Just got off the phone with the hubby. He told me tonight that he did the math, and for a telephone call in Kansas State Correctional Facility, Larned – there is a note by the phones, stating that a 15 minute call will be raised from $2.55 to include an additional 18.2% tax carrying fee, making the total $3.01.

Not bad, you say, compared to other states…but here is where mass incarceration comes into play here in Kansas. Budget cuts in medical, state healthcare programs and many other places have caused the state to tax us three times…18.2% to connect…18.2% during the call…and 18.2% imposed at the end of the call.   What good do federal guidelines do to curb the dishonest greed, when clearly we are helping pay to fix a state budget.

The prisons in Lansing are housing men on the floors and some who desperately need to be transferred closer to home are forever denied because prisons in Kansas are overflowing. We speak of needing Prison Reform at state levels as well as federal levels. What good is making a federal law when the states impose whatever they want. For seven months, Larned has had a billboard up regarding a need for correctional officers. There is nothing around for miles and good help is sadly needed there on the very huge campus grounds. It is also the location of the state mental hospital where inmates who are severely mentally and sexually unstable are housed. They use the term ‘work camp’ there to literally work minimum custody inmates in the laundry room and kitchen of the Mental facility. It’s a forced issue among many inmates. They must go to work there if told. Otherwise, they are subject to threats of good time taken, custody levels rolled back, write ups and yes, sometimes segregation.

It will be 10 months till my hubby can see anyone but me and his kids and his brother. None of us can make it that far often enough to help Darian have the support he needs from his family. Not with taxing the phone time 4 times. Yes, he is taxed also to buy phone time now. Darian has a rap sheet a mile long on the inside. His first felony resulted in his first prison term, felony driving without a license. Hardly the hardened criminal they have in there.

This is why we fight in the Prison Reform movement. They just want to do the time they have been given, without harassment and without hostile environments from wardens, guards, medical staff, food service companies, counselors and others that are hired to aid the inmates.

We are in the digital age. Our story is no worse than others. It does not stand out. There are so many cases and stories of abuse that occur within those walls, that no single website holds every account of them. It takes many voices united to make a tough stand to correct what is being done to so many lives. Tonight I will continue to fight for them all and to share their stories until they are heard.

With approximately one out of every hundred of us locked up, mass incarceration should be on all our minds. The subject is ugly and probably causes some discomfort, but ignoring it isn’t going to solve the problem. One in a hundred is a problem. Those numbers make us the most incarcerated country in the entire world. Every day that passes that we avoid fixing the problem is one more day that one in one hundred of us lives in a cage. Cages are necessary sometimes, but so many of them are filled to overflowing with throw away people that shouldn’t be there. And, nobody even knows.

I made a promise to myself from the start of this. I can’t tell the story of anyone that committed a violent crime.   There are so many inmates that never physically harmed anyone, and I don’t need to read about anyone that actually committed a crime involving violence. I have a lifetime of nonviolent offenders to write about. Then I read about Shimeek Gridine.

Dana Battles was the victim. I made a small effort to locate him, and ask his thoughts, but was not able to, and I didn’t feel comfortable looking very hard. I respect the victim’s privacy and can’t imagine the affect this crime might have had on their lives, although I would love to know what their feelings are on the sentence that Shimeek Gridline was given. I will assume that Dana was scarred physically and emotionally, to some degree, for life. I don’t ever want victims to be overlooked in the telling of a story. Shimeeks’ story doesn’t lessen the price that Dana paid.

Shimeek was 14. From all accounts he had a solid family foundation, and I read that he played Pop Warner football. His mother lost her job not long before the incident, and they moved in with Shimeek’s grandparents.

I know that Shimeek was cared for, but going through some instability that may have included the recent death of two relatives. He was fourteen. I have had a few fourteen year old kids and been one myself. It goes without saying, he wasn’t yet wise, or mature, or fully developed in any way. Who knows if he was shaving yet. I know that he didn’t have the capacity to fully understand actions and consequences. An educated and experienced judge, adult, lawyer, prosecutor, parent – all those people should know that.

The day that the crime took place, Shimeek was with a 12 year old boy. They had a small shotgun, and claimed to have found it under a car. I am not sure it is overly important where the gun came from, but we will assume the boys found it.

The two boys probably felt a little invincible with gun in hand. They attempted to rob a man at gunpoint.   I don’t suppose we can ever know what was going through Shimeek’s head when his finger tightened on that trigger enough to set the gun off.   The man was grazed in the head and shoulder area, was hospitalized and released the same day.   I don’t know the severity of his injury, or if there was any scarring involved, but he was sent home from the hospital the same day that he was shot.

Shimeek Gridine turned himself in to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, accompanied by his grandparents. In reasoning that I don’t quite understand, he was charged as an adult. The boy went before Judge A.C. Soud, without a jury. Shimeek’s family was supportive and their presence was noted in the courtroom. Judge Soud explained that, because Shimeek had so much support, he should have known better. He was sentenced to seventy years for Premeditated Attempted Murder and twenty five years for Armed Robbery.   The sentences would be served at the same time and there was no possibility for parole. At the age of 14, a seventy year sentence will probably last longer than your life, earning release at the age of 84.

I can guess that Shimeek was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was not privileged. He probably saw his mother struggling to take care of him, and I am sure he knew some hardships. He played in a neighborhood where you can find shotguns under cars. Most likely the sentencing judge could not have a full appreciation of the child standing in front of him and his life experiences.   What I find more frightening about his case than anything else, is the power of one man’s words. With a few sentences a man in a robe essentially sentenced a young boy to never be free again. One man had the power to throw a child’s life away, and did so because he felt the boy had a supportive family and should have known better than to shoot a gun aimed at somebody’s head.

Shimeek is no longer a child. He lives in a prison in Florida. He is scheduled for release in April of 2079. I will be dead by then. Some people worry about prisoners being too comfortable. Most prisons in Florida do not have air conditioning.   In order to keep from being idle, inmates get to grow a lot of their own food. Although Shimeek may get to do something to earn some type of job experience in the future, he has no future outside of a cage, so it is irrelevant in his case.   At today’s cost to house an inmate in Florida, it will cost taxpayers $1,264,480 if he lives for the seventy year sentence. That price will surely go up as the cost of keeping someone incarcerated increases over that seventy year time. At that cost, Shimeek could have been sent to college, and also been given a personal therapist and personal jailer. Imagine if he had been sent to college after spending four years in a juvenile facility, and agreed to donate a certain amount of hours a year in his given profession as a payback to society for his extremely poor judgement. With that solution, we would be receiving tax money and time from Shimeek, rather than paying to cage him until he dies. He may have been the first in his family line to graduate college, and he may have started a bright path for an entire new generation. We won’t know that though. All we know is that our tax money is going to cage him to death. It is so much more convenient that way for the system, I guess.

A man in a robe couldn’t come up with anything more creative than seventy years in a cage at a pricetag of $1,264,480. This brings me back to the most frightening part of this story. What kind of power are we giving to individuals with our tax dollars and our lives in their hands? I doubt that the Judge has given Shimeek Gridine much more thought. I, on the other hand, will never forget him. With one in a hundred of us caged, nobody should. Shimeek Gridine has changed my world.

I was tentative when I started this project, not sure where it would lead and not sure I was up to the task. I’m still not sure I am. I knew finding people to write about wouldn’t be a problem, but I didn’t anticipate just how invested I would feel in their lives.

I am working on someone else’s story, but got a note from Travion today. I had written to him, letting him know of my interest in his case, and the post I wrote about him. It’s funny, but when I was originally trying to contact him, I had a little trouble finding his location. The system has him listed as “Travon.” He has been incarcerated for years, and they don’t have his name right.   It seems like such a little thing, really, but it’s not. It’s his name.   It is what his mother gave him. If his only contact with the outside world for most of his life is through this system, can’t we at least give him the courtesy of getting his name right? It’s Travion.

Travion changed things up for me today. Until now he was a story and information on paper. His story originally spurred me to action, but it was paper all the same.   This morning when I read his note, he became more than paper. He is a person. He’s about the age of one of my sons. From that grey cinderblock home of his, he wrote the words, “hope all is well.” He said some other things, and closed with, “thank you for reaching out.”

The one paragraph letter I found in my mailbox this morning confirmed that I am doing the right thing. It made me know, without a doubt, that succeed or fail, wherever the path leads, I can’t get off it. I am not giving up on Travion. I will be copying and pasting his story to anybody I can think of, and I will keep on doing it until this wrong is made right. It doesn’t just have to be me though. I welcome anyone who wants to join me on this path.

I am not anti-government. I just want to make us better. We are better. This system has got to change.