ACID TRIP
A TALE OF GOOD MISFORTUNE
THE EXCITING CONCLUSION
Changes in the Law
I was pretty well ensconced in the daily regimen of prison life by the end of the 1992 summer. One of my favorite pastimes was to go to the library in the evening and keep abreast of the buzz within the legal system. The library was fairly well stocked with a varied selection of books. It was connected with the inter-library loan system, which made it possible for an inmate to get virtually any book available within the State of Texas library system, barring books not allowed to be brought into the prison. They frowned on "how to make bombs with simple items laying around your prison" type tomes.
I got to be pretty familiar with the laws and how they were worded. I taught myself to read the periodicals that pertained to the law. There were various jail house lawyers in the prison. Some had varying degrees of success with changing the sentences of themselves and others. They hung out in the library during the hours that they weren't working; usually either using one of the typewriters that was set up to do legal work on or waiting in line for it to become available to them. They were a good source for where to look for the latest from the B.O.P. on law changes or potential changes in the works.
There were some for whom the process of going back into court to do battle with the legal minions of the U.S. had backfired on them. One guy got back into court and had his sentence overturned. The Government ended up resentencing him, and he came through the whole process with more time than he had originally been given.
It was by allowing my ears to pay attention that I learned about FAMM. The jail house lawyers club who congregated in the library referred to FAMM initiatives often.
A young lady named Julie Brown had a brother who had been popped for cultivation of marijuana. He was caught early into his growing season, so all of his plants were quite small. And it was only pot for god's sake. But he had more than 100 plants, so the sentencing he was obliged to receive was the mandatory minimum of five years. This really pissed her off. So she started a campaign to have the mandatory minimums changed. Or at least to have some sort of change happen in the sentencing structure. Her campaign grew into an organization with the involvement of many other family members of persons who had received horrendous sentencing. The organization was entitled, "Families Against Mandatory Minimums." They created a newsletter and lobbied in Washington where they could. At the time this was pretty much against the grain of the majority belief system in the country - the one that espoused that all sentences were too lenient.
There are some interesting pervasive hitchhiker beliefs riding with the general attitude towards anyone who is incarcerated. One is that they are violent, that only persons who are violent in nature do behaviors that get them incarcerated. It's pretty much unstated but held in silence by the public. So there is an overriding lack of compassion for anyone who gets locked up, because ultimately individuals, when this person and his plight comes to their attention, react directly with the thought that they had to have been heinously violent or they would not have landed in prison. This belief continues that non-violent people do not go to prison. They get to plea bargain and serve some sort of punishment for their infraction that does not include incarceration.
Another pervasive belief is that all persons who sell drugs are violent and that any type of drug sales is a violent act. My prosecutor stated this belief at my sentencing - that the act of selling LSD was a violent behavior in and of itself.
This is the type of generally held belief system that Julie Brown was butting her head against. She did get a lot of press from sympathetic editors. Al Neiwerth of USA Today was very much in support of her cause. He lent an amazing amount of space in his publication to news of FAMM'S quest.
There has been an awareness of the inequities of LSD sentencing within the underground and professional community who were interested in LSD. During the late 50's and early 60's, when LSD was first discovered by the psychiatric and psychological communities, it was kept pretty secret and was being used and studied by well-educated and professional persons.
The non-professional persons who were given access to it at that time were also highly educated and well placed within society. Within the past few years, it came to light that Claire Booth Luce, who owned and had a big influence on the editorial policy of Time magazine, was introduced to LSD in the late 50's along with her husband. Apparently she didn't appreciate it.
So, there was a community of psychiatrists and therapists who used LSD for many years within their practice and had a strong appreciation for what it was and wasn't. One of these fellows was John Beresford, a Canadian psychiatrist who had achieved profound successes with treating individuals with alcoholism with LSD.
Some of these highly placed health care community members became aware of the sentencing discrepancy for LSD and actively lobbied for a sentencing change to occur. No doubt these were the persons who brought the discrepancies to the attention of Senators Kennedy and Biden, when they were prompted to attempt to change the wording of the statute to effect a sentencing structure change for LSD.
Having exhausted the direct legislative route an alternative method for effecting change was stumbled onto - the Sentencing Commission. The Sentencing Commission is comprised of thirteen individuals who are appointed by the president and approved by Congress to oversee the sentencing structure and to go through the process of fine tuning it. There was a system set up where by amendments to the sentencing guidelines could be proposed by anyone who wanted to. These propositions were then presented to the sentencing commission. The sentencing commission chose which of the proposals had merit and allowed for a hearing and the presentation of arguments opposing and advocating the implementation of the proposal. Then they would mull over the hearing evidence for awhile and send the results of those proposals that they agreed to implement to Congress. Since Congress is ultimately lazy, they instituted a process whereby they didn't have to lift a finger to agree to the amendments requested by the sentencing commission. By congress's taking no action the amendments became law by default.
The time line looks like this. The Commission invites proposed amendments during the summer of any given year. Of the proposed amendments received, they choose which ones have enough merit to hold a hearing on in November. The hearings occur in March. The Commission tenders those amendments that they have chosen to send to Congress as a result of the March hearings on April 30th. Congress has until May 30th to vote against the amendment. If Congress has no problem with an amendment they simply don't schedule or hold a vote. By Congress's lack of action by May 30th, they acclaim their support of the amendment. Then the amendment becomes a feature of the law just as if congress had itself gone through the procedure to legislate it. The amendment that has passed all of the process goes into effect in November of the following year that it was chosen to be a hearing candidate.
Many people had joined together, including FAMM and various psychologists to propose an amendment to the sentencing guidelines for LSD. Another group from California who, although they named themselves something like Citizens for Equal Justice, came into existence solely to work for changing the LSD sentencing structure. These got it together to send a proposed sentencing amendment to the sentencing commissions during the Summer of 1992. By November of 1992 the sentencing commission had agreed to have this as one of the amendments for hearings to happen in March of 93.
My B.O.P. Bureaucracy Snafu
It was about that time, November 1992 that I got an impetus to educate myself on the inner bureaucratic structure of the B.O.P. policies. There are four designated custody levels in the B.O.P., minimum, low, medium and high. And for each of these designations, there were correctional institutions with different levels of security structures in place. A minimum level facility is a prison camp. There are no walls, no fences, and no barbed wire. It consists of a dormitory, office, and kitchen building, pretty much with open ground around it and no restrictions to hold the inmates placed there to stay. There is a line created beyond which the inmates may not pass. If they stay within the designated boundary and do their time all is fine. The guards comtingent is smaller than in higher level institutions. Now, if someone was to escape they would not be treated as harshly as an escapee from a higher level institution, but upon recapture they would get the requisite five year tack on and never see a camp again in their incarceration history. All of the inmates residing in a minimum security facility are sentenced to ten years or less with no history of violence, escape, or taboo in-prison behavior.
A low-level institution has fences and probably is not much different than a medium level institution, which Fairton and Bastrop were. There are slightly different internal policies restricting movement. But basically there are two rows of razor wire ten-foot high fencing, various electro-magnetic remotely operated doors, and an armed guard who is driving around the perimeter 24 hours a day. The inmates tend to have longer than ten-year sentences or some history of violence or bad behavior while in prison.
The high-level facilities have walls, fences, and the stereotypical guard towers with armed guards manning them. Some are placed entirely underground. The security is as tight as the B.O.P. can imagine. In many of them, the inmates are essentially afforded the same lifestyle as I was when I was in the hole with a few variations - 23 hours in the cell with 1 hour a day recreation 5 days a week. 24 hours in their cell the other two. They are also allowed a television with cable access in their cell. High level inmates all have either extremely long sentences and some kind of history of violence or escapes. This is the type of existence given to John Gotti and Timothy McVeigh.
Bastrop was a medium level facility. I asked to go there, and the court agreed to my request. Essentially, to bypass the B.O.P. bureaucracy, I was designated as a medium level custody classification when I was sent there. I had no idea of any of this - custody classification or institution levels or their effect on me. I only wanted to be near my family. A combination of my ignorance, complacency, and the tendency of the B.O.P. itself to just take the path of least resistance set me there as a medium level inmate. B.O.P. functionaries are basically civil servants with all of the attitude of, "Do as little work as is easily and identifiably recognized as is possible."
In November of 1992 my father died. He had a history of circulatory problems and heart disease for better than ten years before his death. So when he had a massive brain hemorrhage, it was not a total surprise occurrence. He lingered for few days but was non-responsive and on total life support. My family chose to disconnect the life support systems and allow him to pass on.
Before he died my father did what he could to come to terms with my being incarcerated. Mainly he did this by researching everything that he could find on the subject. He was an aeronautical engineer and analytical facts went a long way to supporting or condemning an issue he was involved with. It was he who found out some of the information about the low mortality rates for LSD. And pretty much with all of his research he came to an understanding that LSD just wasn't all that bad of a substance and that the hysteria created about it was pretty much just that. It was just a lot of emotion fueled by the media without factual substantiation of what was really happening in regards to the result of people taking LSD.
On his visits to me, he related what he had found and went to bat by writing his congressman and other legislators about what was going on relative to the sentencing inequity.
The last words that we said to each other were, "I love you." This was at the end of our last phone conversation. So there wasn't a lot of baggage being carried by either of us relative to not having a clean relationship with each other when he died. The work that I was allowed to do through the psychology classes that I was attending ensured that our relationship was pretty clean by November of 1992.
I began to go through the B.O.P. rigmarole of arranging to be allowed to attend his funeral. And I got a rather rude answer to my request. I was told that I was a medium level custody classification designee. As such if I wanted to travel to his funeral I had to go escorted in full shackles with two federal marshals. I would be placed in the nearest facility to the funeral site for holding for any time spent away from Bastrop except for the actual funeral and burial. I would remain in full shackles during the funeral and burial. I would not be allowed to attend any type of wake after the burial. And I would have to pay for all of the expense of flying the marshals and myself and housing and feeding the marshals. It would cost in excess of five thousand dollars. That seemed to me to be pretty severe restrictions for some lowly acid dealer.
Now, if I was a minimum-security level designee I could have been sent on my way with no escort. Just fly there, attend the event and return. So I did not attend my father's funeral. But I did decide to find out as much as I could about how custody classifications are created and just how they came up with mine. I easily found the manual and studied it. And I found out that, with the nature of my crime and criminal history, I was actually a minimum level designee. It was too late to get to the funeral, but I decided to go through the process of allowing the case manager, whose job it was to keep these types of things together, to straighten this out.
It was easy and obvious and took about five minutes to change me to a minimum-security inmate. I finally lucked out with a case manager who was not totally burned out and cynical from years of inmates conning him into getting something more than the system was created to allow. My first case manager had fit that description. However, that change in custody designation soon came back to bite me in the ass, or almost.
Now that I was a minimum-security level designee I had no business being in a medium level facility according to the B.O.P. bureaucracy. My classification was entered into the computer network and within a week I was notified that I was to be sent to a camp somewhere else in Texas. Probably Texarkana. Ohhh Sheeith! They were going to send me to a place where it was going to be nearly impossible for my children to come and see me. At Bastrop they only had to go to the grocery store to pass by the prison. And who knew what kind of psychology or educational classes were available elsewhere? I didn't like this change in my life at all.
The warden at that time was named Bill Hedrick. He was a very progressive guy. And pretty young to be in a warden position. He was much younger that some of the associate wardens who worked there. The politics of wardens and associate wardens was curious. Much like the roles of principals and vice-principals. In my experience the principal was the politically correct persona fronting the operation. The vice-principal was the enforcer. Wardens and associate wardens held similar roles. The wardens only were there for an average of three years. Then they were moved to another location. The associate wardens stayed put. They had been at Bastrop forever and would serve out a longer sentence there than many of the inmates.
Hedrick instituted a policy whereby he and the associate wardens and department heads would array themselves in front of the cafeteria at lunch time every day. This was for them to be available to hear out anything that an inmate might wish to bring up with them. This made them pretty available to the inmates, not the norm at all. When I got the word that I was being sent to Texarkana I headed to the cafeteria at the next available lunch.
At that time there was rumor of a minimum-security camp being built adjacent to the F.C.I. Since I was closed off from the reality of what the B.O.P. was up to outside of the fence, I really didn't know if this was so. But armed with this rumor and my familial closeness situation, I approached the warden and asked him to arrange for me to be held at Bastrop and be sent to the camp there as soon as it was completed. He did not think that was an unreasonable request and acquiesced.
The next day though I had a scare, as I was approached by one of the unit guards and told to pack my stuff and report to R&D. This was the universal signal that I was out of there. Whoa! I immediately headed to my case manager and told her that something was seriously wrong with this picture, seeing as how I was pretty much told by her and the warden that I was to stay put. She hustled for me and returned to tell me to ignore the packing request. It was another of those bureaucratic glitches where my name had not been removed from the marshals list. It was close to something straight out of the movie, "Brazil."
Unicor
My name finally came up to the top of the list for UNICOR, and I briefly trained as a broom maker during the few hours of the day that were still free to me.
This is one of those things that the prison industries create for use by the entire government bureaucracy. There isn't a broom in a closet anywhere in a government building that has not been created by a federal prison inmate. I stunk at broom making. Not that I was all that excited about the prospect of being a competent federal broom maker. And I was only at work for a few hours a week anyway. I didn't really get all that much time in to get the trick down. Broom making consists of taking a broom stick and holding a bunch of straw to it while holding all that against a machine that wraps the wire about the whole conglomeration to end up with a finished broom.
Once, having gotten my feet in the door it was relatively easy to transferred to another work crew inside of UNICOR. By the time that my broom-making supervisor decided that I just wasn't broom-making material, I had put my paper work in to be on the furniture assembling crew. Again much of the furniture used within government institutions have been created by an inmate.
Unicor was also where it was easiest to get copies made. There were some inmates who occupied clerical positions in Unicor. Hence they had unrestricted access to the copy machines. I paid them in meat entrees and never had a problem getting as many copies as I wanted. While I was in the throes of networking and lobbying for support of the LSD sentencing changes, I sent a lot of letters out.
Drug Treatment
The overcrowding of the prison system had reached epidemic proportions by the end of 1992. Every bed was filled in every institution, and there were more bodies on their way into the system. The prison got a new warden, and an interesting new policy was in the works. At that time there were two men, and one set of bunk beds in each room. Due to the overcrowding, the institution was told to create a triple bunk set, and switch to three men to a room.
As a safety valve, the B.O.P. was looking at legal methods of allowing people to get out early. At that time, the most time that a person could get off for good time was 54 days a year. On my original 97-month sentence of eight years and one month, I would have accumulated one year and 13 days off for good behavior after having served the first seven years. So the least that I would have to serve was seven years. They had a halfway house program in place, but normally the most halfway house time that was being awarded was two months or less. This means that an inmate granted halfway house would actually depart the prison two months prior to his sentence termination and serve out the final two months of his sentence living at the halfway house.
There were rumors that the government was aware that something was needed by them to create some sort of safety valve. And what they came up with was to institute a comprehensive drug treatment program within the institutions.
I didn't use drugs at all when I got busted and only used alcohol rarely and moderately. A two-beer buzz was enough for me. But from all that I had received so far in the system, I was interested in getting more experience on anything having to do with inspecting myself and how I chose to run my internal program.
The first Drug treatment program was started with nothing in place as a reward for those who took it. No extra good time or guaranteed halfway house. But the writing was on the wall. It was likely that something was going to be created to give those who successfully graduated from such a program a little something for their efforts.
I have in the past had the experience of being in the first class of a new program. From this experience I knew that things were a bit wide-open and much looser at the outset than they would become in the second or any subsequent issue of the program. The teachers had to get oriented and to get their bullshit sensors tuned up to deal with predictable ongoing reactions of the participants. And they had to get aquatinted with the materials that they were presenting and find out what worked and what didn't. And the standards for completion would change from a pre-course theoretical ideal to a reality based more concrete one. So to get in on the ground floor is easier on the participant than to get in later.
I also had a belief that the government would, at some point in the near future, institute a reward in the nature of time off. After they did that, every body and their uncle would be signing up to take the program and it would be much harder to get in or to finish out and graduate.
So, in December 1992, I signed up for the first class. It was scheduled as a six-month program that started in January. We ended up doing about 750 hours of classes, which took seven months to complete on that first go around. They moved our group into one wing of one of the units. Basically we lived as together as they could arrange within the existing infrastructure.
We were paired off into cells in our wing, and I settled into my new digs with my new cell- and classmate, Mr. Boyle. Soon after we got there and eased into our new relationship, which, as with all relationships, begins with swapping life stories, I found out that Mr. Boyle had a quite interesting past. He was easily the oldest member of the class, and was there for bank robbery. He hailed from New England. What I found most interesting though was that he was incarcerated at Concord prison in Massachusetts in the early Sixties and while there participated in the psylocybin treatment experiments conducted by Dr Timothy Leary.
We had classes relating to the program all morning. Most of the classes were set up to take an introspective look at the behaviors that got us into prison. And there was an organized exercise program. It really wasn't so much about drug treatment, as it was about thought and mental program treatment. We found out that the use of drugs was just another symptom of the pattern of thoughts that we used to interact with life. To make it OK to use drugs was on the same level as to make it OK to question someone else's behavior and create a polarity between ourselves and them. There was a thought pattern behind all of our behaviors in which we engaged. This was the blue print by which we all chose to do the next move. So all this instruction was giving us a way, for the first time, to see what it was that we did upon engaging an event. How we ran our minds. And it gave us an opportunity to take the time to respond rather than react. That meant to stop and really take a look at what it was that we were encountering, to look at what our first response was and to not automatically do that first response but rather to wait and check out all of the facts and engage in a response that was in our best interests rather than blunder into a behavior that we would have to pay a price for in the future, one that we would rather not be paying.
We were given a sense of responsibility for who we are and what we do that was light years beyond what we arrived with when we first got off the bus and entered the gates. And we got into a mode of acting on an everyday schedule so that we began to re-program - to react as our first behavior in a mode that was beneficial to us rather than have to fight the previously implanted reaction that we utilized before learning the tools of the program.
The class consisted of about thirty inmates at the outset. Most of them had been incarcerated for some kind of involvement with drugs. We were made up of blacks, whites and Hispanics. Americans, Mexican Nationals and Colombians.
When I entered the drug program I had to give up my lucrative UNICOR position. I had achieved the princely hourly wage of $.54 an hour, but since I only was showing up for two to three hours a day that didn't amount to much. I had to beat the bushes for another work crew whose boss was inclined to be more pleased than displeased with my non-attendance at work. I approached Charley Parabeck, the foreman of the plumbing crew. Charlie's parents were actually neighbors of the community where I lived. He was well versed with the notoriety of Greenbriar as well as cognizant of the actual benign quality that we add to local life. And as I already had a record of having been a plumber within the prison system from my short stint at Fairton, it wasn't like I had to train or anything. Charley didn't care a twit as to whether I was there or not. He pretty much trusted that I would be somewhere legally so that he didn't have to end up having to come up with an explanation as to why I was caught at some point in a place other than the one the institution preferred that I be. This was a faux pas that instigated various discipline procedures against the person who was out of bounds. Occasionally a class was cancelled, and I actually showed up to the plumbing shop. It was usually a surprise for Charley to have to remember that I was supposedly on his crew. He made certain that I was not to actually do any plumbing.
Work and Play
We had another Life training in December 1992. As members of the drug treatment program, we were mandated to attend. But with my history of having already experienced this and my continued voluntary participation in the support groups, I was allowed to participate as one of the inside team members. We all had roles to fulfill in keeping the inner workings of communication flowing. It was an exciting time both in being allowed to work alongside the outside team members and to watch the inmate participants do their learning and work.
That winter into spring was an exciting time. I knew that the hearings had been agreed to on the LSD amendment. I had a lot of anticipation about what would transpire about that. And the classes continued. The Drug treatment program took up the entire morning. I was enrolled in another class with Cata Low by the psychology department one afternoon a week. And my Accounting and Spanish classes were still happening.
The class with Cata Low continued with our learning about focusing our awareness and started to be presented with the specifics of how each and every one of us creates our personal universe. By the end of the class at the end of March, she had exhausted the materials that she could present to us concerning the Avatar course without getting into specific exercises that are presented within the body of the course itself. The only other thing that she could give us concerning Avatar was the course itself.
The Avatar course is a nine day long endeavor from nine in the A.M. till seven at night. We were still restricted by the daily schedule of the institution somewhat but the nature of the exercises were such that they could be done within a range of environments, some geared to outdoors and some to indoors.
Cata got permission from the head Avatar office in Florida to present the course to us on a loosely defined donation basis. The course costs $2000 to attend in the free world. We all had to find some sort of service to provide the value of which would reach that amount.
By the time that I got my custody classification changed, I had become pretty well versed in that aspect of the B.O.P. bureaucracy. And just about that time, a B.O.P. curve ball was thrown at all of the inmates. The bureau had decided to change the custody designation of the facility from medium to low. What this meant was that all of the medium custody designated inmates had to be moved to another facility that was of that designation. A mad scramble was going on for inmates who were inclined to stay right there in Bastrop to see what they could do about getting their custody classification changed.
As I remarked, the case managers had enough to do with the everyday requests and bureaucracy needed to keep up with the changes that occurred with individual inmate's custody classification. One of the factors that changed the aggregate score was the length of time that a person had served of their particular sentence. Another time factor was the length of time that had transpired since they were convicted of their offense. Many inmates had not had their classification scores redone in a while and enough time had transpired to change their numbers and designation.
Many inmates were in the same type of position that I was in, when I first was made aware of the existence of custody classification. The basic calculations were either just wrong when they were initially made by whatever B.O.P. functionary did that task or they were arbitrarily set into a classification without anyone really taking the time to do a proper classification score on them. And there were a few caseworkers who just didn't care to do the work necessary. It takes a little while to properly assess the information to come up with a truthful classification according to the set bureaucracy the B.O.P. had in place.
So to pay for my way through Avatar, I began to do custody classification workups for inmates who wanted to stay in Bastrop. I attempted to not charge anything for this to the inmates themselves. But many insisted on giving me some sort of compensation. Within the system, pretty much any jail house lawyer, no matter how far they were from taking the BAR, charged for the time and energy that they provided to another inmate. It was the custom. And was both accepted and expected. So I charged a pint of ice cream in exchange for doing the numbers for them - only to the ones who got reclassified after I ran their numbers through though. After I had run their numbers through the process, I gave them a detailed explanation of which numbers were incorrect, if there were any, and why they were presently wrong. Then I gave them the details of what to present to their case manager, documenting how they might change the existing numbers into the more truthful set. I didn't really count, but there were quite a few persons who looked at me with a new respect after I sent them to their case workers with the script that produced their being changed from a medium to a low classification. One guy I worked out the numbers for got changed from a high level to a low level. He was really impressed.
The sentencing commission hearings on the LSD sentencing change amendment occurred in March. USA Today kept us informed of the daily testimony presented. From the direction that the reporting inferred the sentencing commission was quite receptive to the testimony presented and that the amount of testimony in favor of granting some sort of change for LSD sentencing greatly overshadowed that for no change to occur. It seems that of the twenty or so amendments proposed the testimony for the LSD proposal took up 90% of all of the testimony for all of the amendments considered. All of this was quite encouraging but there were many factors that had to be addressed by the sentencing commission in order for any change that might be agreed to affect my sentence. One was retroactivity. Any change that happens does not necessarily have to be made retroactive. A non-retroactive change would leave me with the remaining six years of my sentence to be carried out. So some hope existed by the end of the hearings but basically the big "I don't know" still was the overriding reality that I was faced with. Ah, uncertainty.
The Avatar Course
All of the bureaucratic hurdles got taken care of, and Cata came into the compound with three other Avatar masters in April. Dr. Rubel agreed to allow me to miss the drug treatment classes for the nine days of the course. The sentencing commission had completed its hearings, and I was awaiting the outcome - what they would choose to send or not send on to Congress as a result of those hearings.
We gathered in one of the Psychology classrooms and got oriented with each other. There were nine inmates, four outside Avatar masters, and both Drs. Al & Geraldine Nagy. Al was the fifth Avatar master there.
We went outside to practice the first set of exercises. It took us awhile. Along with the Avatar exercises, came to all of us a new way of perceiving - ourselves, the world, and our interaction with the world. We all went through a process of becoming less in our heads and our thoughts, and more in touch with what we were feeling about what we were encountering. By feeling I mean not only on an emotional level, which is actually a bit still within the intellectual process of defining how we feel, but rather what we are feeling on a tactile level. How our stomachs, arms, heads, chest feel, the actual feelings that we are experiencing in our bodies as a result of the mental images that we are creating as a result of experiencing and interpreting events.
After we got what the experience of feeling was about, we practiced for hours with different things like objects, animate things, people, beliefs and judgments. This was carried out until we had a clear perception of the experience that the exercises were created to present to us.
The next step of exercises focused on intentionally creating realities and the intended feelings that we desired to have in association with these realities. This consisted of creating through simply announcing what we were doing to ourselves. State the desired thing and feel the completeness of creating what we chose to state with no other thought occurring in cross creation/contrast to that first stated idea. We were creating realities that were experiential and not perceived on the level of thinking about what was going on, just feeling with our bodies what was going on.
This was about the fourth day into the course. It took that long to become accustomed and practiced with feeling as opposed to thinking. What we ultimately began to notice was that we were the creators of everything that we experienced.
After practicing until we became familiar, comfortable, and relatively adept at creating feelings at will we went to the next exercise, that of discreating both current feelings about events and past events. This process also took a couple of days to practice and to get integrated, not only with the process but to become familiar with all of the aspects in our minds and bodies that we are constantly creating feelings about what we do and have encountered. After the ninth day we were pretty light with having looked at and experienced a gamut of feelings about old events and being able to discreate the reaction that we had become accustomed to regarding those events.
After having taken the course I noticed some of its similarities with the Life Training concepts, but this was like Life training on turbocharge, and for me especially, realizing just how I am like everyone else and how connected we all are. And yet again here I was getting these experiences and tools while being inside a federal prison. It still blows me away.
After completing the course, an additional Avatar class was put into the regular psychology schedule so that those of us who took the course were able to get together once a week and practice the exercises we had learned together.
Sentencing Commission Results
At the end of April, the sentencing commission brought out the proposed amendments to the sentencing guidelines. They proposed that sentencing for LSD be changed so that, rather than using the weight of the paper or other carrier, an established set weight per dose was declared. This was to be 400 micrograms per dose. And they did make this retroactive. But they had an interesting codicil.
It seems that the Government is pretty good at appearing to make a change when in fact it's all smoke and mirrors and no changes actually occur. This is what happened to most persons who were incarcerated by the Feds for LSD. What the commission said was that in cases where a person was indicted under the mandatory minimum part of the statutes the original weight was to be used to determine if the mandatory minimum threshold was breached. If it was, then they were still to serve out that mandatory minimum sentence. Then if they received a sentence over that mandatory minimum, their sentence could be changed downward to the mandatory minimum term to reflect the weight of the LSD using the 400 micrograms per dose weight.
Since I was not indicted under the Mandatory Minimum clause, the entire brunt of the change would be applied to my sentencing. This would change the weight used to gauge my sentence from its present 28.63 grams to 1.6 grams.
Another Amendment change the commission passed was to allow a three-step reduction for acceptance of responsibility. When I was sentenced there was a two step reduction in place available for that. This changed my base sentencing level from 32 to 26. With the three-step reduction the final level was 23.
Level 23 carries a sentencing range of 46 to 57 months. Not too shabby, loosing 50 months off my sentence if the proposed amendment was not shot down by Congress. But those of us who followed these things knew something. The jail house lawyer club had been paying attention for years to the working of this bureaucracy. Up until that time no amendment to the guidelines that was presented to congress by the sentencing commission had been acted upon by congress. Every one of them had been ignored and therefore put into the sentencing guidelines and into the law. So now all we had to do was wait it out until April 30th for the time to pass where Congress had an opportunity to vote it down. Although the weight of precedence was on our side it was a slightly anxious wait.
Life continued with my schedule having changed to doing drug treatment groups all morning. This was followed by an Accounting Class in the afternoon and three other afternoons occupied by psychology groups. The other two hours or so a day I got to go to work.
May passed and the deadline for Congress to say no did with it. Cool. It was a done deal. In six months the amendment would go into effect, and I'd have significantly less time to spend on this enforced vacation. My next step was to find out just what I had to do to get the change implemented.
It was back to the law books to research how it was done. I found a passage relating to amendments, and although it was pretty weird, it wasn't as twisted as some of the legislated items I have encountered. It went like this. In the event that an amendment is passed through the sentencing commission process that is retroactive, someone whose sentence if effected by the amendment can get the implementation of the effect in three ways. By having the director of the B.O.P. implement it for any of it effects, by the original sentencing judge ordering it's implementation, or by the inmate going through petitioning the court, i.e., in a formal hearing before the sentencing judge to have the change implemented.
I decided that I would address the first two before I went through the process of having to go back to court. I wasn't too thrilled with the prospect of enduring the El Reno shuffle and a stay of unknown duration back at Fairton while awaiting a hearing in Delaware.
In the meantime I continued to take classes and go through my routine. I became enamored of the Stairmaster and went to it every day as soon as the first movement was announced after afternoon count. Put in a solid forty minutes before taking myself to dinner.
The drug program ended in August. It was fun, and, right about the time that it ended, a new policy was initiated by the B.O.P. to allow anyone who finished the drug program to be granted six months halfway house. When a person is in the halfway house they are still serving out their sentence. So they are still under the auspices of the B.O.P. But they are serving that portion of their sentence out on the streets, with a bit of restriction. Nonetheless they are not behind a razor-topped hurricane fence. Since that time, an additional one-year of good time has been added to sweeten the incentive for inmates to take the drug program.
Gate Pass
There is a crew of minimum level inmates in most low and medium F.C.I.s who work every day outside of the fences. They man the warehouses, do the landscaping of the outside grounds, and some of them drive to the local towns doing chores that require getting something quickly. At Bastrop they were housed in one building in a dormitory fashion. This means that rather than the two men to a room scenario there is one large room with bunk beds set up throughout it. There were about thirty men living in this building. As soon as I was finished with the drug program, I was switched to this housing unit, and I requested to become a member of the outside work crew. It took a couple of weeks, but by September, I was walking every day to a gate and let through it to go to the prison warehouse.
This was a bit of an ordeal, since we went through the strip search bend over routine at each coming and going. But the relative freedom felt when going outside of the fences made up for the undressing experience. There were three warehouses. One was for Unicor. Another was for the rest of the prison. The third was for the kitchen.
The duties were light and sporadic. Once a week we would provide the cleaning and stationary necessities for all of the units and departments in the institution. On another day we would send in the commissary items. There would be trucks arriving periodically that we would unload with forklifts. I did get trained as a forklift driver. The rest of the time, we hung out listening to the radio and amusing ourselves with outrageous tales of the laws we had broken that enabled us to receive this fine vacation we were on.
One of the warehouse clerks had his gate pass taken away, and I quickly got myself sitting at a typewriter making order forms. I had a couple of interesting perks that came with the job. One was that every day I walked the paperwork for any food items that arrived over to the food warehouse. It was part of the job that the guard running the warehouse would make sure he looked the other way while I obtained food items for the warehouse office. We had a microwave oven and could prepare simple items in it at our leisure. The other perk was that I had my very own copy machine at my disposal.
The camp was being built during this period, and we watched the progress through the fall into winter, which was more like fall into a little harsher fall in Texas. My class attendance was not abated by working outside. Whenever I had a class, I would just go back to the gate and reenter the prison compound.
While I was living in the gate pass dorm, I got myself on the movie committee. Every week, one of the guards who worked in the recreation department went to the video store and picked out three movies. These got played through the prison wide cable system during weekends. A group of four inmates met with the guard each Thursday to select from the latest offerings that made it into video that week. Mostly action bang up movies got selected but I pushed to get some of the more avant gard art house movies into the mix. And occasionally I got something slipped into the viewing selections that otherwise would never be seen by this group. I remember getting the selection committee to go for Another Girl on the I.R.T. one week. Although the message was one that the black inmate population might be a bit sensitive to, I got some praise for having pushed for its selection. Those guys would never have seen it in their lives otherwise.
November arrived without Congress having acted on the sentencing commission amendments. This last deadline having been passed, it was time for me to send some mail out to the Director of the B.O.P. I sent a letter stating that the amendment had taken effect and that one of the possibilities for implementation was through her auspices. So, was she inclined to implement the changes?
My letter to the judge was a little more complex. At sentencing, I had made a statement. In it, I said that I was going to take whatever classes were available to me while I was incarcerated. And basically use the time to initiate whatever improvements I could to myself. I got a copy of the transcript when I made this statement and highlighted it. The judge had also made a statement as to the fact that the sentence was far in excess of what he felt was necessary to realistically punish the crime. But that he was constrained by law to implement it anyway. I highlighted that part of the transcript also.
I compiled transcripts of the classes I attended, both within the psychology and education departments as well as any certificates I was awarded upon completion of those classes. After 23 months inside the fences I had accumulated more than 2000 hours of time spent in education and psychology courses and seminars.
I wrote a letter to the judge announcing the amendment and it's potential effect on my sentence. I included a reminder of what I had said at sentencing along with the documentation to present that I went through with what I said I was going to do. I also reminded the judge of his own statement at my sentencing. I tied this all together with an explanation of how the judge could implement the change in sentencing I was eligible for and an inquiry as to whether he was inclined to do this on his own or not. If not then I would go through the process of petitioning the court to have it implemented myself. Then I waited for a response from one of the two letters.
Camp Bastrop
The camp was opened for business at the end of November, and ten of us were sent out there to be a skeleton crew available to work at getting it ready for the other 190 persons who were slated to arrive. It was a pretty nice time as far as my imprisonment goes. There were only one or two guards present. And things were loose. The kitchen was set up in one of the two large bays that were to become dormitories. And a bunch of food was just set out. We had carte blanche to eat what we wished when we wished of what was provided. We ate mostly cereal, bread, and other simple stuff. But relatively speaking, having unmonitored access to anything in prison was freedom. The hassle of having to go through the gates each morning was gone. So was the access to classes. No more life training or meditation. I did miss that.
The building had those two large rooms that were separated down the middle of the building with a wall. These were the sleeping dormitories. A corridor ran adjacent to the ends of those rooms, and the administration offices, visiting room/common room and kitchen occupied rooms on the opposite side of that corridor. The TV rooms were placed just inside the entrance doors to the dormitories along the wall that separated the two rooms. The showers were placed on the opposite end of that wall. There was a separate visiting room placed just outside of the main entrance that sat at the head of the dividing corridor, but that didn't become operational until a few months after the camp was opened.
In the large dorm room, we set up bunk beds. Starting with the first ten of us at the far end of the gymnasium sized room, and as new inmates arrived the beds marched towards the front of the room.
Each week more inmates, who had been living in the same dorm I had been since I was granted an outside pass, were brought out to the camp. First one side filled up and gradually the other side got populated.
In early January, I got a letter back from the Judge. He wrote that he certainly was inclined to implement the changes afforded by the amendment, but no one within the Delaware federal judiciary was sure just how to go about doing it yet. It was too new for a policy to have been created for going about actually using it within the bureaucracy. But the sentencing commission had planned some classes for probation officers to find out what to do, and as soon as Ellen had attended and could get back to the judge they would get it together.
I went about my daily routine, which really didn't change much. The same schedule for meals and work continued. And rather than hitting the gym or library in the evenings, we walked and exercised on a large open area fronting the camp that sat between the warehouse complex and the main camp building. Someone found a nine iron and some golf balls, and a makeshift three hole par three golf course was created on the grounds behind the main dorm. There was a small library located in one room, but it was very poorly stocked.
In February, I was called into the camp administrators office and was presented with the official order from the judge reducing my sentence. The administrator was a career B.O.P. minion and had experienced years of inmates telling him that they had secured some kind of relief and were getting out early. And in 99.99% of these cases, it just didn't happen. So while I had already told him that this was going to happen, he chose to not believe me just like he hadn't believed any of the thousands of others throughout his career who had told him similar stories.
When the actual order arrived, he was very surprised. And this also meant that he had to take care of some bureaucracy that he wasn't prepared for. My release papers. These guys don't function very well when something out of the normal institutionalized process occurs.
The math worked out that with this new implementation of a 46 month sentence, I was fixin to have earned six months of accumulated good time reduction off that amount. And then there was the six months halfway house, I was granted by attending the comprehensive drug class. So, the date that my 34-month stay would be completed was June 20th, 1994.
But of course my incompetent camp caseworker forgot to ask for the six months halfway house that I was entitled to. Initially I was told that I would only get two months halfway house and therefore wouldn't be released until October. The case worker and Administrator held that, by the time the paperwork had progressed that far, it was pretty much written in stone and there was no way that it could be changed. Well, the hell with that.
There was a guy in San Antonio whose B.O.P. job it was to oversee the halfway house program. He found himself barraged with letters and phone calls from my family and friends and their respective congresspersons insisting that I be granted the full six months halfway house time designated within the drug program stipulation. His name was Michael Gingster, so, of course, any of us who were aware of his existence through our impending releases and involvement with that aspect of the B.O.P. called him gangster.
I guess he got tired of hearing from all those people because my halfway house time did indeed get changed and my six months was instated. He showed up prior to my release at the camp for a pre-get out talk with those inmates who were in that position. After the talk he took me aside and told me just what a pain in the ass I had been and that essentially I better not fuck up while in the halfway house time or I'd find myself back inside bookoo quick. I believe that I did not fit the profile of a person who had elicited such a massive display of support when he encountered me. By that time of my incarceration I had not shaven nor cut or tended to my hair, besides washing it, for the entire time I was there. So my beard was to my belly button, and I had dreadlocks well past my shoulders. I did heed his warning though.
Renaissance Done In
During that period between my going out to the camp and my release, some severe changes occurred inside the fence. The opening created within the psychology department with the departure of Dr. Varhely was finally filled sometime in the fall of 1993. A new woman psychologist was added to the psychology team.
The story I got was that during a life training, which were quite emotional and healing events, an inmate and Dr Rubel hugged each other. Apparently this is a severe no-no for the B.O.P., for any employee to have physical contact of that sort with an inmate. Actually we had been hugging these guys for years and it didn't bother anyone. But the new psychologist took offence and basically got Dr. Rubel brought up on internal B.O.P. charges. He had to do the seven dances of hell just to keep his job with long protracted hearings and such as only the federal bureaucracy can conjure up.
The result of all this was essentially Dr. Ruble's withdrawal from participation in having anything to do with outside programs and volunteers being brought in. As far as I know, it made such a non-responsive environment within the institution, especially from the viewpoint of the administration that when Al Nagy hit his 20-year mark he retired and Geraldine went with him.
For a few years there was an amazing renaissance within those fences which culminated in allowing a great degree of freedom, mental freedom, from the many demons that inhabited all of those imprisoned men. And after four years it all vanished.
I was there for the most open and active period of that time, and soon after I left and did not have the ability to attend, it went away.
So, even if everyone I meet is resistant to hear it, I had a wonderful time in prison. I was given opportunities for personal growth that are unparalleled anywhere that I know of.
The Effect of the Psychology Department on the Prison
My basic experience at FCI Bastrop was overwhelmingly one of ease. I did not have a sense of being threatened or of perceiving imminent violence. Actually I felt fairly secure except for the few events I have mentioned. And I had many moments of bliss while living in the supposedly heinous environment.
Inmates who actively participated in the psychology department programs and had spent time in other federal prisons related that this was by far the mellowest institution that they had experienced. All I had to go on was Fairton. But even my short time in population there was far more stressful than the time I spent at Bastrop.
Many of us held the belief that the 10 percent of the population participating in the psychology classes were enough to shift the consciousness of the rest of the prison population.
Ever heard of the Hundredth Monkey? This is a book that is utilized by the nuclear disarmament movement. It relates a story of two islands in the middle of the south pacific each having a population of same species monkeys. One had 100 of them and the other has 99. One of the monkeys on the 100 population island learns how to wash its fruit before eating it one day. The other monkeys it lives with see this and pick up on it. When the 100th monkey on the island learns to wash its fruit, all of the monkeys on the 99 monkey island immediately begin to wash their fruit without any of them ever having been taught how to do so. The theory is that when 50 percent plus one of the population of the planet are thinking that nuclear disarmament is the way to go, the rest of the population will immediately shift to the same viewpoint.
We participants had decided that the general mellow and non violent environment we perceived at Bastrop was a result of enough consciousness shifting their viewpoint to effect the rest of the population, not towards total non violence but to less.
So with this belief my initial focus of this book was to corroborate this theory. With that in mind, I contacted the B.O.P. and asked for the records of all of the disciplinary shots given at Bastrop and all of the other medium/low federal prisons within the same geographical area for the years I was confined there. The hope was that these statistics would show that Bastrop had significantly less incidents of both violence and all infractions than other similar level institutions within the same geographical area.
What I found out upon receiving this information was that Bastrop actually had more incidents than some places and less than others but there was so significant difference there than at any other low-medium FCI in the central south region.
Blew that theory out of the water. The one significant thing was that there wasn't one murder at Bastrop between 1989 and 1993. This was the only medium level or greater FCI that could have that claim.
This means that the only real effect of all this stuff was in the minds of some of the individuals who participated. Maybe the real effect was not at all on what was outside of them but rather on how they looked at the events outside of themselves after having changed their viewpoints through the work they did on themselves.
Hit the Bricks
On the morning of the 20th of June, an event occurred that might not have ever occurred before in the U.S. prison system. The town driver's name was Spence. He was an inmate himself who was allowed to drive anywhere the institution sent him. One of his duties was to transport those inmates to the halfway house in Austin who had not secured other means of transport. And since halfway house inmates were still serving out their sentence, the B.O.P. was responsible for them to get to where they were going.
Spence was black and had dreadlocks himself. So there we were, two dreads riding along in a B.O.P. marked car. I thought that it was rather unique. He dropped me off at the halfway house and my prison experience was complete.
By Motorcycle Michael Sommers