Dear Comrades: Megalomania

Dear Comrades,

Megalomania is a condition that I believe is on full display in the Trump administration and also reflected in the administration of prisons. Many times its symptoms include lashing out at one’s enemies whenever their authoritarianism is challenged. Because my wife and I had challenged the authority of Upstate Correctional Facility to unlawfully withhold my personal property, not only did I then become primed for retaliation, but so did Emily, a civilian who, in all actuality, was just doing her job.

Let me make this situation crystal clear. What you already know is that by researching the law that governs incarcerated individuals in a Residential Rehabilitation Unit (RRU), my wife, the Co-Executive Director of Unchained, had put pressure on Upstate to release all of my property to me even though I had been given a loss of property sanction (like I said in the last blog post, I don’t make these rules, I just follow them). What you don’t know and what tends to happen anytime we have to correct the implementation of a law, policy, or procedure, is that it many times only applies to that one particular instance. In this case, what that meant was that instead of the pressure causing a change to spread jail-wide or even statewide, it ended with me. And I’m pretty sure no one else on a loss of property sanction received their property afterward, even though Emily made it clear when she was reaching out to the administration that she was not asking for a special favor for me but a systemic change statewide to comply with the law.

It is important to know this not only for the most obvious reasons, but also to give you a deeper inspection into the mind of the megalomaniac. Here we can easily see that the megalomaniac only acquiesces to the threat of more power because only power respects power. Upstate Correctional Facility, like most other law enforcement agencies and institutions, has no actual respect for the power of the law because they deem themselves to not only be above it, but the embodiment of it, using and enforcing it as they see fit. Therefore, those without power have no say in its facilitation. Only when power checks power does power recognize power. But power doesn’t like to be checked, especially by someone with less power.

Once we checked the autonomy of Upstate Correctional Facility’s power, it was almost a foregone conclusion that the depth of our power would be checked in return. This was done by a series of responses designed to remind us of who’s boss. First, there was the package of cocoa butter lotion for me that mysteriously came up missing, even though Amazon confirmed that it was delivered to the prison. Then my wife’s visiting privileges were temporarily limited due to what was called an "anomaly" on her body scan, coincidentally the first and only time out of more than 50 prior trips through the body scanner over the past year since their use began. Then, a package of food was rejected because apparently my information on the packaging label was “unreadable,” yet somehow the package room officers were able to confirm for the Superintendent that a package had in fact been delivered for me but was returned to sender because of the label’s alleged illegibility. And lastly, the package of food that was sent to replace that package was also rejected because that time, according to the Superintendent, the package room officers claimed the vendor that has been shipping food packages to state prisons for years suddenly forgot how to correctly print their own information on the mailing label, and the package room did not know where the package came from.

That’s not to mention all the dirty looks, ice grills, side-eyes, prompts to act froggy, and the blatant disregard for any need that arose for me. They made it a point to check me in some way every single day, and every single chance I got I checked them back. They, in turn, tried to goad me into doing something stupid to make me make my own stay longer, checking my manhood, checking my conviction, and checking my intelligence.

Then I got two time cuts for good behavior and was transferred out of there early.

Checkmate!