Dear Comrades: The Box
Dear Comrades,
When I got to Upstate box, I was arriving with a reputation for “being an asshole” (as the staff like to say), an assault on staff charge, and a piece off the printing press so hot it was turning red necks purple (see last week’s letter about an op-ed in the New York Post criticizing me). I was hot hot, when in all reality, I was just looking for peace. A normal bid. A way to continue to grow. A way to fully step out of that quick-tempered street mentality that I needed to correct in order to be a good leader.
In my mind, however, the issue is always this. It really amounts to one single principle: If I have the means to achieve what amounts to reversing the fortune of those oppressed, then even if those results bring me pain, strain, and disdain, I have the right - no, the obligation - to do so, because if I don’t, then tell me, who will? The real problem is that corrections is not about fostering rehabilitation like they say they are. They’re about fostering subservience, and the difference is the expectation that you look and act the part, yes and no sirring to whatever bullshit programs, attitudes, retaliation, and oppression that they can dish out, never challenging their crooked status quo, maintaining that semblance of being a “model inmate,” all while returning back to the community totally unprepared to strive or thrive, and therefore becoming a part of the two-thirds who return to prison. Why? Because it’s job security. It looks like it works. It sounds like it works. But it’s not working! It never did.
When I got to Upstate Correctional Facility in the middle of 2023, the jail was barely giving incarcerated individuals their property, which the recently enacted HALT Solitary Act mandated. Prior to the law change in 2022, people in the box (solitary confinement) were not allowed to have any of their property. Having property is the difference between sitting in an empty room twiddling your thumbs, talking about war stories and which rappers have more money, or having your personal items like food, good hygiene products, and a full complement of books and study material. Research has shown what isolation does to the mind, and it’s nothing nice. Was it then fortuitous to land at Upstate in the midst of my own struggles in order to set the ship on course? Of course. Because if I didn’t, it might still be the same way now.
Even today, Upstate is the only Residential Rehabilitation Unit (RRU - a type of housing unit established by the HALT Solitary Act that is intended to be a more humane alternative to traditional solitary confinement) in the state where incarcerated individuals only get to use the phone tablet every two to three days for four hours at a time, which then has to be shared with a cellmate. All other RRUs in New York State provide the phone tablets every day just about all day. Upstate claims the reason it doesn’t is because incarcerated individuals are stealing the tablets, which are similar to, but not the same as incarcerated individuals’ own tablets. Make sense yet? No? Good. You’re getting it. Interestingly, a couple of the “cool” COs asked me to relay the fact that almost every CO is actually in favor of letting incarcerated individuals have their own tablets because, frankly, they don’t want to have to deal with passing extra tablets out while the personal tablets sit locked away in a property bin. It doesn’t make sense. In fact, the logic behind keeping our personal tablets at bay doesn’t make sense either since the policy claims that we’re not entitled to them because they are not personal property but state property since JPay gives them to us for free. However, using that logic, everyone should have their tablets since state property is the one thing incarcerated individuals always get. In the end, common sense tells us that as long as everyone can use the phone, it would be best for everyone involved if we had our own tablets, especially since the jail has full control of the tablets’ applications. It would make it less of a hassle for everyone.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be dropping short Dear Comrade letters filling you in on the ways I’ve been targeted over the past several years and keeping you posted on my current journey as I approach my release in the fall of 2027. Please join me, get to know me, and give me your feedback. You can send messages to derek@weareunchained.org, and our team will make sure your notes get to me. Your thoughts matter.