The War on Drugs, Part II. The Prison Industrial Complex
By: Matt Bump
Tags: Prison Industrial Complex, Prison Reform, War On Drugs, Slavery, Criminal Justice Reform

The War on Drugs, Part II. The Prison Industrial Complex

By Matt Bump

Date of Writing 01/2019

It has been just over one year since I wrote the original piece: ‘The War on Drugs is a War on People. And It’s Creating Victims’. In that time I’ve come to learn that it was and is a much bigger problem than I ever thought. And the end is nowhere in sight. This has much more of a broad cause and effect, both in the traditional sense and the geographical sense. It’s a geopolitical catastrophe. I alluded to what I thought was a purely American issue, but more so focused on that of Wisconsin and its epidemic of opiate addiction. Which I also said was caused in an epidemic of establishment nonsense. Rooted in all kinds of immoral reasoning like racial profiling dating back to the 70s and being amplified over the years leading to the world’s biggest prison population. But, again, hindsight is 2020 and I think with time I realized that I missed information I knew, but forgot to include. And of course, I have learned more about this issue during my time in prison. So the time for part 2 is NOW. If I get something wrong the fault is mine alone. But what can I say? I am an inmate with limited resources. As you may have read in my prior article I am locked up over marijuana that I proved I never touched. The process was inefficient and messy. I waited 7 months for evidence that should have exonerated me. But it is what it is. It provided me with opportunities to examine my path and the paths of others. It is a constant fight for me and others against an incompetent state and federal government. Even with a competent attorney on my side, it was a struggle to get my evidence. I found out, about a month after taking a plea deal for prison time concurrent with my probation revocation (2 years in prison), which means running together rather than consecutive to each other, that the clerk put in the system “consecutive”. This, even though the judge had clearly stated concurrent. The court record verified as much. It took nearly 6 months for this clerk to do their job and fix it (The supreme court reprimanded my clerk! ) It goes to show that simply doing your job right is not a priority for the courts because after all, I am just a “criminal” to them. Essentially this made my release date 6–9–2020 rather than 12–8–19. Which is what my sentence should have been, or so I thought. More on that later. It meant I would have spent almost 4 years in prison, rather than the 20 months. My attorney had to go to the judge after he left several voicemails and emails giving chances and deadlines to the clerk with not a single response. The supreme court had to force the clerk to follow the law. Crazy, right? I mean, I thought it was a disorderly system before. Yikes. It gets worse, however. I will get to that later.

I have been to 5 institutions in the last 2 years. I have encountered criminals of every caliber from substance abusers, sex offenders, and even murderers. Sometimes even in the same unit. Hell, sometimes even the same pod. I’ve met some of the most mentally ill people I’ve ever seen in these institutions. Someone who is locked up for life for killing his wife over getting rid of a cat, who threatened my life over saying Aaron Rodgers is better than Brett Favre. Yes, Packer fans are ride or die but any reasonable person can see the extremism in the comment. To see it in person was interesting. I laughed at it initially but then felt bad for the guy because he was serious and couldn’t help it. You’ve got to be fearless in prison. Just in case something pops off or someone wants to test you. The key is not to be stupid. I will say the majority of my days were smooth but filled with a different kind of anxiety. The kind that sits and dwells, where you are powerless and have to rely on others to get stuff done. This plagued my mind for 6 months. The feeling that the state and the department of corrections were trying to screw me over was worse than if I had known that they had gotten my sentence right. This culminated in a lot of stress and near breakdown down the road. This place is known as Stanley, and all the institutions I’ve been housed had at, have had a negative impact on my mental health but I think I’ve overcome a good chunk of it. And I know that some of the staff along with my family have some credit due. I still wonder what it’s like to be my family and friends, considering that they express anxiety to me about my absence. My family has had, at nearly all times, at least one person incarcerated. Right now I have 2 family members locked up for a drug-related offense. Both are non-violent and both stemming from an addiction that I feel the war on drugs perpetuates. I’d be willing to bet that they’re addictions that began with a true gateway drug: the pharmaceuticals, the prescription narcotics. Social politics and establishment nonsensical reasoning are not only holding us back but are now pulling us backward. There are countries that do everything with regard to drugs in the opposite way of the U.S. But our politicians and some socially ignorant or politically illiterate citizens still think prison is the answer to drug addiction. Probation and parole officers revoke people who are addicted to drugs for nearly any reason and for simple hearsay allegations. Probation is a trap. Nobody wants to address the root causes or take a small step back and re-examine how we approach crime in general, but especially the war on drugs. It’s even less likely if you are someone whose job relies on your perpetuating the problem. I’m looking at you. Administrative law judges, probation officers, doctors or anyone who is apathetic on the issues facing our country. In a sense, we are all complicit if we want to change but don’t get active and involve ourselves to change the injustices. We are complicit as a civilization when we begin to not care. Our rights, our freedom, and dignity are under attack by our government — and by ourselves when we become apathetic and when we don’t care until it affects our lives directly (by then it’s too late).

The body count of our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and friends has continued to grow. The number of people, dead from drugs or in prison has continued to grow. The addicted on the streets, and country roads have continued to grow, not despite how we approach and combat the war on drugs but because of our war on drugs. It is all a part of the prison industrial complex.

Now for an expanded understanding of just what the complex entails, I can point to my experience and my most recent trip around the state prison system. After 6 months at Stanley Correctional Institution in northwestern Wisconsin, I transferred out due to a few events. I was still fighting my case when I first got there, for example. I resolved the case soon after that and was eligible to be restaffed and have my custody level reconsidered. I was transported to Black River Correctional Center which is a minimum-security treatment center with an earned release program that focuses on those with AODA needs and cognitive thinking therapy for those with criminal thinking tendencies. I requested to come here based on a judicial and clerical error that led me to believe I would be able to save significant time. Over the next 6 months, I worked as a slave for the state and battled away trying to fix my sentence. But I make the best of situations I’m in. In a minimum setting, you are treated a little more like a human. And I was able to converse with guards and medical staff. I was exposed to some raw numbers coming into the Jackson Correctional Institution. You can bet that a lot of this money and expenditure is important and significant to companies like Indianhead, Keefe, etc. Every week there was an order for institutional food between 10–30K and sometimes even higher. It ranges between 500K a year and 1.04 million dollars a year on food alone for this prison. When it comes to inmate clothing it’s about 3K every 2 months. Paper products like toilet paper? 14K every 2 months. Cleaning supplies? 7–15 K every month. Office supplies 789 bucks every other month. I even found the cost of electricity per month at Jackson which is 30K every month. At the time of writing, there are about 1000 inmates here. It’s operating capacity is 896. The budget for this institution alone is 30.6 million dollars. There are 36 institutions in the state of Wisconsin for adults and 6 more for juveniles. I don’t know offhand the budgets of all of these institutions on an individual level, but altogether in 2019–2020, they will amount to about 1.21 billion dollars per year. The state prison system is expected to reach a record high number of inmates by June of 2019. On any given day the cost of housing an inmate is about 89 dollars. The record number of inmates being expected in 2019 is 23,233. That’s not counting the people in country jails or the House of Corrections.

There is something even more sinister not being shown in the background of all of this. Something that can be traced back to the 90s and the Truth in Sentencing legislation brought to us by our former elected leaders.

Keefe Group distributes the food that inmates can order that wouldn’t typically be on the kitchen menu. Everything from ramen noodles to soda, candy, even email credits are all overpriced. Ramen, priced at .35 cents, is probably the most ordered food item. Keep in mind that the food served in prison is low quality (and is subject to lawsuits in the past and present). So people in prison get really ingenuitive in what they order just to feel some sense of comfort and be filled. But it’s not that simple. The state can take 50% of what you get sent to you or what you make in state pay. State pay is something miserable, ranging from 15 cents an hour to 50 cents an hour. That is supposed to be offered to you so you can at least afford hygiene basics The state gives and takes back it’s money so you are paying off fines and court costs. Sometimes the state takes as much as 80% because your judge ordered it that way. In other words, there is an incentive to locking people up and it is hurting families more than is known on the surface. People become revenue for police departments, state departments like the department of corrections who oversee probationers. The department of justice, for police and even more so for private companies like Keefe. A closer look at Keefe shows you how those in the corporate world have reaped benefits from the monopoly over prison food and the legislation that leads to mass incarceration. Former Gov. Tommy Thompson signed this legislation into law. Yet he has the nerve to say he regrets his actions and effects on communities while his pockets got heavier. Thomson says he wishes prisons were converted into vocational schools and rehabs. Former governor Scott Walker pushed for mass incarceration and Truth in Sentencing laws when Democrats like Joe Biden offered funds for states who passed this kind of legislation. Truth in Sentencing has cemented in mass incarceration and protected the revolving door between probation and prison by making people spend more time in prison. The prison population tripled under Thompson’s tenure.

The prison population grew, even more, when Scott Walker was governor, spiking again in 2013. Politicians are only pro-police/prison state because it benefits them monetarily and politically. Police do not realize that they are the pawns in the game of class warfare, or that prison protects modern-day slavery and voter suppression and are complicit in rising racial tensions in our country. What I mean by modern-day slavery is, it is somehow permitted by the Constitution because it allows prisoners to be treated as slaves. The 13th amendment in its attempt to make more people free and able to participate in capitalism, but actually has allowed further dehumanization in modern times. So where’s the outrage? It is seen as racially insensitive to question the amendment that made former slaves and millions of millions of their ancestors free, even with the intention of fully banning slavery. The stigma of being an inmate or convicted felon affords little and elicits little empathy from legislators or the general public, who could care less because they view it as they “make their lives and their own problems.” Addiction, much like mass incarceration, only matters when it affects them or someone they know.

Inmates who have 2 or more years can work for “Badger State Industries” for maybe a couple bucks an hour, full time. Making everything from inmate bunks, street and highway signs to state-issued glasses. I’m not sure if they put the glasses under “Badger State Industries” but it is still inmate labor. Maintenance of the institutions like shoveling and almost any service you can imagine can be practically forced on an inmate or you can get put on “Vuna” status, which means you refused a duty and no longer receive a percentage of it back for fines and court costs. Simply put, it all sucks and is immoral.

Back to my story: As I attended “work” at the JCI warehouse, I started to think about my journey through the hell that is MSDF, Dodge and Stanley. Inmates coined the phrase “It’s the DOC. If it makes sense, they’re not doing it”. I had a painful experience that lasted 6 months at BRCC…The menace was an ingrown toenail. I was given 6 months of “soak it in Epsom saltwater”. 6 months of me asking for removal. 6 months of the nurse’s superior saying “No, it’ll cost money”. Without even seeing it in person. The nurse said he wished he could send them a picture. This is the value of an inmate in pain in Wisconsin. 6 months of all of this along with my issues with the courts. I had gone through 2 sentence corrections, with all the anxiety stemming from that. At the end of my time at BRCC, I chose to leave and was able to help someone else to attain my spot for early release. I felt good about that because he could see his daughter’s 8th-grade graduation after being incarcerated for 10 years. Shout out to overly extensive sentences! The reason I quit the program before it started was because I thought when my sentence was corrected and I would be given credit for every day spent in custody relating to my crime, my release would have been 12–9–18. A day before the program began. But the courts managed to find one more way to screw me over, along with unknown quantities of others. Essentially a case law, as understood in an upper courts’ interpretation denies credit for people who have their probation revoked when later sentenced concurrently on a new crime. The law itself reads that “each day spent in custody should be credited toward the inmate so long as it is in connection with the same course of conduct for which the sentence is later imposed.” It even goes further and states that this “applies to people including those on a probation hold.” This statute is WI stat 973.155. Parts A and B are what I am citing. The courts somehow determined that once you are revoked even though the allegation is the same thing you were charged and later convicted for, that you’re no longer incarcerated in connection with the same course of conduct and no longer afforded credit toward the service of the new sentence.

In summary, I was revoked for a total of 20 months based on an allegation I was both charged and convicted for and the new sentence was 18 months ran concurrent or together with the 20-month revocation. 20 months should be all the time I had to serve. April 4th, 2017 through December 2018. Instead, I will be serving a total of 23 months when 3 months of it is in reality, consecutive. This defies common sense. This case law they used to screw me is an ambiguous interpretation of the law. Because of my 4 months at the House of Corrections, I was given credit toward a 2-year sentence, which is where my remaining 20-month revocation came from. So when it’s all said and done, I will have been incarcerated for 27 months, when my longest sentence was 2 years or 24 months. The interpretation of the law is political in nature and I move that any interpretation made to screw over the people of my state and country like this one, should have its judges assets as well as decisions audited, on the basis of ethics. People must come before profit. Justice must prevail and we must make it easier to reverse rulings that deprive people of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Corrupted judges and politicians all the way up the local and federal chains of command up to the president of the United States should be subject to the fruit of the poisonous tree argument when it is found that they have ethics violations or profited from something they decided upon or signed into law. So that the future of our country can undo the stains of corruption and inhumanity and selfishness forged upon it by the predators in suits and ties and cloaks among us. Judges, politicians and all forms of authority need oversight. Our system as it currently exists does not work for justice but works for injustice. We need to mobilize and make criminal justice reform a priority as well as judicial and legislative ethics. I know what I want to be a part of the change I want to see.

We must make people aware and understand they are footing the bill for mass incarceration and similar failed policies like the war on drugs and address the root causes of crime such as poverty, poor education, and inequality among social levels. I’ve been through almost every situation in the social struggle against the powers and forces of negativity. Due to economic issues, addiction issues of others, and in some cases apathy towards me, I have attended 12 public schools. Moving between 4 counties and one year attending 4 different middle schools, I struggled academically. But I pushed myself to graduate when people in my family even told me I wasn’t graduation material. I depended on food stamps as a kid, free lunch and transportation by the bus lines. These are socialist safety nets that keep society from hitting rock bottom. They are essential and remain essential to our future. As I sit here among my fellow inmates, I notice the disparity in percentages of blacks, whites, Hispanics and how it is not proportionate to their numbers on the streets. I note that 36 percent of the inmates of every year com from Milwaukee County alone. The next closest is Racine at 6.7 percent. When I was in the House of Corrections I noticed the dishonesty of representation of the races because the wristbands of all Latinos or Native Americans were listed as white. That seemed to justify and hide facts for political reasons. The school to prison pipeline needs to be addressed and one way we can do that is reinvesting into our schools. Walk into any school in Milwaukee or urban area and you will see 30–40 kids in one class. There is no way that is conducive to learning. Scott Walker and the Republicans gutted schools and went after teacher unions and cut funding to universities sending education and social safety nets into a tailspin. Conservative ignorance at its best?

They also proposed drug testing those on welfare benefits, when 10 states did similar testing and it resulted in millions of wasted dollars due to not even 1 percent of the people testing positive for drugs. Most people are good people and are trying to make it. We all share the same fight against the special interests of the corporate world. Against the Scott Walkers and Donald Trumps of the world. We must break the general lack of awareness in people supporting the forces opposing their well being and interests. I am hopeful, along with thousands of inmates and their families that the newly elected Democrats, including Governor Tony Evers, will refocus and reinvest in our schools and communities and lift people out of poverty. We hope that he and the legislature will use common sense and empathy and do something about the destructive, wasteful and inhumane politics in the legal system, the war on drugs, mass incarceration. We prisoners sat in prison glued to the TV in hopes of being assured that we are still people and can still be represented, that we matter. That we will have a chance. To have a hope of having hope.

I plan to do my part in many forms. I plan to educate myself and others. I plan to organize and reach out to politicians. But I must not get ahead of myself. I know that I must do everything to earn back my good name. If I succeed, I hope to make it easier for others to do so as well. I will reach out to all progressive groups and organizations and offer my services to the community and to our society. Anything I can do to get my record expunged. With a felony, I cannot run for local office. I will need all the support I can get. I see no limits, no walls that we can’t destroy in order to have a brighter tomorrow.

Somewhere down the line, I want to run for office and show the world that America is and always will be the land of opportunity. Democrats, Republicans, Greens and Libertarians, Pirates, Socialists and Progressives, and Conservatives… These issues are not inherently partisan, but it is all of our responsibility to resolve them. It is important to democracy. I repeat: the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and the prison industrial complex are not fiscally conservative, but are negligent and destructive to communities nationwide. We don’t have any right to moral high ground if we do not change. Challenge the establishment and the status quo!

Heather Thompson, prison historian, on food as punishment for prisoners.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/539n3d/when-prison-food-is-a-punishment

Prisons in wisconsin/Budget/Population. https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/wisconsin/2017/04/29/wisconsin-prison-population-hit-record-soon/100944740/

https://badgerherald.com/opinion/2019/01/29/slavery-is-still-legal-in-wisconsins-prisons-its-time-to-change-that/

Slavery in Wisconsin Prisons.

Stats and Demographics of Inmates and their offenses.

https://doc.wi.gov/DataResearch/DataAndReports/InmateProfile.pdf

Overcapacity prisons link: https://doc.wi.gov/DataResearch/WeeklyPopulationReports/11222019.pdf

The War On Drugs is a War on People: Part 1

https://ourvoiceusa.org/war-drugs-war-people/

There will be a part 3 addressing:

The struggles of being released and details around that fiasco.

Some steps towards hope for some if not all people affected by incarceration.

Some things that I learned about how our system works.

Proposed methods of changing the system.

Politics.

A one week trip back to MSDF.