It doesn’t matter what Unit she lives in, doesn’t matter the custody level, the only sure thing she can count on is, that the guards will lose her stuff when she returns from her hospital stay. The time it takes Perryville prison to “find” the inmate’s lost property varies….sometimes 48 hours, sometimes a week, sometimes never.

Broken TVs are a popular item for the sick and injured to come home to. Inmates pay an exorbitant $230 price for a $35 monitor only to find it smashed when they return. The prison doesn’t pay for a new TV when they lose it or break it….oh no…they only give a sliding scale based on depreciation back to the inmate. If they decide the TV is only worth $45, then that’s all she gets back toward another new TV. Of course, that’s only after she’s waited a month and submitted reams of paper.

What we find to be particularly egregious, is not only don’t they supply the inmate’s personal property, but they don’t supply the BASIC items she needs like a mattress, sheets, blanket, and pillow! We have an email from a lady who watched her friend return from the hospital, with absolutely nothing but the wheelchair she was sitting in! At 4pm a guard wheeled this elderly woman into her empty cube…and walked away!!! Some girls ran him down and asked about the lady’s mattress and bedding, reportedly he said, “She’ll get something tomorrow.”. What about tonight??!!! It takes a village. The women in the bay rounded up a mattress, sheet, blankets, fresh clothes, soap and toilet paper for the poor woman they found out had just gotten out of intensive care. The prison expected her to sleep sitting up all night in her wheelchair??

Man’s inhumanity to man (woman).

Perryville staff keep forgetting one important fact…..visitors are not criminals. Visitors are taxpayers who fund employees’ paychecks. The people that go to the trouble to visit someone in prison, do so because they love them, not because it’s easy. The prison never makes it easy.

There are lots of examples, but let’s just take the weekend of Feb 22-23 food visit. The hard coolers of the correct size have been purchased by the public for food visit transport, they were approved with the little wheels on them to make it easier to carry all that food. On Feb 22 there was no problem with these containers. Suddenly, on Feb 23d, a new person was in charge of food visit inspection and she decided that NO WHEELED containers would be allowed. That forced all the visitors to go back to their car, put the cooler away, and stow all that food in garbage bags (issued by the prison). They came into the food visit looking like refugees from Gaza! What about the elderly and disabled? What if the food was too heavy to be carried, but not too heavy to be wheeled?

A disabled woman was denied entry that same day because her “bra strap was showing”. We looked up the policy, it says a visitor’s ” collarbone shall not be showing “, not bra strap. This poor woman needed to use a portable oxygen tank, and that made one side of her shirt pull more than the other, but it revealed no collarbone…. only a small part of her bra. She is a fighter though and wanted to visit her sister, so she stood outside asking visitors if they had a spare shirt in their car she could borrow. One person helped her out with a shirt, so she went back in with an extra shirt covering her bra strap. The tyrant in charge finally allowed her to visit her sister, albeit late.

Most visitation rules are ambiguous and enforced erratically. This lack of clarity and predictability contributes to both residents and visitors feelings of uncertainty and stress.