Punishing an innocent group of people for someone else’s sins is the favorite cudgel of Perryville staff. A lifelong nonsmoker says, “When the smokers leave their butts all over the yard, the DW closes it down to ‘punish them’. When the smokers get inside they light up anyway in a confined space, so the only folks getting punished are the very people that never put a cigarette butt on the ground in their life.”

Apparently, Complex Kitchen jobs are the most hated in prison, and the worst shift is 2 am. Those people just don’t want to go to work, so several guards turn on the overhead lights, shine flashlights in faces indiscriminately, and yell to wake the dead…..at 2am. It never seems to dawn on them to only wake up the folks who work there…..not the others that need all the rest they can get.

Full time, M-Fri workers like Televerde, Garment, and Hometown Heros, really look forward to their one chance at recreation on the weekends. They have had that time ripped away by ‘blanket punishment’ because the whole yard is shut down until all the Complex workers go to work. The only thing this accomplishes is to give Complex folks more time to sleep in, and aggravates the M-F folks to the point of fighting and unrest.

Several months ago someone in Garment lost a pair of tweezers. Instead of mobilizing with metal detectors and a search team, the staff decided to “scare” ALL the inmates by threatening to take away their visits, fundraisers, baseball games, and rec time, until the tweezers were found. We wish we could step into the deranged mind of a DOC person just for a minute….to see how they work. Why would taking away visits from a 70-year-old granny, who doesn’t even know where Garment is, help find one tiny tweezer????

Can someone please tell us how a government entity with a budget of 1.7 BILLION dollars annually, can bounce checks to companies in the greater Phoenix area? Fundraisers are something the residents look forward to, because it’s a way to supplement the meager offerings of the commissary.

Let’s just take one example, but there are so many others….Sally’s Beauty Supply. This was the main source African Americans had for ethnic hair products. The girls would scrimp and save for this event. Sally’s got burnt too many times by DOC’s rubber checks, so they bounced the DOC! No more Sally’s:-( According to a staff source, he alleges the DOC now has to go farther and farther out from Phoenix to find vendors that will deal with prison fundraisers.

COSTCO will take the prison debit card (no check) but will wait up to 2 months to fill the order. Residents have written in that fundraisers are not nearly as good as they once were, and take twice as long. There is one thing that is a constant, however……. the prison takes the inmate’s money as fast as they can.