The system is rigid, strict and hopeless… and I believe it to be cruel and wrong…I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture  of the body.

This was something sent to me by someone so very close to my heart, but so far away, it is strength and hope that keeps the spirit going. Sometimes all we have is hope, and the knowing that the system is cruel and wrong.

To that person, I love you and admire your strength

Having no information can sometimes be a horrible thing, but I beg to ask you, what is worse, not having information, or having incorrect information, or as I like to call it misinformation.  The following is taken from wikipedia.org.

Misinformation is false or inaccurate information that is spread unintentionally. It is distinguished from disinformation by motive in that misinformation is simply erroneous, while disinformation, in contrast, is intended to mislead.

Makkai proposes the distinction between misinformation and disinformation to be a defining characteristic of idioms in the English language. An utterance is only idiomatic if it involves disinformation, where the listener can decode the utterance in a logical, and lexically correct, yet erroneous way. Where the listener simply decodes the lexemes incorrectly, the utterance is simply misinformation, and not idiomatic.

Damian Thompson defines counter knowledge as “misinformation packaged to look like fact.”  Using the definition above, this may refer to disinformation, as the motive is deliberate and often pecuniary.

In this post I am going to get into 2 situations where misinformation has caused not only time and money, but also emotional distress and all because CT is too lazy to update their website properly.

Currently the CT DMV doesn’t even accept live calls, you either need to use the website or you need to call and go through this maze of automated systems which gets you no where, and this is where my first rant and rave about ct and how not only are they corrupt, but they are lazy, outdated and have no care for the average citizen.

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Ok, I am confused… why is it that there are so many prisons? Oh yea, MONEY. Seriously, how disgusting that this state would rather detain people than feed the poor, house the homeless. They are always bitching about how much it costs to house an inmate.  Well it’s easy like 2+2 =4. Stop putting people in jail for petty bullshit and find programs, or better yet, teach them to do all the hard work, you know like road construction, , every time I see a state worker they are on their ass.  This state continues to waste money on bullshit. What happened to education? if it cost 20k + a year to house an inmate, why don’t they put it into the schools, after school programs, so maybe in 10 years we won’t have 10 thousand more junkies running around, because after all, most kids are home alone after school because parents have to work, ( the ones who aren’t collecting state money that is) well no worries, the drug dealer around the corner will be sure to keep an eye on the kids, and in no time…..BAAAM you got another drug dealing pimp because we didn’t have the money to ensure the children (our future by the way) had something to do after school besides sell dope on the street. Maybe when a real person takes over the state things will turn around. Until then, don’t worry, the money taken from your check weekly will go right to the prisons, or give yourself a pat on the back, your helping someone sit home and collect state money. Sounds a lot like our state workers to me ehh?

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http://www.wtnh.com/dpp/news/crime/correction-officers-speak-of-trauma.

This article makes me want to puke.  Oh poor you, a 20 year pension, or poor you making all that money.  I mean these people chose to do this job, they decided they wanted to enter a facility where people are being kept because of the crimes they committed.  Now they are so scared they cant work, sounds like BS workers comp and disability claims to me.

Why don’t they talk about the harassment, sexual and physical assault on inmates?  Why don’t they talk about how they provoke the inmates and have power trips.  I understand that they are human beings as well but for fucks sake, don’t go into the bears cage, poke it with a stick, rape the bear’s family and then cry when the bear hits you back.

I bet if you were to do a comparison, for every prison guard assaulted, 35 to 50 inmates face the same thing.  They don’t cry and go home though, they get put into protective custody, also known as solitaire, or they lock you up for even longer and limit the interaction to the outside and people.

You know, I am sure there are some good CO’s out there, that just want to do their job, but between experience, stories and what I have read in the news, this is a far cry from the truth.  A one sided story about 2 lone inmates who don’t want to work for their paycheck anymore.

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Why are a disproportionate ratio of women to men trying to commit suicide while in Connecticut’s prisons?

Susan Zimmerman, recently released from Niantic, says there are problems at the prison’s psych ward

Keena Blodgett was 33 when she killed herself in 2006. The following year, 46-year-old Mia Zukowski committed suicide. In 2008, it was Luisa Bermudez who hanged herself. She was 36. Cheryl Thrall, 37, was the latest, ending her own life on July 23, 2009.

All four women were inmates at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institute in Niantic. Their deaths are an indication that the likelihood of your committing suicide as an inmate in our state’s prisons is far higher if you’re a woman than if you’re a man.

Women represent only about 6 percent of the more than 18,000 people incarcerated in this state, but they account for 20 percent of all suicides in Connecticut prisons in the past five years.
Connecticut corrections officials don’t have an explanation for why female inmates seem to have a higher suicide rate.

This state had 20 inmate suicides in the past five years, four of them being women. By comparison, Rhode Island’s smaller prison system had six suicides, none of them women inmates.

“We’re aware of what the numbers are,” says Brian Garnett, a state Department of Corrections. According to Garnett, DOC experts don’t believe women generally have a higher prison suicide rate than male inmates.

“We’re talking in most cases about one [female suicide] a year,” he says. DOC officials believe that “one suicide is too many,” Garnett says.

“Protection against self-harm is a huge component of what we do in corrections,” Garnett says, but that prison suicide “is part of the environment” and can be very difficult to predict.

Garnett says the department goes to great lengths to train prison staff to recognize which prisoners may be potential suicides and how to stop them.

He also says Connecticut doesn’t provide any “gender-specific” training to guards for dealing with women inmates. “The thrust and direction of the department is that every inmate is treated with the same level of vigilance.”

Maybe that should change.

“Women inmates are different from male inmates in various ways,” according to state Rep. Michael P. Lawlor, co-chairman of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee. Women tend to be in prison for non-violent crimes like drug use, prostitution and fraud or theft to pay off gambling debts.
“The big difference is that women inmates have a much higher rate of mental illness than male inmates,” says Lawlor. Only about 15 percent of male inmates are diagnosed with significant mental illness, compared to almost half of all women prisoners, according to Lawlor.
“Obviously, there’s a correlation between mental illness and suicide,” Lawlor says.

Howard Zonana, is a professor of psychiatry at Yale University and the federal court-appointed monitor of a consent degree issued back in the late 1980s to improve conditions at Connecticut’s prison for women.

Zonana says the estimate that half of female inmates have mental illnesses most likely reflects the number of women prisoners who are on psychotropic drugs like anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications. He says women have “a much higher rate” of problems like post-traumatic stress syndrome than male inmates, and often have far more difficulty adjusting to prison.

“It is true in prison general populations that attempted suicides are much higher among women than they are among men,” says Zonana.

But Zonana believes Connecticut’s suicide prevention efforts for women inmates today “is probably better than in other states” and far better than when the federal court order was first issued.

“There were appalling issues when we started,” Zonana recalls, citing major problems with inmate safety, medical and psychiatric care, misuse of restraints and medications, deficiencies in training and staffing levels.

One recent Niantic inmate, Susan Zimmerman of Trumbull, argues there are still problems at that prison and in its psychiatric wing.

“There’s a lot of girls who try to commit suicide up there,” says Zimmerman, who was released in mid-February from a five-week term at Niantic for violation of parole. Zimmerman, who describes herself as bipolar, spent time in the psychiatric wing and complained to corrections officials about conditions.

Those included claims that staff members failed to make regular required rounds of the individual cells to check on psychiatric inmates, and that intercoms connecting those cells to the medical staff desk didn’t work.

In a March 18 letter to Zimmerman, a corrections agency security official denied nearly all of Zimmerman’s allegations but thanked her for reporting the intercom malfunction and said, “It is in the process of being repaired.”

“We didn’t know it was broken until [Zimmerman] told us,” says Garnett, adding that the staff’s lack of awareness of the problem “is perhaps an indication of how little it’s used.” He said guards frequently make the rounds of those cells to check on prisoners.

“I’m not just disgruntled,” says Zimmerman. “There are a lot of good corrections officers up there; there’s good things they do up there.” She insists she’s only trying to help improve conditions for women prisoners.

Zonana and Lawlor say corrections officials are faced with the huge challenge of dealing with mentally ill inmates — many of them women — who probably shouldn’t be in prison.

“One of the reasons these women end up in jail is that prosecutors run out of options,” Lawlor says.

Connecticut already has a shortage of beds at mental health facilities and the state’s budget crisis isn’t helping, Zonano says. There is also the problem that many defendants would rather plead guilty and do a short prison term than be declared mentally ill and serve a longer hospital sentence.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” Lawlor says. “If you’re putting depressed people in jail, they’re much more likely to kill themselves.”

Source: http://www.fairfieldweekly.com/

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