Crooks run most of your government. They are certainly in control in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. "Corrections" is an oxymoron. The crooks really mean "torment."
Prisoners used to be allowed to buy personal clothing. It was a real break for the prison staff and for the taxpayers. Guards could instantly identify one convict from another by his clothing. Far fewer clothes had to be supplied to the inmates at taxpayers expense. As a bonus, prisoners got a little bit of self-expression through their garb.
Republicans didn't like that. They can't tolerate even a tiny bonus going to prisoners. They are perfectly willing to deprived the taxpayers of a million or two dollars in added costs and the guards of an identification tool. They are obsessed with harming their new victims now that their old victims, the Blacks, have legal equality.
The Department of Corrections was waiting for a pretext to justify their seizure of prisoners' civilian clothing. Some guys escaped from the prison in Pittsburgh. They didn't really wear civilian clothes when they escaped, but a little thing like the truth never stands in the way of the Corrections crooks. It was enough that they might have worn civilian clothes!
Using that trumped up pretext, crooked Corrections is now stealing all the prisoners' civilian clothes: no compensation, no natural wearing out. The Department is simply depriving prisoners of their property without due process of law...isn't there a constitutional amendment about that kind of thing?
Being as crooked as Z's, the people who run the Corrections Department have a swell idea to defuse the righteous anger of the prisoners who have had hundreds of dollars of their cherished personal clothes stolen from them. Crooked Corrections will "compensate" the victims by "giving" each man a shoddy, prison-made sweat suit in the approved brown prison color.
The gimmick is that prisoners will really have to buy the suits at a vastly inflated price from the prison monopoly that makes them.
Prisoners have a fund that's supposed to benefit them. It's called the Inmate Reserved Fund, or the Inmate General Welfare Fund. All the money in the fund came from the prisoners or their families. The Corrections Department holds the money in "trust." What a joke!
Crooked Corrections is going to steal millions of dollars from the inmates' fund to buy these shoddy sweat suits. Where will they "buy" the suits? Why, from themselves! Prisoners will subsidize the prisons that confine them!
A prison-run shop produces the junk suits. Whereas the inmate used to be able to buy a good quality, name brand, gray sweat suit for less than $20, now the men have no choice but to take the second rate suits made in the prison-shop and they have to pay about $30!
"Correctional Industries," the racket run by the Corrections Department, is a marvel of waste, corruption and ineptness. As part of the scheme to steal civilian clothes from the prisoners, "CI" turned out about 6000 pairs of worthless brown shorts. The idea was that the prisoners would be forced to buy the garbage at greatly inflated prices, about twice retail value. The shorts were such complete trash that they couldn't be forced off even on prisoners. Taxpayers ate a bungle of about $40,000!
The Corrections crooks can't seem to get even their crookedness right!
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