The Prisons
By: George Feigley
Cofounder
To be employed by the Pennsylvania Department of Imprisonment
(called the "DOC", it helps to be a bumbling oaf. The
more inept, incompetent and negligent an individual is, the better
he or she fits Pennsylvania's prison administration. We can't
really say that any of these drones actually "work" for
the DOC. They're employed and grossly overpaid by the
Department, but we've yet to see any who actually do much
"work." They can't. They lack the personality as well as the motivation and the acumen.
If you've ever seen the old TV show, "Malcolm In the Middle," they are Reese - violent bullies with personalities of the brain-dead - sludge in the fuel line. Since prison employees are dolts, it takes lots and lots of them to mismanage the DOC. Staff rosters are enormously bloated. There is between 4 and 8 times as much staff as a real business would need to do the same job. We taxpayers pay for the featherbedding. How many prison employees does it take to screw the public and the prisoners? Sixteen thousand, but right now they're browsing Internet stores. Please hold. So much for your public servants in the DOC. It's a shame, but it's not all that's wrong. Pennsylvania's prisons are filthy. Diseases are rampant. Sickness is endemic. Serious infections including MRSA are spreading in the Pennsylvania prisons. It's even gotten into the schools. The principal reasons for the spread of diseases are (1) the very poor healthcare and (2) the very poor level of sanitation. Pennsylvania prison guards and the inept staff are afraid of cleaning materials. In reality, they're afraid of just about everything. They're cowards. But cleaning supplies seem to be especially frightening. The guards and staff treat prisoners VERY badly. Much of the staff (such as the pathetic "Mr. C.") are afraid that, if a prisoner gets the opportunity, he'll try to get even for all the abuse he's suffered. Maybe a prisoner would spray cleaning solution on the offensive guard. Cowards are afraid of that.
Instead of real cleaning materials, the Pennsylvania prisons use colored water. The colored water has no cleaning property. It doesn't disinfect. It doesn't kill germs and certainly has no perceptible effect on the deadly staphylococcus. The little germs flourish in the colored water, like piranha in the Amazon. I've already got plenty of physical maladies. I'd just as soon not rot away with MRSA especially if it could be prevented by just cleaning up the prison a little bit. After lobbing inside the Frackville state prison, I wrote a formal grievance. Certainly I realize that the prison grievance scheme is just a scam to dodge the courts. It's phony, pure and simple. It's an expensive farce. I submitted the grievance just in case I should get MRAS. I would then be able to point to the grievance to prove in a suit that I'd tried to keep myself safe.. I said: I'm not provided with effective cleaning supplies. The chemicals used by the prison are ineffective. There's no effective disinfectant, scouring powder or scouring pads. As hard as I try, I can't clean my cell sink. The men can't properly clean the showers. They're heavily infested with mildew and heaven knows what else that stuff is. From walking in it my shower shoes are contaminated. I can't get them clean. Staphylococcus infests the prison. It's infected both staff and prisoners. "MRSA" as it's being called, is almost untreatable. Much greater care must be taken to keep everything clean... It was no surprise that Bobby Shannon, the prison superintendent, and his mindless minions thought that the prison was clean enough; why be germ-free. I appealed to the Department of Imprisonment's central office. At the DOC central office there's an army of bumblers and apologists. Their job is to cover up for the many errors crimes and abuses of the department. They don't make things better. After a very long delay, much longer that allowed by the rules, a bureaucrat using the name Dorina Varner denied my appeal. (What kind of a name is "Dorina," anyhow?) Apparently, Dorina was so overworked (or is it over-rested) that she couldn't answer promptly. She seems to have been acting for another bureaucrat, a Cindy G. Watson. Apparently the Watson woman is the boss of grievance rejections. The duty of these two persons is to make sure that nothing changes in Pennsylvania's grossly mismanaged prisons. One effect of their efforts is to insure that the prisons will stay filthy and disease-ridden. Since neither of them must spend time in the actual prisons or use the contaminated showers, they can't have much personal concern if they are clean. Do they even know what MRSA is? Dorina's rejection of my grievance said in part that "If you think your shower shoes are dirty, you may wash them in your sink and if you think that they cannot be cleaned, you were (sic) advised to buy a new pair at the commissary."I don't think Dorina even bothered to read my grievance. I'm not surprised, of course. A filthy sink and filthy shower shoes don't seem to faze her. Some persons seem to think that it's perfectly acceptable to wash diseased things in diseased sinks. It takes all kinds! My point is that the prisons are filthy and infested with disease that the Department of Imprisonment is unwilling to address. And also that the prison grievance scheme is a lie.
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As a result of the staff's unfounded terror and of the DOC's
"economizing," there are no longer any real cleaning materials
in the Pennsylvania prisons. Not many years ago, soap and other
cleaning products were actually manufactured in one of
Pennsylvania's prisons. No more. It's much too scary to do that
now.