Many prisons, even the newest ones, are in bad repair. Prison building contracts are usually payoffs for political favors. The Ridge Reich is notoriously infected with the cancer of graft. As a result, the prisons are badly built and very badly maintained, but the "friendly" contractors reap huge profits.
Recently a conscientious inmate, "RJ," in one of the older prisons made a good faith effort to induce the prison administration to correct some of the many health and safety hazards in the prison. He asked the Deputy Warden about having some of the health violations corrected and drew his attention to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry regulations.
RJ reported that the Deputy Warden answered to the effect that he, (the Deputy Warden) ran the jail and that the Department of Labor and Industry (which supposedly sets and enforces health and safety standards) could get fucked!
Concerned for the well-being of other inmates as well as himself, RJ wrote to the Department of Labor and Industry to voice his complaints. In response to his letter, the prison administration had him written up!
Obviously, even a Pennsylvania prisoner still has a Constitutional right to petition government (and that's what the Department of Labor and Industry is) for redress of grievances. Being punished for making such a complaint clearly has a chilling effect upon all prisoners who try to improve the basic safety of their dismal housing.
The write up was only the first act of retaliation against the well-meaning prisoner!
In most prisons, the front of a cell is a solid wall with a solid door. The inmate is afforded a scintilla of "privacy," or at least he's not put on continual display. That was not the case in the older prison where RJ was housed. He lived in a cell which was faced not with a wall, but with an open work of bars. The entire interior of his cell including the toilet and the cot was on grand display.
In those older, far more exposed prisons, the inmates have traditionally been allowed, indeed encouraged, to put drapes up to partly cover the open bars. Such a precaution not only discourages homosexual interests and attacks (RJ is an attractive, younger inmate), but it also discourages prisoners burglarizing one another or disturbing one another with lights or typing.
The cellblock in which RJ is housed is one where the tiers of cells face one another. From across the tier, the occupants of several cells could look directly into JR's cramped quarters if it were not for the drapes (or cell-curtains as they are called). The same is true for the occupants of cells on higher and lower tiers opposite from RJ.
Apparently in retaliation for his complaint to Labor and Industry, a guard subordinate to the Deputy Warden, seized the bit of drapery that RJ was using on the front of his cell. He was put on display "Twenty Four - Seven*" as the prisoners say.
We free citizens can't appreciate the conditions under which prisoners must live (and guards must work). You wonder what kind of trivial violations a prisoner would complaint about. Well, how about flaking lead-based paint and the airborne dust from such paint, not to mention the crumbling asbestos, lead contaminated water, rat droppings in the food and baked goods, deafening din, slick steel stairs, death-trap fire "escapes," doors without electric unlocking capacity, no fire hoses on the cellblocks? We've even learned that in order to conceal environmental hazards such as lead, lead-based paint, asbestos and so forth, these materials have been hosed down the sewer system and even buried in bulk on the prison grounds. In addition acrid smoke from the prison furnaces nightly engulf the prison. The state police deliver hazardous materials including drugs and biologicals to the prison to be tossed into the ovens and "burned" or, at least, to be wafted over the whole prison. (Wonder why there are so many "positive" drug test results?)
This example of the punishment of a "whistle-blower" is only one example of how the arrogant and corrupt prison administrations retaliate against prisoners who struggle to stand up for their own well-being.
*Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; continually!
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