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The prisoners' store, the commissary, at the state priSon at Frackville is by far the worst commissary
in any Pennsylvania state prison system. Hundreds of complaints
about it have been ignored. Frackville is a prison where
problems of all sorts aren't solved,
they're covered up.
Prisoners are allowed to buy only 100 sheets of typing paper. It's one of many censorship ploys. There's not enough paper to prepare court documents or write to the media. Adding to the censorship is the price charged for the paper, two and a quarter cents a sheet. That comes to over $11 a ream! You pay about $2.50 at Office Max. The prisoners earn $15 a month. The paper comes from out-of-state, an outfit called Top Flight Paper of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Brother is this stuff overpriced schlock; very flimsy, almost transparent and wildly irregular in size. The company seems to aim for the school and student market and suckers like prisoners. We suggest that you avoid "Top Flight" products. The name is a lie. Of course, none of this is really the point. Pennsylvania prisoners and their families have come to expect to be screwed by the state. The point is how the Frackville prison administration handles the complaints; cover-up, lies and contempt! What develops from such mismanagement and neglect? What happens when prison administrators refuse to address complaints and solve problems? You'll remember prison guard Charles Graner, the thug who left a Pennsylvania prison job to become a ringleader of the prisoner abuses in Iraq. His violence and abuses didn't start in Iraq. There were MANY complaints about him while he was a Pennsylvania prison guard. The prison system ignored the complaints or covered them up. It certainly didn't solve the problem. If they had, perhaps the abuse scandal wouldn't have happened. From the top down the Pennsylvania prison system is a travesty. Negligence, arrogance and abuse are the hallmarks of the administrators. The boss is more interested in gouging pennies from old and sick prisoners than in improving society. The whole system is fixated upon hurting people, not helping them. The Top Flight paper incident is just a minor microcosm. The typing paper was purchased from a place called Capital Enterprises out of Lansing, Michigan. Why a Pennsylvania prison should spend it's money 800 miles out-of-state is baffling. The Frackville commissary pays $30.27 for a case of 24 packets. That's just over $1.26 apiece. state regulations limit the commissary to making not more than a 5% profit. With the markup, that's $1.3243125 a packet which rounds to $1.32. The commissary was charging $2.16 plus tax, an 84 cent overcharge! A prisoner who did a lot of legal typing, complained. Richard Gavlick the guy who managed the commissary refused to correct the problem. He's proven to be arrogant, unresponsive and contemptuous of his prisoner customers. James Lasota, the business manager, refused to correct the problem. The story was cooked-up that good, old Top Flight, in its benevolent kindness, had been giving "free sheets" of paper and when they cut back to a mere 100 sheets, the price stayed the same. That was an invention, pure lies. Robert Shannon, the prison superintendent didn't solve the problem. His way is to coverup. The superintendent parroted the "free sheets of paper" lie, leaving the prisoner paying 60% more that he should have. Had the problem been solved, there would have been no reason for anyone to go further and get ALL the bills for commissary purchases. The paper turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. We'll be publishing a series of stories about the business dealings of the Frackville commissary, their vendors and the prison administrators. We hope to involve the state Auditor General. It seems like the less a statesman amounts to,
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