They’re Dying, and Nobody Cares!

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room for a moment, shall we? COVID-19 is sweeping through this country like a wildfire through dry brush, and while some people (you know who you are, and thank you), have attempted to defend those who were in prison, how many people have spoken up for the people who find themselves committed in California’s Department of Mental Health? (DSH) Specifically, for the guys in Coalinga State Hospital? (CSH)

Coalinga, in case you didn’t already know, is where people go once a court has determined that there’s “probable cause” to believe they’re a Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) under California’s SVP Act. Now, for those who didn’t already know, “probable cause” basically means “is there a warm body?” If the answer is “yes,” then the person is sent off to CSH, after they’ve served their prison sentence, in full, to await a full trial to determine whether or not they’re a Sexually Violent Predator. If such a finding is made, then they’re kept there, indefinitely, year after year, until 2 things happen. First, the people at the DSH have to determine they no longer meet the definition of an SVP, which is an extremely high hurdle to overcome, and second, the District Attorney’s Office believes their own evaluators when they say this person no longer meets the criteria. (Seriously, I know of many, many people who were told by the evaluators at the DSH that they no longer met the criteria to be committed, but the DA’s Office refused to accept their evaluation and ended up fighting to keep them there.)

Anyway, I digress. The point here is that, contrary to popular opinion, the people in CSH are not the “worst of the worst.” They’re simply people who’ve made a mistake, paid their debt to society, and then had the misfortune of having an evaluator who had a quota to meet, after which time they’ve ended in in purgatory waiting for their trial. In fact, I know of some people who have been there for DECADES, just waiting to go to trial. Think about that, for a moment: you’re in there for DECADES just waiting to go to trial, but because you’ve already been tried and convicted of a sex offense, nobody gives a shit about you, even if you did just finish serving 2 decades in prison for the crimes for which you were convicted, but it’s all “legal,” because you aren’t being “punished,” although, for the life of me, I can’t see how being put in a setting such as this isn’t “punishment.”

Whatever… I’ve gotten off topic again, which is easy to do when discussing this particular subject, but to get back on topic, let me say this: there are far fewer people in CSH than at any other facility secured by CDCR, and yet, they not only have one of the highest rates of infection, they also have the highest overall percentage of people dying from COVID-19 infections. The latest numbers, which aren’t always accurate, courtesy of DSH using HIPPA to withhold their numbers, has the latest death toll at 13, so why isn’t anyone saying anything about them? Do we truly not care about what happens to them, just because they’ve been committed of a sex offense? Or is it a combination of this and the fact that we’re only talking about 1,300 people? Either way, right is right and wrong is wrong. Or, to put it another way, how many times have you heard the expression, “two wrongs don’t make a right” (but two Wrights make an airplane), or said that same expression to your children? By not taking a stand and doing the right thing, we’re sending the message that it’s okay to repay one wrong with another, and that’s not the message we need to be sending to our children. And keep in mind that every single one of these people have already paid their debt to society, in full. We’re not talking about releasing a sex offender from prison early because we’re afraid he might get a flu, we’re talking about releasing people who have already served their time in prison, and then some, many of which DSH themselves has stated are no longer a threat to society.

No matter how you choose to look at it, it’s wrong to just sit by and watch as people are dying. These might not be the people we’d invite to our house for Christmas dinner, let alone ask to watch our kids, but at the end of the day, they’re still people, and I know of no religion that doesn’t discuss the possibility of forgiveness. Now, I’m not saying they deserve your forgiveness, merely that they don’t deserve to die because of an inability to practice adequate social distancing. They all have to wear ankle monitors anyway, so it’s not as if they’re being set free on an unsuspecting society without anyone to keep an eye on them, and they’ll all be under some form of supervision, in most cases, parole, with mandatory treatment afterwards. Hell, if you ask, I’d be willing to bet that most, if not all, would be willing to participate in some form of house arrest, and it would certainly be a lot cheaper to put them up in a hotel room, put an ankle monitor on their leg and bring them their meals then it would be to put them up in a prison, oops, I meant “mental health facility,” which costs far more than it does to incarcerate someone in a regular prison (something like $200k per individual as opposed to $35k per individual). It’s a better use of time and resources, I say, and has the added advantage of saving lives as well.

Shawn L. Perrot

826 4th St.

Eureka, CA 95501

shawnLperrot@outlook.com

My friend Carl

 

I’d like to introduce you to someone. He’s currently incarcerated, and if the State has their way, he’s going to be incarcerated for the rest of his natural life, and for good reason. You see, this guy was not the kind of guy you’d like to have met in a dark alley. Hell, he’s not the kind of guy you would have wanted to meet in a room filled with cops all armed and there to protect you. The simple fact of the matter is, this guy was a prick, in every sense of the word, and no one would agree more than him. Back then, he had a pretty nasty drug habit, which is a nice way of saying that he would have sold his own mother down the river if that’s what it took to get his next fix. But as the title of a popular book once said, “that was then, this is now.”

So this guy, Carl, goes to prison, and not for the first time, either, where he’s told by the judge that he’ll never, under any circumstances, see the light of day again. As I may have already implied, there was a pretty good reason for this. The guy had pretty much destroyed not only his life, but the lives of anyone and everyone he ever came into contact with, but then, that’s what drugs do to you. They ruin lives. It doesn’t matter who we are, or who we think we are, there are just some drugs that, from the moment you take your first hit, your first injection, your first snort, they control you. Metallica has a pretty good song about it, called Master of Puppets, that sums this up pretty well because, once you’ve tasted that first high, you no longer have any control over your life. You’re just a puppet under the control over your need to get high. You’ll sell off everything you ever owned, betray anyone you ever cared about, there’s no level too low for you to sink, so long as it means you can get high, yet, for some reason, we all seem to think that we’re going to someone be able to control a need that no one else has been able to. Anyway, my friend, Carl, found himself in exactly that same predicament. He knew the dangers of drugs, knew what he was up against, and yet, he somehow thought he’d be able to control the drugs, instead of allowing the drugs to control him. He’ll be the first to tell you that, looking back, he had no freaking clue.

Anyway, my friend, Carl, goes on binge after binge, gets into trouble with the law time after time and runs around the kinds of people you’d see in some sort of movie portraying the evils of certain disreputable motorcycle clubs, if you catch my meaning. Finally, the judge has enough and throws the book at him, sending him to prison for the rest of his life. In doing so, the judge may have saved an untold number of lives, because my friend simply didn’t care about anyone or anything but himself and his next fix. This wasn’t because he was a bad person under the surface, just that the addiction has a tendency to override any and all common sense. Allow me to give you an example.

I grew up in Ohio, Akron and Cleveland, to be exact. Like many impoverished neighborhoods in the world, we had a crack-house on our block. The way it worked was that you’d go around to the back, known on the back door and wait for it to unlock. When it did, you’d step onto the back-porch and close the door and an electronic door lock would automatically lock you in until your business had concluded, for your safety as well as the safety of the occupants in the house. It was also a way of buying the dealers that extra couple of seconds to get rid of any evidence, in the event of a raid, something that had paid off, time and time again for them. Knowing they couldn’t ever get into the house in time to prevent them from disposing of the evidence, the cops decided to try a new tactic, which was to park their police cruisers on the street, right in front of the house during peak hours of operation, which was usually in the middle of the night. Now, what do you think happened? Do you think the addict seen the cop cap parked on the street and turned around to take his business somewhere else? Hell no. He’d walk back and forth on the street, all night long, if need be, trying to figure out if he should continue waiting, or risk it to get a fix, and  sure enough, it was only a matter of time until one of these idiots was dumb enough to walk right up to the back door, as if it was legal, and demand a fix for the wad of rumpled up dollar bills they’d managed to scrounge up. Needless to say, they were always sent away, empty-handed, which always led to the inevitable screaming and shouting from the addict as he scratched himself bloody into desperation.

My point here is simple: when that monkey climbs on your back, it’s a wrap. There’s nothing, and I do mean nothing you won’t do to get that fix. That’s the power of addiction, and that’s the power that had my friend Carl when he entered the prison system this last time. That is not, however, the Carl that I met, the Carl that’s there today. The Carl I met is one of the most responsible people I’ve ever met. He’s driven, goal oriented, conscientious, caring, compassionate, even religious, which is surprising because, as I may have mentioned already, he was a complete monster before his most recent imprisonment. In fact, I’d bet my life that, if some of his victims described him, they’d describe him as the devil himself. So, what happened to change him? The short story is that he reached rock bottom, and while down there, realized he needed to change his life. In other words, he realized that he needed to get off the drugs. Unfortunately, he arrived at this realization far too late to make any difference, as he’d pretty much been given so much time that he’d never see the light of day again, yet he still felt compelled to make a change, which is what makes Carl’s story so important. You see, anyone can pretend to change when they think others are watching, or better yet, when there’s something to be gained. Carl, on the other hand, changed when he believed, with every fiber of his being, that he’d never see the light of day again, that he’d never, ever even be considered for parole. He began attending 12-Step Programs while in prison, in both AA and NA, began participating in other rehabilitative groups, started working in one of the prison’s many, many slave shops and basically turned into the kind of man he always was under the illusion of the drugs. His progress is nothing short of miraculous, and made doubly meaningful because, unlike everyone else in prison, he underwent these changes under the belief that they’d never amount to a hill of beans, due to the way the laws were written at the time of his sentencing, but then something changed. For some reason, some people finally began to realize that human life is never beyond redemption, that people truly can change, and they began to push for the laws to change to reflect this. While we still have a long ways to go, there have been some rather significant changes for people like Carl, changes that will allow him to at least get an opportunity to be considered for parole. Will the changes he’s made in his life be enough? More than likely, not. The simple truth of the matter is that CDCR’s (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) BPH (Board of Parole Hearing), rarely grants parole, particularly to those who truly merit it. For them to actually grant him parole would be nothing short of miraculous, but then, so was the chances that he’d become a better person. Somehow, despite the overwhelming odds against him, he managed to overcome his addictions and change, so if that miracle is possible, then perhaps the miracle of being granted parole will be bestowed upon him. And if not, he’ll continue to be the positive influence he’s now become because that’s who he always was. We just couldn’t see it under the multiple layers of addiction.

So, “where’s Carl at now,” you ask? At the moment, he’s in quarantine. You see, like many of the people (notice I said “people,” and not “inmates”), who are currently incarcerated, Carl is literally a slave, which is completely legal in the United States, under the 13^th amendment (Contrary to popular opinion, the 13^th amendment legalized the terms and conditions under which slavery could exist in this country), and like the rest of the slaves throughout the prison system, Carl had to go to work throughout the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping through the prison system like a wildfire through a field of dry grass. And Carl’s job wasn’t something “essential,” like making the food he, and everyone else in there, had to eat. He worked in a factory, producing products sold to the State of California for a profit, and now my friend has been infected with COVID-19 because of the failure of the CDCR and the CCHCS (California Correctional Health Care Services), to reduce the prison’s population, so as to allow for proper social distancing. Like many in Soledad, Carl lived in a dormitory, making social distancing absolutely impossible, and like many, Carl is now faced with the very real possibility that he’s going to die, alone. Visits have been canceled, phone calls are outrageously expensive for those few who can actually afford them, and in prison, there’s no such thing as Facebook or Zoom to allow us to connect with our loved ones in the outside world. As I sit here writing this letter, I can’t help but wonder how my friend is managing. Is he going to be one of the lucky to survive? Or will he be one of those who, because of his age and health issues, dies? Only time will tell.

One thing I do know is that Carl, like all of us, deserve to know that, no matter what we’ve done in life, we’re not beyond redemption. He deserves to know that his efforts to change, to redeem himself, are being recognized, if not by the prison or the judicial system, then by the rest of us. More importantly, those around Carl deserve to know this, because it gives them hope and incentive to continue to change, or in some cases, to decide to change, because, while Carl might not ever see the light of day again, either because he’s never given that chance by the BPH of because he dies of COVID-19, others in there will see the light of day, and the last thing anyone wants is someone getting out of prison who hasn’t changed. So, I’m asking you, take a moment and drop Carl a line to let him know that you’ve read a part of his story on my blog, and that you’re proud of him for having taken the incentive to change, not because it was required for him to parole, but because it was the right thing to do. His efforts deserve no less, especially right now as he’s struggling to live another day.

For those of you who are actually interested in writing to Carl, his name and address is as follows:

Carl Taylor CDCR# J-01025

CTF-FD 1L

P.O. Box 705

Soledad, CA 93960-0705

A postcard is such a simple thing, but in prison, it can make all the difference. It does something rather unusual in a prison environment, which is to say: it puts a smile on someone’s face.

As I go about concluding today’s entry, I just want to take a moment to express my sincere thanks to you for taking the time to read my entry. You could have spent these last few minutes doing anything, literally, and yet you chose to spend them reading this entry. For what it’s worth, even though I’m not out there at the moment to see you reading this or to interact with you directly, it’s deeply appreciated. When I was transferred from the prison system to the county jail to face civil commitment proceedings, I thought all was lost, but since coming here, I’ve been contacted by a number of loyal followers to tell me that they not only missed me, but that I actually made a positive impact in their lives. Trust me when I tell you, you could have paid me no greater compliment. The idea that I, using a contraband cell phone in prison, was able to have any kind of impact in your lives, let alone such a positive one, gives me such a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. I felt like the Grinch whose heart had just grown 3 sizes bigger that day he brought the presents he’d stolen back to Whoville. Poor metaphors aside, I wish there was a way to get the people in authority to understand that not everyone with access to the outside world uses it for evil, that most of us, if given half a chance, would use it for more meaningful things, from staying in touch with our loved ones, to speaking out about the injustices of the prison system. Either way, thank you.

Shawn L. Perrot

826 4^th St.

Eureka, CA 95501

shawnLperrot@outlook.com

Discrimination

 

So, I’ve decided that, from this moment on, I’m going to discriminate against people with blue eyes. I don’t care what color your skin is, if you’ve got blue eyes, you’re getting the cold shoulder from me. Drink from your own water fountain, use your own toilets, and whatever you do, don’t eat at the same table as me. From time to time, I might allow one or two of you to be near me, if you’ve got something I want, but as soon as I’ve got what I’m after, it’s straight to the back of the bus with you, so don’t get all offended when I suddenly get up and point. You knew what time it was before you sat down with me. And as far as “why” I’ve chosen to discriminate against people with blue eyes, the real question is “why not?” The way I look at it, I live in a society that’s chosen to discriminate against people based on the color of their skin, and those people had just as much to say about the color of their skin as you do over the color of your eyes. Was it right? Of course not, yet here we are, hundreds of years later, and we’re not only continuing to discriminate based on the color of people’s skin, we’re doing it live. People are running around with their little cell phones, capturing every racist moment, especially when it’s committed by one of the boys in blue, and nothing is being done about it, implying that we’re doing nothing more than paying lip service to our claims that racism is wrong. So, I figure, why not discriminate on something else, like the color of someone’s eyes?

Wait a second, my associate just informed me that my eyes are, in fact, blue. Having been in prison for so long, and not having access to a proper mirror, I kind of forgot about that little fact. Did I say “blue” eyes? I meant to say “green” eyes. Yeah, that’s it. We’ll all discriminate against people with green eyes, or better yet, maybe we could discriminate against people who no doubt deserve our contempt, people like the politicians who were elected to represent us, and who somehow can’t seem to be able to do the simplest of tasks, like passing a stimulus bill that actually helps their constituents in a way that makes a difference in our lives. Instead of expressing our hatred to them, however, we choose instead to express it to each other, for reasons far more frivolous. Why? Our politicians have a choice over how poorly they choose to represent us, but your neighbor had no more choice in the color of his skin then you did over the color of your eyes, so why have you chosen to hate someone whose presence has no impact over your life, someone who didn’t even know you existed until you started hurling racial epitaphs his way. Your elected official, on the other hand, goes out of his way to bend you over and give you a royal screwing, and doesn’t even have the decency to offer you a reach-around. Maybe, instead of being mad at someone based on the color of their skin, you can instead choose to be upset over someone who’s actually hurt you. Or we could just all hate each other because of the color of our eyes.

Shawn L. Perrot

826 4th St.

Eureka, CA 95501

It’s the Little Things...

 

I’ve been incarcerated for almost 18-years, and during that time, I’ve asked, and been asked, more times then I can count what I planned to eat for my first meal once released from prison. Without hesitation, my answer has always been the same: while lasagna is, hands down, my favorite dish, it’s pizza I truly crave. To be specific, a large with sausage and extra cheese. The cheese melted all over the place, and stretching from the pie to your mouth as you lift to the slice away from the box, the steam rising from the center as it separates from the pack. I also wanted some fried chicken, extra crispy and a 2-liter of Coke. My mouth waters just thinking about it and I knew, I just knew that, on August 7^th, 2020, I’d be out in the free world eating my first slice of pizza in well over 18-years, followed by an extra crispy drumstick and an ice cold Coke. Then COVID-19 hit.

I watched the COVID pandemic sweep throughout the world. No one, it seemed, was safe. Small “mom and pop” stores all over the world closed their doors, hoping and praying it was only temporary, only to later learn they’d been closed for so long there was simply no recovering. One after the other, businesses would shutter their doors, temporarily at first, and then permanently, and soon enough, bigger businesses were following suit. As I watched the drama unfolding, I began to realize that I’d be lucky to get a meal when I got out, let alone a slice of pizza, but then decisions were made by those in government that allowed restaurants, especially pizza places, to continue doing business during the COVID crisis, if they were willing to follow the guidelines. “All was saved,” I thought. In just a few weeks, I’d be out of here and having my first slice of pizza, sauce and cheese sliding down my chin as I stuffed 18-years worth of missed opportunities down my gullet, but then the prison system decided to have a laugh at my expense.

Some of my readers already know that I played a role in convincing the CDCR to give everyone a credit of 12-weeks towards our prison sentences. Naturally, I thought I’d be one of the ones getting the credit. After all, I hadn’t received a rules violation in well over 13-years, had been a model slave and was mere months away from the house as it was. Instead, they chose to sit on my credit issuance for a week, and then issued me only 48 of the 84 days, claiming they still needed to provide my accusers with 60-days notice. Well, not being able to access the law library, I had no idea they were full of it, but by the time I completed the appeals process, I would have been home anyway, or so I thought, so why bother. Don’t get me wrong, I filed anyway, I was just never able to  complete the process because, as I predicted, they refused to give it the urgency it merited and I was forced to stay in prison for another couple of weeks. No matter, right? I’d still be eating that slice of pizza, it would just take me a few more weeks. Did I mention that CDCR wasn’t the only one about to have a laugh at my expense?

So, there I was, just two days away from being released and I’m told to “roll it up.” “Roll it up? For what,” I wondered. Well, it turns out that my sentence may be ending in a mere two days, but the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office had plans for me, big plans. Turns out that I fell into a category of people that, when their sentence expires, they’re subject to being put away for the rest of their lives in a mental health hospital. Well, shit, let’s call a “spade” a “spade,” shall we? You can call it what you want, but at the end of the day, it’s a secure facility with guards provided by the State’s prison system (CDCR), with rules and regulations out the wazoo, without any ability to come and go, let alone as you please, and with inmates serving prison sentences. No matter how you spin it, it’s prison. Anyway, according to the mental health evaluations served on the court, I suffer from something called an Antisocial Personality Disorder, which doesn’t mean someone who doesn’t like to socialize. Essentially, it means someone who doesn’t care about rules or regulations, someone who doesn’t care about anyone else’s feelings or rights, someone who, basically, can’t stay out of trouble to save their life, and since I was in prison for a sexually based offense (regardless of the fact that I was innocent of this particular charge), I fell into that special category meriting special attention once their sentence was complete. Never mind the fact that I haven’t been in trouble for well over 13-years, and forget about the fact that the “evaluator” didn’t even bother reading my mental health file. According to them, I was dangerous and the public needed protecting.

So, there I was, mere hours from tasting that first slice of pizza, only to have that melted cheese snatched away from my grasp at the last moment. The extradition officer was nice enough, even buying me 2 small cheeseburgers and a small fry from Burger King (were their small cheeseburgers always that bad?!), but it wasn’t the pizza I’d had my heart set on for so many years, and then HCCF decided to have a laugh of their own at my expense.

HCCF, in case you didn’t know, means the Humboldt County Correctional Facility. Now, technically speaking, they’re not allowed to subject me to punitive of confinement. The reason for this is simple. The U.S. Constitution prohibits double jeopardy, which is a fancy way of saying you can’t be punished twice for the same allegation. Since I’d already served my prison sentence, (in full), I couldn’t be punished again, but the law does allow for someone to be placed in a mental health facility because, allegedly, it’s not meant to be punishment. Well, someone clearly forgot to explain to the HCCF that I wasn’t supposed to be punished, because the first thing they did was throw me into solitary confinement. The first 14 days were for “quarantine,” never mind the fact that I’d been on quarantine for months, or that I’d just given 2 separate negative tests for COVID-19. I was in solitary confinement, allowed out for 30-minutes a day. When my quarantine ended, I was moved to the hole, where I was released a few hours later because there wasn’t an outlet for my medical device, but even then, I was just released to another building where I continued to remain in solitary confinement. After weeks of arguing, fussing and fighting, they finally agreed to treat me the same as any other person in here, which was a major step up from where I was, but still punitive.

So, I’m sitting there on the phone one day, and I hear the woman who runs the mental health program talking about how she’s going to throw a Christmas party for the guys on her wing. She’s bringing in pizza, chicken and their choice of soda. I’m guessing you might be able imagine the thoughts that ran through my mind in that moment. If they’re getting pizza, surely someone will slide me a slice, right? I mean, after all, I’ve already served my time, and they haven’t, but not a chance. They completely ignored me, and when I asked, I was told, emphatically, “no, not a chance.” Surely they’re joking, right? Surely they’re not going to bring in pizza, chicken and soda and not share, right? I mean, even if they didn’t know I was innocent, so what? I’ve paid my debts to society, in full, but they could have cared less. On Christmas Eve, she brought everyone on her tier pizza, chicken and soda, and I could only watch and drool as my dreams, once again, passed me by. This incident only reinforced something I came to realize some time ago: at the end of the day, it’s the little things you miss the most.

 

Shawn L. Perrot

826 4^th St.

Eureka, CA 95501

shawnLperrot@outlook.com