August 26, 2007

11:49pm

They say we shouldn't cry over spilt milk. I can't help it, especially when that milk was cold, fresh and in a glass titted toward my mouth. We had these bastards and let the opportunity slip through our hands.

The key to the protest succeeding was money, when you interfere with the bottom line you get demands met. When the workers don't report to work for the prison industry jobs at Holman the state loses money if deadlines aren't met. The inmates in the "Tag Plant" make tags for states all across America and the inmates in the "Metal Fabrication Plant" make park benches , grills, tables and other objects that are sold to governments for public use. The "Tag Plant" has contracts for about 8,000,000 tags to be delivered by the end of the year, over 1,000,000 need to be done by the end of August.

Most of the money these inmates generate goes to help run the entire prison system while they make less than $70°° a month. We'r talking about men making 25-40 cents an hour for jobs that will pay $10°° an hour or more if done by free employees. Oh, keep in mind that when no inmates report to key jobs in the kitchen the state has to pay their officers overtime to have enough staff on hand to feed us. More money they must spend when they are already crying broke, which is so routine nobody pays it attention anymore, inmates understand how broke they really are.

The few diabetics that live in my dorm would tell us what was happening when they wen to eat and/or get their medicine. To hear that these lazy officers were sweating as they did some of the most demanding jobs was very satisfying to me. These are the same officers that think what the inmates do is easy, some even come to work with attitudes and take it out on us. These police forget that they are paid for doing nothing ! Don't get me wrong, they are not paid to work in the normal sense of the word but are paid for what could happen. In other word's, prisons run themselves on the backs of inmates and the staff is paid to prevent escapes and to prevent or halt violence. Most of these officers have not been working long enough to have experienced full blown riots or the hellish days of Holman's past and they take their jobs and the laidback nature of the inmates for granted. There is nothing like having to prepare meals for a thousand men to help them put things in prospective.