June 3, 2023

About 2:30pm we get let out to use the phone. Phone calls are about 15 minutes long. Fifty cells, each with two inmates is one hundred inmates. Four phones in constant use of fifteen minute calls should be six and a quarter hours to rotate through the phones. Apparently one of the inmates lied to a guard to get to use the phone sooner and a supervisor, "Redbeard," comes through to threaten everyone about being disruptive. When I try to ask him about being punished for other inmates behavior he accuses me of knowing that it wasn't supposed to by [sic] my turn to use the phone. I am like "No, it has been more than seven hours since I last used the phone" to which he responds that we are not to expect to use the phone every day. Then, as he is walking away he had collected my cellie's request to be a "swamper" and rips it up saying that he just throws those requests away, anyway. Authority and power are so quickly telling of a persons character. Once the wrong type of people are given opportunities to be an authority, there are rarely examples of that being retracted, even when it is so painfully appropriate. As usual, the senseless contempt by which I am being treated provides no reformative or rehabilitative benefit. In a way it just makes things worse. The phones block you for fifteen minutes after you make a call. Now guys just linger at the phones pretending they cannot get ahold of anyone until the phone allows them a second call. The phones now move even slower while more wrongs still haven't made anything right.