from frontburner.dmagazine.com
At the end of February, I arrived at the Fort Worth Federal Correctional Institution, where I’ll be serving the remainder of my five-year sentence, unless something unforeseen happens, like, say, the American people overthrow the federal government, release me from my cell, and declare me Dictator For Life of the Amalgamated Union of North American States. I’m not saying they should do that, mind you. It’s not for me to tell the American people what to do.
In some ways, this place promises to be far more exciting than the various jail units I’ve been calling home for the last couple of years. For instance, I’d been here a little over a month before certain elements within the prison administration began explicitly violating their own stated policies as well as U.S. law in an effort to disrupt my attempts to bring to public attention other instances of wrongdoing within the Bureau of Prisons in an incident that’s already made headlines and which now appears likely to end up in the courts later this year. So, that’s certainly exciting.
Before going into all that, I should probably explain something about the BOP as a whole. It is more likely than not that, in the history of mankind, there has never been an organization other than the Bureau of Prisons in which the high and noble ideals of technocratic reformers who decide on policy from afar are so often trampled underfoot by the low and beastly foot soldiers who are actually charged with carrying out these policies, with the obvious exception of the Democratic Party. This is not to say that the guards and mid-level administrators are all fascists or anything like that; I would put the figure at around 30 percent, which is not too far off from that of the adult population of the United States as a whole. But, as with the Republican Party, it is the fascists that so often end up setting the pace.
