Source story is here: KULR-8
Montana Corrections Enterprise laid-off five workers last Wednesday in Deer Lodge, who managed inmate work and job-training programs statewide. The lay-offs are not expected to affect the prisoners participation.
How will this not effect the 400 inmates that participate in this program?
Wasn’t this program funded by the inmates, and not the State?
Many of the inmates in the Montana Correctional System have been forced to utilize the internal grievance process, which is tilted against the inmate.
Now, yet another hurdle has been placed on the inmate with the May 13th, 2009, policy updates. Policy now requires that an inmate attach the staff’s response on the Informal to grievance and this requires the inmate to either give up his copy of the staff’s response (which he will never see again) or make a photocopy at the library at .20c per page.
The population needs to understand a few things, in that the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) requires you to exhaust through the internal grievance process, it does not however require you to pay to exhaust, which is essentially what grievance policy 3.3.3. (f.) (5) is stating.
Article II, Section 16 of the Montana Constitution states in part:
“…justice shall be administered without sale, denial, or delay.”
In all four stages of the grievance process, the forms are made up of three (3) parts (white, canary, and pink) and the white is to be forwarded to the grievance coordinator by the responding staff. If you give up your copy of the response from staff and/or attach a photocopy of it to the grievance, then you are fulfilling the duties of the responding staff.
The prison population needs to grasp the fact that a state employee is not unlike a chimpanzee, with training they can accomplish even the most simple of tasks like forwarding necessary paperwork to the grievance coordinators office.
Robert Rose, in his 2009 letter regarding REPORTING STAFF MISCONDUCT hit the nail on the head. MDOC and MSP staff can be held accountable through the “Mandatory Misconduct Reporting” process, even for something as simple as failing to adhere to policy for not forwarding the necessary paperwork to the grievance coordinator after responding.
If your grievance is blocked, refused, or denied because you refuse to buy your way through the internal grievance process that is to be free, well then, you have an even stronger case against Mr. Ferriter and his fellow primates.
~Douglas R. Boese #24525 | MSP
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23 hour solitary confinement
slowly destroying my judgment
thoughts are turning foggy
seeing shadows as I pace
whispering voices; Am I sleeping, or awake?
lost in this world of my 8×10 cell
starved from the pleasures of life
so I’m stuck overloading my imagination
23 hour solitary confinement
playing mind tricks with my conscience
should I give up and turn heartless
or play it by the big book and pray for my captures
if so than Lord I need deliverance
Cause my mind is slipping in this void
that I’m condemned to live in
23 hour constant
solitary confinement
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This is an email update we received from FAMM:
In recent weeks, I’ve attended three oral arguments the Supreme Court has held in cases about sentencing in which FAMM submitted amicus (or “friend of the court”) briefs. We participate in Supreme Court cases to push the Court in the right direction.
The highlight for me was Tuesday’s argument in Barber v. Thomas, aka “the Good Time case.” I watched as the justices struggled to do what so many of us have tried – and failed – to do: understand how the BOP justifies its flawed calculation of good time.
The value of our litigation work was confirmed when one of the justices relied on a case and argument raised by FAMM. The moment occurred after the justices had grappled for some time with the calculations involved in measuring good time. Justice Ginsburg suggested that the law was ambiguous. This is important because if the Court finds that the statute is “ambiguous,” it must apply what is known as the “rule of lenity” to sort it out. This means the Court would side with FAMM and prisoners would then be able to earn 54 days credit for every year of their sentence, not just for the years they were actually imprisoned. The rule of lenity only applies to criminal statutes however and Justice Kennedy cited our brief for the proposition that the good time statute is a criminal statute.
In addition to all the complex math and lawyerly jousting, there were also moments that drew the Court back to the issue of real people doing real time and the costs of doing business this way. Justice Stevens pointed out that there are 195,000 people spending “significantly more time” in prison than they ought to. Justice Kennedy calculated their additional time at a collective 36,000 years and Justice Stevens asked whether the Court, in trying to resolve the good time problem, shouldn’t take into account the $100 million spent to overincarcerate federal prisoners.
We won’t know until the end of June at the latest how the Court will rule and I am not going to go out on a limb to predict the outcome of this or the other cases in which we filed briefs. But we are very happy to have been a part of all of them and will report back to you as soon as the decisions are handed down.
Sincerely, Mary
Vice President and General Counsel
To read FAMM’s brief, follow this link
To about the background in this case, follow this link
To read FAMM’s answers to frequently asked questions, follow this link
To learn more about other cases before the Supreme Court and to see FAMM’s briefs, follow this link
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This is a reminder that the Law and Justice Interim Committee, will be meeting April 5-6, in Room 137 of the Capitol in, beginning at 8 a.m. each day.
Meeting materials, including a (pdf) revised draft agenda and preliminary committee bill drafts, have been posted to the website.
The meeting is open to the public. Public comments are welcome as indicated on the agenda. Agenda highlights include:
Please note that public comment, on the preliminary bill drafts for the DUI study, is structured and limited.
Members of the public are asked to keep their comments brief, and to the point to ensure adequate time for all who wish to speak.
All written comments should identify the name of the individual, group, or agency providing the information.
For more information, please visit the committee website or contact Sheri Heffelfinger at (406) 444-3596 or, sheffelfinger[remove]@mt.gov.
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