On the road to Lompoc
Letters from Prison 1 Comment »
July 2, 2008
I know lt’s been a long time since I’ve posted so this one stands to be a long one. It may very well extend into several parts as my good friend has to type it in and he’s pretty busy these days as well. Anyway, thanks for reading. By now everyone knows that I’ve been relocated to Lompoc Federal Prison Camp in central California about 2S miles north of Santa Barbara just a bit in from the coast. The camp sits in the middle of a gigantic farm which is owned and operated by the Bureau of Prisons. The camp is also next to the old Lompoc Penitentiary which is now the Lompoc Federal Corrections Instltutlon. The camp, a second camp for the Residential Drug Abuse Program and the FCI make up the Federal Corrections Complex at Lompoc.
Lompoc is where I wanted and expected to go but the trip here and getting adjusted has curtailed my ability to write new blog posts but is a pretty good story so hopefully it is worth the wait. It all started on the morning of June 11th at around 5am when my cell door was opened and a C.O. said “Rose. Pack up. You’re leaving.” This was music to my ears. While the detention center at Dublin was fine and all, it was really boring and was starting to get on my nerves a bit. A month and 2 days sitting in teh same room with the same group of guys watching the same shows on TV (Sopranos at 10am and again at 4pm) gets pretty old. Finally getting to go to my designated facility and start to actually do my time was something I had been hoping for for a week or two. I packed up my stuff and was put into a holding cell with about 15 other guys. We waited for a blt and then we were put in handcuffs, waist chains, and leg trons and placed on an inconspicuous old bus. Plain white with an orange stripe down the side. You probably wouldn’t notice it if it weren’t for the government plates. You could probably see the bars on the windows through the tinted glass if you looked hard enough but it wasn’t obvious. The bus was actually quite nice considering other prisoner transports I had ridden in. For starters the seats were padded vs. the steel seats I was expecting. The windows had simple bars over them making it easy to see out vs. the sort of diamond shaped grates I’ve seen on other vans and busses. Most everyone got a seat alone and we were each given two bag lunches to eat on the road. Yes. It was very tricky to construct and eat a bologna sandwich in a pair of handcuffs that were locked to a chain wrapped around your waist. If you dropped anything, you can simply forget it. We each also received a styrofoam cup and there were two coolers of water in the back of the bus. Again, all shackled up on a moving bus made getting a drink of water tricky. There was also an open bathroom in the back of the bus. You could urinate if necessary but dropping a deuce was not only forbidden it was impossible given the cuffs and that. If you imagine your hands together not being able to extend further than about 5 inches out from your belly button, it won’t take you long to notice the logistical complexities involved in carrying out such an ambitious feat. It should be noted that we had no idea where, individually, we were headed. It was fairly well known that buses that left on Wednesdays alternated between heading north to facilities like Sheridan in Oregon, and south to facilities like Lompoc and Victorville. Since there were so many of us it was assumed we were headed to Victorville because it’s sort of like a hub for all California inmates. Going in or coming out of California usually involves a hold over in Victorville. It was also known that on route to Victorville that we’d stop by Atwater which was the next closest facility. As for me, I could get dropped off in Atwater (they have a minimum security camp) or dropped off in Victorville (they have a camp as well) or hold over in Victorville to go to any other facility in the BOP.