Lost in Florida

Personal Blog

Categories: Life Updates

It’s been a while!

It’s been a while! If you are new here, I am so glad you found your way to my little corner. Allow me to (re)introduce myself.

I’m Sigrid, I’m French and I live in Northeast Florida. The American Dream? Well, not really. I was living my personal dream of settling in Beautiful Copenhagen, Denmark – my first Love – and a marriage later, I ended up in a city/State that couldn’t be more different, here in the United States. No need to say that the adjustment was not easy. And the craziest part is that I am doing it alone since my husband is incarcerated (before you ask, no, he is not coming home anytime soon).

I have a lot on my plate as I balance a full-time job, my awesome prison pen pal program Wire of Hope, trying to develop my shop Sweet Undertone, my community engagements, and being a good mom to my amazing toddler.

This blog was created to:
– Be real about life in the USA.
– Share my knowledge of navigating the FDOC and other prison systems for the last 7 years.
– Support my fellow families impacted by incarceration and create greeting cards that fit your situation!
and probably vent about the struggles of motherhood… especially as a busy “single” mom with a sick child (postpartum depression anyone?).

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Categories: Prison

‼️‼️ [ACTION REQUESTED] ‼️

You may have seen in the last couple of days that the FDOC has moved forward with the mail rule changes. If you have not been following this since last year, the FDOC plans to simply get rid of physical incoming mail, by having us send our mail to a third party who will use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and send it to our incarcerated loved ones through JPay.

This means the end of greeting cards, kids drawings, and much more, and they also limit the weight of our letters to ONE forever stamp.
This also means everything you will ever write will now be saved in a database.

You can read the full proposal here.

Please, make sure to request a public hearing on this matter before 6/8/2021.

Send email to:  Jason.Holman@fdc.myflorida.com
Subject:  Request for Public Hearing on Notice of Proposed Rule 33-210.101

You don’t need to write a lot, just explain that as someone who writes to people in the FDOC care you are directly affected by this rule under F.A.C. 120.536(3) and you want to request a hearing, preferably virtually and with a 14-day notice pursuant to 120.54(3)(a)3., where prison families will be allotted time to speak and the people responsible for the rule be available to answer questions and comments.

Categories: Life Updates

The Last Blockbuster

Going down Memory Lane tonight watching The Last Blockbuster. If it’s still around then, I’ll take my boy to an educational road trip and try to explain to him that Mama’s dream was to work at the counter when she was a teen. All she wanted to do was watch movies or talk about movies, and even write movies.
I’ll tell him she rented My Own Private Idaho several weekends in a row because she felt this was the most special important movie she’s ever seen and wanted to memorize every detail… until the shop owner sold it to her for a few francs.
I’ll tell him that when she moved out of her parents, laundromat night was okay because it was rent-a-movie night too.
I’ll tell him she had hundreds of VHS that were organized by genre and actors – and chronologically (and would get really mad if someone would mess them up!).
He’ll think his mom is too damn old but hopefully he’ll see the girl she used to be and thinks she was awkwardly cool too.
I sure miss her sometimes.

Categories: Prison

Routine Mail Notice of Rule Development – REQUEST A WORKSHOP!

I started looking into this issue in April 2020 as an amendment to the contract between the FDOC and JPay showed their clear intention to get rid of the “real” mail and have the incoming mail sent to an outside company that will scan everything. 
They planned to take away the JP5 tablets the incarcerated people bought, to “give” them a JP6 loaner instead. A very obvious step towards processing regular mail electronically.
Besides the fact they have to turn in a tablet they own for a loaner, my main concerns were the replacement of the regular mail by OCR (Optical Character Recognition – (is OCR good enough to read cursives?).) emailed through JPay, the full control of the FDOC of all means of communication (including inmates’ grievances), and the back-up of personal letters by a private company and the DOC for many years, apparently even after release.

A notice of development of rulemaking was published on Chapter 33 on 9/16/2020 regarding routine mail being processed electronically in the future. The preliminary draft was still not available. I requested a copy of it and a workshop regarding the rule proposal. I received a response about a month later that the FDOC had “chosen not to pursue the promulgation of proposed Rule 33-210.1011, F.A.C. Rather, instead of having the processes and protocols related to electronic mail scanning stated in a separate rule, they will be incorporated into Rule 33-210.101, F.A.C. (Routine Mail).”
Well, the draft is here…
The FDOC is trying to limit A LOT what its residents can receive and shows intent of incoming mail being processed electronically by a third party. 

There are two different ways the Department of Corrections in the US are trying to limit the incoming mail: when they make a copy for the incarcerated (which usually requires the family to only write on one side of the paper), store the original for a while, then discard it, and when they want to use Optical Character Recognition to send the letters as emails. Though of course, it is really about money, they pretend it is to avoid contraband / for security measures, so they would absolutely argue it is for penological interest.
I looked at Turner Vs Safley and I believe this is an “exaggerated response”. Mail has been coming to prisons for as long as they have existed, so it’s hard to suggest an alternative because all we want is incarcerated people to keep getting paper. In Florida, they want to get everything going through JPay and their tablet which I think is the most restrictive alternative. I don’t know if it affects the incarcerated’s amendment rights, but I believe it affects the senders?

I believe, for example, that children have the same constitutional rights as adults. Young children, or maybe non-verbal adults, may only express themselves through drawings. If it is possible to copy a drawing (though we can argue how much of the expression is removed when we pass from a colored original to a black and white bad quality photocopy), it is not possible to send a drawing by email. Nowhere they explain how they would deal with things like that. Their freedom of speech would certainly be attacked?

Today, we are allowed to send different things, like newspaper clippings, print outs, etc. We can attach up to 15 additional pages to a unlimited handwritten letter. From this draft, we see they try to impact the incarcerated’s right to information but limited everything we can send to one LETTER envelope (no big envelopes anymore) with ONE forever stamp (how about foreign mail? Guess they didn’t think it through…).
 
My other concern is the right of privacy (I know it’s an implicit right), with the letters being available to any DOC employees for some time, then to any governmental agency for years, possibly for ever, even after release. I found this case, Whiterow Vs Paff that mentions the need to avoid “unnecessary intrusion”. Today the mail only goes through the mail room employees and doesn’t stay available to them and everyone else around for years.
I personally tell pretty much everything to my husband on paper. Every little detail, my occasional rants, how I slept, my worries, how I was sick (would this violate HIPAA? lol I’m throwing everything out there!) and everything you can imagine. If this were to end up all in a database for the next 70 years, it would definitely impact what I write, and so my relationship. Maintaining family links should be a number one priority for the DOC since it is the best tool for rehabilitation.
This is a version of the proposed rule with quick annotations: 

 

Please request a workshop to try to block some changes:

Email: Paul.vazquez@fdc.myflorida.com
Subject: 33-210.101 Routine Mail Request for Public Workshop
You don’t need to write a lot, just explain that as someone who write to people in the FDOC care you are directly affected by this rule under F.A.C. 120.536(3) and you want to request a workshop, in public or virtual if needed, where prison families will be fairly represented.
Categories: Prison

JPay (scam) update

The JPay stamps in Florida have been incredibly expensive compared to other States, the cheapest being Washington State. Until today, we could buy stamps in any State we had a contact in (for example I had a pen pal in Washington State so I was buying my stamps there) and we could use those stamps with any of our contacts (so I would mostly use them on my husband in Florida, and occasionally with my pen pal in Louisiana). I was buying A LOT of stamps because I am also sending a lot of videos of the baby during this pandemic, and in Florida (again this is different in every state) a 30 sec video is 4 virtual stamps. Now the stamps we buy in one State can only be use in one State. That means if I want to write one email to each of my contacts, I have to buy stamps package in all the States (-_-). But to be honest I mostly use my stamps on one person (Florida), and now I probably won’t be able to afford to write as much or send videos. I guess this is a personal issue but I know numerous families are in the same boat. Right now we have no visits, video visitation doesn’t seem to work for those we have access to it, they are planning to kill the regular mail and now most people won’t be able to afford emails… FDOC is going completely backwards trying to cut the incarcerated people from their outside support. This is terrible.

FYI: those are the jpay prices in Florida

And in Washington:

 

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