The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.

July 16th, 2024

“My time in jail was intense immersion education. It was painful but ultimately mind-expanding and heart-opening and there is no other place I could have learned the lessons I learned there.” -Rebecca Rubin

It took almost 6 months, but I finally mastered the art of sleeping on a thin mat on a narrow metal bunk. I’ve become an early sleeper—which is astounding if you know me, because I have been a night owl my entire life—but you really have little choice when everyone goes to “dinner” at 430pm, lights out at 10pm, and your bed must be made and uniform-ready by 730am, every day for half a year. 

This mail call was unusually late. I’m always happy to hear my name except for that night, because I was very much ready to go to bed. I don’t know why I was convinced it must not be anything important.

Except it was. From the halfway house: “We are ready to accept Renea Goddard on September 3, 2024.”

It is incredibly strange to hold a piece of paper in your hands that essentially frees you from imprisonment. And even stranger: prisoners here don’t receive these letters, ever. It was supposed to go to my case manager—a man who is widely known here as a petty, incompetent, retaliator who often sits on important information far longer than necessary. He’s basically a black hole of a person—but the letter had completely bypassed him and landed right in my hands.

“That was nothing but an act of God, girl,” Michelle said. Michelle is a stud in her fifties with a kind face, who wishes me a blessed day, every day, without fail. “That letter was supposed to go to you.”

“Only 7 months of an 18 month sentence, that’s truly a blessing, you know that?” my friend Juju told me. A Mexican lady with a daughter my age, she was the one who showed me around on my first day, walked me to lunch, taught me how to make my bed, gave me shower shoes and a toothbrush.

It is a blessing. And it could have all been so much worse. So why am I just as anxious and wary, as I am relieved and grateful? 

One of the FSA (First Step Act) classes I took to reduce my sentence was NRDAP, or the Non-Residential Drug Abuse Program. My NRDAP book describes eight criminal thinking errors. One of them is “sentimentality.” “I had to sell drugs to support my children” is listed as an example of this “thinking error.” People who are accepted into the residential version of this program, at minimum and low-security prisons like FPC Bryan and FMC Carswell (where my codefendants were designated) are expected to be grateful—it takes a year off your sentence.

“A fellow prisoner described RDAP’s methods as: ‘They break you down completely and build you back up from nothing. That is why we are so mentally and physically tired at the end of each day.’

The guard-‘therapists’ (an intentionally blurred line) tell me that RDAP is a behavioral modification program intent on ‘challenging your core beliefs’ to orient you toward a ‘prosocial lifestyle.’ RDAP contends that all ‘criminal’ activity stems from correctible thinking errors and not material conditions. It is fiercely atomizing—attacking and neutralizing prisoner solidarity by reframing it as an anti-social ‘criminal’ lifestyle. Prisoners are required to break solidarity and publicly shame their peers, often creating escalating cycles that regularly destroy the social bonds that have formed. Racist, sexist, and transphobic events have gone unaddressed as the prisoners who did them are protected (encouraged and even facilitated) by guards.” 

Menlo, a climate activist and political prisoner, wrote this in a Kite to the Editor for The Abolitionist, Issue 41. This, in a nutshell, describes the entire philosophy of “corrections” in the United States. Nowhere in these programs can you find any acknowledgment of how U.S laws, our economic system, and social inequality not only /creates/ things like addiction and illegal business—it /requires/ these things for the system to function as intended. Of course not. There is only “criminal” thinking and “criminal” lifestyles. Any acknowledgment of how material conditions create crime would betray the extremely lucrative business of “correcting” human beings.

“I do not know how many more there are like me: People quietly arrested and sentenced, given minimal time, and put in a Residential Drug Abuse Program (RDAP) unit. It is odd that the state tried to cover up my case and send me to a low-security federal facility,” Menlo writes. “It is reminiscent of that old philosophy of labeling political prisoners ‘criminally insane’ and quietly disappearing them to psychiatric facilities. It all sounds rather sinister when I put it on paper.”

Spicer, the NRDAP prison guard-therapist-whatever, is a smiley white woman who carries quilted bags and a thermos with a quilted coozie, jokes about her “addiction” to sweets, and often tearfully sympathizes with all the poor “incarcerated mothers taken away from their children.”

She also wears the same bulletproof vest and black belt with its heavy rings of keys that all the other prison guards wear. She is a trained correctional officer, even though she looks and quacks like a high school counselor. 

“I agree, the system needs to change,” she cries, when I argue about the programming in class. “I’d burn it all down if I could!” she says, adjusting the mace can on her belt so she can sit more comfortably.

To her credit, one of the few times I’ve ever heard a CO make sense, was when Spicer told us once: “Whenever you start thinking that a staff member here is out to get you, just remember—this is a decent-paying job in an area where there are none. They don’t hate you—it’s not even about you. They just hate their jobs.”

When Max drove me here to turn myself in, the last couple hours was a drive through pure isolation. No phone service, barely even a gas pump for miles. The last little bit of human civilization before getting to the prison was a Walgreens, a gas station, a Cracker Barrel, and a Waffle House—where I had my last free meal before I came here (biscuits and sausage gravy, buttery grits, and sunny-side up eggs…I think some of the best I’ve ever had). Closer to the prison, there were a few trailers here and there in the woods. It didn’t occur to me until later that some of those may even belong to the duty officers who work here.

“Prisons and jails have become ‘answers’ to everything from unemployment to dilapidated infrastructure to revenue shortages to declining school enrollments.” Judah Schept writes in “Abolition From the Forest to the Mountain Top: Fighting for a Livable Future,” for The Abolitionist, Issue 41. 

They put prisons, like this one, in the poorest parts of the country, like it’s some kind of band-aid. /It creates jobs, it’ll boost the local economy, rah rah rah./ This kind of thinking—the kind that has poor folk guarding cages full of other poor folk—is the same kind of thinking that also has poor folk here putting together bombs in Lockheed Martin and Raytheon factories, to bomb other poor folk halfway across the world.

“This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger.” —Audre Lorde

It’s ultimately the prisoners and the locals who pay for this. The COs project their displaced resentment on us. The prison compound itself is ran incompetently, unprofessionally, and inefficiently, because the staff is apathetic and discontent. Combined with the extremely rural location, this results in delayed paperwork and release dates, bare bones programming, and a near complete lack of adequate medical care. Visitation is often abruptly cancelled due to lack of staff. Many of these women go without seeing their children for years because simply coming all the way out here is costly and time-consuming. 

Meanwhile, the non-incarcerated locals deal with pollution and environmental disruptions (not to mention the prison sucking up all the jobseekers in the local area). One day in the garage I found the guard-foreman struggling to fix a large, rusty, and broken-down trash-grinder. He informed me that the prison has been disposing of all its waste in a nearby landfill. The municipal gov. has been complaining for years, and is on the verge of bringing a lawsuit to the prison—so only now is the prison attempting to find ways to destroy its own garbage. 

Rural Appalachia has the highest concentration of prisons in the country. But abolitionists in the region work tirelessly: right now, they’re committed to preventing a new prison, FCI Letcher, from being built. There’s always a way.

“Is it true they have to snitch on each other in RDAP?” I ask Ms. Peggy, out of curiosity. Peggy probably knows corrections better than any CO who works here. She’s been locked up since ’98—the year I was born.

“Yes, it’s the only way to get through the program. But look,” she said. “This is what you do. You get yourself a buddy, right? Then you just make shit up about each other. Little shit. Like, ‘she takes too long in the shower’ or whatever. That way you help each other. See, there’s always a way.” She winked. “Just gotta get creative, right?”

Maybe I’m anxious and wary because this is not over yet. I spent a little over three years on pre-trial supervision prior to my incarceration, and I will spend another two years on probation after I am released. This place is full of probation violators—everything from “pissing dirty” to simply forgetting to pay your restitution can land you back in here.

By the end of this, I would have been under the boot for nearly the entire duration of my twenties. 

And even after I’m punished, they will punish me. As a felon, I can’t vote in some states. If I ride in a vehicle with someone who’s strapped or has drugs on their person, I’d be risking a lot more than someone with no record. 

“You’re only 26 and already in federal prison! Well, at least you got street cred for the rest of your life,” my coworker at the garage told me. She laughed and slapped me on the back. “So, are you still gonna protest and all that stuff, after all this?” 

I didn’t hesitate. “Yes!”

Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.