Fifty Second Visit to Taft

This was a very difficult week for both Ron and me. He had his team meeting, which they have every three months during the last part of incarceration. He was told his release would be later than he originally thought. When they told him that this week, it felt like a punch in the stomach to both of us. Seven weeks more than we thought! However, that could change at anytime, so you just have to learn to go with the flow. As I say, staying on an even keel is the most difficult thing to do. Lucky for Ron he has friends like David, Richard and Mark that really lifted his spirits. He was down in the dumps Thursday night,but by Friday morning when I saw him he was almost back to his old self, jokes and all. This experience has taught us both to be cautious of what anybody tells us. Someone else might give you very different information. The challenge is figuring out what's really going to happen. That's where patience comes in. In due time we will find out what his date of release really is.

Early last summer I started counseling a man facing a lot of jail time, and his wife. We met several times for coffee, and I shared with them some of the things I had learned from this experience. About a week after one of our meetings his wife called to tell me that the marshalls had come to their home and taken him away in handcuffs. They decided he was a flight risk, and sent him to a county jail in a small town in Minnesota to until his sentencing. That was in August. He has since been sentenced, but he is still sitting in county jail and has no idea when or where he will be sent. He got a long sentence, 10 years, 10 months, but still qualifies for a camp because with good time his sentence is well under 10 years. But when will he go? Here is how he can expect to get to his prison camp once he is finally assigned somewhere.

He will have what the prisoners call "diesel therapy." He will probably be coming to California, so he may come by bus over the course of 6-12 weeks. They will shackle him, put him in a bus, and take him to the next city. There he will stay in a local jail until they determine it's time to move to the next city. Then they will shackle him again and take him by bus and house him in another local jail. If he gets lucky he might get to Oklahoma City and take the prison plane to California. That doesn't usually happen though. Many men Ron has talked to have arrived at their destination in this fashion. It's never a point to point ride. One friend of Ron's who is at Taft had a court appearance in San Diego. It took him 3 weeks to get to San Diego via Victorville, one of the worst prisons in the state. He had a one day court appearance, then waited weeks to be returned to Taft. Maybe they put the guys through this torture so that when they actually do arrive at their destination they think they're in paradise.

Oh happy day. It's a new week and things are going to be better. Keep positive and know that the best is yet to come. Ron is wondering if he should be recalculating the hours, days, weeks and months until his release. I told him "No" because we don't really know. On second thought, it's a good project for him to work on. He has plenty of time.