I Ain’t Got No Misinformation

One of the most bizarre and disturbing parts of leaving prison has been emerging into a world in which claims and facts seem to have the same weight. Such confusion has, of course, always been with us, but it feels to me now as if a proud disdain for critical thinking — or even the desire for it — has overrun damn near every discussion of every topic. What this means is that life after prison almost perfectly reflects life inside prison. Self-serving spin and propaganda is the air you breath behind bars, and that bad atmosphere has leached into the general public, and not at all by accident. So now I find myself increasingly exhausted by having to sort through all kinds of triple negative statements in the quest for some kind of reality.

“I ain’t got no misinformation,” means what, exactly? Well, misinformation is not true information, so “no misinformation” would be accurate information. But if I ain’t got that, well, then I’m back at bullshit. What’s even more amazing to me is to see the ways in which misinformation and spin have been packaged and distributed as official documents. The other day I came across a public statement from the Bureau of Prisons called “Correcting Myths and Misinformation About BOP and COVID-19.” Thank God the COVID I had inside the federal prison system had already trained me to operate while being short of breath. Otherwise I might have had to call for oxygen while reading this dyspnea-inducing document. It’s going to take a while for me to work through the outlandishness of federal propaganda here, so please have some patience. I feel the need to break down the the nonsense that the Bureau of Prisons published in this May 2020 statement with a more systematic approach than the BOP took to writing it. The BOP writes: “The following information is compiled to address misreporting and misinformation about the BOP’s response to COVID-19.” Ah, the passive voice of finger pointing and disavowal: complied by whom? how? We’ll never know who is responsible for writing such nonsense, which means nobody can ever hold the author(s) accountable for it. “Responsibility” and “accountability” are the great shibboleths of the criminal justice system, but they only apply to the accused and convicted. Furthermore, the misreporting and misinformation alleged here are claims made by the government. They are in no way undisputed facts, so labeling them as misinformation already has the effect of propaganda right from the get-go. Moreover, these all take the form of strawman arguments, magically spouting from mythical antagonists to the BOP. If they were, in fact, misreportings, at least have the decency to cite the reporting directly. Use some credible evidence. But let’s also remember that the current buzzword “evidence-based” — of which politicians and bureaucrats are so fond — usually means the powerful justify their actions on the basis of some self-serving study, rather than a survey of all the best available research. It’s a grandchild of the phrase that Mark Twain popularized: “There are three kind of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Let’s see what the BOP calls a lie and see if they qualify as something more.

In May 2020, with the corona virus raging through the federal prison system, the BOP says that the following things are myths or misinformation:

“Prisoners, fearing they may be abandoned in an isolation cell and left for dead, are not reporting their
symptoms.”

This is a distortion. Many prisoners were not reporting symptoms in May 2020 or in the months leading up to that point. Yes prisoners feared being put in an isolation cell; of course prisoner fear this because being put in an isolation cell is literally every prison’s first line of punishment for alleged infractions of prison rules. It’s hard to shake the truth of that experience and believe that you will be treated any better because you might be sick. Indeed, the thought of being locen in a 6×9 room, 24/7, for an indeterminate time, while ill and having, according to the BOP, “Health Services staff … conducting rounds and temperature checks twice a day.” That might do quite a bit to dissuade you from volunteering your illness, especially when you can clearly see that you aren’t the only person around you with COVID. You might do better to have your buddies in the housing unit check on you, especially if things were to take a turn for the worse. At least my bunky would notice if I stopped breathing, and he would check on me more than twice a day. Pre-COVID, I once moved into a new cell and literally within 90 seconds of meeting my new cellmate, I could see that physically he was in a bad way, so bad that I actually went and go the CO to get him medical help. He ended up being hospitalized for 3 weeks with a massive infection that Health Services had known about but downplayed. Any guard making his rounds would have seen him on his bunk and just figured he was sleeping the day away. And people act surprised to find out that inmates trust each other more than they trust staff.

BOP says this is a myth: “Prison staff walk the grounds, often without masks and gloves, failing to observe social distancing with either inmates or themselves.”

Utterly true. As President Biden recently pointed out, there is a machismo component to anti-masking, and you would be hard-pressed to find a more malignant machismo culture than amongst correctional officers. I even witnessed COs standing outside the COVID isolation in a non-socially distanced, unmasked group having a smoke. Seems like a good plan for a respiratory pandemic. In trying to “correct” this “myth,” the BOP goes on to say this: “Staff are not required, but can opt to wear masks while walking on the compound, per CDC guidance of recommendations to wear masks where social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.” I know. What the actual fuck? So you call the claim about failure to mask and social distance a lie, and then you admit it’s not a lie in your “refutation” of it. Hell, you should cut the convicted the same slack. Probation and its restrictions should be available to me, even recommended, but really it should be at my discretion. Seems reasonable.

The way the government was handling the corona virus pandemic might lead to massive casualties. Well, that just couldn’t be true. After all, Trump propaganda told us that it was all going to just go away. According to CNN on 6 May 2020, the day the BOP published this non-misinformation misinformation, 73,000 Americans had died of COVID-19. Less than a year later, that number is at 534,000 and still rising. Most inmates saw the disaster coming, but almost none thought it would be a direct cause and effect from prison outbreaks to the general population of the US. This is misrepresentation on the BOPs part. Moreover, inmates were more concerned about the corona virus being imported into federal facilities by people coming from the outside (i.e. prison staff because visiting had already been suspended by this point) than about it “escaping” from prisons. We all knew we were captive culture media for any and every virus out there. This is not prescience; it’s common sense. As the BOP so glibly put it in their response to this non-mythical concern, “Infectious disease management is a way of life in corrections.” This doesn’t mean that they will be well-managed, just that they see it as a cost of doing business. Of course, you are going to lose a few, but what can you do about it?

Here’s the next bit of “misinformation” the BOP tried to turn to their advantage: “Prisoners assigned to clean facilities are ignoring their job assignments because they fear the work will kill them.”

This is actually fairly complicated. In the first stages of the coronavirus pandemic, the prison actually created a bunch of new work assignments for “unemployed” inmates and made them roam the compound doing things like wiping down door handles. Then the BOP decided that was not a good virus-containment strategy and moved to locking us all down in our cells and/or housing units. So, the BOP itself went from a hyper-cleaning position to a number of weeks with only, at most, standard cleaning. One of the other things that you should understand about inmate culture is that cleaning your living area is a high priority. In fact, inmates in my unit started a short-lived food strike because they felt that the prison staff was providing neither sufficient nor the right kinds of cleaning materials to keep us safe. So it’s rather the opposite of what the BOP claim is here. Now, for some reason, there did seem to be a total turnover in the inmates who cleaned the general use areas of my housing unit. Stuff still got cleaned and cleaned pretty well, all things considered, but what wasn’t lost on me was the fact that those jobs, during a lockdown, also became vital chokepoints for contraband because the cleaners were the only people with even limited freedom of movement and contact with staff (if not inmates) outside the housing unit. That is, those jobs became far more lucrative than they had been pre-COVID (where they might have maxed out at a pay rate of $50/month for the head orderly and paid just under $20/month for the guy who cleaned the showers). So, some people did seem to leave their job assignments, but it’s not as if there were no cleaning. Moreover, isn’t the BOP’s implication here that it’s somehow the inmates’ fault if there are virus-tained surfaces? How sick is that?

BOP myth/misinformation allegation: “Inmates must have a fever and other COVID-19 symptoms to be placed in isolation. Only those ill enough to be taken to a hospital are tested for the coronavirus.”

BOP’s own response: “Inmates exhibiting signs or symptoms of COVID-19 are placed in isolation in accordance with CDC guidelines. Inmates whose conditions cannot be managed within the institution are sent to the local hospital for management. Testing of inmates within the institution and by the local hospital is conducted in accordance with CDC and local health department guidance.” If you are writing a textbook on logical fallacies, this is a nicely complex example of “begging the question.” This is myth because other people said it is a myth, but when we say the same thing, it’s true. It also leaves out the problem, according to a Department of Justice Inspector General’s report, that lots of institutions and staff didn’t know how to accurately administer COVID tests or how to do so in an adequate manner. as a result, the virus continued to spread and testing was a bureaucratic fig leaf.

What the BOP says is misinformation: “Bureau staff are not educated about what to do.”

A couple things I head from staff: “Just take vitamin C that you can get at commissary and you’ll be pretty much protected.” “Just give us a couple weeks and we will have this all under control and pretty much back to normal.” What somebody at one institution told the Inspector General: “She also told us that she may have administered the first two inmates’ tests incorrectly: when she herself was tested a few days later, she realized that she needed to probe deeper into the nasal cavity. She said that there was not a lot of guidance or instruction, at that time, for how to administer the test; that the training she received consisted of watching an internet video; and that additional training would have been helpful.”

Exhausted yet? I am. But this is “To Be Continued…”