In the
last blog installment of Informant America it was noted that I received a long
letter from Rick Wershe who is now in prison in Florida. Communication with Rick, or any
inmate in the Florida prison system, is not easy. Rick has spent nearly 30
years behind bars, most of them in Michigan. He says the Florida Corrections
System is real culture shock. This blog continues with quotes from Rick’s
letter…
Rick Wershe wrote his multi-page letter to me standing up.
He had no choice. There is no place to sit in his two-man cell. “There’s not
anywhere in the cell to sit down and write a letter,” he writes. “I stand up
and use the top bunk to write on.” Eating meals in the cell is a challenge,
too. “You stand up and eat off your tray or sit on the floor with the tray on
your lap,” Wershe writes.
In a previous blog I wrote that prison food in Florida is nothing to write home about. It provides daily nutritional needs and that’s
about it. Like prisons everywhere, Florida has “canteens” where prisoner with a
little change in their pocket can buy snacks or simple foods like packaged
soup. “The prices down here for a lot of things are more than double,” Wershe
writes. “A soup in Michigan costs 34 cents. In Florida prisons, it’s 70 cents. (The
cost of) Everything is 50% to 100% or more and here they have no paying jobs
like in Michigan or with the Feds.”
What he’s referring to are paying work details in other
state and federal prisons. Paid work details accomplish several things. They
give inmates something useful to do with their time. It gives them a means of
acquiring modest amounts of money they can spend inside on something they want.
This mimics the world outside, where you work to earn money to spend. Imagine
that. Yet, Florida doesn’t offer that constructive opportunity for prison
inmates.
Someone reading this might sarcastically think, ‘Aw. Too
bad for those poor criminals.’ That kind of hard-ass crime-and-punishment
thinking might make some macho men feel better, but it comes down to a bigger
question: do we want convicted criminals to do time behind bars and nothing
more, or do we want to at least try to educate them in subtle but daily ways
about acceptable ways to get a long in life on the outside?
You can learn a lot about the crime and punishment
attitudes of each state by doing an Internet search of their “Corrections”
Department websites.
Allow me to show you an example of what I’m talking about.
If you think Rick Wershe is being wussy in his complaining about the Florida
Department of Corrections, I invite you to do the following Google search:
Fire up Google and enter the following: Florida Department
of Corrections Photos.
The first thing you get is this:
Click on it. It will take you to a page of “high resolution”
images of—Death Row. You will find 23 images—all related to executing
prisoners.
 |
| This is Florida's gas chamber, which they proudly feature as the first photos you find if you try to find images about their prison system. (Photos: Florida Dept. of Corrections) |
This is a cell where Florida inmates on Death Row wait to die. (Photo: Florida Dept. of Corrections)
There are 16 views of the Florida gas chamber, six views of
Death row cells where inmates wait to die and one image of an electric chair.
That’s it. That’s all the Florida Department of Corrections offers Internet
visitors who would like to see images of what their “Corrections” system is all
about.
Good luck finding other images. If you dig around you can
find some. Like this one, celebrating trophies won by guards who work with
attack and tracking dogs:
 |
| (Photo: Florida Dept. of Corrections) |
 |
| (Photo: Florida Dept. of Corrections) |
Bloodhounds for tracking escaped prisoners seem to be a
favorite photo subject for the Florida Department of “Corrections”:
 |
| (Photo: Florida Dept. of Corrections) |
But as the photo above shows, the Florida Department of “Corrections”
doesn’t just rely on dogs. They are ready for deadly combat with inmates, too:
Yes. Yes. They have to be ready for trouble because some of
their guests are troublemakers. But it tells us a lot that Florida emphasizes photos of Death Row and attack dogs and assault troops in what might be called their public relations. It tells us that concepts like "corrections" and "rehabilitation" don't mean much in their prison system.
There’s a bit more in Rick Wershe’s letter from prison and I’ll share
it in the next post.
***
Here’s how to write to Rick Wershe if you are inclined to
do so. Be sure to include his inmate number in the address and on the head of
the letter itself:
Mr.
Richard J. Wershe, Jr.
No.
K70365
Columbia
Correctional Institution
216
SE Corrections Way, Lake City, FL 32025
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