Free Marc Emery

[Editor’s note: Find out more about Marc Emery, including how to help bring him home to Canada, and how to send him a letter, at www.FreeMarc.ca. Marc also writes regular blogs, which are posted at CannabisCulture.com and FreeMarc.ca]

 

January 10-17th 2011: I have had many complaints about this concentration camp for foreigners. No US citizens are incarcerated here, where nothing ever seems to improve. But one aspect of my situation has gotten better.

 

The photocopier for inmates is finally available for use after this place has been operating 3 months. My fingers are so aching from writing five or six 8-10 page letters every day that I have decided to type up the whole story so I can mail it to people and add personalized parts at the end. I am falling behind in my correspondence; I’ve about 35 to 40 people I want to get back to but it’s not possible, so I hope this new format will suffice to keep them informed.

 

Nothing at D. Ray James, this private prison run by GEO Group, ever can be an exclusively good thing, so while the photocopier is functioning, the typewriters have not had correctable ribbon for 3 weeks now, so typos will abound this original hand-written newsletter, and there is little I can do about it.

 

This typewriter is vintage 1983. I hadn’t seen a typewriter for over 20 years until I got to D. Ray James. Even though US citizens in a “low” security prison have access to email (hours a day), computers, word processors, and printers, that is far too much for the ‘foreigner scum’ housed here at DRJCI. My apologies in advance for numerous typos in this letter I am unable to correct. [Note from Jodie Emery: typos and errors have been corrected for this online version.]

 

My job here at D. Ray James is to keep the inmate reading library in good order, straighten the shelves, prevent theft, keep the noise level down, and try to encourage the powers that be to spend some money on obtaining current books and magazines. The lady that is the Head of Library Services is Doctor Davis.

 

I was dismissed from this job on December 20th, 2010 because I love the library too much to see it dysfunctional. Not a single book or magazine in the English Language has been acquired in 3 months since D. Ray James Correctional Institution opened “for business” on October 4th 2010. There were 20 or so beat up magazines from July and August 2010 (although the only copy of Rolling Stone Magazine was from August 2009) and about 7 Spanish magazines (for about 1,000 Spanish-speaking inmates!). The library is made up of 3,332 books (I did the official inventory), 2,930 in English, all 10-40 years old, beat-up beyond belief, decrepit, ex-library, obsolete. There are 400 books total in Spanish. These were acquired when the prison opened, but are largely classical novels. That is the only purchase I have seen this facility make for the library.

 

So I ordered magazine & book purchasing catalogs. I, with the kindly librarian, Mr. Folk (not a real librarian; he actually applied to be head of security, but they made him the librarian instead – and he has since retired) giving me permission, filled out requisition forms to order magazine subscriptions. I was told by Mr. Folk to order 20 subscriptions to popular magazines.

 

One day, Dr. Davis came in and was alarmed by a library aide (me) filling out the GEO Group Requisition forms. I nonetheless read her the magazines I had chosen: Car Craft, The Sporting News, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, TV y Novellas, National Geographic… “Oh we aren’t getting National Geographic,” Dr. Davis said. “That’s way too sexually explicit. I know what the inmates are looking for when they read National Geographic. No, we won’t be subscribing to that.”

 

“But” I responded, slack jawed, “National Geographic is the single most subscribed magazine by libraries the world over. Every elementary school has a subscription to National Geographic.”

 

“Well, we won’t be subscribing to it here. Way too sexually explicit.”

 

It’s noteworthy that National Geographic is specifically EXEMPTED in Bureau of Prison Policy and Procedure from being considered indecent even if it does show aboriginal tribes with exposed nipples or genitalia (which isn’t common anyway). So that’s the kind of mind-set of the HEAD of Education and Library Services.

 

The next day, my personal subscription copy of National Geographic arrived with “King David and His Times” on the front cover, perfect for backward southeast Georgia, with articles inside on the 12th century Christian church architecture of Spain. No naked aboriginals anywhere to be found. So I put it up on the magazine rack, and it is without question the most popular magazine amongst the inmates.

 

We have not received any magazines through subscriptions by the institution since the time Dr. Davis took the magazine subscription requisition form. Then, as you might be aware, I had Jodie announce to my Facebook supporters – now numbering over 35,000 – Marc Emery’s D. Ray James Library Resuscitation Program. Since this penny-pinching place won’t improve the library, I took it upon myself to do it. I asked supporters to send me like-new current magazines, and they did. Dozens of them. I asked for contemporary Spanish-language novels and fans responded by sending dozens of them, and over 100 books in English. I was sent current law texts, hardcover Spanish to English dictionaries (the library – incredibly – had none), and large pictorial books, all for donation to the inmate library.

 

Then the people working here started going on the internet, and they learned of my plan to improve the library despite the best effort to keep the inmates in the dark and stupid, without any current reading material (except the atrocious newspaper, USA Today), and dismissed me after 100 items for donation to the library arrived. The mailroom stopped me from receiving any books or magazines. They rejected numerous letters sent to me. They cut off my phone access over the Christmas Holidays from December 22nd to 27th, 2010, as they did to every Canadian here, and some Canadians had not even had their phone access restored 16 days later (but more of that D. Ray James perfidy later). In short, my effort to do what this institution refuses to do – make the law library and reading library viable and current – was stymied and I was punished for caring too much about the inmates’ welfare. It’s clear the people who run this facility do not care, and want the library to be moribund and of little use to inmates.

 

In the law library, I am still doing paralegal work. I have supplied the other paralegals, a team of 4 other inmates, with information and texts and newsletter subscriptions and contacts on the outside to help us because the institution here provides no resources other than a clunky version of Lexus/Nexus, a program that will show all existing federal statutes. The five paralegals do virtually all the documents, inquiries, motions, appeals, grievances, requests, for all the 1,000 inmates, who largely don’t speak English, and very few write credibly in English. This is a huge task, to which they get paid 12 cents an hour (in my case) up to 40 cents an hour (in the case of Guy, a Pakistani-born British man who has a college education).

 

Of course, we can’t use a computer for all these formal documents! We have to use these ancient, obsolete typewriters, using non-correctable ribbon. Using the word processor, which is here, connected to a printer, which is here, would be a standard at every “Low” security prison for US citizen inmates, but we foreigners are too contemptible to be entrusted with the word processor so all our work for the inmates has to be done on these ridiculously time-consuming typewriters. Even though every one of the inmates is here for a non-violent offense, many are just illegal residents within the United States, working without permits. We are treated like we are in a medium-high security prison.

 

I was dismissed on December 20th, 2010, but on January 6th, 2011 I was reinstated. The warden was away for 2 weeks, and on his first day back he saw me. He said, “Emery, you shouldn’t have been fired from the Library. You’re reinstated.”

 

“Excellent, Sir,” I said. “There are issues with the mail room I’d like to discuss. My mail is being rejected, books are restricted to me –”

 

“Let’s talk about that later,” he said. “Right now, can you tell your people to stop the emails and phone calls to my office and GEO Offices in Boca Raton?”

 

So, I’m back in the library, and at some point I can donate books and magazines to the library. I’ve never figured out the reason the top brass forbid inmates from giving books and their own subscriptions to the library. The library is, after all, for the inmates, it is common practice at any other prison. It’s all about control here. Any initiative here by the inmates is a threat to their control mentality. That’s the whole reason. They do not have any rationally grounded reason. At first it was some invented rule about the Dept. of Justice forbidding donations, but in reality it’s just that donations require a bit of 30-second paperwork, which I did when I donated any book or magazine. But it’s all about control really.

 

The library is unfortunately extremely pathetic. All the books are beat-up, decrepit condition ex-library books 10-40 years old. They are obsolete, largely book club fiction hardcovers. There are, inexplicably for a male-only prison, about 300 Harlequin romance novels; one of the biggest – if not the biggest – category in the library. The library hasn’t spent a dime on any new magazines since opening, so the dozen or so that have survived from summer of 2010 are falling apart now. In December there were 15 magazines that were current once my donations from people like you started coming in: Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Runners World, Dog World, Time, Beautiful British Columbia, Newsweek, and others. Donations were the only source of current material, other than the atrocious USA Today. I would donate my personal daily New York Times for actual newspaper content.

 

I’m going to lend around any magazines I get, but the mailroom has me on this bizarre program that in order for me to receive books I have to mail out an equal number of books. So on Tuesday, I’ll go to the mailroom, and pick up to 5 books, but I have to bring 5 books back to the mailroom to be mailed to my friend Loretta Nall. In any other prison, I could just donate to the library, give them away or put them in storage in my property, but not at DRJCI. There is no policy or procedure in their own book of rules specifying this; it’s just made up and applies only to me, as no other inmate is required to do this. But as I shall point out later, there is a whole routine of discrimination against the Canadians here by our American overlords.

 

[Note from Jodie: Marc has been told that the 5-book rule no longer applies, and he is now getting all of his mail and books, but only because the warden spoke to the mail room. Please keep sending mail. Address at www.FreeMarc.ca]

 

The Canadians, being from an English-speaking country with a modicum of civilization, know what’s rational and normal in these circumstances, and are all bitching and complaining about the bizarre conditions here and about the unequal treatment we are receiving in this concentration camp for non-US citizens. A full comparison of the differences in treatment for Canadians in the US Federal Prison system vs. how an American is treated in a US Prison comes later. Canadians know it’s wrong and we speak out.

 

The Hispanics, for now, know that there is little they can do about any inequities, so they tolerate them. But by summer there will be 2,500 inmates, and right now Georgia is cool in winter. When it gets hot and humid in summer, day after day, and this institutional insanity carries on, we shall see what they will and will not tolerate.

 

Starting on Monday, January 10th, I’ll be getting the reading library in order. It’s a mess now. The shelves haven’t been straightened. There is no method for tracking down overdue books, and many books loaned out are overdue. I get most of the paralegal books and newsletters so I’ll continue to help various inmates but that will fall to Guy, Darren, Miguel, and Eugenio to do, although many inmates come to me because they’ve seen fellow inmates get their paperwork done by me.

 

I had a visit from Richard Malloy Barnes, the staff lawyer for Georgia NORML. He drove 8 hours from Atlanta largely just to meet me and see how I was doing. But I asked him if he would be our prison lawyer at pro-bono rates, maybe $60 or $70 an hour, to send letters to the prison in matters of extreme neglect or obstruction of clearly defined legal rights. I figure a good letter taking 30 minutes could be sent to the prison here on a really egregious matter. For example, there is an inmate where who had his dentures lost by GEO last June, now 7 months ago. He has put in 9 requests to have his dentures replaced, but even though GEO Group lost them, they have still been unwilling to replace them. Now, after 9 refusals, GEO Group at D. Ray James Correctional Institution is saying that because he is now less than a year to go on his sentence, they don’t have to replace them! Meanwhile, his gums are in pain from 7 months of trying to eat without his dentures, and swollen too. The prospect of going another eleven months without dentures is very discouraging for him. Yet that’s what GEO Group (DRJCI) is telling him. So I looked up dental care court precedents in my Prisoners’ Self-Help Litigation Manual, a fabulous 900+ page huge tome by John Boston, and found out that “willful indifference” in the case of serious dental need – “serious” meaning there is pain and swelling of the gums – constitutes an actionable negligence. This fellow, having done 7 months now without dentures, now constitutes a willful negligence; to go another eleven months makes it a certainty. On his last grievance form, I attached the relevant court cases and law to underscore his request. Even if they didn’t lose his existing dentures, they are obligated to maintain his dental regime of adequate dentures.

 

In an FCI (Federal Correctional Institution) for US citizens, this would not even be a problem. It would be a routine issuance of dentures. For us foreigner scum in the US Federal System, all these for-profit prisons we are warehoused in care about is spending as little money on us as possible. There is one doctor here for 1,100 inmates, and one dentist. As you’ll see in the chart that follows, we are deprived of virtually every amenity, opportunity or facility that Americans in the US Federal System get.

 

So I asked lawyer Barnes if he could send some letters on behalf of prisoners here who really need a little outside help, and I would have my supporters try to raise $1,500.00 or so to retain him to do these letters and some follow-up. “It’s got be cheap,” I said. So we’re going to discuss these things further, but I think having a Georgia lawyer keeping an eye on this prison and the inmates in here is a good idea if it can be done inexpensively. If you are interested in helping with a financial contribution to legal representation on behalf of the inmate population here at D. Ray James Correctional Institution, email my wife jodieemery@gmail.com and discuss how you can make a $25.00 or $50.00 donation to this retainer.

 

I’ve received many legal texts thanks to my friend Dana Larsen. Paralegal Procedure, Burtons Legal Thesaurus, a US Jailhouse Lawyers’ Manual, Prisoner Self-Help Litigation Manual, and subscriptions to Prison Legal News (see their website at prisonlegalnews.org). The US Jailhouse Lawyers Manual is an excellent primer for understanding and doing writs of Habeas Corpus, despite there being 178 typographical errors in the first 50 pages of the book. Yes, I said 178 errors; it’s self-published I think, and maybe he put the first rough draft disc in the printer, but I hope to send him my edit and maybe I can get an editor credit in the next edition.

 

A writ of Habeas Corpus, a term seldom used in Canada (an American legal term that does, however, stem from British common law), is a demand to be in court requiring the state/authorities of the prison to demonstrate that the prisoner’s detention follow the letter of the law/rule of law. It is a mechanism to seek relief, from the court, of unlawful or unjust conditions, treatment, or detention. So I learned in this book when an inmate can file a writ of Habeas Corpus. The courts require an inmate, for example, to exhaust all internal remedies via the internal grievance process. D. Ray James is sneaky in that regard. Many times you file a form or grievance, the staff here simply do not answer back. What are you going to do? This is a rogue facility. They often don’t even make the proper forms available so you cannot file a proper grievance. Then they didn’t have a photocopier available so you couldn’t make copies of your documents.

 

It’s very complicated, all the forms, the grievance process, etc. Considering 97% of inmates here are non-English speaking and hardly literate in English, that makes the paralegal advisers very valuable. Most staff here at D. Ray James Correctional Institution do not know the correct procedure to recommend to any inmate requiring a grievance form. All appeals about the treatment of an inmate here go to GEO Group, not the Bureau of Prisons, so there is no government agency that oversees these grievances or requests. It’s handled as a business or corporate matter, incredibly. I believe the only real way to get any help for inmates is media exposure, outside pressure, getting the truth out to the Canadian and American public. I think most Canadians are surprised to find out that Canadians in the US Federal Prison System are ghettoed into a concentration camp completely different from what US citizens in the US Federal System experience.

 

I’ve gotten all these great books on jailhouse lawyering from my friend Dana Larsen, who is currently campaigning very seriously for the leadership of the British Columbia New Democratic Party. It’s a quixotic campaign centered on Dana’s sound views on repealing marijuana prohibition. I fear Mike Farnsworth will be the next leader of the BC NDP. Farnsworth is a prohibitionist; he has always parroted the ‘more cops, more laws, more prisons, more punishment’ mantra that the BC Liberal Party and upstart BC Conservative Party already advocate. The only ideological alternative in the case of Farnsworth taking over the BC NDP leadership would be the BC Green Party, who seem to be poorly led by Jane Sterk, a hard-to-like, prickly matron of a leader who clearly dislikes people and politics, and certainly does little to improve her party’s standing with the people of British Columbia. Ineffectual as leader, she may as well be invisible. In the 20 months since the most recent BC provincial election, her distant personality and her lack of any common touch, along with inaction and lethargy, have made the BC Greens irrelevant and a non-factor in BC Politics, even though the brand itself is polling 12%. My wife Jodie is on the executive council of the BC Greens but she has become somewhat disillusioned. Sterk is certain to be ignored in the next election, trounced on the day of the vote, which could be this spring or this fall if a provincial election is called. It’s a huge missed opportunity that the BC Greens cannot take advantage of the political vacuum that exists in BC right now. With both the BC Liberals and NDP searching for new leaders, and the Greens as the third party of BC (the Conservatives are just starting up), no one has captured the public imagination from either party. After the BC Greens get no results in the next election, Sterk will have to resign and then the BC Greens will have only one more opportunity to get a leader with charisma, gravitas, vision, toughness and an enthusiasm for campaigning virtually non-stop. Plus some good ideas that contrast with the NDP/Liberal line, and a vision that can be clearly articulated to the voters of BC. It may take a generation to alter the way we treat the environment and the planet, so the BC Greens should focus on what can be done immediately in the field of social justice in appealing to voters. That means police reform, ending prohibition, more civilian oversight, a viable and accessible citizen initiative process that cannot be undermined by the legislature, more choice in schooling, giving more power back to the people, empowering the cynical mass of citizens who are weary of government being the problem when the solutions stare at us.

 

I did have a visit with MLA (member of the provincial Legislative Assembly) Guy Gentner, on Sunday, January 2nd. This thoughtful and intelligent elected representative from British Columbia (NDP – North Delta) was visiting his daughter in Gainesville, Florida, when he announced in a newspaper interview he was planning to visit me while in Florida. It took him two hours to drive here, two hours to drive back, and he spent four hours with me. We spoke of the conditions here at this peculiar place, and private prisons more generally. I supplied him with my chart outlining the discrimination faced by Canadians in the US Federal system, and urged him to take up the view that while Canadians are being treated in this segregated manner, no Canadian should ever be extradited from Canada to the United States. Prosecute them in Canada until such a time when Canadians receive the identical same regime in the US prison system as Americans. We discussed various things: the ruinous policies of prohibition, the conditions for the ten Canadians here, and our activist/political backgrounds. It was a serious talk with much discussed and I was honored to have such a gentleman take 9 or 10 hours out of his holidays to investigate my current circumstances.

 

So, I explained to Mr. Gentner some of the differences between what Americans receive in the way of services and amenities compared to what is provided for Canadians in the US Federal system. Firstly, all US citizen federal inmates are housed in Dept. of Justice/Bureau of Prisons facilities, subject to oversight by the courts and Dept. of Justice policy and procedure.

 

All Canadians, once sentenced, are housed in for-profit prisons run by GEO Group or Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which don’t have to adhere to BOP policy and procedure, have little oversight by the Dept. of Justice/BOP, and whose primary imperative is warehousing inmates at the lowest possible cost. These private prisons are contracted by the US Dept. of Justice for the 20 facilities that house foreigners exclusively, even though the cost to the taxpayer is no less than the cost of housing a US Citizen in a BOP facility.

 

One of the most glaring inequities for Canadians is that all Americans in the US federal prison system have Corrlinks email. At $3.00 per hour (at no cost to the taxpayer), all US citizens in a federal prison have email, hours a day, with up to 30 correspondents. (Correspondents can be added or deleted). This is extremely important for communication with loved ones, and accessing news and legal material, because both Canadian and Americans only receive 300 minutes of phone time in total for a whole month. Most months, it’s less than 10 minutes a day! This is way too little time. But when an inmate has access to hours of email a day, it makes a huge difference. Currently, sentenced Canadians have no access to email, while all federal American inmates in the corrections system have access to email.

 

There is no exercise equipment here of any kind. Americans in every federal prison facility have treadmills, steppers, and other equipment (in each unit’s gym). There are no plans to bring in exercise equipment here. There are only the most rudimentary courses or vocations available here. In a US federal prison for American inmates, courses are plentiful and accredited, with accredited instructors also required. For Canadians and others here, the instructors are not accredited. Nor are the courses accredited. Currently, DRJCI is offering welding classes, horticulture, and culinary arts course, but these are largely bogus course with little relevant skill-building going on. Canadians have real difficulties putting money into a Canadian inmate’s commissary account here. Americans can have their family send money orders or wire money via Western Union, using their credit cards or cash. Canadian families cannot send money orders, nor use Western Union, nor can Canadian families of Canadian inmates use a Canadian-based VISA or MasterCard. Canadian families must travel to the USA to buy at Wal-Mart or some such place, a US-based prepaid MasterCard or VISA or Debit Card, and then place money in their loved one’s account using the Keefe Commissary Network monopoly at http://www.accesscorrections.com, where service charges are considerable. It is commonly thought that Keefe, which supplies all the items for inmates that we buy in commissary purchases as well as the deposits to our accounts, is owned principally by the Bush Family.

 

American inmates sent to a Low Security FCI are largely housed in 2-man cells. The “low” my judge recommended I get sent to, Lompoc FCI, has 2-man cells. In fact, a man from Sea-Tac FDC – a 9-time bank robber using a bomb threat while robbing banks – was sent to “low” security Lompoc, replete with email, exercise equipment, outdoor visitation, and dozens of courses & vocations, while I, a political prisoner who sold cannabis seeds, am at a “low” security concentration camp for foreigners without any basic amenity American prisoners take for granted. He was sent to the nearest “low” security FCI near his home in Washington State, as Bureau of Prison requirements are that an American should be placed at a facility within 500 miles of their home (though that often doesn’t happen anyway). I am 4,000 miles from my home, requiring my wife to travel by airplane for 9 to 13 hours in flight, and up to 48 hours in total transit time getting here, as has been the case on two occasions so far. All the Canadians here are in the private prison furthest away from their home, the exact opposite situation to what is mandated for American inmates. There is no Federal facility further away from Vancouver than this corner of southeast Georgia (Florida having no Federal prisons for foreigners).

 

The Law Library here has Lexus/Nexus, which is the complete compilation of US law statutes. That is all. Anything else here, I have brought in: the dictionaries, paralegal procedure, jailhouse lawyer manual, Prisoners’ Self-Help Litigation Manual, newsletters, etc. Without email, we cannot make requests for assistance or legal material, addresses of government agencies, or prisoner assistance groups. With only 300 minutes and a set list of phone numbers permitted for us to call, we cannot call outside legal help to send us or provide materials. Americans therefore have a far more advantageous ability to do legal work on their and other inmates’ behalf.

 

The reading library is supposed to have 30-50 magazine subscriptions to provide inmates with a variety of current reading material. There are no contemporary novels or reference books in either English or Spanish. 400 Spanish books, largely classical fiction, were delivered when DRJCI became a federal prison, but nothing contemporary or illustrated was amongst these books. Essentially, the library has largely useless obsolete books and management here refuses donations from outside sources, the inmates, as well as refusing to spend money on a regular infusion of new materials. A certified librarian is required in any BOP inmate library, whereas DRJCI has a part-time teacher sit in on the library, under the controlling auspices Dr. Davis, to ensure that no progress of any kind takes place.

 

Foreigners have unique needs here, yet there is no way they can be accommodated. No inmate is from Georgia, so any lawyer would be extremely expensive to visit an inmate here. There is no information of treaty transfers for foreigners here, or addresses of their consulates, representatives. There is not a single legally trained individual with any experience in deportations, immigration law available to any inmate here. Without email, this becomes extremely difficult to get information, ensuring each inmate stays here as long as possible.

 

Americans in the Federal prison system can use word processing programs (Word, for example), and have these programs connected to printers. That is not available to Canadians here, and no explanation is ever offered, even though this is a low security facility, and none of us were convicted of computer crimes. Dr. Davis even tries to restrict the law library photocopier to “legal” material only, even though inmates are supposed to be able to buy a photocopy card, and pay 10 cents a copy. The photocopier was paid for out the inmate trust fund! Canadians must use ancient typewriters instead of word processing. Americans in US federal facilities are able to have photographs taken of themselves and their loved ones visiting on all federal holidays for a nominal cost (2 prints for $1 per photograph, up to 5 photographs, was the rule at Sea-Tac FDC). Canadians here at DRJCI have not been able to have photographs taken on Christmas or New Years, even though it requires only one inmate taking the photographs. It’s incredibly simple, but they simply don’t care here, so it doesn’t happen, like everything that ought to be provided as an inmate right for US citizens in their system.

 

In Federal facilities for Americans, visitation can happen in outdoor visitation areas (when weather permits). Here at DRJCI, there is no such outdoor visitation area, just a windowless room with a prison guard booth, cameras, and mirrored windows to be watched from.

 

In Bureau of Prisons facilities, fresh fruit is served one or two times daily, rotating between oranges, apples, and bananas. Here at D. Ray James Correctional Institution, we get the scrawniest orange imaginable once every two days. All lunch and dinner meals are virtually identical:

 

1) Ground up chicken or ground up beef

2) Corn product, niblets, grits or tortillas

3) A sweet cake

4) Shredded lettuce

5) Brown beans

6) White rice

 

Breakfast is essentially shredded potatoes and tasteless scrambled eggs with tortilla. Occasionally grits (creamed corn) too. If they don’t have a scrawny orange to give out, they give us canned mandarin slices or peach slices, but neither contain any nutrients. Fresh fruit or vegetables are almost never to be seen here. Nor can we buy fresh fruit or vegetables as can be done at other federal facilities (for example, Taft and Moshannon Valley sell vegetables in the commissary).

 

Americans in the Federal system have upright metal lockers. Canadians have two bins under their bunk to put all their possessions in. They had lockers in this prison when GEO took over this facility. They took the lockers out! Americans qualify for early release, home release, and drug rehabilitation sentence reductions, none of which is available to Canadians stuck in this system. Canadians working a long day in the kitchen, a long 8-hour day, get paid 12 cents an hour. Most inmates here get 12 cents an hour for their work. Americans get 40 cents to $1.40 an hour in their facilities. The staff here is almost always unaware of their own D. Ray James rules on procedures. For example, an inmate is trying to get married, and has been getting the runaround for three months. Yet the rules by GEO in their rule book are clear: the case manager puts together the request, confirms the fiancée is willing come to the facility to marry, forwards the request to the warden, who, if there are no security concerns, then arranges for the Justice of the Peace to come perform the ceremony. The inmate pays all costs of the Justice of the Peace. It’s simple, but they just can’t be bothered here, like just about everything. The mailroom, for example, makes up all its rules. There is no procedure or policy that is in the D. Ray James Correctional Institution policy and procedure book dealing with mailroom procedure.*

 

 

In an Americans-only federal “low” security prison, all toilets are in the cells or have doors on them in the range, and showers have doors on them. In my 64-man dorm, there is no privacy of any kind, and certainly no doors or curtains on the showers or toilets.

 

Yet the US taxpayer pays the same or more in taxes per inmate to house a Canadian as an American, but the executive and shareholders of these private prison corporations are instead pocketing the money.

 

The Bureau of Prisons, their mission statement (Policy 551.90) states: “Bureau staff shall not discriminate against inmates on the basis of race, religion, NATIONAL ORIGIN [Note from Jodie: emphasis Marc’s own], sex, disability, or political belief. This includes the making of administrative decisions and providing access to work, housing, and programs.”

 

Considering DRJCI is a ghetto completely based on apartheid of national origin, this mission statement is fraudulent on its face. Wages paid to Americans are greater, housing is clearly better, and programs (email, exercise equipment, music, law & reading libraries, vocations, etc.) are all clearly superior for Americans.

 

Currently, this prison houses 1,100 inmates, adding 300 monthly until capacity of 2,500 is reached in August. Of the 1,100 inmates currently warehoused here: 1,025 are Hispanic – 800 Mexicans, 75 Hondurans, 50 Cubans, 50 Guatemalans, 15 Salvadorans, 15 Colombians, 10 Argentinians, 5 Peruvians – and 40 are English-language born – 20 from the Caribbean (Jamaican, Bahamian, Dominican), 10 Canadians, 3 Nigerians, 1 from England, 1 from South Africa, 2 from Guyana, 1 from Belize, 10 Asians (2 Laotians, 3 Vietnamese, 4 Chinese), 10 Europeans, and 6 Middle Easterners (1 Swede, 2 Romanians, 2 Armenians, 1 Lebanese), and we have 2 from Brazil (Portuguese-speaking) and 5 from Haiti (French).

 

As to the staff here, the ordinary C.O.’s (Correctional Officers), while completely untrained in BOP procedure (most have never ever worked in corrections before and receive only the most cursory on the job training here), are decent people trying to do their job as pleasantly as they can. Many admit to seeing documentaries, movies, and TV shows that I have appeared in. Very few of the regular C.O.’s show mean or hostile tendencies. Most of them are probably very nice people in regular circumstances.

 

The inmates here I get along with are fine also. In my 59 days here at the time of this writing, I cannot say I have had any conflicts at all with inmates or C.O.’s who do guard or supervision duty. The problem is with management and the corporate dictates that come from GEO. This place has no budget of any kind devoted to inmate amenities.

 

97% of the inmates speak Spanish, but because all staff is local, virtually none of the staff do. I believe there are no more than 4 staff members here who speak Spanish. There is no local lawyer or legal help for these inmates. All their attorneys are in California, Arizona, Canada, Mexico, etc. All legal work for these inmates is done by 5 English/bilingual paralegals, also inmates (I’m one of them), getting 12 cents an hour. Any legal work on appeals, motions, grievances, writs of Habeas Corpus, divorces, requests, treaty transfers, access to government services, etc. is done by us on these ancient model typewriters.

 

Compare the time involved for an American in a federal prison requesting information or legal information. Each email takes about 90 minutes from inmate to recipient and return, so that is 3 hours. Here at D. Ray James Correctional Institution, a request by mail to Canada takes 6 to 8 days each way, meaning what might take an American 3 hours to obtain would take me, a Canadian, possibly 15 days or longer. Americans can print out their emails and have permanent copies of them too on email printers that are available for every American. So making any kind of legal claim is much harder here for numerous reasons.

 

I live in a 64-man dormitory with no privacy, as I have said. All 64 of us share one microwave to cook and heat up coffee. You get line-ups! American facilities have 4 televisions per range (Spanish, sports, news, and variety). Here we have two televisions: Sports and Spanish. I watch neither. There are few if any good rock and roll radio stations in this part of the world, though 3 country western stations come in clearly, as is always so true about rural America. I was spoiled at Sea-Tac FDC, having a 2-man cell, numerous great radio stations, email (Jodie says I sent her over 1,000 emails in the 5 months I was at Sea-Tac; that shows you how important email is to an inmate!), more fruit, no weird rules on books or magazines in the mail, and my newspaper came the day of issue or the day after. Here in nowheresville Folkston, Georgia, my New York Times arrives 3 or 4 days after publication.

 

In my 64-man dorm, I’m one of 3 native English speakers; the Armenian and Nigerian are fluent in English. The 1 Romanian and the 60 Hispanics speak Romanian and Spanish. I have no locker, but two plastic bins under my bed for all my belongings. Quite the stuffing of belongings going on there.

 

An ear splitting grinding-sounding (just evil!!!) fire alarm has gone off 28 times in the 50 days I have been here. It is frightening and painful on the ears. It is always a false alarm. It has actually gone off over 70 times in total since DRJCI opened on October 7th, 2010, but they refuse to fix the defective sensor in pod 6. I have been outside or at the library on about 10 occasions when it has gone off. This is not included in the 28 times I’ve experienced it first-hand. It grinds away for 5 to 15 minutes and I always have to put my fingers in my ears to deal with it. It certainly constitutes as torture, as they refuse to fix the problem. Yet when an inmate is burning baby oil to make jailhouse ink for their illegal tattooing that goes on, the fire alarm never goes off, even though a fair bit of putrid smoke is produced (that’s how they make the black ink, from the soot of the burning baby oil!).

 

At least I am busy. I do lots of work I consider helpful and useful to other inmates. At this time, I can’t solicit magazines and books for donation, but I give my newspapers and magazines that I subscribe to away. Currently I have to mail out a book for every book the mailroom lets me have so I can’t very readily donate any books at this time. This whole prison has way too much razor wire, frisking, and high security behavior to call it a “low” security facility. A “low” has essentially one single fence and far more open movement than this place allows inmates. It is run like a strict medium-high security facility. I’ve had an atlas in the mail refused to me because they believe all maps will be used to plan escapes! I’ve had large books refused to me because the weight or size of them (“75 years of DC Comics” was 18” x 13” x 2” thick – large enough, the mailroom felt, to be used as a weapon). An 8” x 10” hand-made Christmas card was rejected because it was too large. Where do they get these rules? Newspaper clippings are seized. I’m limited to three magazines sent from the public every few weeks or so. Over 20 letters from correspondents were rejected without notification and returned to sender. And so on and so on.

 

Trevor is from Vancouver, just a few blocks from where I used to live. He’s here for cannabis in a vehicle while traveling through the USA. When his parents came to visit him from Smithers in BC, over 5,000 miles away, they arrived one day early in their rented vehicle, and decided to drive around the perimeter road that encircles the prison, so they could see what it looks like, because the road is unblocked nor is there an advisement prohibiting it. The next day, when the parents visited, prison staff noticed the vehicle the parents used as the one that drove around the perimeter road, and cut short the visit after an hour, handcuffed Trevor, accused him of plotting an escape with his parents, and put him in solitary confinement for 9 days! Of course, it took 9 days to realize their idiotic presumption was absurd on the face of it, releasing Trevor from SHU (Special Housing Unit – the “Hole”) and reinstating his parents’ visiting rights.

 

Shortly afterward, Trevor, like all Canadians here, lost his phone access to Canada when the prison telephone control computer “unintentionally” cancelled all Canadian phone numbers from the database. Whereas I lost 6 days over Christmas (sadistic timing you have to agree), Trevor lost his access to the 604 and 250 area codes (his family in BC) for 16 days, from December 22nd to January 7th! Trevor works for 12 cents an hour, 40 hours a week in the kitchen.

 

Bradley, resident of Pender Harbour, is here on a weird charge, “Theft of Honest Services”, the same charge Conrad Black had overturned in the US Supreme Court. Bradley is a fine fellow with many skills, a certified sailor, and a licensed pilot. He has been trying to take a correspondence course in advanced aviation from Ohio University’s Prisoner Correspondence course. For two months he has been refused on the basis that – you guessed it – he’ll try to escape, steal an airplane and fly back to Canada! The mailroom rejected a map of Croatia he received as part of his ingenious (non-existent) plot to escape. It’s why I had an atlas of the world seized as contraband last week when someone sent it to me in the mail. We Canadians are thought to be obsessed with escape! This is a “low” security facility whereas the maximum-security facility Sea-Tac FDC where I was at, allowed me to have detailed road maps for all fifty states (so I could advise & direct FREE MARC rallies across the USA and Canada on Sept. 18th 2010).

 

Randy, of New Westminster, is here on a three-year sentence for marijuana transport. When Randy arrived, DRJCI lost his paperwork so he was put in solitary confinement for 14 days until the paperwork arrived. I remember walking around the yard explaining to Randy how fucked up this place is and he said, “Oh, it doesn’t look so bad.” I said, “give it a few days, you’ll see how dysfunctional it really is.” Sure enough, each passing day, Randy became more and more annoyed at the absurdities that pass before our eyes each passing day, and then one day last week, Randy got put in the “Hole” for allegedly inciting a riot, which all witnesses say is nutty. A very disliked C.O. was pissing off all the inmates in his unit. Randy uttered to another inmate, “What a Bitch!” and so far, he’s spent 5 days in the “Hole” on that. In between his two visits to solitary confinement, Randy’s phone access to his daughters and family in Canada was “accidentally” suspended from December 22nd to January 7th, sixteen days, pretty well the only time he was out of solitary since he’s gotten here in early December.

 

Peter is from Aylmer, Ontario, and he is a slave in the kitchen 40+ hours a week at 12 cents an hour. By the way, if an inmate refuses to work their slave-labor job assignment, they get put in solitary confinement until they “reconsider” and go back to work. It is reputed that there are about 15 inmates in solitary for refusing kitchen work. An inmate is allowed to pay another inmate to do his kitchen job; the going rate is a one-time payment of $35 – $50 dollars, which is a bargain price to permanently avoid kitchen detail.

 

When an inmate arrives here, each of us is issued a pair of work boots, decidedly uncomfortable ones, but in Peter’s case he was issued two left feet as his pair of boots. When he complained that they were two left feet, that his right foot was hurting as he worked on his feet 8 hours a day, the management refused to issue him a proper right & left foot pair of boots. Eventually all his right socks developed holes in them, and his right foot was in considerable pain, but still the DRJCI refused to issue a proper set of boots. Only after eleven weeks of complaining, did the inmates in the clothing section replace the boots. Peter’s phone access to Canada, like all the Canadians here, was down during Christmas December 22nd – 27th. Peter has now worked in the kitchen three months, and after three months in one job, you are supposed to be permitted to change “assignments”, but so far they are refusing to let Peter change jobs, so desperate is this place for kitchen workers. Of course if they paid the workers properly (like American inmates get in their FCI’s), say 45 cents to $1.00 an hour, you’d have line-ups to work in the kitchen.

 

And so it goes. Me, I keep busy, writing five or six letters to correspondents daily, reading voraciously when I’m not writing or working in the library. I’m 80% through Keith Richard’s autobiography “Life”. I just finished reading all the material I received from Prison Legal News (online you can see their stuff at prisonlegalnews.org). Next up after the Richard’s autobiography is “On the Road to Freedom (A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Era)”, and then “Dumbing Us Down, the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, then the “Dark Tower” graphic novel, and then “The Flag: An American Biography”, which is a history of the development of the US flag from its earliest incarnations.

 

I read perhaps the best graphic novel not written by Alan Moore, originally from 1993, called Marvels (#0 – #4), a brilliant painterly reinterpretation of the Marvel Comics stories of their superhero universe from 1939 to 1975, seen through the eyes of an ordinary human observer. Another wonderful comic I enjoyed was a two-part “Enemy Ace” comic by Garth Ennis and Russ Heath. Strange and beautiful was this very exciting reinterpretation of Shakespeare in a graphic novel called “Kill Shakespeare”, very original and surprising and beautifully illustrated. I read “The Return of the Supreme”, another collection of terrific Alan Moore stories. This Alan Moore fellow wrote the greatest comic book stories ever, full of references throughout all his work (though especially in “Promethea” and “Supreme”) of the artists and styles of the comic books of the golden age (1939 – 1947), the EC Comics period (1950 – 1956), the Adventure and science-fiction pulps, the cartoon comic strips of newspapers, the late 50’s DC Comics universe (Supreme), and of course the 60’s Marvel Comics world. My favorite Alan Moore comics, highly recommended, are: Promethea Vol. 1-6 (#1 – #36 in comic book form), Tom Strong Vol. 1-4, #6, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1 & 2, Supreme and Return of Supreme. If you are a comic book historian and scholar as I am (I collected comic books and sold vintage 1940’s, 1950’s, 1960’s Marvel, DC, EC, comics, science-fiction and adventure pulps, newspaper comic strips and Sunday Color pages from 1925 – 1955 and managed to meet Neal Adams, Jim Steranko, Mike Kaluta, Len Wein, Jeff Jones, Vaughn Bode, and other great comic book creators in the 1970 to 1974 golden era of comic book collecting) – this is a wonderful tribute to that era. Watchmen – still terrific after three readings.

 

Best books I’ve read in prison so far would have to be the hero-smashing biography of John Lennon, “The Many Lives of John Lennon” by Albert Goldman, and “Hitch-22”, the memoir by Christopher Hitchens, timely in view of Hitchens’ current and potentially fatal battle with esophageal cancer that affected Hitchens immediately after its publication. Hitchens is simply one of the most erudite and entertaining writers of English prose in the world today. Vanity Fair columns of Sept/Oct/Nov 2010 addressing his cancer and the reactions to it are hilarious and poignant.

 

My magazine subscriptions have been slow to get transferred to the gulag here from Sea-Tac FDC. MacLean’s, National Geographic, The Hockey News, The Economist have all finally been rerouted here, but no sign yet of Rolling Stone, Atlantic, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Reason, Discover and a few others that escape my memory.

 

It is my supporter base that got my library job back and it is my supporter base that protects me from retaliation by the forces of evil here. MLA Guy Gentner reiterating in two newspaper interviews that I was a political prisoner is extremely helpful.

 

This is my 300th day in prison on this sentence, as I write this: 66 days in Canada, and 234 days in the US. With a good time credit of 235 days, that is 535 days off 1,825 days (5 years), so if I get stuck in the US Concentration Camp system for foreigners, I have 1,290 days to go, a release date of July 7th, 2014 – 42 months away.

 

If I get transferred back to Canada, I qualify under current Canadian law for full parole November 16th, 2011 – this year, 10 months from today. In the Canadian federal system, a non-violent first-time offender gets parole at one-third sentence, in my case, 20 months. Of course, I’ll be on parole for 40 months after that date (Nov. 16th, 2011). So if I screw up, I would be put back in jail. But I’m retired from the seed business, and otherwise a law-abiding person, so I will be able to do my parole successfully as I was able to maintain my bail conditions (while awaiting extradition) for five years from 2005 to 2010.

 

But 10 months to go is far more appealing than 42 months to go. That is why I need a tremendous outpouring of support from citizens of the USA and Canada, and from elected officials in both countries, to assure that my transfer application to the US Dept. of Justice and Canadian Minister of Public Safety are approved. Instructions on the kind of letter to send are at FREEMARC.ca and CANNABISCULTURE.com.

 

It’s only fair to say some good things about this place. The inmates like me and I get along with them. The working people, the ordinary C.O.’s, are polite and try to do a good job with the often-chaotic instructions they get. The weather here, in winter, is pleasant (although it will be hot & humid and I think unbearable in summer). My Case Managers, Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Maynard, are very responsive to me and have kept all their promises so far, and have always tried to be helpful with any requests regarding visitors, and transfer paperwork. The warden is a good person too, but he’s given no budget to make changes, and I often think his subordinates try to undermine his innate sense of reasonableness.

 

My greatest pleasure of my existence here is getting a visit from Jodie every 2nd weekend. Your donations to her are how she can afford to visit me. Otherwise, it’s simply too expensive for us to afford. The visits are 6 ½ hours each day on Saturday and Sunday, and the upcoming weekend, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (Monday January 17th) is a visitation day also, so I’ll get 3 days in a row of visits from Jodie!!! It requires Jodie to fly 4,000 miles from Vancouver to Jacksonville Florida, clear across the continent and back, which is grueling and exhausting for her. Sometimes, when bad weather strikes, flights get canceled and what would normally take 10 hours of flying and airport time can take 48 hours of waiting, flying, and airport processing time, as has happened twice already.

 

We are allowed a brief kiss at the beginning and end of each visit, and we can hold hands throughout the visit. After my visit with Jodie on December 18th, I was stopped by an officer on the walkway outside a few days later, and day before my phone access was cut off to Jodie for 6 days. “Emery, you had a visit Saturday. Was that your wife?”

 

“Yes, sir.” I responded.

 

“I was watching you on the hidden camera, and I observed your kiss at the beginning was too long. It’s supposed to be a brief kiss, not a movie kiss. I don’t think your kiss was brief.”

 

I was stunned. I said “BOP regulations at Sea-Tac FDC in Seattle were a kiss under 30-seconds. What do you consider brief, 10 seconds?”

 

“10 seconds is more like what I had in mind. But if BOP rules are 30 seconds, I’ll take that under advisement.” He responded.

 

I wanted to say, “If you stare at any couple kissing after a long absence, their kiss is going to seem very long because you’re intruding on a couple’s intimacy, something normally a person might be a little self-conscious of. 10 seconds will seem like a minute if you just stare at a couple clearly in love, 30 seconds probably seems like 5 minutes. After traveling 4,000 miles and spending days in planes, airports and hotel rooms, that kiss is going to have a bit of urgency to it, you know?”

 

Jodie was in an extended malaise, a 6-week period that I would call depression from mid-November to January 1st. The death of my seed business partner, Michelle Rainey, at age 39 from cancer, hit her very hard at the end of October. By mid-November, with the dark, gloomy, rainy Vancouver weather, her first Christmas holiday period without me in 7 years, business pressures, and extraordinarily long travel to see me, it was all getting to her. She was exhausted, sad, having a hard time getting work done, her hair was falling out, her skin irritated, her sleep disturbed. Her visit of Saturday, January 1st was full of cynicism, doom and gloom. I spend the whole visit reassuring her we’d get through this ordeal, no matter how long it took. We have support from millions (I feel), her family, our close friends, and elected officials, and it was just rest and prioritizing her immediate tasks that she needed to do.

 

Finally, on Friday, January 7th, I heard over the phone, an invigorated, energetic, positive and powerful optimism. I said right away, “Hey, my Jodie is back!”

 

She said, “I feel like I’ve come out of a 6-week depression. I feel strong again, boo, I’m feeling improved. Guy Gentner the MLA, referred to you as a political prisoner in an interview today in a newspaper. I’ll be strong for you now, Marc; I’ll get you out of there. You were strong for me, you pulled me through. So now I’ll be strong for you again.”

 

Each day over the last 3 days, Jodie has rested, and gotten stronger so I am very relieved. I was worried about us, and with all these stresses, I was fearful of her health and her drive being compromised. So it goes for a couple like us, under all this turmoil and challenges!

 

Since her visit, MLA Guy Gentner has referred to me as a political prisoner in two media interviews. That reaffirmed to Jodie that even in the political establishment, there is widespread support and sympathy for the underlying activist nature of my life’s work.

 

My treaty transfer paperwork is due in Washington in eleven days from writing this page. After that, the US Dept. of Justice will consider my application to transfer to the Canadian Correctional system. I would dearly love to be home in Canada this year, so please do what you can to help to that end.

 

The most important goals this year are, for Americans: 1) Getting legislation on the ballot in Washington State, 2) Supporting and working to make RON PAUL the Republican presidential nominee for 2012. Petitioning for signatures begins in April to make Washington state the first state in the USA to repeal all state laws restricting the personal use and cultivation of cannabis. Polls in Washington show 56% of voters support legalization of cannabis. Last year, only 195,000 signatures of the 247,000 necessary were successfully collected. In large part this shortfall was due to rainy, cold weather in April and May, and zero funding. This year Sensible Washington will be better prepared, better organized. I hope Cannabis Culture can assist the organizers in a few live-streamed moneybombs, with a target of $10,000.00 per moneybomb, in February and April. Activists from California and Colorado, two states that I’m sure will attempt ballot initiative drives for legalization in 2012, should go north to Washington state as soon as university and college is over in April. Let’s do it like they did in the 60’s, just move to Washington state for 3 months and live and breathe the life of signature-gatherer! Petition unrelentingly! Even Canadian activists should consider going to Washington from BC and Alberta to gather signatures, whether for a weekend, a week, a month, or the whole campaign!

 

If Washington repeals cannabis prohibition on Nov. 1st, 2011, it will have a huge impact on the success of initiatives in Colorado and California in 2012, ultimately causing a change in federal law, and the likelihood of other states passing their own repeal bills!

 

RON PAUL, the greatest congressman ever, a great and true libertarian, my personal hero for many, many years, a friend to all in the cannabis legalization movement, will likely announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President for 2012. Ron Paul is truly a wonderful man, a principled man, and I so enjoyed campaigning for him in 2007 and 2008 when he first sough the Republican presidential nomination. Oh, how much improved America would be today if he had been elected President November 2nd, 2008!

 

If you have never heard of Ron Paul, or researched his brilliant ideas and proposals and writings, you must! Then be ready to join his campaign when it is announced! For Canadians, the 4 goals in the upcoming year are 1) to stop Bill S-10, the mandatory minimum jail-time-for-drugs bill from becoming law 2) defeat the Conservatives in an election that hopefully will come soon, 3) urge all your American friends to support the Presidential aspirations of Ron Paul once he announces his candidacy, expected in early spring, and 4) please bring me home, if I can immodestly suggest this as one of your political goals for the upcoming year!

 

Upon my return to Canada and release from custody, I plan to run for elected office in a fully funded campaign, traveling across Canada and British Columbia extensively. I believe that whenever I am able to do this, in 2012, 2013, or 2014, once I emerge from this ordeal, my political star will finally be ascendant. I feel I will be able to capture the zeitgeist of the times. “It’s broken, let me fix it.” Clearly, our democracy is dysfunctional, much like prohibition. For over 30 years, Canadians have heard me relentlessly prescribe the correct treatment for the ills of my country, and for 30 years the voters have chosen to swallow more of the poison election after election. I believe Jodie and I together will be able to win over enough of Canada to put me in government, to finally undo so much of the damage that has been wrought on our country from the miscreants who have exploited the people’s trust.

 

Jodie and I will be making a huge effort upon my return, in fundraising, touring Canada, speaking, meeting with Canadians, organizing, to finally once and for all bury this prohibition and restore liberty, principle, and greatness to the country that I love. Until next newsletter,

Marc Emery #40252-086 Unit Q Pod 2

D. Ray James Correctional Institution

P.O. Box 2000

Folkston, GA

31537

USA

 

Find out more about Marc Emery at FreeMarc.ca

January 10th, 2011

Dear Jodie,

The censorship of my mail here at D. Ray James is continuing to outrage me. So far I am aware of;

* 36 letters returned
* An 8 x 10 Christmas card (hand made)
* An electoral map of the Nov. 2 elections
* A US atlas seized
* 75 years of DC comics hardcover denied because its size constitutes a security risk. (it’s 12x24x2 and $125)
*Over 100 books denied that have been sent to me
* Numerous magazines returned to sender

For me to receive any books of any kind at all I have to mail out an equivalent number. To receive 5 books I have to send out 5 books to somewhere. Currently I am mailing them to Loretta in Alabama because postal rates to send them within the US are cheaper than to Canada.

US citizens in federal prisons do not have to experience this discrimination. Additionally, US citizens in US federal prisons all have email access to up to 30 correspondents for hours a day. But not for Canadians in a US fed prison. Even the paltry 300 minutes a month of phone access – and there is no reason why D Ray James limits us to 300 minutes – is erratic, as this facility can cancel phone access at any time as they did to me Dec. 22 – 27. Some Canadians here have not been able to make a call out for 13 days now, from Dec. 22 to Jan. 4, like Trevor Lubbers from Vancouver and the Canadians from Montreal, New Westminster, Vancouver, still have no phone access as the computer here which controls our phone access just mysteriously cancels our phone access. This happened exclusively to Canadians.

All newspaper clippings get taken out of my mail. Photocopies of newspaper articles get removed. Even a copy of an email sent to D Ray James protesting their tampering with my mail was removed from a letter from Catherine Leach to me! In none of these instances of refused letters, books returned (dozens) books denied me (about 100), Christmas cards rejected, newspaper clippings, was I given any notification as is required by D Ray James and BOP policy and procedure. Most importantly all this mail room behaviour violates Bureau of Prisons policy and procedure. But, the mail room, like everything else about this place, runs not on any established BOP policy but arbitrarily whims made up on the occasion. So, it’s MADDENING!

I will consult with lawyer Kirk Tousaw when he visits next week about taking legal action against this place. It routinely violates my civil rights whether it’s interference in every aspect of my mail, or in the blatant discrimination that goes on against Canadians in the US Federal prison system. The sign in the intake hall specifies that the US Federal prison system does not discriminate on the basis of national origin! My chart (published below) shows Canadians are to receive nothing here at D Ray James that an American inmate routinely receives at an American ‘low security’ federal prison – email, exercise equipment, courses and classes in skilled trades, word processors, proper reading library and law library, outdoor visitation areas…

When BC MLA Guy Gentner visited me for 4 hours on Sunday Jan. 2, I emphasized that these private prisons, this one run by GEO, which receives $2,400,000,000 from the US Federal govt. In 2010 for prison services; I emphasized that private prisons do not adhere to or operate under any fidelity to Bureau of Prisons policies and procedures. Secondly, the prisons are about warehousing humans using the least possible monetary expenditures. A huge percentage of money the taxpayer gives over to GEO goes right into the pockets of the shareholders and executives. Almost nothing is spent on services or rehabilitation for the inmates, unlike a government-run US Federal prison.

After being moved from SeaTac FDC on Oct. 27 or thereabouts a full 70 days ago, my property (books, photographs, food, notes, batteries, book light etc…) still has not been delivered to me here at D Ray James. I am satisfied at least that word about these concentration camps for foreigners and Canadians handed over to the US by our compliant Canadian government are getting some small amount of attention. No Canadian should ever be extradited to the US while Canadians get shockingly less opportunities, facilities and access to communications as compared to US citizens in a US Federal prison.

Conrad Black wrote articulately about the prison he was at, Coleman FCI. Yet Coleman is the Hilton of prisons compared to here. Coleman had email, exercise equipment, outdoor visitation areas, extensive courses (Mr. Black taught creative writing) yet Mr. Black is not an American in an American only federal correctional institution.

Americans in Canadian federal prison are treated identical to Canadians in Canadian federal prison. If Americans are going to be putting Canadians in the ghetto facilities based on our nationality, our government should insist on parity; Canadians should have the same access to services that any Americans would get in a low security federal prison.

Compare Lompac FCI or Terminal Island FCI with D Ray James. All are considered low security yet the differences are staggering. Terminal Island has numerous skill trade courses, email, exercise equipment. Lompac has the same 1-2 man cells (unlike my 64 man dorm) outdoor visitation areas. In fact, I qualify to be in a minimum security camp, but because I am Canadian I am denied any opportunity to serve my sentence in a minimum security camp, which are used exclusively for US citizens. D Ray James is run like a medium-high security prison, even though all inmates here are non-violent offenders.

If anyone has suggestions I’d welcome them. Of course, there’s little assurance I’ll get your letter responses if people do write with their suggestions. I will be meeting with my Canadian lawyer and a Georgia lawyer from NORML, Richard Mallory Barnes in the next few weeks to explore my legal options; But this censorship and frugal access to communication in this private prison is frustrating. My treaty transfer paperwork is due in DC by Friday. Jan 21. Only 16 days away.

I need all Americans and Canadians to send letters on my behalf to the DOJ urging my transfer into the Canadian Correctional System. Getting US elected officials to write the DOJ recommending my transfer is especially valuable in aiding my successful transfer.

Trying to keep positive in the US Gulag,

Marc

PS. I cannot understand why Mr. Black, a non-US citizen was not put in one of these, shoddy, cut-rate prisons for foreigners. Mr. Black is a citizen of the UK I believe, having given up his Canadian citizenship.

Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2010
10:45 a.m.

Dear Jeremiah, Jodie, & Dana,

This morning as I reported to work at 8 a.m., I was informed by Mr. Folk (who is in his last week) that he had to let me go. I said, "Why?" and he said, "Your mail room issues."

Of course, this is about my trying to get books and magazines into the library. As I have told you the GEO group that runs this concentration camp for Canadians, Mexicans and others not officially US citizens get the worst possible treatment or services or education or library, if we get them at all. You have my extensive comparative chart (see below) about this GEO group prison DRCJF is to a Canadian compared to how a US citizen is treated in a ‘low security’ US federal prison. GEO does not want any inmate to have use of a proper library, law library, exercise equipment, email, photo copiers…ANYTHING!

Essentially I was fired from my .12 cent an hour job because I was donating books, magazines, and newspapers. Because in the 3 months the library has been open they haven’t received a current magazine (in any language) or bought a book in English for the library. I had contributed 46 books and magazines as of today in the 23 days I worked in the library, including 2 hard cover Spanish-English dictionaries, 2 paralegal texts, coffee table books (Billy Gibbons Rock-N-Roll Gear Head) over-sized illustrated soft covers like "Remembering John Lennon" and "Time’s Year in Review". So I was dismissed for adding books and magazines and newspapers to the library while GEO has every intention of stopping or obstructing books/mags/newspapers getting into the library. The library has no relevant Spanish/English reference books even though 850 inmates are Spanish speakers.

While I was writing the last paragraph the excruciating fire alarm went off (for the 18th time it has gone off since I’ve been here…but over 65 times since Oct. 4 according to staff.) And for the first time they told us to go to the Emergency Exits, which is supposed to be standard operating procedure, but then the Emergency exits won’t open (the controllers didn’t open them), but when the fire alarm stopped they insisted we go out the fire exit and stay outside for 20 minutes, so they can prove to a fire inspector that we went outside according to fire regulations.

Everything in every Dept. is INSANE here. The staff constantly comment on it, too. The management is utterly NUTS though, so the staff like us, can criticize as much as they want, but absolutely nothing changes. It’s totally important that Canadians know their Canadian government sent me, FOR SELLING SEEDS, (which would appear to be a widespread activity in Colorado, California, and all of Canada and generally legal and widespread in all of Europe..Netherlands, UK, Spain, Germany etc..) and sent me to the most insanely run concentration camp/federal prison in the United States.

Jeremiah, I’ve decided to investigate taking a correspondence course, but through a Canadian institution. Can you send me course booklets outlining courses for the incarcerated? I’m not sure what to take, but it will allow me to study and read during the day rather than end up in the kitchen where they will surely try to send me as punishment. It’s only a matter of time before this place sends me to solitary to try to stop me from observing how badly this place is mismanaged.

Yesterday an Bureau of Prisons liaison from the DOJ was here, he often is, to observe, he says. Well I spent 30 minutes telling him how dysfunctional, illegal and wrongly this place is run. I had to straighten the mail room Nazi out as I had the actual rules and procedure, whereas they were using entirely made-up incorrect premises. I got all my books as I’m entitled, but every manager here is intimidated by me as all of them deviate from the set out in their own D Ray James policy and procedure book, and the BOP policies & procedures, which we can access on Lexus/Nexus.

I will try to get reinstated to my library job. Mr. Folk says although he’s "required to dismiss me" I am welcome to use the library any time, all the time and that I’m a real gentleman.

But, I think I will ask you to put the library resuscitation program on hold and simply focus on books I can read personally .

So, please let City Lights, Chris Goodwin and all others know that the noble project is on hold because this place doesn’t want inmates to learn (there are still no skill trades or actual education here unlike the dozens of classes, skills, vocations for US citizens in federal prison). They don’t want us to gain knowledge or read or learn about the world. They want to remain indifferent to us as human beings, spend as little money as possible on warehousing us.

I really enjoyed two comic books that were sent to me by a person who sent me 20 comic books. But I was only allowed to keep 3 of them, so I kept parts one and two of ‘Enemy Ace" by Russ Heath (artist). They were excellent! More Enemy Ace Comics please! After I finish the #1 Ladies Detective Series (got 20 pages to go) I’m going to read a graphic novel "Kill Shakespeare."

By the way, in Psalms 46 of the bible the 46th word from the beginning is "Shake" and the 46th word from the end is "Spear". I believe that’s the Bard’s thumbprint of his authorship of the King James version of the Bible, at least Psalms anyway. The King James version of the Bible was translated & written during Shakespeare’s peak years under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth and King James. Are there any books that ascribe to this theory that Shakespeare has a hand in the King James Bible?

Here are some books from Hamiltonbooks.com Nov. 12 catalog that I would like.
* denotes that I would especially like them.

7474849 The Grand Inquisitors Manual
2437163 The Years of Extermination
* 1793047 Encyclopedia of Monograms
2448777 The Story of English
2434202 The Vale of Kashmir
* 1727664 The Ten Cent Plague
* 7154992 Showcase Presents Enemy Ace

Previous Requests;

* 738842x Humbug
1740733 Blue Shoes and Happiness
* Stoned, Drunk and Dead A $40 retrospective of National Lampoon just published (Available at Amazon)

I believe it will be important to have political actions in place for if/when this place seeks to punish me. Many of the people who work here are fans and supporters of mine. I have had 4 conversations today and yesterday with supporters/admirers/members of the culture who work here. I am well respected by most employees here, because they are ordinary people from the ordinary world, the kind of people I have represented and spoken out on behalf of. But, management, the senior GEO lackeys they will get more confused, nervous and uncertain what to do with me, especially since their junior staff are sympathetic to me, though this does not result in any preferential treatment. But Chris Goodwin, Dana, Jeremiah, Loretta, Jodie, Kirk et. al.and others need to discuss what can be done if I get punished with solitary, or having my mail blocked or being put in the kitchen 8 hours a day. All these actions will be to suppress my awareness and letters about this place. The time is coming shortly, when, like at SeaTac, they simply won’t know what to do with me. And that will likely result in them doing the wrong things, punishing me as a consequence.

So I hope that I can find some interesting correspondence courses and read lots of books to use up my time.

Right after I was dismissed from the library the remaining 6 library aides had a big fight and now there’s animosity, so the library broke down right away. There is a new librarian there in 10 days so it will be interesting to see what happens then.

Given the Major’s questioning me on the length of my kiss with Jodie last Saturday’s visit was extraordinarily bizarre. And that he would spy on me kissing Jodie and deciding a kiss is too long, somewhere between 10 seconds and 30 seconds and reprimanding me days later. It’s so weird!

My transfer paperwork is required to be in Washington D.C. no Jan. 19th, less than a month away. I really need my supporters to have their letters of support and the recommendation of their congressman and senators done soon. Canadian elected officials should also write to the DOJ or Jodie should have her letter from Canadian elected officials DONE IMMEDIATELY! Don’t forget to add Guy Gentner, MLA, to it.

Hope you got my chart comparing the treatment of US Citizens vs Canadian citizens in a US Federal ‘low security’ prison. Push that, it ought to offend Canadians. Americans in a Canadian federal prison are treated identically to Canadians.

More Soon,
Marc

 

Sunday Dec. 19, 2010

4:20 pm

 

Dear Jodie & Loretta,

 

You two just visited and it was wonderful! Having both of you here made it special as we were able to talk outside the usual range of subjects. So pleased to have you Loretta as an official part of the organization (Editor’s note: Loretta will fill the position of ad sales manager for Cannabis Culture) That is going to be great for all 3 of us, I assure you!

 

I’m totally excited by the prospect of elected Representative for the British Columbia Legislature Guy Gentner coming to visit me at D. Ray James, who is nearby in Florida of all things, to investigate private prisons. Please forward an edited compilation of my letters that specifically reference D. Ray James & its treatment of inmates here. Enclosed is that chart I compiled about contrasting regimes for inmates. Also enclosed is an article "Strength to Love: A Challenge to the Private Prison Industry". Both should be copied and forwarded to Mr. Gentner with my edited letters.

 

As a contrast to the very bad recidivism rate of the US system, where 66% of released inmates re-offend: transfer Canadians moving from the US system to the Canadian system have a recidivism rate of about 3%. An astonishingly low figure! I mention this as Mr, Gentner may be interested in this figure (show him that article too) when you ask him to sign the letter to the Justice Dept. and Public Safety Minister. I hope Loretta is able to introduce him to Ralph whose work with private prisons we should find illuminating!

 

As I mentioned to you the mail room has been sending back any books and magazines when more than one is in a parcel, even when it comes from Amazon or the publisher. Dana sent me 4 books; A graphic novel"Return of Supreme, The Man who Wanted to Be King, about a fellow who was the basis of Kipling’s story "The Man Who Would Be King", A biography of Kipling and a book on Genghis Khan. Jodie had two books returned from here that she sent from Amazon; "On Leadership" Thomas Jefferson and Nelson Mandela’s new book "Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela". These were actually refused by the mail room and I wasn’t even told about it.

 

When the mail room removes clippings or other ‘contraband’ ephemera from the letters I get they do not inform me. So even the mail room here does not adhere to BOP procedures that should be added to my chart. And my newspapers are not being delivered promptly due to mail room weirdness. Of course, I’ll go to the mail room on Monday to see what they say. (Editor’s note: Due to the posting of Marc’s letters online the mail room weirdness stopped today. Please see this post for details.

 

Some reminders: I need a copy of the $100 fine receipt. Make sure you fax him the visitation form he has to fill out immediately and provide him with the fax number to fax it to D. Ray James.

 

Also, Jodie, be sure to contact the NY Times subscription/circulation dept. and change my address.

 

It was sure great to see Loretta in 27 months, I guess since Sept. 2008.

 

Loretta: I need you to contact the Atlanta field office of ICE and ask those questions about the stipulated deportation order. I’m curious to know if they can provide any information or insight on applications we have been sending in. (Time it takes to process, an FAQ on it, who is the Atlanta field agent, etc).

 

Also, a divorce kit or a kit with legal forms that includes divorce. Go over all the requests and queries I made and see if you can forward answers to me soon.

 

Monday, Dec. 20, 2010

Library 9:30 a.m.

 

Dr. Davis came and said she loved how the library looked and complimented us on a good job. I’m curious to know what the discussion with the mail room will be like at 1 pm. I’ll tell you later in this letter how that goes. I’m going to try to talk to the warden about mail room procedure.

 

I’m having fun working the library. We (or, rather, I) got no new magazines last week so I know the mail room is interfering with those, too. We’ll see. So, I’m anxious to get some new materials in here. Today’s mail should tell a story.

 

3:00 p.m.

 

Well, the mail room told me to come back on Tuesday (tomorrow) to discuss mail matters.

 

Loretta: I need a kit with do-it-yourself divorce papers good for any state in the US.

 

I’d like to be put on this company’s mailing list for their monthly catalog:

 

Edward R. Hamilton

PO Box 15

Falls Village CT 06031-0015

 

It’s also Hamilton Books online. I should get them as soon as someone sends me some books from them.

 

So, I saw case manager Garret Rodgers and gave him my visitation list addition of MLA Guy Gentner. It says Member of the British Columbia Legislature, Parliament Buildings, as address. He said he would submit it \right away so he could visit me soon. I said it could be as early as Christmas Day or the day after Christmas just to get them to do it right away.

 

Then I met the Major and explained my books were being rejected when there were two or more in a package and that this was not BOP policy. He actually stopped me to tell me this though:

 

"I saw you had a visit on Saturday. I was watching you on the camera and the rules say you’re supposed to have a brief kiss, not a movie kiss, and your kiss was too long."

 

I said, "BOP policy at FDC SEA-TAC was 30 seconds, which I believe it was (the kiss in question), and 30 seconds in a 61/2 hour visit is brief. But what do you consider brief, 10 seconds?"

 

He said, "I’ll check on BOP policy, if it 30 seconds or 10 seconds…but 10 seconds sounds like brief to me."

 

Then I asked him about the strangeness in the mail room. Then I, rather joyfully, said, "A member of my Government, an elected member of the legislature is coming to visit me next, so the kiss won’t be a factor there. He’s in the Southeast US and he is visiting government officials and he’ll be visiting me shortly."

 

That’s when the Major, quite animatedly asked, "WHO ARE YOU?!" and looked carefully at my name tag.

 

That moment was so satisfying! So, I have no idea if that will change anything around here in regards to my mail or kissing Jodie. But I’m hoping my library resuscitation program can go ahead. Or if the Major or Warden Google my name they are going to get an earful! I’m sure they are doing that right now! I should show him the Angus Reid poll if he wants to know who I am, since the majority of Canadians want me home and a member of the Legislature is coming to see me.

 

I think I’ve got a fair bit of business for Kirk I think I’ll have three or four Canadians here to retain him on transfer paperwork and procedure. I met a guy who just arrived from New Westminster today and Randy got 36 months for a lot of weed in Oregon. He has 3 daughters, 27, 29, 31 who will likely visit him in Jan. or Feb. But he is just getting here after 3 1/2 months in transit. It seems all the Canadians took no less than 3 months to get here to their designated prison. So my 4 weeks was a record short by comparison.

 

He was at a county jail for one month, the was at Sheridan FDC for a month, then 3 weeks at Nevada Southern (he hated it there the most he said), then 1 week at Oklahoma City, then here. He was able to get bail until he was sentenced on Sept. 10 (sound familiar?) and then he was supposed to be at Sheridan as his designated prison. At least that’s what he hoped & what his lawyer asked the judge for. But, Canadians are not going to BOP prisons anymore. He ended up here. So, I introduced him to Brad and other Canadians. Our number is up to 9 now. Grant (Montreal), Carmen (Van), Peter (Alymer), Trevor (Van), Randy (New Westminster), me (Van), Toronto guy (whose name I forgot), that’s 8…I’ve forgotten somebody.

 

I need a paperback book in German for Peter. There are places like Sophie’s that might sell them and MCC Recenter its an office that works with citizenship’s and passport. It’s a Mennonite organization that works with providing books for Mennonites. Or you can order German fiction books on Amazon I bet.

 

They brought the mail. I got my subscription copy of MacLeans, the Dec. 27 issue, so that’s great! Not one you sent but my actual subscription. I got two envelopes from you full of articles from Atlantic, my facebook page from Dec 1-6, about wikileaks, rabble.ca, Washington Post and a whole bunch or articles from the news on CC.com. Dec. 10 & 12. I got 80 pages in 2 envelopes!

 

Then I got CIA & the Culture War book and the Chomsky reader from Jeremiah. Addie and mary Clemons wrote and sent me the novel "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe" by Fannie Flagg for the library. So, I’m getting those books and subscription copies but I suspect the mail room is doing something with my mail. Mike (Anidas) gets Wall Street Journal and it comes through ok. But, sometimes, his USA Today doesn’t show up.

 

This is a forlorn place, Folkston, with a bizarre prison mail room. However, we shall see what happens tomorrow at 1:00 pm when I talk to the mail room woman.

 

I had a great visit with you both. Loretta, I hope you can make FreeMarc.ca real functional with links to all my blogs, articles, interviews, in other words a great resource for anyone who wants to learn about my work, my career, my current situation, how they can help, where to send books, money, letters, how to organize Free Marc activism activities etc. And, when you’re not doing that sell lots of ads!

 

Marc

 

 

 

Dear Jeremiah: D. Ray James is a bizarrely run prison – excuse me – “correctional facility”. Of the many wrong things here:

 

Security

 

The facility is designated low-security for INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) ‘deportable alien’ inmates. It is, in fact, run and controlled like a medium-high security prison. But in regular BOP medium-security prisons, you get a two-bunk cell to share; here in this “low”-security prison, we have 60 men in one big dorm with no privacy.

 

At BOP low-security prisons for Americans, there’s a large fence to keep inmates in. Here, there are two rows of huge fence with razorwire on top and all over. It’s very menacing and makes this place seem like a medium-high security facility.

 

Administration

 

As an INS facility, it is supposed be staffed with immigration experts who can do treaty transfer applications. Unfortunately, none of the staff here has ever done a treaty transfer application, nor have they correctly started the procedure for any of the Canadians or anyone else here.

 

When they said they wouldn’t start my paperwork until the Canadian Consulate forwarded paperwork to them approving my return to Canada, I realized they had no idea how the procedure works.

 

Aghast, I had [lawyer] Kirk [Tousaw] contact [transfer specialist lawyer] Sylvia Royce in Washington D.C. (Royce worked for the Bureau of Prisons in Washington as transfer specialist before her private practice). She must have got something going because when I went to see my case manager, Mr. Rodgers – lo and behold – he said, “I just got your package from Washington D.C. 30 min. ago”. There it was, about 15 pages with my name across the top. He said it’s his first one, so he’d contact some INS people to help me. As far as I understand, it has to be completed and back in Washington D.C. by January 16.

 

Well, well, well. That money bomb fundraiser for Royce was more than a good idea – it was essential.

 

Up till that moment these people were operating under entirely false assumptions of how transfers are done. I will keep you informed on how things go.

 

Visitation

 

Jodie is due to visit me tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday for five hours each week – which is wonderful and I can’t wait – but there’s nothing in our ‘inmate handbook’ about getting visitors approved. I found out from other English-speaking inmates (about 40 to 50 of the center’s 750 inmates) that I have to get a form for each visitor to fill out and return. I have, in fact, sent Jodie a blank one so you can visit me at some point.

 

The Commissary Inmate Funds Account

 

The commissary inmate funds account is a total scam.

 

This place is run by The GEO Group Inc, formerly known as the Wackenhunt Corrections Corporation. In a normal Bureau of Prisons (B.O.P.) run detention center or Federal Corrections Institution (F.C.I.) or US Penitentiary Maximum Security (U.S.P.), money can be put on an inmate’s account by money orders sent to the Des Moines, Iowa B.O.P. or through Western Union Quick Collect (online or phone-in).

 

It’s convenient, but there is a charge from Western Union. An inmate can have up to $10,000 in an account. The reason for the $10,000-limit is that an inmate often has to pay child support, order books and magazines, pay bills, pay lawyers, etc., and from an inmate account (also called a “commissary” account) one can issue a certified check. Of course, the commissary account is where you pay for your 300 monthly phone minutes, order up to $350 worth of goods monthly from the inmates store, and pay for Corrlinks electronic mail service ($3 per hour).

 

That’s how it’s supposed to work for all American inmates in any normal US prison. ‘Deportable Alien’ Prisons, like this one, do not run under these rules at all, and we don’t get Corrlinks either.

 

Here, one can only put money in an inmate’s account through a private company known as the Keefe Commissary Network, an affiliate of the Keefe Supply Company, which bills itself as “the nation’s leading supplier of food products, personal care products, and electronics to prison and jail commissaries”. The company does business in many GEO-run private and state prisons and is rumored to be owned by the Bush family.

 

Using this service, Canadian or other non-US Visa or MasterCards are not allowed, and neither are Western Union wire transfers or money orders.

 

Only US credit cards are allowed, even though every inmate here is a non-US citizen.

 

When a non-American inmate’s family can finally find someone with a US-based Visa or MasterCard, they call 1-866-345-1844 from 8 AM to 5 PM Central time or go to http://www.accesscorrections.com and put money in an account at D. Ray James Correctional Facility (being careful not to put it in ‘DRJ Prison’, which is the state prison next door).

AMOUNT TO INMATE FEE BY WEB FEE BY PHONE

$0 – $19.99 $2.95 $3.95

$20.00 – $99.99 $5.95 $6.95

$100.00 – $199.99 $7.95 $8.95

$200.00 – $300.00 $9.95 $10.95

 

Keefe Supply Company also makes many of the products sold to inmates through our commissary accounts, so they are making money on the income of mostly poor inmates in every which way.

 

What’s really strange is that you can’t send a money order to inmates commissary account, even though the inmate handbook says you can. They are, in fact, sent back. You can’t send money via Western Union.

 

If Keefe doesn’t get a cut, there’s no way to put money in an inmate’s account.

 

Collect Calls

 

Instead of just dialing 0 to make a collect call to one of our 30 approved numbers (like you do at a B.O.P. prison), a prisoner here must have someone put money on a ‘prepaid collect phone account’ before he can make a call.

 

A collect call through the phone provider Public Communication Services is staggeringly expensive, and it is not really collect, as it has to be paid in advance – and there are extra service charges to boot.

 

Electronic Mail

 

B.O.P. prisons allow inmates to use an electronic mail system called Corrlinks (or Trulinks) to communicate with a pre-approved list of friends and loved ones. This system is not available in INS facilities.

 

There is a sign in here that says they don’t discriminate in their treatment of ‘Deportable Aliens’, but that is obviously not true. Though we get the same amount of telephone time in an INS facility as a B.O.P. prison, there is no Corrlinks here in GEO World, nor will there ever be. This makes communication with family much harder, and our 300 minutes per month goes much faster.

 

Lockers

 

Instead of having our own lockers, we are expected to put all of our property in these clumsy and awkward ‘barracuda boxes’, plastic bins we keep under our bunks. They are horrible and so annoying and it’s impossible to organize your stuff in them.

 

In a 60-man dormitory, there is no privacy in any aspect. Showers have no curtains or doors, and the toilets are the same. I bunk beside 15 other guys, so when I go through my box it is noisy, cumbersome, public, and completely dysfunctional.

 

They took the lockers that were previously here out just before GEO opened this place on October 1.

 

Language Barriers

 

All the English speakers here are segregated from other English speakers. In my 60-man dorm, 55 to 57 speak Spanish.

 

There are two Canadians (me and Peter), one Nigerian, one Armenian, and about seven others who speak English as second language fairly well.

 

Of our entire 750-inmate population, there are six Canadians, one British guy, one South African, three Nigerians, three Bahamians, three Jamaicans, and maybe 25 others who speak English as their first language; yet we are kept in separate dorms.

 

The six Canadians in this 750-man inmate population should be in one pod of 60 English-speaking inmates so we have each other to converse with, but also so we can watch television shows in English on the limited number of televisions. In my current unit, one TV is permanently Spanish programming and the other is permanently sports.

 

Library

 

I have a new job in the Inmate Library. The Library – though it is now tidy, organized, and staffed with friendly people – is the most pathetic library anyone has ever seen.

 

The magazines, a total of 38, are all one to 18 months old – our single issue of Rolling Stone is from August 2009; the Michael Jackson death issue.

 

There are a total of four magazines in Spanish in a place with over 700 Spanish speakers! There are about 250 Spanish paperbacks, but only about 100 are popular.

 

The English language books are universally 10 to 40 years old, severely beat up, although now well organized and labeled.

 

I’m encouraging my many supporters to send copies of magazines or simply send a one-year subscription from www.Tradewindspublications.com to me (click here for Marc’s mailing address) or to

 

D. Ray James Correctional Facility

Mr. Folk, Library

P.O. Box 2000

Folkston, GA

31537-9000

USA

 

Tradewinds has one-year subscriptions at bargain prices, and it would be great if my supporters could send interesting magazines (there are over 400 to choose from). The Library will think they ordered it and he the inmates would really appreciate it.

 

We desperately need Spanish-language magazines on sports, celebrities, TV shows, and on current events in Mexico, Cuba, and Central America (these are often published in Miami or Mexico City).

 

Any English-language magazine subscription from the original publisher, Tradewinds, American Magazine Service (1-877-4-INMATE), Amazon.com, or any other source would be greatly appreciated.

 

Paperback books can be mailed to me from any supporter’s personal collections, or new from a bookstore, Amazon.com, or anywhere else. Books must be sent one per envelope in new or like-new condition.

 

Hard covers books must be sent from Amazon.com

 

English- and Spanish-language newspapers must come from directly from the publishers.

 

We are in urgent need of hardcover reference books including Spanish to English dictionaries, Encyclopedia Mexicana, Libros de Historia De México (books in Spanish on Mexican history), how to write letters, formal business, etc.

 

We are in need of books and magazines on topics including business, investing, sports, fitness, art, tattoo, travel, science, current events, horses, animals, nature, cars and trucks, computers, boating, swimming, skateboarding, celebrity, movie stars, and just about anything else you can imagine (but no skin mags).

 

Popular authors we need include Dean R. Koontz, Stephen King, James Patterson and any current fiction or non-fiction bestsellers.

 

It would also be great to have works by Spanish-speaking authors like Victor Villasenor, Paulo Coelho, Carlos C. Sanchez, Isabel Allende, Gabriel G Márquez, J.J. Benitez, Vargas Llosa, Julia Navarro, and Carlos Ahumada.

 

I’d like to have Ayn Rand’s books here too, in English and Spanish, and Peter Schiff’s Books on investing and finance. Ron Paul’s books, Mark Twain, H.L. Menken, Trump, Buffet, etc.

 

The good news is, I’m responsible for choosing the magazines and books for the Library, so hopefully we’ll have a great selection. My first order from Tradewinds publications was one-year subscriptions of National Geographic, Muscle and Fitness, Home Business, Chevy High Performance, EQUUS, Hispanic Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Tv y Novelas and Wired. I hope to order 10 magazine subscriptions a week until the Library has 50 coming in by February or March.

 

They have to pass through the bureaucracy here and it’s likely magazines won’t begin to arrive until late January and February, so please tell supporters to send their current new or like-new magazines to me now or get the prison Library a one-year subscription for Christmas. One magazine will be seen by hundreds of inmates in just one month – it’s a tremendous gift that costs only about $1-2 an issue, but is worth so much more here.

 

At my Library job I get 29 cents an hour and work from 8 AM to 10:30 AM and 1 PM to 3:30 PM, Monday to Friday. That is $1.45 a day – $7.25 a week. I like the job though, so doesn’t matter that the pay is so low. I type up legal letters for inmates and help them do requests and fill out job forms. Most of them have limited English skills, so there’s a lot to do.

 

Ok, Jeremiah, that’s my report.

 

Thanks for everything!

 

Marc

 

UPDATE: Marc has sent a longer list of books and magazines that would be good for the library. Please send them today to Marc the address above (one per envelope).

 

Magazines

 

* Sports Illustrated

* National Geographic / NG Traveler

* National Geographic – Spanish

* Muscle and Fitness

* Men’s Health

* Runner’s World

* Home Business

* American Photo

* Artists Magazine

* Basketball Times

* Car Collector Caribbean Travel & Life

* Chevy High Performance

* Super Chevy

* Discover

* Disney and Me

* Drag Racer

* Equus

* Farm and Ranch Living

* Fast Company

* Flex

* Hispanic

* US Weekly

* Don Balon (Spanish) – very popular

* Horse Illustrated

* Reptiles

* Hot Rod

* Inc Magazine

* Interview

* Islands Magazine

* Wired

* Low Rider

* Slam

* MAD magazine

* Maxim

* Muscle Mustangs / other muscle car mags

* Business Week

* Auto Week

* People (Spanish)

* TV Novellas (Spanish)

 

Books

 

* Books by Warren Buffe

* Books by Donald Trump

* Books on Business or by Businessmen

* Books about Horses

* Paperbacks by R.A. Salvato

* Paperbacks by David Copeland – Christian

* Louis L’Amour

* Spanish Language Novels or non-fiction

* Exercise, Running, Physical health

* Cars and Engines

* Science Fiction

* War Books

* Illustrated; cartoons, art books, comic books

* Soccer! (Spanish)

 

More Magazines!:

 

* Barrons

* Card Player

* Card Maker

* Economist

* Esquire

* Fight

* Hispanic Business

* Hispanic

* In These Times

* Skin and Ink

* Urban Ink

* Tattoo Flash

* Nascar Illustrated

* Savage

* Ultimate MMA

* Franchise Handbook

* Surfing/ Skateboarding

* El Grafico ( Argentina)

 

* subscribe at bcmag@cox.net

 

Dearest Jodie: Last Thursday at 10am in Nevada Southern Detention Centre, a guard said, "Emery, roll up!", which meant I was outbound. I was taken with about 100 others to a series of tiny cells, where I waited until 3am (17 hours) to be chained with leg irons and handcuffs secured to a chain around my stomach, then put on a bus to Las Vegas airport.

 

We were at the airport at 7am but the ConAir plane didn’t arrive till around 10:30am. Still in chains, we were boarded onto the plane at around noon. I was the only Canadian. The plane first flew to Arizona and landed to let off prisoners going to Arizona federal prisons, and picked up more prisoners. The plane has room for over 200 prisoners. Then, still chained, we flew to Oklahoma City, the processing hub of the Bureau of Prisons, where we arrived around 5:30pm (central time) and were unchained during intake.

 

That was over 12 hours being chained up, often to another prisoner. Intake took about six hours of mostly monotonous waiting, and by Friday at midnight I was one person in a two-man cell in unit E5 at El Reno, OK processing. It took 36 hours from "Roll up" to arrival in my cell here, a grueling experience.

 

I have been here six days now and may be shipped off any day toward my new designated privately-run prison, D. Ray James Correctional Facility in Folkston, Georgia. It’s an INS (Immigration & Naturalization Services) low security federal prison for "deportable aliens", which are non-US citizens. It used to be a state prison, but was closed and taken over by the prison industry giant, GEO Group, and turned into an INS low security facility. I was supposed to be sent to Taft FCI in California, but the BOP has changed it to send me as far away from you as possible.

 

Still, I really would like to get there so I can receive mail, my magazine subscriptions, do my transfer application back into the Canadian correctional system, and most of all, get visits from you every other weekend. I miss you more than anything in this hard and tough existence. I have been in prison eight months now, and it’s only because of you that I have made it, I’m sure.

 

Your visits to me will stretch across as long a path across America as is possible: Vancouver to Seattle, to Jacksonville in Florida, then a drive north into Georgia from there. The cost isn’t that much greater, just the time in the air. I’m glad my friend Loretta Nall will sometimes be meeting up with you and accompanying you to the prison I’ll be at, or your friend and employee, CC ad manager Britney, will be with you. The visits are going to be like at Sea-Tac FDC, so we can hold hands and I can kiss you at the beginning and end of the visit, and they may even be all-day visits (9am to 3pm) from what I can deduce, so I am so excited to be able to do that.

 

It’s unlikely there will be Corrlinks messaging there, but I’m happy to have it here at this Oklahoma City transfer facility. Corrlinks is so vital to keeping in touch with family and friends; it really does go a long way to making prison bearable. But I will finally be settled in and able to receive and write letters in Georgia. I was able to write to six of eight people I received letters from at Nevada Southern Detention Center, and feel bad I got shipped out before I was able to write to Trevor in Pennsylvania, who helped out on the Washington DC “Free Marc Emery” water bottle campaign event on October 30 at the Stewart/Colbert “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”, or my good friend Howard Ulep, also in Pennsylvania, who writes me wonderful letters regularly.

 

I’m pleased to see the Canucks are at the top of their hockey division (Britney wrote me with updates), but I tell you, news was scarce until I got on Corrlinks today. I haven’t seen a newspaper or magazine in a month. I miss my subscription to Macleans; it is a great Canadian magazine and kept me up to date on my own country. I hope you can have all my magazines rerouted to D. Ray James soon after my arrival. I hope they deliver USA Today, the Atlanta Constitution, and hopefully the New York Times at the prison there. Hopefully it’s not too remote to get newspaper subscriptions!

 

The food here is very poor, and I look forward to ordering commissary at D. Ray James to supplement my diet. Sea-Tac FDC was a pretty good place in comparison with my experiences since, as I always had enough fruit there to maintain good regular health. Since then, I’ve had very little fruit, although Nevada Southern had some fresh vegetables with most meals.

 

I am impressed by your terrific blog of your experience campaigning for Proposition 19 in Oakland, which you read over the phone to me, as well as Catherine Leach’s great blog on the “Free Marc Emery” water handout and info event in Washington, DC that she and her husband Keith pulled off for you.

 

Your letters to me of November 11, 12 and 13 are so wonderful in the detail you put in. They are like listening to you talk to me in loving words and details across the universe in perfect clarity. Many times, like now, when I think of you and our great love, I want to break down and cry (and I often do), but you reassure me when you can and I pull myself together and pray for the better times ahead when we are reunited once again.

 

I have read two light fiction books: “Next week will be better” by Jean Ruryk, and Alexander McCall Smith’s particularly good “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.” The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency is about this African woman in Botswana who sets up a detective agency, and is delightfully written. The romance of Botswana is quite affecting. There are five more in the series I’m hoping you’ll send me at some point. The Jean Ruryk novel is a sort of mystery that takes place around flea markets, and since I went to estate auctions and flea markets for years from 1975 to 1985 in London, Ontario when I was a bookseller and curio dealer, I found her situational detective story taking place largely at these kind of venues familiar and entertaining in her observations.

 

Since I was connected on Corrlinks yesterday, I have read many of the articles from the CC website Jeremiah emailed me, and Russ Bellville’s "10 Lessons from Prop 19’s Defeat" is terrific. Russ Bellville is a great writer and a genuine treasure for our movement. All his writings are exceptional insights and I do hope CC continues to carry the work he writes for NORML.

 

Eight months in prison is a long and very challenging experience, but so far I have gotten through it. I hope that in 12 months from now I am in Canada, getting released on parole as the law today would apply, and able to be home with you for Christmas. For that to happen I need political support in Canada and the US for approval from both the US Department of Justice and the Canadian Ministry of Public Safety.

 

 

I’m hoping my American supporters will arrange meetings with any elected officials they know well and urge them to join the letters prepared for the governments in Canada and the US, and also have Canadians meet with their representatives for the same purpose. I dearly need their help in this regard if I am going to be able to be repatriated back to Canada. I’m hoping former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson and Texas Congressman Ron Paul will endorse our request for my return to Canada, along with other Congressmen and legislators in America, in addition to the many Canadian public officials who are already signatories to these two letters. I know you will do all you can for me to get home!

 

I hope you will be visiting me soon. My dearest wish is to see you.

My sweetest love, to my great soul mate,

Your husband

Marc

 

 

By Marc Emery, Cannabis Culture

Dearest Sweet Wife Jodie: I was going to write a historically accurate but bitter screed about the genocidal tendencies of our American and Canadian rulers, regarding the meaning of Columbus Day (Monday in the US) and Thanksgiving Day (Monday in Canada), and you’ve already got half of it in a letter I wrote you in that theme… but it’s just not how I’m feeling anymore. I’m optimistic and in a much better mood now!

Today marks my 210th day – 7 months now – in prison on this sentence, and I’m feeling very sharp mentally. I’m reading good books, educating myself, and I’m completing the New York Times crosswords and the other newspaper crosswords in short order. I feel I’ve never been so mentally adept, and I do have much to be thankful for, so I’m in a great mood. The food here has even improved in the last 10 days; there has been more variety and the quality of preparation has noticeably gotten better. All the inmates think so, not just me. I thought the idea of things improving in a prison was an impossibility, but it’s actually happened. They say the food services supervisor has been in making changes, and they are noticed! I’m going to put in a thank you to food services, although I wonder if that’s the opposite of what I should do. Sometimes I think telling them anything that makes life better for an inmate will provoke them to reverse any decision that brought that about!

I’m so excited you and Jeremiah are going to Oakland in California to witness History in the Making, the Proposition 19 vote of Tuesday, November 2! After you visit me on Saturday, October 30, you’ll be heading to Oakland that afternoon to volunteer for three days on the campaign on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday (election day), and Tuesday night at the vote counting celebration – or wake, depending on how it goes. I hope people in our movement did not buy into the propaganda put out by the treasonous miscreants I call Traitors Against Proposition 19. The self-serving prohibition profiteers who have been telling people to vote "No" are disgraceful for trying to defeat what will be the greatest single opportunity for progress in our movement ever. I hope there are more people out there saying "Vote YES on Proposition 19" so we can see victory – California becoming the first state to legalize cannabis anywhere on earth!

Cannabis Culture editor Jeremiah will be there to report in to www.CannabisCulture.com several times daily to give people the story of history being made in real time. How I envy you, but how pleased I am you are going, and that the incredible Richard Lee is welcoming you to join them at their headquarters. You’ll have to work long days, Mrs. Emery, 12 hours either on phones, or giving out literature, or whatever they need done. Please encourage everyone on Facebook and CC – especially young people – to register to vote by getting the form at any postal office before Friday, October 15; that’s the deadline for Californians to register for this vote. All our cannabis culture will want to be able to say they showed up for the historic moment marijuana was first legalized in North America. You know how I always say that political influence is often about "just showing up"? It has never been more true than this vote on Tuesday, November 2. People can register to vote online by going to www.YesOn19.com – the link is on the lower right-hand side!

I hope you can get east coast supporters to go to Washington, DC on Saturday, October 30 on the Mall when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will be hosting "dueling" events that will attract about 250,000+ people. My supporters should wear FREE MARC t-shirts and hand out FREE MARC literature, available at www.FreeMarc.ca – and it would be terrific if we could get FREE MARC water bottles made to be distributed for free, as it will be a long day and people will get thirsty, so it will be good to have those bottles of water for people to stare at all day long. We’d need to have those labels made quickly, and we’d need some manpower in the DC area to put them on the bottles and give them out at the event all day. It’s a promotional opportunity that shouldn’t be passed up, as the people attending are the activist demographic we need to reach, so I hope they contact you at Jodie@cannabisculture.com if they want to take part, and you can send them to someone in charge of organizing.

I started writing letters to my supporters again after a break. In the last 4 days I have written about 15 letters. I took some time off, but so many good friends who’ve been so supportive and kind have sent me letters, and are deserving of a response, so I had to buckle down and get to it. Each one has an illustrated envelope with their letter too, done by inmates here in SeaTac prison, so every piece of mail from me is unique on both the outside and inside of the envelope.

I have so much to be thankful for, as today is the Canadian Thanksgiving. First and foremost, I have our sacred, unbreakable love which is better than any other state of existence, in prison or out. You are simply the greatest companion, wife, and protege imaginable. You bring me joy in every way – and you are going places, Mrs. Emery! You work so hard, your heart is with the people, and you inspire everyone with your savvy, love and commitment to me, our cause and our people. Virtually every letter I receive from correspondents reminds me how amazing everyone thinks you are.

I have such dedicated, loyal and earnest supporters all over this wonderful planet! How can I not be grateful to be loved and respected by the hundreds of thousands throughout the world who write letters and hold signs on my behalf, wear my FREE MARC t-shirt, speak to friends about me, contact the media, and keep the liberation of our cannabis culture foremost in their actions. I have wonderful friends like Dana Larsen, who sends me books and helps us out so much; and great folks like the band ZZ Top, who gave us an autographed guitar to sell to raise money so you can visit me at Taft when I get transferred there; and our dear supporter Tommy Chong, who wears a FREE MARC t-shirt for every TV appearance he makes; and all the media scribes who write and report glowingly about you and I.

So, I feel the love and support from so many people, Miss, and that’s why I have no reason to be miserable and many reasons to be grateful. It’s a wonderful world when I can feel like a ‘somebody’ because of people who value the work I have done for our people over the last thirty years!

I hope I get a good response on the "Marc Emery Legal Fundraiser MoneyBomb" this Saturday, October 16th to raise funds for me to get home to you. Please remind all my supporters on Facebook, and at www.FreeMarc.ca and www.CannabisCulture.com that it’s a 24-hour hour fundraiser to pay the US lawyer who is a specialist in prisoner transfers, as the fee she requires is $8,500. Once I am at Taft Correctional in the California desert, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, the paperwork should be done immediately – but the lawyer will need to paid by then. I can be packed out of here at any time, though it may take two to three weeks of travel and detention centers before I actually get to Taft. I know there is a MoneyBomb page at FreeMarc.ca and I know it will be updated regularly throughout the day on Saturday October 16th so people can see how the donations are coming in. Let’s hope people have $5 or $10 or $25 they can donate via Paypal or credit card, as it will all really help. I hope people will contribute to me in my time of need knowing about the millions of dollars I generated and gave to the movement when I sold seeds.

My enthusiastic supporter Taralee Gerhard in Ottawa has a rally in support of me on Parliament Hill this Saturday, October 16th too! Be sure to promote her Facebook page about the rally and help her in any way you can. Let’s hope Taralee can gather 50 or so people to hold signs, do some FREE MARC chants, and hand out literature from 2pm to 5pm at the steps in front of the Parliament. I really want to encourage these kinds of independent actions from my supporters because they are so helpful in increasing awareness of my situation, especially my needs in regards to writing the Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and the US Department of Justice asking for my repatriation to the Canadian correctional system.

I love my fabulous wife, and am so thankful for you on our Thanksgiving! Can’t wait to see you next Saturday!

Onward to Victory and our future World Liberation Tour, oh wonderful wife!

 

Your grateful husband,

Marc

 

P.S. I hope we can find some supporters in the Bakersfield, California area to help you when you come to visit me at Taft correctional federal prison about 30 miles away from Bakersfield. I know now that there is good bus service daily to and from Bakersfield and the Los Angeles airport, so I’m assured you can get to Bakersfield in a timely manner, where you’ll be staying. You must check up if there is a bus going to Taft from Bakersfield in the mornings when you are going to be seeing me on Thursdays, Fridays, & Saturday every 2 weeks, and if there is some kind of bus or shuttle service from Taft to Bakersfield once our visit is concluded. Since I could be moved to Taft soon, possibly even the day the voters of California legalize marijuana on November 2 (making a superb irony that will surely show up in the movie that will be made about me), I’m a bit anxious that you find out these details. Have any supporters from the Bakersfield area contact you yet?

By: Marc Emery, Cannabis Culture

 

Dear Jodie: I was saddened to hear the tragic news that Michelle Rainey is possibly just weeks away from dying from her melanoma and lymphatic cancer, which has now reached critical proportions throughout her body. She’s only 39. Melanoma is such a vicious cancer, and cancer has been terrible on her brother, killing him young, and affecting others in her family. Considering Michelle battled Crohn’s Disease since she was a teenager, it’s a bitter blow for her, this life of suffering she’s had.

 

Michelle was my #1 partner in so many of my great triumphs, which I hope she regards as her great triumphs too. Considering the considerable pain her health has given her, she was heroic in so many ways, in so many campaigns that helped so many and represented the movement with class and clout.

 

With Matthew Johnson, Michelle and I ran the legendary and historic full-slate election campaign of 79 BC Marijuana Party candidates in the 2001 BC general election. You had to be there to believe it: in the campaign HQ, gathering all the candidates, getting the 40 signatures in each riding to qualify, having Richard Nixon’s old campaign bus tour the province with BCMP leader Brian Taylor (now Mayor of Grand Forks) on board. We nicknamed that old bus the "Cannabus", and that campaign was when you got into politics, Jodie, going to your very first rally in Kamloops the day that bus came by Riverside Park.

 

That campaign, with our 54,000 votes, 3.5% of the total cast, would never have been possible without Michelle. When we didn’t have a candidate way up north in Peace River South, Michelle volunteered to be the candidate and went up there to Tumbler Ridge and Dawson Creek, getting signatures at The Alaskan Hotel in Dawson Creek. You know how Charles, the owner of that cool old museum of a hotel, is always so nice to us there, Jodie? That’s because Michelle smoothed the way for us in that community. Michelle was a great campaign manager with Matthew, she was like Mother Teresa, Houdini, and Vince Lombardi all rolled into one: cajoling, guiding, and making impossible things happen in the last play of the game for that campaign.

 

Michelle was an all-inclusive mother, household manager, and business partner, and while both of us attended to our own spousal relationships, we were a powerful and dynamic duo six years from 1999-2005, the greatest period of activism Canada had seen in our movement. Michelle lived with me pretty well from 1999 at the house on 9th Ave. on the Sunshine Coast to January 2003 at the apartment on Nicola in Vancouver, over three years, and worked from sunrise to late every night making sure I looked great and presentable every day, keeping my house clean, all the employees paid, the seeds out on time, the producers paid and happy, the media fully informed, Pot-TV running smoothly, and Richard Cowan (who lived with us on the Sunshine Coast for over a year) taken care of – it’s amazing, all the incredible accomplishments she got done.

 

Michelle was my great team mate at the 2001 and 2003 IDEACITY in Toronto where I spoke about our incredible work to end prohibition and save the world. The 2003 IDEACITY is where I announced, for the first time, on stage, that I was going to smoke out the Toronto Police Station the next day as the first demonstration of what became the wildly successful Summer of Legalization Tour, proving that cannabis possession laws did not exist at that time. Michelle made sure she introduced me to everyone of importance there and indeed, many of the speakers said they thought our work was important. Romeo Dallaire, Henry Morgentaler, Wade Davis, Dianne Francis, Jaymie Matthews, and so many other great Canadians complimented Michelle and I on our great determination to end the suffering caused by prohibition.

 

The greatest celebration of cannabis I have ever experienced or ever heard of in the annals of cannabis culture were Michelle’s fabulous Toker’s Bowls of 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, hosted by Cannabis Culture Magazine. There has simply never been any presentation honouring the cannabis culture as classy, considerate, cannabinoid, warm, and loving, as Michelle gave love to every attendee for the whole glorious four-day affair. There were the boat trips, the bus trips (with the ever helpful Reverend Herb as the driver!), the 20-25 kinds of incredible pot for each judge, the nightly parties, rented restaurants, the entertainment, the prizes, the bubblehash, and the gracious and thoughtful Michelle making everyone ever so comfortable and welcomed. And Michelle had to work so hard to earn the money to cover the losses that each Tokers’ Bowl had. They were the greatest parties our culture ever experienced, but they didn’t make money, and Michelle had to work months to pull them off.

 

We had the greatest cannabis seed business ever known, that revolutionized the world, because Michelle, known fondly as Denmother, put love and care into every order. A medical cannabis user herself, struggling with Crohn’s, she fully appreciated how our seeds were helping thousands of people. I certainly gave away millions of dollars to all those great and good causes, like the 2003 Canadian Supreme Court challenge to legalize marijuana ($85,000), the 1999 class-action suit of the US federal government in Philadelphia to bring back the compassionate use program of medical marijuana ($28,000), the 2000 Canadian Marijuana Party election campaign($22,000), the 2001 BC Marijuana Party campaign ($152,000), the Iboga Therapy House treatment facility for hard-drug addicts ($205,000), the Worldwide Global Marijuana Marches of 1999-2005 ($35,000 each of those 7 years), ballot initiatives in Colorado in 2000 ($15,000) and Arizona ($10,000) – all of those expensive projects and hundreds more which was paid for by mine and Michelle’s hard work.

 

Michelle did what virtually no other human being could do or did, except her and I. She was an engine for great change in the world, committing money, her health, and her whole soul into this great movement that is forever in debt to her – just as I am in debt to her, for everything she has done for me and our cause. The whole movement, but especially the Canadian movement, may never know how much of our progress in the last decade is attributable to Michelle’s perseverance in the face of great pain, stress and financial pressure. Everyday we had tremendous demands on us for monies we had committed to activism, to our suppliers, to our many employees. Every day we knew we risked a run-in with the law, and all these combined pressures certainly took their toll on her.

 

Michelle is dealing with this critical juncture in her life with modesty and privacy, but before it’s too late, Michelle needs to be recognized as one of the greatest activists this movement has ever had. Michelle may have literally given her life to the movement, and when people think about what they can do for freedom in their lifetime, Michelle’s life is a shining example of how much is possible, even under great duress.

 

I wish her a miracle, as she certainly deserves one. I salute her as my great comrade in arms who brought honour, passion, and achievement to our movement, and I can confidently say that the lives of thousands of people are and were forever improved by Michelle being there for them, and for me.

 

By: Marc Emery, Cannabis Culture

 

Dearest Jodie: After I saw you Sunday for our perfectly lovely visit (smashing dress you had on), I was informed I was moving from unit DB to another unit. I thought, uh-oh, what did I do, but it wasn’t punishment at all, it was to unit FA, which is kind of a waiting unit for inmates who have been designated to their federal prison. So I’ve been designated!

 

I probably pack-out in about 4-6 weeks, but they don’t tell you when you go, or where you’re designated to. Wish I knew! I sure hope it’s Lompoc near Santa Barbara in California. The prisons I can be sent to have to have INS, or Immigration and Naturalization Services, because I’m a foreigner. The options include California, New Mexico, Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, or Pennsylvania. I’m hoping for Lompoc in California.

 

Once I get packed-out, by the way, you can follow me by putting my name and inmate number in the BOP.gov inmate tracker. That should let you know where I am once I’m on the road, as it were, because there might be up to several days where I have no ability to phone or email you.

 

I should have called you from unit DB when I was told after our visit at 10:30am Sunday that I had to move immediately, because it took 24 hours for my phone and email situation here at FA to be set-up and I know you were so worried to not hear from me. But I’m okay, miss! Just make sure people know that any mail they want to send to me should be addressed to Unit FA from now on.

 

I know my cellie JD was disappointed to see me go; we got along great, listening to old music stations like the Vancouver Island 100.3 (The Q) and guessing who the artist was and when it came out originally, making food at night, and sharing all our commissary and books and newspapers. I was disappointed for a few moments, but really, I’m glad to be moving along in the process.

 

My Canadian transfer application is in to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. Our friend Dan Grice’s meeting with Toews sounded very positive, and I’m hoping the money bomb for October 19, for my new US lawyer (transfer application specialist), gets promoted heavily to raise as much of that $8,500 as possible. Loretta Nall in Alabama is donating the $100 she wants to give me to that effort, and I asked her to tell everyone she knows to help out, even if its $5 or $10 or $25. It all adds up and it all helps. Every day I get letters from people wondering how they can help us, and I’d have to say giving a little bit to help pay this new lawyer is what we both really need.

 

You can donate through the Cannabis Culture online store by clicking here.

 

Each step along the way brings me closer to you! As of July 29, that was the last day charges could be filed against me from any other jurisdiction (5-year statute of limitations) in the US on the seed selling. Then on September 10, the sentencing went as we’d agreed under the 11(c)1(c) plea agreement, so that was done. Then we got the transfer application in to the Canadian government the same day, and we have probably have had over 2,000 letters sent in to encourage Toews to bring me back to Canada – plus people stop him everywhere and bring it up, and he is always saying that he’ll bring me back as long as I promise not to break any laws. I’m on record as promising quite clearly not to re-offend, and for my 5 years on bail I certainly did not, so he has every good reason, politically and in the interest of “public safety”, to bring me back home.

 

Now I’m in the first stage of getting transferred out to my designated US prison, and once there, I put in my US transfer application. So I’m excited! I have my own cell for now, and that’s nice. In the near 5 months I’ve been here (I have 200 days served so far with my Canadian 66 days credit), I’ve shared a cell and never had my own, except when I was in solitary for 21 days! So last night was the first day with my own cell when I wasn’t being punished. I have sunlight coming into my cell this morning, with the same view I had in solitary of the parking lot and surrounding trees. It’s nice to see the world on a sunny day!

 

I finished the Nelson Mandela auto-biography, "Long Walk To Freedom". It’s a great and very inspiring book. Most of it was written when he was in prison. I hope you are working on my autobiographical stories that I’ve written while I am in jail here! I want those stories up at MarcEmery.ca by the third week in October, so please don’t let that project lapse! I know you are busy with the store, your writing and researching, the fundraising and money bomb, visiting me, all the interviews, etc., but I have 15 stories now, plus all my other writings, interview, documentaries, videos, and I so want to have them in one place where people can see all the work and experiences I’ve had in my life that got me to be Prince of Pot. I’m going to quote you a number of sections from Mandela’s book later on, his observations about being in prison and being a freedom fighter and political prisoner are very astute and prescient and it’s a book made for quoting.

 

Today, in the mail, I’m hoping part three of Taylor Branch’s brilliant trilogy on the life and times of Marin Luther King, Jr. arrives, “Canaan’s Edge”. It’s the perfect time for it to arrive, as I’ve completed the first two, and after Mandela’s book I’m excited to finish MLK’s great life story. If it doesn’t arrive, I’m going to read Tom Gordon #3, the next book in the great Alan Moore graphic novel.

 

I’m hoping I start to get people’s photographs of the Marc Emery Support Day on October 18th, especially from Loretta Nall, Addie Clemons, you, Chris Goodwin and others. I want to see what the bottles of “Marc Emery Bong Water” that the activists in Toronto gave out – 2,500 bottles of clean water bought and labeled by my great supporter Khalid and his partners at Pixel Dreams – look like. I would have called it Marc Emery Freedom Water if it were up to me, with subtitles like, "Slake Your Thirst For Freedom" or "Water the seeds of freedom" or "The cool, refreshing taste of liberty", etc., but they do call themselves the Toronto Hash Mob so a funky title is very much in keeping with their rep. That’s the fun of a decentralized campaign, eh?

 

My health is good, I loved our two visits on the weekend! Glad you thought my chapter for Barry Cooper’s book on the law ("Never Get Busted Questions & Answers"), "Life in a Federal Prison" was good, and fair. Since you are the editor of that book now, you’ll learn plenty about the law to enhance your credibility as Policing & Crime critic for the BC Green Party. This experience is all part of our education, Mrs. Emery!

 

I love my fabulous wife, and am excited about making progress in the scheme of things. Every day that goes by is a day I learn something new, write something about my life, and especially it’s one day closer to being with you and sharing our terrific future together! I so want to be your Executive assistant when you get elected to office! "The Speaker recognizes The Honourable Jodie Emery from Vancouver Center" – can’t wait to hear that! It’s so going to happen Miss!

 

But in the meantime, better get to work on all the things you’ve got to do! I love my Mrs. Emery so much!

 

Your Husband with tremendous admiration for you,

Marc

By Marc Emery, Cannabis Culture

 

Oh Sweet Wife O’ Mine! The Marc Emery Support Day on Saturday was thrilling to know was going on, what little I knew about behind these bars. Some staff at the FDC here however, are have taken a hostile turn against me, I think, as a consequence of all this support and media surrounding my sentencing and my work.

 

In yesterday’s mail, the Facebook pages I have been regularly receiving since May – printouts of the Marc Emery fan page, and your personal page – were seized by the mailroom staff here at FDC, and I am barred from receiving them further. Plus my 8 pages of photocopies from StopTheDrugWar.com (DRCNet) that Vanessa Nelson sends each week were looted too, along with two letters from Ken Holland in Michigan. Ken usually sends me a letter everyday which included a newspaper clipping all annotated by Ken’s pithy observations, and a few other cartoons he’s photocopied from newspapers, and some other photocopies of articles Ken thinks are pertinent. So both Ken’s two envelopes were empty with a notice that Ken’s clippings and ephemera have been seized as "contraband". Vanessa’s letter was still there, but the excellent material from DRCNet were gone because, according to Big Brother in the mailroom, they were from a publication, and any publication has to come from the publisher. Of course, I have been receiving weekly photocopies of these drug war articles since May.

 

I immediately put in a complaint to the mailroom, the woman came down to speak to me about it this morning. She said I can’t get the Facebook pages any longer because they constitute third party messaging. I asked why that is a rule, and if it’s a rule, why isn’t it in the rulebook? She didn’t really have a good explanation of how me getting Facebook pages constitutes any harm, and she said when the rule book was written, Facebook didn’t exist. My rulebook was updated in January 2010, Facebook started in 2006. So there is a rule that they invented for the occasion of busting my balls. She did confirm that the mailroom let me have them for 14 weeks leading up to yesterday.

 

On Friday I was called into a Lieutenant’s office and given a charge, or "shot" as its called, a 328, because you sent my cellie JD $75 because he’s poor and you felt sorry for him. This was 4 weeks ago you did that on your own. I was told to report to the Disciplinary office and the man there was quite hostile to me. He mocked me as the FDC’s famous inmate, spent the whole time intimidating me. It’s not against the rules for you to give an inmate money, my dear, for you are such a sweet woman, you’ve given newspaper subscriptions, books, and small amounts of money to fellow inmates of mine before, back at North Fraser Pre-Trial – and as part of Cannabis Culture Magazine, we corresponded with prisoners, printed their artwork and letters in CC, such as prisoner Jimmy Rasta in Texas who even sent you that wonderful oil painting of you that is in the Lounge. You’re the Policing & Corrections critic for the BC Green Party and you talk with prisoner wives on PrisonTalk.com, so this was hardly out of the ordinary for you.

 

The rule forbids me from giving money to other inmates, but I don’t have any money, nor is cash allowed (or possible) here. The angry man in the Lt’s office told me he reads all my emails and listens to all my calls, including, he added with a disgusted emphasis, "your personal ones", implying my intimate talks that I get to occasionally have with you or my sign offs on my emails to you. Nothing at all out of the ordinary, considering I’m your husband! But he was contemptible towards me.

 

Then he said what I write in my emails is lies, and he specifically said my chapter I wrote for Barry Cooper’s book on life here at Sea-Tac FDC was, and I quote, "bullshit". He further asked me why I felt qualified to write about life here, and I added, though we wasn’t interested in my point of view, "because I’m here." Then he went on sarcastically saying "You said we tortured you in the Special Housing Unit". I said "Solitary was a form of torture as far as I’m concerned." He sneered. In fact, most C.O.’s here have told me I was sent to solitary (SHU) for 21 grueling days in June simply because I was "high-profile" and "famous" and for no other reason at all. Certainly not the stated reason that you recorded my phone call, Miss, that was just their excuse, as there is no rule against recording my phone calls. They brought out that "3rd party" rule which I see they use just to mess with me when they feel like it.

 

Then his cohort asked how long in was in the solitary confinement, I said "21 days". "And you feel that qualifies you to write about SHU?" I thought one day in there qualifies an inmate to write about it authoritatively because every day is the same in there, but I said nothing, they weren’t listening. Then this cohort said, "well maybe you ought to spend more time in SHU and see what you think about that." I felt that was sinister intimidation trying to suppress and silence my writing here, which is protected speech. Especially the Lt boasting he reads all my emails and listens to all my phone calls, including my "personal ones", like he’s trying to cow me. Notably, he obviously didn’t have any emails or phone calls that provided any support for this charge that I somehow gave my cellie money.

 

That was a creepy enough experience. I will say, not all the C.O.’s here have this attitude, but enough of them have it, it would appear. I got my verdict after having a second meeting: two months of no commissary for me, and one month of no commissary for my cellie. That means no purchasing anything, like stamps, envelopes, soap, toothpaste, or the nuts, trail mix and other food items I bought that gave me protein and other vitamins I need. Clearly there is some institutional bias going on against me now; I can only conclude as a result of the media attention that has come to my situation in the last few weeks.

 

Even in the visiting room on Monday, I arrived at 2:45 pm. You didn’t arrive until 3:10 pm, so I asked the C.O. if my 2-hour visitation time started at 2:45 when I arrived or 3:10 when you arrived. It was the C.O. who has reprimanded me twice before and threatened to give me a shot because on two occasions I was touching your arm instead of holding your hands, and it’s the one who also complained that I’m not allowed to kiss you in our photographs like we did once on photo day, and that he’d be watching me in photo days in future. You know whom I’m talking about, Miss, the one you refer to as " the mean guy". When I asked about this time question, politely as always, he got all over-sensitive and said "you’ve been here many times Mr. Emery, you know we never short-change your visit times." I commented that my rulebook, which I’ve memorized, says on page 22,"The time period will begin when the inmate arrives in the visitation room". Since I had to wait 25 minutes in the room before you were escorted in (you had been waiting 70 minutes in the other part of the building), and according to the rulebook, that would count against our time, and I wanted that clarified. So we got our two hours together, and it was wonderful, but the rules are obviously not very clear, which makes them difficult to follow.

 

You have my chapter for Barry Cooper’s book, as you are going to be the editor of Barry’s book, Mrs. Emery; a wise move by him, I’m sure. As I’m sure you agree, the "Life in a US Federal FDC" is very fair. It doesn’t criticize any staff here nor even the institution itself, it’s just the way it is. Of course I say the food is terrible, but who can disagree with that?

 

The rulebook doesn’t prohibit these so-called 3rd party messages in a mailed letter. A 3rd party message could be "The kids want you to know they love you" or "Your mother asked me to pass on her love and her hope that you are eating well" or even "I’m supposed to remind you to call your lawyer, write your mother, etc". Why I can’t receive my Facebook pages is not rationally explained. The rulebook just says "Unauthorized mail includes musical greeting cards, Polaroid photos, nude personal photos, plant material, non-inspectable items, etc." Typically, any 8.5 x 11 photocopies or 8.5 x 11 printed pages are considered a "letter" – or were, until yesterday. Today, the mailroom seized a one-page laminated chart for editing my own stories that a retired teacher sent along. Seized because it’s laminated.

 

I hired a lawyer to help me process my US application for the treaty transfer back to Canada. The process for the US side of things is more complicated so I think a lawyer who specializes in this transfer application business is a good idea. It’s $8,500 and of course I don’t have any money so I hope you can get some donations from our supporters to help me pay for this lawyer. I know you’ll take some of your own pay and help me with this lawyer, but I already use up so much of your income being in here, where phone calls, emails, and everything else that costs money.

 

I know you received $350 in donations for me last month, so that helped. Loretta Nall is sending $100 to help too, probably just in time to pay the $100 fine I have to pay from the September 10 sentencing. The $8,500 for this new US lawyer will need to be paid soon, at least a good chunk of it, so you should ask our supporters to help out, because we just finished paying my sentencing lawyer Richard Troberman. I will say this for Richard, he is a terrific lawyer and he does great work and would definitely recommend him to anyone who needs a criminal lawyer in the Seattle area. I feel I’ve been fortunate getting excellent lawyers like Ian Donaldson in Vancouver and Richard Troberman here. But now yet another lawyer needs money and I’ll need help to pay her that $8,500. I sure hope she can help with making my application for transfer successful.

 

I hope this week you can read my 15 stories of my autobiography and begin to edit them for the marcemery.ca website, where all my writings will be going. I’d love to have those available to people by mid-October to read. These stories have never been read by any of my supporters before and it will provide insight as to how I became who I am. Plus they are so cute and full of nostalgia and I’m looking forward to the feedback. Tomorrow I’m going to write about Iboga Therapy House, and then the garbage strike in 1986, and then scenes from my travel adventures in India, Indonesia, my trip to the middle east in 1975. I’m going to try to finish a story every day starting tomorrow.

 

I’ve been reading a lot at night until about 2:30 or 3 am. I finished two graphic novels by Alan Moore, Tom Gordon #2 and Top 10. Alan Moore is a fantastic story-teller. I finished the Cartoon History of the World, Books #1, #2, #4, and #3 just arrived today. Alas, most of the world’s history is a depraved slaughter; militarism & enslavement with genocides, and it’s gotten wearying, since regardless of place (China, Rome, Egypt, India, South America, Europe) it’s the same predictable mass killing, stupid punishing religions, domination and conquest. Even me doing this 5-year sentence in this prison feels like an extension of this sordid history of domination over peaceful, largely powerless people by oppressive governments and institutions. I begin to read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography tonight, on that note.

 

After writing over 300 letters from May to early September, I’ve gotten burned out writing letters to correspondents, Miss, so I hope they’ll forgive me if I take a break. I spent 3 to 4 hours every day writing 5 or 6 letters to people but in the last two weeks I’m more wanting to spend that time writing stories that everyone will get to read at marcemery.ca about my life up to now. The Life in Federal Prison piece for Barry Cooper’s book, Robert’s Vietnam story, my autobiography stories, my Canadian voter’s guide: these are the projects I want to focus on for now. I’ve still got the letters I’ve received stacked up, and I’m going to get to my regulars – Carol in Camino, Vanessa in Sacramento, Daniel in Vancouver, Arlette in Vancouver – but I’ve got to get my stories done while the muse is in me, Miss.

 

Loretta is sending me photos of her Marc Emery Support Day activity in Montgomery, up Dexter Avenue where Martin Luther King’s church was. And I hope Jeremiah and you can send me photos of the activities you’re aware of, especially since they won’t let me receive copies of my Facebook page anymore.

 

I haven’t been designated yet, but I’m going to be soon, then I expect I’ll be moving out near the end of October or beginning of November.

 

I sure loved seeing you Monday in that pretty red dress. You had a great tan from Saturday, standing on the bridge over highway #5 with the FREE MARC EMERY signs and all the Seattle-area activists who were with you. You are the loveliest sight for my lonely eyes Miss. You know how I cry many times on the phone or when I write you, Jodie, and even when I see you, and I’m crying now. This is such a difficult challenge, and I won’t lie, it’s disheartening to think I’ve got years to go. As of today I’ve spent over 194 days in jail, and with good time credit of 232 days on my 5-year sentence, I have no more than 3 years and 10 months to go if I spend every day of it in these United States of America prisons. That’s still very discouraging to think about, Jodie, it really is. I hope people are still contacting Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and the US Department of Justice, asking for them to let me serve my time in Canada.

 

I really hope people give some money to Proposition 19, and urge everyone in California to vote for it, because it needs 50% plus one of the voters to vote YES, not just enough votes to beat the No side. Lots of voters go to vote but don’t vote on every initiative, and if you go to the polls but don’t vote on Prop. 19, it’s like a no vote. So it’s more challenging than people think to win; it’s not just a matter of getting more votes than the no side. That vote is in just 6 weeks. If it wins, it will be the most monumental thing to happen in North America this year, and it will really help end the marijuana prohibition so much sooner than if it fails. I’m so disappointed that Peter Lewis, MPP, the DPA and other well-financed groups have not contributed the big money they have access to on this great, great opportunity. If Prop. 19 fails, there will be people in our movement to blame for holding back when they should have committed.

 

I’m very pleased to hear that you have gotten Canadian city councillors, Mayors, MLA’s, numerous Members of Parliament and a Senator so far to sign a letter to the Public Safety Minister urging my repatriation to Canada. That will be impressive. We will need a letter signed by American elected officials for the same purpose to be presented to the US Justice Department regarding my transfer. I’m hoping our supporters can urge Congressman Ron Paul and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson to sign a letter like that, along with any other elected official they know who is sympathetic to ending prohibition. These letters do not ask for my clemency, only that I be transferred in accordance with existing law in both Canada and the United States back to the Canadian Corrections system.

 

I can’t wait, as always, to see you this weekend. Your visits are so precious to me. Since we don’t know when and where I might be sent away to my designated prison, and how long it might be before you can visit me, or even know where I am, I savor these visits. I try to stay strong, sweetheart, and I’m always busy, but I feel I’m not very brave. I miss you tremendously and can get so sad thinking about my loneliness from you. I’m glad no one here razzes me when they see me crying when I write to you, it’s considerate of them, because I am such a wuss. I’m so, so in love with you. Remember when you were sixteen, you predicted to one of your classmates that you would "marry Marc Emery or work for him, or both", as she reminded you about recently? How perfect that your destiny was fulfilled! You are the best thing that ever happened to me, Miss. We must be meant to be soul mates forever.

 

Your prince,

Wanting to come home,

Marc Emery