7/03/2010

Update 3

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Dear Prayer Partners,

I believe it has been a week since I last wrote. It seems much longer and it feels like a different world. I'll explain the transition - not for my own need to express it (and it isn't about expressing my emotions or feelings through it), but because I know a number of you are interested in the imprisonment process and the life of prisoners.

If my memory is correct I left off my last letter describing the inmate conflict in our pod in Sherburne County. The lockdown did conflict with our final fellowship meeting because I had high hopes of a final meeting and it needed to be cancelled. We have Carlos, Fernando, Bird and the others in God's hands and pray that they will continue in their new lives as disciples. Tuesday morning at 4:30 AM I got the knock on the door and was told to pack up my stuff and go to booking. Three of us were placed in a cell and joined by a fourth, Jeff, who has since become a good friend. At 6:30 AM we were removed from the cell, taken to a room where we were told to take off our prison orange suits and given our street clothes we had come in. In my case it was a dress slack with white shirt, no belt, no tie.

We were all cuffed and shackled and placed in a van along with three others in orange suits. We had no confirmation of where we were going. We came to Anoka, stopped in Anoka County Jail and picked up two more guys in orange suits.

One of these guys so happened to be one who "walked away" from Duluth prison camp in 2004 and has been "on the loose" since then. He was just arrested in California, returned to Minnesota to finish his sentence with another three years added to it at a higher security prison.

After Anoka we ended up at St. Paul Federal Court house where the orange suits got out and the rest of us went to Minneapolis where we were delivered back to the US Marshalls. All the jewelry "shackles and cuffs" were removed and we were placed in a cell again.

I must say here before moving on that while Sherburne county is known as a very high security, bad food, bad place, it was all better than I had expected. The guards and staff for the most part were like real people and I felt their respect.

The US Marshalls were also very nice, respectful, even helpful at times.. At 9:30 AM they removed us from our cells (the four of us), replaced the shackles and cuffs, loaded us back into the van and headed east to Stillwater. We went to Oak Park, which is a state penitentiary. We pulled through a gate in a fenced in area with razor wire all around it. We waited about 20 minutes when a prison buss arrived. It had made its circuit from Chicago, with a stop in Wisconsin and now Stillwater. The buss stopped, the guards came out with shot guns and we were told to unload the van. After they talked some more the shot guns were put away, our hand cuffs and shackles removed, and we knew then we were heading to Duluth. The big buss was full of prisoners who are sitting in shackles and cuffs. We are told to find a seat where we could. We walked on board through the steel gated front of the buss, past all the tough looking shackled prisoners and found our seats next to the same. While the crowd looked pretty tough I reminded myself that the four of us look exactly the same when we were in the orange suits and cuffs. I often think to myself even now how different these guys would look if they had street clothes and no cuffs.

We drove about an hour and a half and stopped at Sand Stone prison where everyone except eight of us were removed. Sand Stone is a mid level security prison and we were all glad we weren't going there.

We got our first look at Duluth Federal Prison Camp at 2:00 PM Tuesday. We couldn't see any fences to make it look like a prison. There was no guard house and no gate. It was a dark overcast rainy day. It seemed we were just at a campus of some kind, which it is. It was originally built as an Air Force base and I'm sure it had more security at that time than it has now.

I forgot to say that on the buss we were like in a big cage. The driver was up front along with an armed guard who locked us in the cage before the buss left. In the back was a port potty toilet on one side with a cage on the other side. The door to the cage was only from the outside the buss and a guard sat in the cage with a shotgun.

The buss pulled around behind some buildings and we were unloaded. It was amazing for us to be standing outside with no cuffs, shackles, or chains. Even though it was raining it was the first time we stood in daylight in seven weeks. To this day in Duluth we have not seen a gun, tazer, or handcuff. We were about to enter a world of big change, the first to be negative.

Tomorrow - the booking experience.

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