James Bauhaus 12-1-05
pob 220 -88367
Hominy, Ok 74035
Re: saving $33,000/year
Dear Warden Lightle,
I notice that you like to save money by cutting costs on food. You've cut us out of our daily glass of milk. You've got us down to two glasses of milk/week. Yet you serve coffee every morning and let the inmates drink all they want. Consider that milk and coffee cost approximately the same. One is nutritious, the other is a plant's version of bug poison. Which would be wiser to discontinue? (Mint: you people have already taken away our nicotine, which is another organic bug poison.) Why don't you save a buck on coffee and let us have our milk. You've got your own dairy, but no coffee plantation. If you continue to "sell" the prison's dairy milk to the state lodges and institutions instead of giving it to the prisoners who process it, you may eventually get audited.
You've also chopped out a lot of good food like pork chops and chicken quarters, etc, and substituted low-quality, cheaper ground-up "meats" such as sausages, pasted-together "loafs" and hamburger. These "scrap" meats are often adulterated with condemned meat that is prohibited by law from human consumption. The inmates who still eat these ground scrap meats in the spaghetti, meatloaf, pizza, burritos, patties and chilies are begining to realize that their chronic diarrhea is not always caused by over-spicing used to conceal the stuff's unpalatable nature. We CAN sneak samples past you to Universities which will gladly analyse them for heavy metals, nitrosamines and other chemical poisons and carcinogens.
Few inmates have yet noticed the disappearance of most of the fruit. By depriving us of citrus and other fruits, you make an unhealthy diet even worse. One banana/week and jello and pudding as substitutes do not add up to the daily servings of fruit that our govt recommends. Our govt also recommends fish and seafood twice a week; your diet for us provides less than one serving every two weeks.
You short us on vegetables, too. We get a very limited variety of them, mostly just lettuce, carrots, green beans, cabbage and some corn. We teed cauliflower, broccoli, squash, tomatoes, radishes and okra. (Okra grows like crazy around here! Why don't you lot us grow it ourselves?)
These are vegetables that we NEVER see or see only as small particles in watery soup. Pinching pennies on the food is not wise. In fact, screwing with prisoner's food is why this prison burned in 1983. Forcing prisoners to eat garbage is the primary cause of almost every prison riot in history. This is a well-known fact, so why do prison administrators make this same mistake continuously over the decades?
l am guessing that maybe you would stop screwing with us on the food so badly if I showed you a quick way that you can save at least $33,000/year in only 90 days.
In each of the guard's tea control cages there are four holes that are two inches wide and seven feet tall. that equals a total of 46 square feet. (4 x 2 x (7 x 12) x 10 divided by 144) We reasonably assume that air blows through them at half a foot per second 24 hours per day for the 90 days of November, December and January (46 x .5 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 90 = 178, 848,000) and that the air has to be heated 20 degrees from 40º to 60º, it means that you are losing 3,576,960,000 BTUs by heating air that escapes out these holes. Divide this by 141,000 (the thermal energy of a gallon of oil) and you get a crude estimate of the gallons of oil you will he saving if you screw sheet metal over these holes. (25,368gallons). Also, the missing louvers to the exhaust fans would need to be put back in their places, or a bag put over the thing and the fanbelts removed to prevent someone from trying to run them with the bags on. Also the two side doors of each building would have to be lacked each winter so that they wouldn't defeat the purpose of the main doors and airlock whose function you just restored by plugging the holes.
Only you know how much you pay for heating oil, but 1'm sure you know that it is much more expensive than food is in the long run.
You can also save an even larger amount on electricity, if you are willing to listen.
Z had sent your predecessor that proposal and his lackey sent it back, unread, absurdly telling me that it must go through the counselors, case-manager and unit manager first, as if they had anything to do with the electrical flux in this prisone!
I would be glad if you would accept my ideas and recommend that you pass them on. If you think you have found any error in my calculations, 1 would like to hear of it, and if you doubt my expertise in these areas, there are people working for Ruud and GE who will gladly confirm my figures or give you ones that are more accurate.
Sincerely,
James Bauhaus
12-4-05
James Bauhaus
pob 220-88367 Hominy, Ok 74035
re: prison costs
Dear Speaker Hiett,
There is a class of prison guard forgotten in Corn and Reynolds' scheme to Jack up their pay 20 and provide bonuses for new hires: bureaucratic guards. In each of your hundreds of mini-prisons are at least four guard-crats who do nothing but shuffle paper and produce edicts for the other guards to enforce, such as ''All inmates must have their buttons buttoned at all times!" or "Shirt tails must be tucked in at all times!" etc. These guard-crats get an extra $200/month to use these techniques of petty harassment as a way to increase inmate hostility and vandalism. This increases costs and increases the need for more guards as they heighten the probability that another of your prisons goes up in smoke , as they regularly do.
Put these guardcrats to work doing something useful, such as being the missing guard in the unsupervised, adjacent miniprison, as in the case of the Hominy prison. Guess what their busy day consists of now*The average guardcrat shows up an average of 4.5 days/week, passes out cleaning supplies or shuffles paper, then wastes the rest of the day supplying coffee to his inmate buddies during a gab-a-thon that lasts til noon. Then there is the two hour lunch, three more hours of "work" that has no visible accomplishment, and then they are gone again until 9AM the next day. Meanwhile the vandalism, dope, gambling, extortion and robberies proceed apace, made obvious by the black eyes and skobbed-up heads etc, that no one sees but us, and we can't get it publicized. Even if we do manage to get it publicized, doing so endangers our lives. Most of us are too frightened of permanent injury and disfigurement to complain about the extortion and robberies. We are too old to defend ourselves, and if we do defend ourselves, we are given the same punishment as the aggressors. Also, complaining to the prison crats about this only makes us bigger targets for worse attacks by more powerful people who WILL set their pet inmates onto us like pit bulls.
We older prisoners would appreciate very much your providing us better policing while we suffer your more and more violent prisons.
Sincerely, James Bauhaus
James Bauhaus
LOTTERY SCAMS
Politicians and their tax-scientists love to sell lotteries to the public. Lotteries make instant, fat cash for politicians. The payout is miniscule, plus it is stretched out in small yearly lumps over decades. No one reads the small lawyer-print, either, so most don't know when the winnings are not transferable to heirs upon death, or other legal scams that permit the state to scoop up the remains of what should be the winner's estate. Pro-fits are astronomical for the politicians. They get to pretend that lotteries fund education or other children's needs, etc. Politicians use lotteries as a way to claim that they are relieving the middle class of a portion of their tax burden. (The middle class, being
better educated, know that the lotteries are a losing proposition and do not waste much money on them.) Politicians prey upon the ignorant poor to fund lotteries; people who are least able to appreciate the odds or afford to waste their money.
The people who are ill-educated enough to flush their money on lottery tickets try to rationalize their behavior in various ways. Some think God will reward them for being "good". Others say, "Somebody's got to win: it may as well be me." If a mentally challenged person fell into a bonfire after trying to capture a flame, wouldn't you pull him out? Then how about you and us helping them out here? Good reasons for doing this are some of the statistics that slipped out about lotteries recently from a TV "news" show proporting to inform us about lotteries.
They said that the total US revenue from lotteries nationwide equals $36 billion/year. Of this, $12 billion is said to be profits to the lottery industry. Two billion dollars went to retailers who sell the tickets. Only $1.2 billion went to schools, the most widely used bait to sell lottery legislation down the throats of voters. Many politicians hide the fact that they are, as a group, almost totally pro-lottery because they know that lotteries are a colossal waste: it's like a heroin dealer selling drugs to a junkie. Politicians love the huge piles of fast, easy cash that lotteries generate for them to spend, but they dread the day that citizens learn the ugly secrets of lotteries. One ugly secret appeared above; that only 3% of that $36 billion ever finds its way to schools. Another ugly secret is that as soon as the money begins pouring in, a secret cash-grab war erupts among the politicians in back rooms of the state capitol as they scheme-up legislative ways to skim and divert this river of ear-marked lucre into the general fund. From there the most powerful politicians carve up the beef like so many cattle rustlers.
Politicians are very sneaky about selling lotteries for the above reasons. Knowing better than to soil themselves by sponsoring such classist legislation, they use your taxes to buy public relations firms to sell this crap, then grandly proclaim, ''Let the voters decide in their own election!" This way they generate the fanfare that causes passage of the legislation, then dodge all responsibility when the dirt finally falls. They arrogantly point their fingers at the voters and declare, ''You did this!" fact is, the people who
vote this crap into law do not buy lottery tickets. By far the lottery tickets are bought by the poverty-stricken, ill-educated lower classes who do not vote. The middle class is tricked into voting it in, the underclasses pay for it and the politicians spend the money!
The TV show said that the cost of lotteries is $159/person/year. This figure is suspect, since it adds up to about $46 billion/year instead of their claimed $36 billion/year previously mentioned as the total take in ticket sales. Despite this discrepancy, we can all agree that both figures are sky high.
Another dirty secret of lotteries is that they must be constantly advertised and hawked to the public. This fact is almost never mentioned, and the TV show is to be commended for covering this fact. Unlike good, worthy products this gambling product gets virtually zero word-of-mouth sales. The public must be daily goaded into buying lottery tickets by slick commercial advertising, else sales-eventually fall to nothing as the dupes gradually lose interest as they gradually realize that payoff is not going to happen. About $128 million is spent every year to provide this encouraging pabulum that keeps the lottery scam chasing its tail. The gambling industry, primarily made up of limited liability (read "legally protected"d)partnership corporations whose members and stockholders are rich, connected politicians, lawyers and venture capitalists, addresses this problem by creating many tiny jackpot games that pay off more often, but with the same ratio of money versus wins as in the big games. This flimflammery tricks the fools into thinking that they have more of achance to win. It also makes them crow "I WONT I WON!" more often, which tricks nearby dupes into buying into the scam. It is the same as having free advertising. It's like shooting dope in front of an addict. The retailers pick up on this and recycle it as lists of winners posted inside their stores, since they get a cut too.
One more ugly truth about lotteries is that once started, they must never be allowed to run down and stop. Silk-suited robbers move in immediately and gradually make their moves to perpetrate accounting scams that siphon off the principal that generates the interest that is used to fund the yearly payouts. As capital and principal are quietly shoved out the back door, payin is used as payout. It can't keep up. Inevitably bankruptcy ensues, usually long after the last crooks in the bureaucracy have scurried off like cockroaches to infest other corporations. Lotteries run by govts get bailed out with more of your tax cash.
The last ugly truth about lotteries is the sleazy, rich lawyers that chase down the winners. When a poor fool wins his "millions". he spends every dime of his first year's allotment, then he spends all the credit that the sharks will extend him. They hound him for payment at higher and higher refinance and mortgage rates until it becomes certain ` that it will take several yearly allotments to just get back to even. Instead of cutting back into his lifestyle, he seeks still more "help". The sleazy, rich lawyer then steps in and buys the fool's millions for pennies on the dollar.
In these ways almost every penny of lottery money rushes up in a flood from poor = peoples' paychecks to fill the pockets of the already rich. The only lotteries that should be permitted are reverse lotteries where the rich are forced to buy all the tickets and '
the poor given the task of siphoning off all the "overhead" costs and profits. This would get the bloodsuckers off the people who are already bled white and onto people who are fat and swollen *e ticks.
Of course there are many better ways to tax the rich, such as a pro-rated sales tax and traffic fines based on the violator's ability to pay, as is law in Sweden and other progressive countries. The reverse lottery is a guess, but you get the idea. The task of creating a better, merit-based distribution of wealth is not one that the hereditary rich or the newly rich will take on. This is our job, so let's do it.