Travel In Style

As I reported earlier, the RDAP program at the Florence, CO camp is closed. I was supposed to begin the program on June first. Naturally, every single RDAP camper had to be processed and transferred to various other RDAP camps scattered across the country. I’ve been wondering, how on earth does a guy who lives in the southwest end up in the northeast over 1800 miles from home? I asked for a furlough to finish the transfer process in a timely manner, but with 120 other campers waiting in the wind for a transfer, the camp secretary refused to approve any requests. Ever heard of ‘diesel therapy’? It’s a real thing, and the US Marshall service brags about it to discipline prisoners they don’t like. I was not one of those. I obeyed, didn’t argue or cause trouble, and cooperated during the transfer nightmare.

Here are the details and the positive outcome I discovered from the grueling ordeal to my new camp in MN. On the day of the transfer, the guards print out the list of campers moving which was 44 days ago! They wake everyone up at 4:00 AM, give us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, pile the first group of 77 in a tiny holding tank (I was one of the original 77 campers to transfer) to simmer for about an hour, strip search everyone, redress in inmate travel cloths, and begin the shackling of hands, feet, and waist. Then it’s back to the holding tank for another hour, and a slow shuffle to the bus park outside to begin the 45-minute ride to the airport in Pueblo, CO where we waited for another 1 1/2 hours for the US Marshalls to land the airplane. This part of the show is quite thrilling to watch. The plane comes to a complete stop; the engines turn off, an automatic stepping ramp deploys, and the Marshalls strut off the plane. A couple of police cruisers circle the aircraft with heavily armed officers, and they stationed several heavily armed guards at the front and tail of the plane with shotguns and an M-16 rifle. Very scary for a bunch of campers. Finally, we shuffle off the buses and begin the hour-long ordeal of getting searched again, lined up like rag dolls, and once completed filed onboard like good little sheep.

I was relieved to have a seat on the plane with a cushion. The bus had plastic seats and sitting on those seats for several hours was extraordinarily uncomfortable on the posterior. Next, we endured several stops in California and various other locations in the western regions of the country before landing in Oklahoma at the BOP transfer center that evening. What a long time to be shackled. We waited again before stepping through an assembly line of ‘de-shackling’ five inmates at a time, surrounded by a guard front and back, unclasping the handcuffs. The ordeal didn’t end either. They tested everyone for Covid and guess what ... one guy had the bug, and they quarantined us for 10 days.

Luckily, I made plans for a worst-case scenario because that’s what happened. I had the forethought to invite a fellow camper from Florence who was transferring to the same camp as a cellie, or bunkmate, while we awaited a transfer to our final destination at the OK transfer center. We bunked together for 31 days while waiting for quarantine to clear and a plane to arrive. It would have only been 10 days and out the door we would have gone, but the BOP staff exposed us to a fresh batch of inmates on the last day of our quarantine; thus, we all had to begin the quarantine process all over again for another 10 days at the transfer center. Upon completion, we waited another eleven days to catch a plane to Terre Haute, a hospital prison that accepts other inmates on the move into their SHU hostel, which is a high-security prison ... not exactly what a camper is used to.

We spent 24/7 in the segregated housing unit (SHU) with a 20-minute break to shower and shave every other day. This went on for 11 more days until they announced the next 4:00 AM call to “Pack Your Shit.” A bus ride awaited for another 6 hours to the Oxford prison, another overnight hold-over. The final 8-hour leg of our horrific transfer ordeal to the camp upon the BOP bus ended 44 days from start to finish. How could anything positive come from this experience? It was not a positive experience, but a wonderful thing happened on the way to MN. I made a valuable friendship. My cellie, the guy I planned to spend my time with in case things went wrong during the transfer process, which is an understatement, became a dear friend. It is amazing how positive affirmations, meditation, and staying positive can change a loathsome situation into a productive experience. I built a terrific new friendship that I believe will endure the test of time in the coming years. It is amazing how being trapped together, sharing ideas, bad breath, body odor, laughs, fears, tearful moments, all the dread, loneliness, regret, anger, bad BOP jokes and smears, building a genuine bond between men, and being thankful for the opportunity to find a real friend in the mayhem of BOP madness. It is a wonderful takeaway from the diesel therapy, a specialty of BOP practice. I have won the game by coming away with a genuine friendship that will endure.