Day 7 in FCI Seagoville I am writing this on 2/28 at 12 pm, sitting in the computer/TV room, getting ready to be moved to my main housing unit which apparently is now unit 5, not unit 53. An interesting thing happened last night. The quarantine unit, unit 10 I have been in since I got here is separated by a locked door in the middle. Turns out one of my co-defendants is next door. I haven’t seen him since the day we got arrested in February 2017. We were close friends before that, but when you are indicted by the federal government in a conspiracy, part of your bond conditions is you cannot talk to any of your co-defendants, or the feds will violate your bond and throw you in jail. Now we are moving to the same housing unit, unit 5.

Pretrial detention centers in the Fed system are horrible. I was in one for two months for my violation of online gambling from February 2018 to April 2018. Most of the federal detention centers are county jails that are subcontracted with the Bureau of Prisons. They are horrible and would make a grown man cry. Even the “hardest” criminals I met in detention complained about it. It should be criminal how the Feds do that. They put you in a detention center if the judge denies you a bond or revokes your bond. Mind you, while you are in detention you are in pretrial and have not been convicted of anything. “Innocent until proven guilty”. In order to be denied a bond initially the judge needs to determine you are either a danger to the community or a flight risk. In order for them to violate you on your bond the judge just needs to find probable cause that you broke one of your conditions of release on your bond. Probable cause is an extremely loose standard, and they don’t even have to have enough proof to charge you with a new crime. In my violation the judge violated me for what would have been a class C misdemeanor in the State of Texas; mind you I was never given a ticket or charged with the misdemeanor I was violated for. I am convinced the Feds make these detention centers unbearable to encourage defendants to plead guilty in order to get out of the detention center and be moved to a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility which is like the Ritz Carlton compared to these detention centers. The federal bureau of prison low-security prisons is infinitely nicer than the detention centers it is no comparison.

I am not sure why no one is talking about this fighting for criminal justice reform, but it is absolutely ludicrous that someone who hasn’t been proven guilty is confined in a place much worse than people who have pled. One of the many broken parts of our system no one is talking about.

Moving on, the food has picked up here quite nicely and actually is fairly decent. We get our first run at commissary this week which is supposed to be weekly with a 180 dollar spending limit every two weeks but because of the Covid hoax, they are giving us 50 dollars every two weeks. It is honestly ridiculous, and I don’t see it changing maybe forever. The Federal BOP is using it as an excuse to not do their jobs but still house prisoners and get their budgeted allocations, and our government, in general, is using it as an excuse to run us and control our lives. 20 more seconds left on this computer session. Hitting send. Pray for my wife Amy!!!!

Brad