My name is Reggie Harper. I’ve been housed here for four years in the Rush City Prison in the state of Minnesota and I’m reaching out because regardless of how we go about it, kites [an informal message or complaint], staff not responding to kites. We’ve reached out to the news and the media, and it seems like regardless of like when our family members call up to central office, which is where the commissioner is housed here, they give the facility our families’ numbers and have them call. And when they call our families, they ask who called you and then they harass us or we get in trouble. So, we’re just trying to get outside attention to the things that are going on here.
You’ve got guys that are being forced to live in a room, you know, with people that they don’t want to live in a room with. There was just recently a situation a couple of weeks ago where a guy had been murdered, and when it hit the news, they’re telling the news that it was a gang violence situation when it wasn’t. These guys simply just were incompatible, didn’t want to live in a room together, had requested to staff to move multiple times. They told them no. And then even when the guy was getting beat to death in his cell, there were multiple guys yelling out asking for help, nobody showed up until the guy was dead.
There was also another situation a couple of months ago where a white guy had told the staff that he was going to stab the Somalian guy if they moved him back in the room with him. They forced him to move back in the room and he stabbed the guy while he was sleeping. The Somalian guy spent a week in the hospital fighting for his life.
The state of Minnesota recently proposed a bill for the MRRA [Minnesota Rehabilitation and Reinvestment Act], which is basically an initiative to allow us to earn time off our sentence. There’s nothing going on here, there’s no programs, nothing that represents rehabilitation. Most guys get out, never gone through programs, never gone through anything to change the way they’re thinking. There’s no trades here; there’s nothing here that allows you to do a job or get you ready for the community upon release.
You know, any staff here that try to help us out, or any staff here that try to, you know, treat us like humans, they’re targeted. And that’s pretty much what’s going on. Like, we work from 6:45 to 2:45 in the afternoon. Most days we don’t know if we’re going to get flag or not. We work Monday through Friday, Saturday and Sunday—flag being time out of our cells—Saturday and Sunday we’re almost guaranteed to be locked down. There are no gyms, no yards. Everything here is—it’s just—everything here is just optional. When we’re asking for help for psych services or we’re asking for help for health services, you know, it’s a long wait. They’re understaffed, and that’s it, that’s it. And they don’t have the budget. They saying that they don’t have the money for people to work overtime or for them to staff the people they say they can’t get people to come out here and work and things like that, and we’re suffering because of it.
And we’re not able to reach out to the people that we need help from. When we reach out to them, they’re just saying that, you know, “Well, your captain or your lieutenant are the ones who are in charge,” you know. Our lieutenant’s not listening to us. Our captain—we never see her. And when she is here, she’s just taking more and more stuff away from us. We’ve lost all our programming, our movie channels, our video games—anything that had anything to do with any type of recreation, we’ve lost it. And guys are just walking through a mental funk around here.
So, the things that are going on, that are popping up on the news, they make it seem like—like it’s the inmates who are dangerous and things like that, but these conditions are purposely being created. So, we need help with programming, we need help with funding, we need help with people reaching out and understanding why the people that are in charge are creating these conditions and are not doing anything about the complaints that are coming from our family and that are coming from us.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
