Bureaucracy

The prison (BOP) website https://www.bop.gov says, "The BOP encourages inmates to write to family, friends, and other community contacts to maintain these ties during incarceration," and "With the inmate's eventual release, maintaining family ties will improve the likelihood of a successful reentry into the community, thus reducing the potential for recidivism," (not that recidivism is even a consideration since Tom hasn't broken any laws and doesn't intend to).  

So, as I said, I've written to my husband every day and each of my letters have been returned because of the return address label.  As soon as I received the first one back and found out they don't allow labels, I printed out all of the letters I had sent, put them in separate envelopes (because only five sheets of paper are allowed in one envelope) and sent them all at once.

  The BOP website also says, "§ 540.13 Notification of rejections.  When correspondence is rejected, the Warden shall notify the sender in writing of the rejection and the reasons for the rejection. The Warden shall also give notice that the sender may appeal the rejection. The Warden shall also notify an inmate of the rejection of any letter addressed to that inmate, along with the reasons for the rejection and shall notify the inmate of the right to appeal the rejection." And, "The Warden may not delegate the authority to reject correspondence or sign notification letters below the level of Associate Warden."  

Since I was desperate to get letters to Tom who was in isolation, I had scoured the correspondence rules on the website multiple times to try to find these obscure rules.  When I called the prison, they said the rules were on the website.  But they weren't.  So I emailed the prison asking where I might find the rules.  They sent me a pdf of a memorandum that listed all the rules about no colored paper, no labels, etc.  How were we supposed to know that?  How were we supposed to find that memorandum?  In that email, I also told them that I saw on the website that the warden was supposed to be notifying the inmate of the rejected mail and was that being done?  Their response was "yes".  Well, that was a lie.  Tom didn't receive one piece of mail from me until August 3, which was 15 days after he went in.  To this day, he has not received word from anyone, much less the warden, that he had received mail that had been rejected.

It just broke my heart in pieces that he sat there in that tiny cell for two weeks without a word from me as if I didn't care that he was gone.  Either the prison system is run by imbeciles, or diabolically cruel men.

I know it may not seem like much...he didn't receive mail from his wife, nor she from him (because he didn't have stamps, for goodness sake) for two entire weeks.  But, when you're an innocent person and you love your spouse, for him or her to just disappear into a black hole for two weeks, unable to comfort each other in any way, that is torture.  This is America, not communist China...yet.