Extreme Tuning#01

Megan Lee, the host of a podcast, shares her own experience of being incarcerated in Arkansas and her journey of redemption. She also interviews others who have been in prison and their family members to discuss their stories. Megan has been in and out of prison due to drug addiction and has seen the injustice in the prison system. She decided to start the podcast to shed light on the experiences of those who have been incarcerated. She talks about her own crimes being committed out of desperation and shares her last trip to prison, which was affected by the COVID pandemic. Megan talks about the poor management of the pandemic in prison and the challenges of social distancing in a cramped space. The Arkansas Department of Corrections started releasing inmates due to the emergency powers act. By May or June, there were only 18 people left in the barracks. From behind bars to behind the mic, join me, Megan Lee, as I share my story and sit down with others who've experienced it, to share the truth of what life is like behind bars in Arkansas, and the road to redemption. Why did I create this podcast? Tune in to find out. Well, my name is Megan Lee and I am the host of this podcast. I decided about a month ago that I wanted to start a podcast to share the stories of those that have been incarcerated in Arkansas, and also to sit down with their family members to discuss what life has been like for them, what they have gone through, and to just share their stories. I first want to share my story, which is pretty lengthy and I won't get into all of it today. My name is Megan. I am in long-term recovery from drug addiction. I have been to prison several times because of my drug addiction, and I've currently been out a little over three years now from my last stay. And so I'm really have gotten gained interest in justice reform because I've seen the injustice in our prison system in Arkansas and other states as well. And so I just really wanted to come on here and share some of the insights that I have. And there's a lot of politics that have been going into the prison system here in Arkansas lately, and I will discuss that in length later. Right now, I just kind of want to give you the info on why I wanted to start this podcast and what my plans are for it in the future. As I said, I'm someone who has been to prison on several different occasions, and it is not something that I am proud of. However, I can honestly say that I've come out of it a better person. So I went to prison for the first time when I was 21 years old, and it was for forging a check, a $150 check. And I ended up overall doing two years over that $150 check. And that was actually in Texas, and it completely changed the trajectory of my life. I feel like I really wasn't given a fair chance to try to redeem myself. And there's been so many things that I've learned in the years since then that have made me feel like I actually didn't deserve to go to prison at that time. Now, I will say that in the later years, the last several trips that I made to prison, I was fully aware of what I was doing and the consequences of it. That first time that I went when I committed that crime, I wasn't really aware that it was a felony. And with all of my crimes, I will say this, they were committed out of desperation. I was somebody that was very poor. I didn't have notable job skills. My jobs had always been fast food, really some retail experience, but it wasn't really enough to live off of. And for whatever reason, whether it was lack of transportation, lack of training, drugs interfered a lot in my work-life balance, especially in my 20s and early 30s. And so I was really unable to hold a job for a long period of time. And so that led to me committing most of my crimes. In 2019, I was actually caught with a sizable amount of drugs and charged with drug trafficking. That was the last time that I went to prison. I was given a 12-year sentence on an A felony, which I was supposed to have served a half of a half of my time. And so that would have been three and a half years or roughly three years I was supposed to serve. But I did end up getting out early to complete a program. And as a sort of reward for completing the program and following the rules, you are released earlier than your expected release date. And so that was my last trip to prison. I do want to highlight the COVID pandemic and how that affected my last trip to prison. So I was arrested early 2019, like January of 2019 and February of 2019, I was sent to prison. And I went to McPherson Prison is the intake prison for female offenders in Arkansas. So I was taken there to McPherson and immediately I was pulled out of intake and put into the long term substance abuse program they have there. It's called TC for short, but it stands for therapeutic community. If I was pulled into that program, it was a nine month program. And during that time, I went to classes, drug treatment classes, I was pretty successful in the program, mostly because I have done those programs several times. And so I just know how to go in there and work them and elevate yourself to status in those programs. And so I was made the house coordinator my third month in, which is the very top of the pyramid. And, you know, I pretty much helped them run the program. It's not something that was new to me. I did it last time I was in prison as well, which is how the counselors knew me. And the thing about me is, I've done time so many times now that I'm always kind of given a pretty good job in prison. They know I'm going to show up and do my job. So I was also given the job of laundry clerk or chemical clerk within laundry. And so 2019 blew by pretty fast and I knew that I really wanted to do something further with my time. And so I kind of planned that out during 2019. And I had decided I had enough time that I wanted to go to work release where I can work and save up money within the prison. You go outside the prison walls and you work a free world, what they call a free world job, and you get paid free world money, which is an extreme privilege in the Arkansas Department of Corrections because very few jobs actually pay you money. Most jobs, most compound jobs, you do not get paid anything. So I had decided that was what I was going to do and save up my money so that when I got out, I would have a cushion so I could get my, you know, get a place to live and get a car and all that. So late 2019, we started seeing the news where there is this virus called COVID. And without much contact to the outside world, there's just not a lot of information that I knew about it. I mean, I would see it on the news. I was like, it's no big deal. It kind of reminded me of when they had like the swine flu or whatever. You know, we may get sick, but we'll be OK. But it started getting a little bit more serious, I guess, December of 2019, which was also the same time that I was pulled to go to work release. So I got pulled to go to work release, which the unit for work release was at this other unit called Tucker Reentry. And so it was a very, very small facility within the Arkansas Department of Corrections. And on one side of it was work release, and then on the other side of it was what they called the reentry side. And I don't know why they called it the reentry side, because there was nothing reentry about it. There was no programming. There was it was just nothing. It was just another unit to house people in. And once I got there, I got pulled there to go to work release. Once I got there, the records lady told me that I had a warrant. Now, I knew that all my court cases were settled and I kept sending requests in because they removed me from the work release side and put me on the reentry side. So I kept sending requests in saying that they redo the warrant search and they refused to do that. I kept telling them that I had already been sentenced on that case and I sent in all my documentation and they still wouldn't. They kept saying that I still had that warrant and I knew it wasn't true, but I didn't have any family or friends or anybody that I could ask to call Lone Oak County for me and get all the documentation that they needed. And so I was denied work release. And so I was sent to the reentry side, which was where I remained housed for the remainder of the year. Now, come January, February, March, things really started escalating with COVID and people started dying. People started dying on the outside. It was on the news every night. Then it came out that they were shutting down, like you couldn't go into stores and people were having to miss work and not go to work. And we were just seeing all this on the news every day. And then I guess it was like March 11th, they shut everything down or around the country, different states started shutting down. And so coming into the prison, the officers started bringing us these masks. Now, the masks they made weren't the kind that you go buy at the store. They used inmates at Cummings Unit and used the same material that our uniforms are made out of. And they made them into little squares and put little rubber bands around them. And those were the masks that we had to wear. And how I was supposed to wash them. I mean, there's so many things they didn't know what they were doing. In fact, Wendy Kelly was the director of ADC, ended up resigning because of their poor mismanagement of the COVID pandemic. So many inmates died. So many inmates got sick. Now, I was blessed to be a smaller unit and we actually did not have too many COVID outbreaks at that unit. However, the guards would come in and they would tell us that we'd have social distance. So this was the thing we were supposed to say six feet away from each other. Tell me how we're supposed to do that. Our bunk beds were two and a half feet space between them. And then it was a bunk bed. So there was a person on the top bunk and then a person on the bottom bunk. And and also the unit that we were at was a very small unit. I mean, we were kind of cramped in there. So the barracks actually had 30 bunk beds in it. So it would house 60 people. And the Arkansas Department of Corrections started releasing people. They started doing emergency powers act. If you met certain qualifications, which I did not meet, but they started releasing people in droves pretty much. They would call people to the office and they would release 10, 15, 20 people. And so by May or June, there was only about 18 of us left in that barracks. A lot of the officers had quit. But they would yell at us to social distance and to keep our mask up. But here's the thing, as an inmate, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not in touch with the outside world. The only people that are in touch with the outside world for the officers. But also they were still letting work release go to work outside jobs, which really, I'm not going to say it bothered us, but it just didn't make much sense to us. Because if you're so worried about an outbreak inside the prison, it would make sense to contain the prisoners as much as possible and not let the work release inmates go to work. And it was only certain, certain of them had been laid off, but some of them were still going to work every day. And the only sense that I can make of this is that the prison, the prison got paid for this. They received money for those inmates. Because when you work and you get paid on an outside job, you had to pay, I think it was ninety eight dollars a week in rent. And so what they rent, they called it program fees or something like that. And so the prison was actually getting a lot of money off these people still going to work. At the end of the day, if you're so worried about COVID, it would make sense that you stop letting these people go to outside jobs, no matter how much money they're bringing in the prison system. But they didn't. They continued to go to work for months and months and months. And the officers would come in, they wouldn't be social distancing, they wouldn't be wearing their masks, but yet they would write us up for not having our masks or for not social distancing. And to be quite honest, it was a it was a it was chaos. It was pure chaos. And, you know, we were scared in there because you don't know your family members could die. You know, one person could come in and bring COVID in and it takes out the whole unit. And every day our governor, which was Asa Hutchinson, would get on the TV and he would announce how many deaths they've had for the day and like how many new cases. And and then part of that started being they added to it how many prisoner deaths per day, how many prisoner outbreaks they had per day. And so we were just watching all this and ADC is not giving us any information about what's going on in the outside world. It's just like it was very scary, to be honest with you. And I mean, I am so thankful that come January of 2021, I got picked to go to outside reentry and actually left that month because that stuff drug on we ended up going. They closed that prison down because of lack of staff and they moved us all to Rottsville unit. And I mean, I'm so grateful that I got to leave that situation. But there were so many inmates that did die and lose their life because of the mismanagement of COVID, so much so that the director of ADC at the time, Wendy Kelly, actually stepped down. She lost her job because of it, because they didn't know what they were doing. And if one person had got it in a unit, they quarantined the whole unit. And anybody who had come in contact with that inmate, they quarantined that whole unit. But they would quarantine them together like they put them all in the same barracks. I mean, what sense did that make? So to finish up this story, in January of 2021, I was able to go to the outside reentry program in Little Rock, and that was the beginning of my new life. I did six months in the reentry program. I went to work every day and they took out money for rent. But every other penny that I made went into a bank account that they saved for me when I got out. And so during this time, also, all of the stimulus checks that were sent out by the federal government, there was three of them, I had been able to collect those as well. So I had those three stimulus checks, plus all of the money that I saved up working at reentry. And I was able to roll out for myself into an apartment. I had a job when I got out, although I didn't keep that job for very long, but I found a better job. And then I was able to buy a car and pretty much furnished my apartment and I had everything that I needed. And it set me up on the right path to be successful. And I wholeheartedly believe that that reentry program, as well as other treatment programs I've been to previously, are the reason that I've been able to turn my life around and be so successful this time out. And I'm so grateful for that experience. I wanted it so bad when I learned of it, when I had gone to prison before. And I thought, you know, they should really give everybody that opportunity to do that when they get out because it really sets you up for success. Normally, when you get out of prison and you don't go through the reentry program, they give you $125 at the gate or they give you $50. And then when you go see your parole, you get the other $75. And especially in today's economy, I mean, that's one trip to Walmart and you still wouldn't have everything that you needed. And so trying to get those things that you need to get started back in life can be extremely difficult. I mean, can you imagine, you don't have transportation, you don't have any clothes, you don't have a cell phone, you're living with your cousin or your mom or dad. And that springs on a whole nother set of problems as well because your family or whoever you parole out to has put these expectations on you and they might not have even told you about their expectations, but they expect you to act in a certain way. And if you don't, then it's a problem, then it's an issue. And you might not even know about their expectations. You're just doing the best you can with what you've got to work with. And so we will dive more into reentry and release in later episodes. I really just wanted to get this episode out tonight and get it posted to get this podcast started. Y'all bear with me because I am still learning how to do this podcast thing. I am an amateur. I am a beginner and I am doing the best I can with what I have to work with. Now, it is important to me to get these stories out because I think everybody's story deserves to be heard. And I'm so excited. I have so many people lined up that want to do this podcast and want to share their stories, and I'm so excited to share them with you. And it's not only going to be people who've been incarcerated, but also I plan on having family members on here as well. Ladina Biddle is the founder of this nonprofit called Arkansas Department of Corrections Family Support Group. We have a group on Facebook with about 400 members of people who have loved ones incarcerated in the Arkansas Department of Corrections. And we actually went to speak to the legislators last December and we will talk about that some more as well. But if you're listening to this and you have family members who are incarcerated in Arkansas, please feel free to reach out and join the group for support. Oh, you know, we do things in the group like answer questions and how to do, you know, just simple things like get on someone's phone list, how to do emails, those kinds of things, just questions that people that have never been involved in the system before might not know how to navigate the system. And so the group is there to help with those kinds of things as well. And so I would encourage you if you are involved in the system anyway, just reach out to that group and request to join. Arkansas Department of Corrections employees are not allowed in a group and that is so that it can be a safe space for the family members. And I just really like the group that we have. It's been very therapeutic for me since I've been out to be a part of the group and be able to give back to family members. My mother and grandparents are deceased and I don't have any brothers or sisters. And so it helps it helps me feel better about myself to be able to help other people that may not know how to navigate the system to learn how to navigate it. And so that's pretty exciting as well. I am going to end this podcast with this next week. I plan on having a woman named Brittany on. I met her in 2010 when we were at RPF together. I am excited for her to share her story. She actually gave birth while she was incarcerated. So I want to talk about, you know, the medical treatment she may or may not have received and how that has affected her long term. So be sure and tune in for that. I will be releasing that episode next Sunday night as well. And I am so glad that you have decided to join. If you're still listening, thank you so much. I have a very lengthy story and there's no way I could fit it all into one piece. But this is a small piece of it. If you have anything that you want to add or any questions you want to ask, feel free to reach out to me on Facebook. Other than that, thank you so much for listening. This has been exciting for me to start this venture and I am so excited to see where it may go.