This is my last communication from the Lompoc Federal Prison Camp that has been converted by my former law firm, specifically, my executive assistant and friend, Pat Sadler, into email form and sent as such. Many of you by now no doubt have read my email newsletter number 6 (August, 2006), and so you know my situation and plans.
I leave Lompoc on September 5th, on the adventure of a Greyhound bus ride for 35 hours before arriving the evening of the 6th at Coeur d'Alene, ID - a beautiful resort town that happens to have a "halfway house". For a maximum of 45 days I will be in "pre-release custody", but expect to be home with Mary Ann in our log house on the Clearwater River by the third week of September. It truly will be wonderful to be home, especially when I officially am released from custody on October 20th.
I have learned a lot, both about myself and what really is important in life - family and their love, and friends and their caring support. I am encouraged in my plans for a non-lawyer consulting practice by the support and suggestions of many professional associates and friends. So watch for my next newsletter - likely in September or early October - when I will provide details of the consulting effort as well as more recent tax and estate planning developments. Also, of course, I will have a new name for the newsletter, since I will be "outside" and no longer "inside". A copy of this email has been posted on the website as newsletter #7, just to insure that everyone who has been checking the website sees this communication.
The main purpose of this communication is to pass on some information on a new book by a fellow inmate, Michael G. Santos:
INSIDE - Life Behind Bars in America
Michael G. Santos is an inmate here at the FPC-Lompoc, and I have come to know him well since he arrived here several months after my July, 2005 self-surrender. He is an amazing person, a self-starter who began his years of imprisonment at age 23 some 19 years ago with a release date of 2013 when he will be age 49. You might think his new book would deal with his own case as a cocaine wholesaler and be the rantings of a disillusioned criminal. Far from it - Michael, who has become my friend, built his own world of dignity, competence and a positive view of the future against tough odds set by the Federal prison system. And that is the point of his book, namely, that America's prisons are about warehousing rather than incarceration plus opportunities for education and rehabilitation.
"INSIDE - Life Behind Bars in America" was published in early August by St. Martin's Press, and already this work has received outstanding reviews in various publications, including Publisher's Weekly, the L.A. Times and on September 10th there will be a review of the book in the New York Times Sunday Edition. I found the L.A. Times review to be awesome and most favorable, and thus recommend it to you. It appeared in the August 20th Sunday issue of the Los Angeles Times, authored by Edward Hume, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and himself author of a number of books.
Mr. Hume wrote: "This surprisingly dispassionate account of life in federal prison reads more like a work of advocacy journalism than personal memoir, freshening both the genre and the arguments about the failings of American prisons." The book is startling in its documented tales of prison abuse at a low security "camp"), but "vivid vignettes and character profiles" (as put by Mr. Hume) clearly are presented in the setting of proving a broken system of incarceration that appears hostile to rehabilitation.
I strongly urge you to read INSIDE, and to consider its message in the light of other voices of criticism and other events. For example, recall the recent "shootout at the Federal prison corral" - among U.S. Department of Justice employees, one with the DOJ Inspector General's investigative unit and the other one of a half dozen Federal corrections officers accused of abusing female inmates in a Florida institution. Then, refer back to my own email newsletter, #5, dated July 12, 2006, at www.owenfiore.com, where I referenced a national commission report critical of prisons in the U.S.: "Confronting Confinement", The Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons", June, 2006 Report.
By the way, my son, Mark, a nationally known political cartoonist and animator, happened to have recently put on the Internet a color, voice plus, animation as part of his regular contributions to www.sfgate.com, focusing on abuse in America's prisons. The best way to view the animation is to check the archives on Mark's own site - www.markfiore.com - July 5th animation: "The United States of Incarceration". Also, see the Santos website: www.michaelsantos.net.
I thank you personally (and later on no doubt we will talk by phone and be able to communicate normally) for your support and ask for it also as I go forward with consulting this Fall. Any suggestions you may have for me would be most welcome.
Owen Fiore
