St. Brides Correctional Center - Federal

I arrived at St. Brides Correctional Center at the end of February 2024. When I first got here things were pretty chill. We had rec all day, with 4 buildings and evening rec three times a week. By all day I mean, 08:30-10:30 gate break at 09:30, you could skip lunch and go to rec from 11:30-13:30, afternoon rec from 13:30-15:30 gate break at 14:30, evening rec from 18:30-dark. The day recs were with 4 buildings– 8 different pods on the “Big” rec yard. The other 2 buildings (4 pods– the short-timers) on the “small” yard. Around the beginning of June things started to change.

The VADOC came out with a fentanyl policy for increasing lockdowns due to drugs. Now, I’m not sure to what extent other prisons in VADOC enforced or implemented these policies and I’m not sure if this is the actual reason this prison did what it did. For starters, this prison was having problems with quite a few people “falling out” from smoking ‘deuce’. Our annual shakedown was 6/3-6/7/2024 (I kept track on a calendar). This was the start of the cracking down on the drug-use and punishing everyone for what only some people were doing.

Every time someone “fell-out” the pod where the event occurred would be put on sanctions (locked down) for 7 days. This was also around the time when they stopped doing lunch rec. So, our pod, specifically, was on sanctions between 6/3/2024 (start of the new policy) and ~10/21/2024 (when they started to become more lenient about it) a total of 50 days. The worst part, the guy who fell out is taken out of the pod, and sometimes was put in a different pod that was not on sanctions; i.e, not getting punished like everyone else. The sanctions include no JPAY kiosk from 06:00-18:30, no going to chow hall, and no rec, programs (school, work, and religious).

Consequently, because of the ‘drug issue’ they wanted to try to limit contact between pods and started a new rec schedule. Instead of having rec all day with four buildings, now each pod only gets 1 hour of outside rec a day where on 2 days of the week a pod has two 1-hour rec sessions in a day. It is a rotating schedule so you do not have rec at the same time every day and it is only one building (2 pods) on a rec yard at one time. Needless to say, but I essentially spent my summer indoors like I was still in jail despite the fact that I do not get high, sell drugs, or cause any trouble. Just recently they started doing “grab-and-go” where we grab a tray from the chow hall but carry it back to the pod to eat in the pod.

These new systems make it harder to interact between pods, to go to programs, and have done nothing to stop the prevalence of drugs. Luckily, they have dialed back their response in their punishment when people do partake. But, they still have not brought rec back to normal hours and they hardly offer many programs– especially when you consider all the days classes are canceled. I dream of the day when they bring back some type of normalcy. This is a level 2 prison in Virginia. There should be some privileges and incentives to being classified as a security level 2.