If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.

Today I received a letter signed by 21 women who are inmates in the Cameron County Jail. I won't include their names because I don't know the status of their cases or whether there is a risk of retaliation.

Please remember these women have usually not been convicted of the crimes they are accused of committing. If they are convicted, they will be moved to a prison. Some may have never committed any crime at all. The following are excerpts with spelling and grammar as I received it:

"To start here in this Jail all the guards are nice persons. I think is not there fault about what's going on in this Jail is the fault of the County the one that is responsable for it. The food is so bad, sometimes it comes with hairs, with nats the water too. About the toilet paper we still having hard time with it one day thay had us with two brown paper napkins for each inmate. Now that Mrs. Gail Hanson has been banned out from this jail like we don't have nobody that we can tell about what we are passing through all weekend and other day we havent no toilet paper if we need they just give us a piece but in the cell we don't have none.

"...About the medical ...other girls they wait they cry of pain or about their physical problems. And the stuff take their time, while the inmate is hurting.

"I was like...bleeding of my surgery and they would give me hydrocarbonate water to clean the cut that was infected. They didn't took me to the doctor until the Consul of Mexico call them.

"Some of the inmates have the mattess torn and the blankets are torn.

"Commisary takes advantage of all the Inmates by selling the items on a very very high price. Somthings comes expire. They do it because they know we don't have other choice.

"The indigent package is toothpaste, a bar of soap and a toothbrush. When they should provide at least one stamp, envelope, one piece of paper and one pen so can the families be notify not everybondy takes collect calls and they should start selling phone cards.

"Recreation should be at least 3 times a week and not always they do that we could one week without getting rec. and that's unfair."

Is this true? In my experience, inmates tend to be more straight forward than people in the free world, just because there are few pretensions left. I think inmates tend to suffer silently. As our founding document says, it is a self-evident truth that 'mankind is more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.' Since these women don't have much chance to abolish the jail, they will be even more disposed to suffer according the self-evident truth of the Declaration of Independence.

Inmates often become stoics, perhaps not in philosophy, but certainly in practice. I have seen inmates suffering from swollen jaws, bad insect bites and dislocated shoulders not even mention the problem. Until I ask about it.

When inmates begin to risk complaints, the conditions have often pushed the boiling point--something else Cameron County has seen.

I have been listening to inmate complaints for over 30 years and I know that there are explanations for mistreatment. I had a client who ate light bulbs. Another who set her mattress on fire. And others who made a regular habit of stuffing up toilets and causing floods.

I don't know if Cameron County jailers were faced with these types of problems, but I know that jailers reach decisions to deprive the inmates based on violations of jail rules. Sometimes jails run out of supplies, which may be the case with toilet paper here.

Part of the problem is sometimes everyone gets punished if the jail administrators can't figure out who is causing the problem. This creates moral and ethical problems. There is a specific provision in the Geneva Conventions that prohibits group punishment.

If it is true that the inmates go a week without recreation, that is a violation of the Jail Standards Commission:

Each facility shall have and implement a written plan, approved by the Commission, for inmate physical exercise and physical recreation. Documentation of physical exercise and physical recreation shall be maintained for Commission review. Each inmate shall be allowed one hour of supervised physical exercise or physical recreation at least three days per week. (Click on the title for reference to the Texas Jail Standards).

Part of the problem is sometimes neither inmates nor jailers know what conditions should be expected under the jail standards. The inmates don't know to ask for them and the jailers don't know what they should be providing.

The commissary is a different type of problem. One of the Democratic candidates for sheriff attempted to make an issue of giving a private contract on the commissary. I was glad he raised the issue, but doubted it would help him much in the campaign.

A private, profit motive for a captive market is not free enterprise. I don't know what the prices are, but there is no reason prices won't be extortionate because there is no competition. Why not give this contract to the Big Brothers, Sierra Club or the Kiwanians or the Hanna High band? Any nonprofit is better than a private, profit making group. Contracting out the courthouse restaurant is different from the jail commissary, because in the courthouse, if prices are too high or the food is old, people can go somewhere else.

Security is also often a problem. The women's jail does not report complaints of being controlled by prison gangs, but I have heard these complaints from Carrizales-Rucker.

The most disturbing thing about the letter remains the complaint that a jail minister is being excluded for fielding complaints. This creates problems both for the Free Exercise of Religion and for shining a light on the nature of the problem. If no one can report on what goes on in a jail, it becomes a dungeon.