Rodriguez was transferred from FPC Morgantown to FCI McKean, a facility four hours away. What should have been a short drive turned into a 30-day ordeal through the Bureau of Prisons transit system.
Two trans-continental flights, three multi-hour bus rides, 23-hour lockdowns behind iron bars, and cell mates ranging from murderers to worse.
He requested a transfer furlough to transport himself at his own expense. Minimum security classification, no incident reports, self-surrendered.
"On June 8th my request was denied without explanation."
Instead he was stripped, searched, shackled at the ankles and cuffed at the wrists, with a chain wrapped around his waist connecting it all together.
"The end result being that you could not lift your arms or hands much higher than your waist, and you could walk only in painful short shuffling steps."
He was loaded onto a Cold War-era plane with safety stickers in German and Russian, flown to the BOP's Oklahoma City transit hub, and packed into a concrete holding cell where inmates immediately began smoking K2 made from rat poison.
The staff at OKC were "breathtaking in their incompetence. Every last officer was less than useless, all of them wearing an expression of bewilderment as to how they happened to stumble into this predicament of dealing with a plane load of convicts, as if normally they were payroll accountants or copy clerks."
This is part one. Rodriguez is serving five years in federal prison for building non-custodial Bitcoin privacy software.
Full letter: https://www.therage.co/letter-7-notes-from-the-inside/
