Staff

Your case manager oversees your progress, measured by completed programming, your transfer home, and whether you get put in for a transfer to another facility.

They are the most consequential staff member in the building for you.

The counselor is the go-between for you and administration. The case manager is described above. The unit manager supervises both.

Together they are your unit team, and almost everything you will ever need goes through one of the three.

A meeting with your case manager where they hand you paperwork generated by a computer system.

It is also the only scheduled opportunity you get to ask about your release date and your halfway house referral, so go in with your questions written down.

Sure, but realistically only on the chow line.

Executive staff walk mainline, and that is the actual access point. It is a thirty-second conversation, so bring one sentence and not a story.

Bring receipts. In writing, one thing at a time, with the policy reference if you have it.

That last part is the whole trick, and it is why the program statements are annotated on this site. A request that quotes the policy it relies on is a different object than a request that does not.

A written request for informal resolution. It is what you submit before going up the chain.

Keep a copy of every one. The formal remedy process will not take you seriously without a record that you asked nicely first, and the whole chain is in PS 1330.18.

Get used to it — and keep asking anyway, in writing, on a schedule. The written record is the only thing that makes escalation possible later.

Your people on the outside can also create pressure that you cannot create from inside. The family guide covers how to do that without making you a problem.

If you follow what I have said elsewhere, not really.

Friendly, to a degree. Friends, no. And being seen in extended private conversation with one creates a problem for you with everybody else.

The problem it creates is that people assume you are talking. Information and trust is about why that assumption is so cheap to form and so expensive to carry.