Hi Everyone! Rob and I were visiting today and he asked me to wish you all the best in 2003. He will actually be home again in 2003, so we are trying to look at the new year as "the countdown". We are both really thankful to those of you who sent contributions to Rob at the prison, or to his paypal account last month.:)  December would have been a very difficult month financially otherwise! Rob finally was able to purchase a decent pair of sneakers, as well as to replace his radio which was stolen from his coat pocket last week. He has also sent a letter to the IRS trying, once again, to find a way to freeze his monthly tax payments while he is in prison. Keep you fingers crossed for us! That is would be a huge burden lifted from me if it were to go through.
Rob's Dad just reported to me that Rob's web site is finally beginning to show up in search engines. I submitted it to many places, but without really having a clue how to go about it. --So I was surprised to hear that Google has it now, as well as this other site: www.whassup.com  --who have it listed at the bottom of their home page. I was hoping to rally the kind of support the www.savekaryn.com site was getting. If any one of you have any ideas about promoting the site, please let me know. Without any hope of Rob being able to go to the halfway house and begin working again, I am not sure how we are going to make it though the next 12 months on my paycheck alone.
There are a lot of questions and rumors going around the prison about the new halfway house policy. It does not appear that anyone has been sent back to the prison from there as of yet. However, inmates who were scheduled to leave are not going anywhere. Rob also told me he saw something in an article in the New York Times. Here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/business/26FRAU.html   But the important part in the article is this:
"And Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered the Bureau of Prisons to end its long practice of allowing certain low-risk, short-term offenders (many of them white-collar criminals) to serve time in halfway houses instead of prisons.
In a memorandum last week to Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the director of the Bureau of Prisons, Mr. Ashcroft said that the practice violated federal sentencing laws that require imprisonment and that it offered favorable treatment to white-collar criminals. The directive from the attorney general was first reported by Newsweek.
Bureau officials said that as a result of the directive, about 125 inmates at halfway houses (roughly half of them convicted of financial crimes) will be sent back to federal prisons for the rest of their sentences."
:P!!!
Other news....There has been a hot water shortage for the last 6 weeks. Both hot water tanks failed sometime in November. One was repaired about a week later, but it does not house enough hot water to allow for 130 showers every morning. The trick to getting a decent shower there is apparently going during off peak hours. Rob got up at 4:30 one morning to get clean last week!
Rob has not been running on the treadmill much lately. He has been sick on and off a lot, but also because of foggy weather conditions when the prison to goes into "lock down" mode. Inmates who work off site cannot go to work either. So Rob has been stuck inside a lot and doing a lot of reading.
I think that about covers everything!
Thanks,
Shannon
www.freerobrothberg.com