Month: March 2022

Refers to taking a bath using one’s sink in the cell rather than going to the shower.

There can be several reasons for choosing to take a bird bath, but safety is the most common. Trans persons may choose to take a bird bath for both physical safety and to avoid harassment and embarrassment in the common showers.

We don’t see it too often, but occasionally TPI receives letters without stamps and the words “Frank Mail” written where the stamp would be.

Frank mail refers to a custom of providing free postage to members of congress and other elected officials. Many prisoners believe that they have “franking privileges” for various reasons, and we do sometimes receive these letters. However, there is no allowance by the postal system for such “Frank Mail” that prisoners or indigent persons sometimes use, and the letters likely have just slipped through the system unnoticed.

In the TDCJ system, CMI stands for “Chronic Mentally Ill” and is often used to refer to the CMI-TP, or the CMI Treatment Program. The program was started in early 2019 (the official policy can be found here), and is claimed to offer additional assistance for persons dealing with certain mental health conditions. However, actual practice indicates it is a means of continuing to assign persons with mental health issues to what is essentially solitary confinement, which TDCJ claims to have eliminated, but which in practice continues under different names. A 2019 Texas Tribune article provides some more discussion of the program.

We don’t see this acronym often, but it is good to know about because when we do see it, it is usually just the “CMI” with no explanation of that that means.