“Hey man, I just left the pill line,” Davis explains. “I haven’t eaten yet.”
“Chow halls closed,” grumbled the guard. “Next time eat first and then go pick up your dope.”
Davis reminds the guard that policy says all inmates must pick up their medication prior to each meal. Unfazed, the guard tells Davis that policy says a lot of things, but he’s still not going to eat.
Too sick to argue and just wanting to go lay down, Davis returns to his unit and goes to bed hungry.
In 2008, Jim Davis was sentenced to both the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) under the same predicate offense. Specifically, he robbed several banks with a gun, earning him 20 years in the TDCJ and an additional 32 years in the BOP, both sentences to be run consecutively.
The recipient of a liver transplant in 2006 that took place at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas prior to his incarceration, Davis figured that he was eligible for early parole under Texas State law. In a nutshell, Davis argued that the prison medical care system was inadequate to house a liver transplant survivor such as himself, a sentiment that was echoed by the doctor who performed his transplant, Marlon F. Levy, M.D.
“Surviving liver transplantation requires highly complex comprehensive coordinated medical care, which is daunting for the vast majority of non-transplant trained and transplant experienced physicians to deliver,” Dr. Levy wrote to the Texas Parole Board on July 18, 2008. “My sense is that that the degree of medical care available through the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is not optimal for the care of a liver transplant recipient.”
On June 6, 2011, after serving just 32-months on a 20-year sentence, Jim Wesley Davis was released on parole into the community.
“I fully expected the feds to be waiting outside the door when they released me from Huntsville,” Davis told Gorilla Convict in an face-to-face interview on August 22. “I just couldn’t believe it when they let me go home clear and free. But I assumed that they knew what they were doing.”
He assumed wrong.
Sixteen days later, US Marshals rearrested Davis and whisked him off to federal prison to begin his 32-year sentence.
Like Texas and other state prison systems, the federal prison system also has a compassionate release program, albeit one that has come under much scrutiny for its lack of use.
“Last year [former Attorney General] Eric Holder told the BOP to let at least 3,000 of us go under the compassionate release program after he changed it or revised it or whatever you call it,” Anthony Keith Green, an inmate housed in the same prison as Davis, tells Gorilla Convict. He sums up in prison-speak what steps the BOP took following Holder’s directive.
“Basically, the BOP told Holder that he wasn’t running shit and the best thing for him to do was to go suck a dick or advocate some more queer shit for a bunch of fags ,freaks and weirdos,” Green said.