Three prisons, thirty days protocol

The Three prisons, thirty days protocol is a staged custody procedure requiring a prisoner to spend time in three prisons over thirty days before being brought in. In the exchange between Richards and Sykes, its importance lies in the gap between a formal safeguard and the urgency of a specific transfer: Richards has already moved the prisoner ahead of schedule, and Sykes’s objection cannot undo it.

Purpose and Procedure

Sykes states the protocol as a sequence: three prisons, thirty days, and only then a transfer inside. The waiting period marks a deliberate interval before intake, rather than an immediate handoff. Sykes insists that the procedure exists for a reason, although the conversation does not specify its operational purpose or the risks it is meant to address.

Richards’s Bypass

Richards explains that he moved the prisoner on a troop transport out of Waco, carrying a group of reservists. He reasons that the transport counts as a federal corridor, and says it landed in Denver shortly after midnight. The prisoner has therefore reached Denver without completing the protocol’s three-prison, thirty-day sequence.

Objection and Practical Limits

Sykes considers the transfer too quick and asks whether Richards knows why it has been rushed. Richards cannot identify the order’s definite cause; it came from a liaison at Special Weapons. He speculates that the urgency may be connected to the prisoner’s deprivation and circumstances, including a cot, a hot plate encrusted with soup, a year without sunlight or fresh air, bad dreams, and the Red Roof. He also links the situation, tentatively, to Elizabeth Macomb Lear’s long battle with cancer, but presents this as a guess rather than confirmed explanation.

Sykes reiterates that the protocol requires three prisons and thirty days. Yet his challenge remains an expression of unease, not an enforceable command: Richards recognizes that Sykes cannot truly order him to reverse course. When Sykes asks what they would do, return the prisoner, he abandons the objection and tells Richards to call when the van arrives. The procedure’s breach is thus acknowledged but not repaired; the pending intake takes precedence over the prescribed waiting period.