The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

October 10, 2009

Angola 3: Herman Wallace's Appeal Denied After 37 Years in Solitary Confinement

Appeal Denied After 37 Years in Solitary Confinement
by James Ridgeway. The Unsilent Generation
Posted: 10 Oct 2009

The Louisiana State Supreme Court Friday denied an appeal from Herman Wallace, who has been held in solitary confinement for more than 37 years. Wallace and Albert Woodfox are members of what has become known as the Angola 3, whose story I have been covering for Mother Jones. Convicted of the 1972 murder of a prison guard at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, both men maintain their innocence; they believe they were targeted for the crime and relegated to permanent lockdown because of their organizing work with the prison chapter of the Black Panthers. Wallace, who is now 68 years old, was recently transferred from Angola to the Hunt Correctional Center near Baton Rouge, where he continues to be held in solitary. Two days ago, Wallace descended even deeper into the hole, placed in a disciplinary unit called Beaver 5 for unknown violations of prison policy.

Herman Wallace launched the appeal of his conviction nearly a decade ago. His lawyers have introduced substantial evidence showing that the state’s star witness, a fellow prisoner named Hezekiah Brown, was offered special treatment and an eventual pardon in exchange for his testimony against Wallace and Woodfox. In 2006, a judicial commissioner assigned to study the case found that there were grounds for overturning the conviction, but Wallace’s application was subsequently denied–by the state district court, court of appeals, and now by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

While every setback comes as a blow to a man nearing 70 who has spent nearly four decades in lockdown, one of Wallace’s attorneys said tonight that this denial by the state’s highest court came as no surprise, since it has a reputation for refusing to overturn the decisions of lower courts. Today’s ruling opens the doors to a federal habeas corpus challenge, beginning with the Federal District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana at Baton Rouge. Here, if Wallace is lucky, his case will be reviewed by a fact-finding federal magistrate, and his conviction overturned by a federal judge. This is what happened to Albert Woodfox last year. Yet Woodfox, too, remains in prison–and in solitary confinement–as the state appeals the judge’s decision.

Louisiana’s Attorney General, James “Buddy” Caldwell, has stated that he opposes releasing the two men “with every fiber of my being,” while the Warden of Angola and Hunt prisons, Burl Cain, has more than once suggested that the two men must be held in solitary because they ascribe to “Black Pantherism.”

In addition to their criminal appeals, Wallace and Woodfox (along with Robert King, who was released in 2001), have a case pending on constitutional grounds. They argue that the conditions and duration of their time in solitary confinement constitute cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Their lawyers have submitted reports showing the effects of decades of solitary confinement on men in their sixties—including arthritis, hypertension, and kidney failure, as well as memory impairment, insomnia, claustrophobia, anxiety, and depression. The suit also argues that Wallace and Woodfox are being held in lockdown for their political beliefs, in violation of the First Amendment.
http://unsilentgeneration.com/

Posted by lois at 10:52 PM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2009

Illinois DOC Press Release Outlining Plan for Reforms Including Tamms Prison Review

Illinois Department of Corrections Director Outlines New Vision for State Prisons, Completes Tamms Prison Review, Announces Reforms
Released September 21, 2009

Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) Director Michael P. Randle today outlined his plan for reforming the state’s prison system. Randle’s vision to move the department forward includes implementing the Illinois Crime Reduction Act of 2009 and a 10-Point Plan for the supermax prison in Southern Illinois.

“There are a number of criminal justice reforms on the horizon in which IDOC will play a significant role. One in particular is the implementation of the Illinois Crime Reduction Act of 2009, which will fundamentally reshape the criminal justice system in this state,” Director Randle said. “I applaud Governor Pat Quinn for signing this into law and Senator Kwame Raoul and Representative William Burns for their hard work in getting this legislation passed. I will use this new law as a blueprint to move the department forward.”

The Illinois Crime Reduction Act of 2009 will reduce the number of commitments to IDOC in part by creating a new program to help divert adults from prison.

Funding for the Adult Redeploy program will be given to those counties who use community-based diversion programs to help those who would have otherwise received a short-term prison sentence. Reducing the prison population will save the department money, stimulate the economy and help reduce recidivism.

The Act also calls for the implementation of an automated integrated system to link courts, probation, prison and parole. Such a link will help formulate an offender’s reentry plan and reduce recidivism.

It will identify resources and services needed, such as substance abuse programming and job placement, as well as other factors, including education level, skills, attitude and relationships that can affect the outcomes related to the reentry process.

In addition to the Illinois Crime Reduction Act of 2009, IDOC will implement reforms at the Tamms Closed Maximum Security Unit (CMAX). After appointing Randle as IDOC director in May, Governor Quinn requested that Randle thoroughly review the operations at the Tamms facility.

“There is ample evidence that shows significant decreases in staff and inmate assaults and gang activity since the opening and operation of Tamms. While the need for such a facility exists, there are several operational reforms that are being recommended,” Director Randle explained.

Tamms CMAX, which opened in March 1998, is designated to house IDOC’s most disruptive, violent and problematic inmates. Inmates approved for placement at Tamms CMAX have demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to conform to the requirements of a general population prison.

After conducting a thorough review of the operations at Tamms CMAX, Director Randle made the following recommendations in his Tamms 10-Point Plan:

* Point 1: Allow each inmate placed at Tamms CMAX to have a Transfer Review Hearing.
o Specific timelines to conduct Transfer Review Hearings are being designated.
o Inmates will be given an opportunity to refute and offer information that may impact their transfer to Tamms CMAX. Inmates will also be given an opportunity to appeal their placement at Tamms CMAX.
o An audio recording of all Tamms CMAX placement hearings will be maintained.
* Point 2: Inform each inmate of an estimated length of stay and how privileges can be earned to provide for eventual transfer from Tamms CMAX.
o Based on the offense the inmate committed, staff will use professional correctional judgment to inform the inmate of a range of time he should expect to serve at Tamms CMAX.
* Point 3: Promote the medical and mental health evaluation process conducted prior to and after placement for each inmate sent to Tamms CMAX.
o Each inmate placed at Tamms CMAX will receive a full mental health evaluation within 30 days of placement.
o Mental health staff will make weekly rounds in all housing units to identify any inmate who is decompensating as a result of transfer to the facility.
* Point 4: Increase inmate privileges throughout the Behavioral Level System to incentivize positive behavior at Tamms CMAX.
o Dependent on behavioral adjustment, the amount of out-of-cell recreation time and commissary will be increased.
o Telephone privileges will be added to the Behavioral Level System at the facility.
* Point 5: Begin offering General Educational Development (GED) testing at Tamms CMAX.
* Point 6: Implement congregate religious services for inmates at Tamms CMAX.
* Point 7: Rescind some of the printed materials restrictions for inmates at Tamms CMAX.
* Point 8: Develop a plan for a Reassignment Unit at Tamms CMAX similar to those operated at other step-down units.
o The Reassignment Unit will be an intermediate step for inmates who present the most risk if transferred from Tamms CMAX, but have demonstrated appropriate adjustment behavior.
* Point 9: Plan a media, legislative and public outreach strategy that includes a visit to Tamms Correctional Center.
* Point 10: Reexamine the population of inmates having served extensive time at Tamms CMAX for transfer eligibility.
o A review of the inmates held at Tamms CMAX from 1998 through 2004 was conducted to determine which inmates were appropriate for eventual transfer out of the facility. Of the cases reviewed, 45 were deemed eligible for transfer.

“The John Howard Association of Illinois has championed many of these reforms since Tamms opened in 1998. We are deeply grateful that Director Randle has made so much progress in such a short time, and we enthusiastically endorse his Ten-Point Plan.

These reforms will improve the conditions of confinement, better address mental health needs, afford inmates greater access to fair and humane treatment and offer them the promise of education and other programming. Inmates who have demonstrated years of good behavior also now have a chance to earn their way out of Tamms and back into prisons with less harsh conditions.

As advocates, we know that reform is a process, and we will keep a close eye on monitoring the implementation of these welcomed reforms,” said Hanke Gratteau, executive director, John Howard Association of Illinois.

Director Randle is looking forward to implementing the Tamms 10-Point Plan and will continue to monitor and evaluate the reforms to ensure their effectiveness.

The full report on Tamms CMAX is posted on IDOC’s Web site: idoc.state.il.us.
http://chicagopressrelease.com/press-releases/illinois-department-of-corrections-director-outlines-new-vision-for-state-prisons-completes-tamms-prison-review-announces-reforms

Posted by lois at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2009

IL: DOC head visits Tamms and unveils some reforms

Illinois"Members of Tamms Year Ten, an activist group, praised parts of Randle's plan, but said it doesn't go far enough, particularly when it comes to mentally ill inmates.
"It sounds like the Illinois Department of Corrections is really moving into a new direction at Tamms," said Laurie Jo Reynolds, a spokeswoman for Tamms Year Ten. "But ... there must be some mental health oversight, independently, to prevent well-documented abuse and neglect of mentally ill prisoners."

Ill. Corrections head unveils reforms for Tamms
By SOPHIA TAREEN Associated Press Writer
September 17, 2009
CHICAGO - The head of the Illinois Department of Corrections unveiled a reform plan Thursday for the state's lone supermax prison, including increased mental health evaluations, more incentives for good prisoner behavior and the transfer of dozens of inmates.

Department of Corrections Director Michael Randle, who was charged with reviewing the debated Tamms Correctional Center when he was appointed in June, said his 10-point plan came after a visit to the far southern Illinois facility.

"We must take a holistic look at the entire institution," he said Thursday at a luncheon for the John Howard Association of Illinois, a prison reform group. "It's imperative to take systematic reforms."

Randle said he spent about 10 hours of his second day on the job at Tamms, which houses about 250 of the state's worst offenders. He said he interviewed staff, walked every cell block and observed routines.

He said a review was conducted of inmates held at Tamms from 1998 to 2004 and that 45 would be eligible for an eventual transfer to lower security facilities. He also vowed that every inmate at Tamms would receive a full mental health evaluation within 30 days of arriving and mental health staff would conduct weekly checks on inmates.

The reforms come as Tamms, where prisoners spend most of their days in solitary confinement, faces heavy scrutiny and numerous lawsuits for allegations of inhumane treatment of prisoners.

Amnesty International has urged Gov. Pat Quinn to end indefinite solitary confinement at Tamms and to prohibit transferring seriously mentally ill prisoners to the facility. Other advocates have even pushed for closing the 11-year-old facility.

Randle said Thursday that closing Tamms never was considered. He said he did not know the details of Amnesty's call for change at Tamms, but he does not support independent reviewers coming into the facility.

He declined to discuss specific details on allegations of abuse.

"Any allegation is looked into," he said.

Members of Tamms Year Ten, an activist group, praised parts of Randle's plan, but said it doesn't go far enough, particularly when it comes to mentally ill inmates.

"It sounds like the Illinois Department of Corrections is really moving into a new direction at Tamms," said Laurie Jo Reynolds, a spokeswoman for Tamms Year Ten. "But ... there must be some mental health oversight, independently, to prevent well-documented abuse and neglect of mentally ill prisoners."

Randle, a former deputy director of Ohio's prison system, devoted most of his speech, entitled "Charting a New Course for Illinois Prisons," to touting his Tamms plan.

He said the reforms also include informing all prisoners on their approximate length of stay, giving each prisoner a transfer review hearing, allowing Tamms prisoners to take the GED and increased incentives for good behavior, like telephone or out-of-cell privileges.

Quinn, who appointed Randle, has signed off on the reforms.

Tamms warden Yolande Johnson told The Associated Press the plan "is very doable" but some points will be more difficult to implement than others, like installing a telephone system for inmates.

She declined to comment on abuse allegations, saying prison staff follow the state's mission of treating prisoners humanely. She disagreed with some activists' recent comparisons of alleged abuse at Tamms to abuse allegations at Guantanamo Bay.

"We don't torture inmates," she told the AP.

During the speech, Randle said his other goals for all the state's prisons is to reduce the recidivism rate, which is about 51 percent, and the number of prisoners overall.

Illinois has about 46,000 inmates and about 33,000 parolees.

Randle said it would be better for lower level offenders to be punished through community programs, instead of jail, particularly as his agency faces budget cuts and staff reductions.

"We are reviewing every facet of IDOC," Randle said.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-illinois-correcti,0,5700735.story

Posted by lois at 09:17 AM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2009

IL: Allegations of Human Rights Abuses at Tamms super max during Senate hearing on mental health in prisons

“Mental illness has been criminalized in our country over the last 30 years,” Durbin said. “By allowing our prisons and jails to become a primary provider of mental health services, we have taken a step backward in the effort to protect the human rights of people with mental illness.”

Tamms super max discussed during Senate hearing on mental health in prisons
BY CALEB HALE, The Southern

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Allegations of human rights violations at the super maximum security Tamms Correctional Center in Alexander County were part of a hearing in the U.S. Senate Tuesday.

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law heard from Illinois Department of Corrections Director Michael Randle and others in its first-ever hearing related to a domestic human rights issue – mental health in U.S. prisons. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Springfield, set the hearing after learning about alleged problems with the treatment of mentally ill patients at the Tamms super max prison.

Tamms Year Ten Committee, a group based in Chicago, as well as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have urged action on reports of prisoners being held too long in solitary confinement without any mental health treatment, despite displaying problems.

Randle is investigating how Tamms and other state prisons address mental health issues, a directive from Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn.

“Mental illness has been criminalized in our country over the last 30 years,” Durbin said. “By allowing our prisons and jails to become a primary provider of mental health services, we have taken a step backward in the effort to protect the human rights of people with mental illness.”

More than 2.3 million people are imprisoned in the U.S. and half of all inmates have a mental health problem, according to a 2006 study by the U.S. Bureau of Justice. Mentally ill prisoners have little or no access to services and their conditions often deteriorate, as was alleged in multiple cases at Tamms.

http://www.southernillinoisan.com/articles/2009/09/15/breaking_news/doc4aafd563d71b0862786042.txt
This and other news about control units and supermax prisons can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2009

Coalition for Prisoners' Rights Newsletter now can be found on the Real Cost of Prisons website

As many of you know, the C.P.R. newsletter was published for 34 years. In June 2009, they mailed an announcement to their 9,100 subscribers ... almost all of whom are prisoners saying the could no longer afford to keep printing and sending the newsletter. The Real Cost of Prisons believes in the work of the C.P.R. To reach out to families, friends, allies of prisoners, we will post the C.P.R. Newsletters in PDF format beginning with July, 2009. Each month, we will post a new newsletter. The Newsletter is now 2 pages. We encourage you to download the newsletter and send it to prisoners so that they will continue to receive this important source of information and inspiration for organizing that the Newsletter provides.
http://www.realcostofprisons.org/coalition.html

Posted by lois at 07:41 PM | Comments (0)

August 03, 2009

Part 2 of series on Tamms: Trapped in Tamms: Inmates in Illinois' only supermax prison face battle proving mistreatment

Monday, Aug. 03, 2009
Trapped in Tamms: Inmates in Illinois' only supermax prison face battle proving mistreatment
BY BETH HUNDSDORFER AND GEORGE PAWLACZYK - News-Democrat

Anthony Gay always fought back. Even in first grade he was quick with his fists, especially when kids mocked his temper or taunted him because he lived with foster parents.

When he came home bloody and bruised, a big mutt he called Diamond comforted him. His aunt, Shirley Gay, who raised her nephew in a tough Rock Island neighborhood, said she always feared that someday Gay's anger would get him into serious trouble.

However, there was nothing in his juvenile record to suggest that Gay would end up where he is today -- serving 99 years in solitary confinement at Illinois' supermax prison, the Tamms Correctional Center -- after an initial conviction for punching another youth and stealing his hat and a dollar bill. He received probation for that crime, but violated it and landed in prison at age 20 to serve seven years, with parole possible after 3 1/2.

Gay was sent to the maximum security Pontiac Correctional Center, where convictions in the nearby Livingston County Court for assaulting guards added decades to the quick-tempered inmate's sentence, even though these crimes did not involve serious injury and such crimes often are not prosecuted at other prisons, a News-Democrat investigation found.

Gay spends 23 hours a day in a cell at Tamms, in the southern tip of Illinois, where he has been held for the last five years. He first was transferred to Tamms in 1998 and held for about a year before being returned to Pontiac.

To cope with the isolation at Tamms, he has regularly mutilated himself to the point that it required extensive suturing to close his wounds, sometimes without anesthetic, court records state.

The Tamms policy regarding "cutters" often means time on a strap-down bed, a metal framework where an inmate lies spread-eagle, bound by his arms and legs with leather straps.

Gay has been strapped down for periods of up to 32 hours, according to court documents. A prison doctor has testified that mutilators are restrained this way for their own protection so they can't cut themselves until the desire to mutilate passes.

For civil rights lawyers and prisoner advocates, cases like Gay's raise the question: Does a lengthy sentence for a series of minor crimes served in solitary confinement under conditions that drive a person to self-torture amount to cruel and unusual punishment banned by the Constitution's Eighth Amendment?

Civil rights attorneys say a lawsuit raising that question probably would not succeed. They say federal law and U.S. Supreme Court decisions have produced legal hurdles that make it all but impossible to bring many Eighth Amendment arguments. In particular, they cite the 1996 Prisoner Litigation Reform Act passed by Congress in response to a flood of inmate litigation, including frivolous lawsuits that made national headlines.

"The combined effect of the federal legislation and the Supreme Court's pronouncements in the area of prisoner rights has been that courts have essentially left the field of regulating the treatment of prisoners in this country," said attorney Locke Bowman, director of the McArthur Justice Center in Chicago.

"The consequence of this, intended or not, is that prison officials are essentially left to do as they please with respect to solitary confinement, strap-downs and the like," he said. "If it became known that animals were treated in this fashion, there would be widespread public outrage."

Citing the 1996 federal legislation, David Fahti, an attorney at the Washington, D. C., office of Humans Rights Watch, said, "There is one set of rules for everybody else in the country and a different and less favorable set of rules for prisoners."

Fahti's organization criticized the special rules for prisoner lawsuits in a 46-page report released in May. It cited a wide range of unfavorable rules for prisoners, including the difficulty of meeting much shorter deadlines for filing motions and a requirement that inmates first exhaust administrative remedies within the prison, even if they are unfair, complicated or vague.

Michael Randle, newly appointed director of the Illinois Department of Corrections, said the Tamms staff handles inmates in a firm but fair manner.

"The staff at Tamms do a very professional job with a particular population that is the most difficult to deal with in corrections," he said.

U.S. District Chief Judge David R. Herndon in East St. Louis said that the legal rights of inmates who bring lawsuits alleging civil rights violations are well-protected. But Herndon said that without a specific legal complaint,a federal judge does not have the duty to question issues such as whether the effects of long-term solitary confinement are cruel and unusual.

"If there is some specific issue in the complaint, of course, we're going to get into it," he said.

Bowman said attorneys who represent inmates like those at Tamms should address cruel and unusual conditions through indirect or "peripheral" issues, such as alleging that prison officials fail to provide treatment for the seriously mentally ill or arguing that criteria used to transfer inmates to Tamms deny them due process.

Gay's lawyers have filed such a lawsuit. It contends that placing their client on a strap-down bed amounted to a failure by prison officials to provide proper medical treatment, even if Gay caused his own injuries.

The Department of Corrections, in its legal response, said the strap-down bed was proper because it prevented Gay from injuring himself further.

Inmates who file what judges consider frivolous lawsuits can lose their right to a free, court-appointed lawyer and must pay hundreds of dollars in filing fees in small monthly increments, even though they are in solitary confinement with no means of making money.

It can take up to 10 years to resolve a case due to court delays, even when plaintiffs raise immediate issues, such as guards beating prisoners.

Chicago attorney Alan S. Mills filed suit on behalf of 36 Tamms inmates nearly 10 years ago. That lawsuit is scheduled for trial in November before U.S. District Court Judge G. Patrick Murphy in East St. Louis.

In the complaint, Mills contends that his clients' right to due process was violated by a secret and arbitrary system that transferred them from other prisons to Tamms and placed them in solitary confinement, where ordinary privileges like phone calls, access to basic education programs and religious services are banned. The initial complaint also stated that inmates were sent to Tamms in retaliation for filing lawsuits about prison conditions.

The Department of Corrections said in its response that the criteria for transferring an inmate to Tamms is based solely on disciplinary records and alleged gang involvement, according to court records.

'Alice in Wonderland'

Many inmates at Tamms were transferred there from the maximum security Pontiac Correctional Center after they were prosecuted for what officials at other prisons, such as the maximum security Menard Correctional Center near Chester, often consider non-criminal harassment of guards. At other prisons, such incidents as throwing urine, feces and food at guards usually would mean a loss of privileges or other punishment, not usually a criminal conviction.

At Pontiac, prison officials don't tolerate such actions. They prosecute offending inmates, who get extra years added to their sentences if they are convicted. The convictions mark these inmates as troublemakers, and many of them become prime candidates for the label "worst of the worst" and a transfer to Tamms.

That's what happened to Gay.

A relatively small man at 5-foot-6 and 150 pounds, Gay claimed corrections officers at Pontiac repeatedly taunted him, knowing he has a hair-trigger temper. Before he was transferred for the second time to Tamms in 2004, he was convicted numerous times for aggravated assault against a guard, which added 92 years to his sentence under a state law that requires this time to be served at the end of the inmate's original sentence.

A review of Gay's record inside prison showed that 18 incidents involved throwing body wastes, pulling back on handcuffs or struggling with guards -- none of which led to serious injury. These sentences combined pushed Gay's parole date to 2093.

Livingston County State's Attorney Tom Brown said that after several years of permanent lockdown at Pontiac in the late 1990s, violent crime against prison staff decreased.

"Most of everything has trickled off to stuff that's relatively non-violent, usually throwing some sort of liquid on a guard," he said.

Brown said that the non-violent harassment of guards is still prosecuted because prison staff "have the same right to be safe at work and free of crime as you or I when we go to work."

But a former judge in Livingston County, where the Pontiac prison is located, criticized prosecutors for pressing charges every time Gay essentially resisted authority.

Referring to 10 incidents in a two-month span in which Gay eventually was convicted of "throwing liquids" on guards and received 35 additional years, Circuit Judge Charles H. Frank wrote to a fellow judge: "I would think a $2 piece of plastic draping would have prevented all of these. Apparently, no one out there understands that. ... Mr. Gay committed a minor theft. As a practical matter, he is now a lifer."

In a recent telephone interview, Frank said Gay, who always acted as his own attorney, was articulate and once won an acquittal in Frank's court during a trial on an aggravated assault charge.

Frank said he tried to work a deal with prosecutors to wrap up all pending charges in one reduced sentence, but Gay wouldn't cooperate.

"He'd say, 'Nope, I want to try them all,'" the former judge said.

Frank said prison guards who accompanied Gay didn't like the idea that an inmate would so enjoy being in court, even though it was for prosecution of crimes against their own kind.

"It was kind of like Alice in Wonderland around there," Frank said.

Metro-east inmates Michael E. Williams of Hartford and Wade Thomas of East St. Louis faced situations similar to Gay's.

Williams originally was sentenced in 1994 in Madison County Court to two years for theft and was eligible for release after a year, but because of subsequent convictions for crimes committed in prison, including weapons violations at prisons other than Pontiac, he isn't scheduled for parole until 2028. If released then, he will have served 34 years.

Thomas was sentenced in 1997 in St. Clair County Court to 12 years for vehicular hijacking where he was a passenger. He was 18 at the time. He could have been released after six years but because of several convictions for non-injury crimes while in prison, he isn't scheduled for parole until at least 2014, when he will have served 17 years.

Not a judge's place

Thomas, the filed suit in 2004 in federal court claiming that after mutilating himself, he was strapped down for 12 hours while naked and then left without clothes in a cold cell for days. He acted as his own attorney.

Thomas pressed his case for three years, using the same basic argument that is the basis for Gay's lawsuit -- prison indifference to medical needs after self-mutilation and retaliation for filing grievances. He eventually asked the court to drop the case, stating he felt he wouldn't get a fair trial.

The prison's physician, Dr. Marvin Powers, "Cleaned his wounds and gave him stitches, but without any anesthetic, causing unnecessary pain," a federal judge's summary stated.

An attorney for the Department of Corrections gave the same response as in similar lawsuits: The prison provided medical care and Thomas was strapped down to prevent him from further harming himself.

Herndon, the federal judge in East St. Louis, said inmates' concerns, even in what might appear to be baseless complaints, are not ignored.

"We get all kinds of complaints from Tamms. ... Do I sit around and concern myself with the issues at Tamms? No. Not unless there is an issue before me in a case. It's just not our place to go around and start driving to Tamms and say, 'I'm here to make an inspection to see if you're running your prison right.'"

Herndon said he and other federal judges are seeking ways to shorten the time it takes for a prisoner lawsuit to reach resolution.

In another case, Damir Green was sentenced for a drug charge in 1992 in Cook County to six years with parole possible after three. Like other Tamms inmates, he was convicted of crimes within the prison system that added considerable time to his sentence: 19 extra years in his case. He has been held in continuous solitary confinement since 1999.

In 2000, Green filed suit in federal court in East St. Louis alleging that his rights were violated after he struggled with another guard and was singled out for a digital search of his mouth and then his anal cavity by a guard using the same "dirty glove." Green alleged that the purpose of the search was "humiliation."

A lawyer for the Department of Corrections contended the guard's digital search was proper because Green was suspected of having hidden a weapon in his body.

Green faced a difficult legal hurdle established years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was not enough to prove that the guard searched him with a filthy glove. He must prove that he was seriously injured, and that the guard intended to violate his rights.

After a jury in federal court could not reach a decision, a judge ruled that the case should not go further because Green's physical injuries were minimal.

Green also complained that he was left for 40 minutes in a locked holding cell with his legs shackled and his hands tightly bound behind him. To relieve his discomfort, Green "stepped through" his handcuffs so that they were in front and more comfortable, and this enraged a guard, which led to his harassment, according to Green's lawsuit.

"This message, that they can do anything they want to you because you're not sitting the right way, is just the tip of the iceberg with Tamms," said Nadya Pittendrigh, a member of the Tamms Year 10 Committee, which has long pushed for reform at the supermax.

"It's just a snowflake on the iceberg compared to indefinite isolation with absolutely no legal recourse or due process."

His appeal to the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago was denied two days after it arrived in the mail.

Even when a Tamms inmate wins in the federal court system, collecting real damages is virtually impossible unless a serious, direct physical injury can be shown.

Alex Pearson, a murderer doing 45 years, was told he would be transferred out of Tamms in 2005 after doing eight years in the supermax. Pearson had successfully convinced officials he was no longer involved with the Gangster Disciples, a feared prison gang. This cleared him to get out of Tamms.

However, in the weeks before his transfer, Pearson said a prison guard supervisor told him he would have to become an informant against the gang at other prisons. Pearson said he objected that this would amount to a death sentence and refused. Two days before he was scheduled to ship out of Tamms, he was given a disciplinary ticket for "sexual misconduct," which set his transfer back a year. Pearson said he was urinating and did not notice a female social worker who approached his cell.

Pearson, who acted as his own lawyer, sued on the basis that he was improperly held at Tamms for an extra year.

The Department of Corrections filed court documents stating that no inmate is disciplined except for violations of rules.

A jury in federal court in East St. Louis found in favor of Pearson, who argued that the real reason for the ticket was that the social worker had several times tried to persuade him to "rat out" his former gang colleagues right up until a few days before she made the complaint about him urinating in her presence.

The jury approved a "monetary award" of $1, plus $1.50 attorney's fees. Pearson appealed to the Chicago federal appeals court seeking a larger award. His request was denied.

Tamms is virtually closed to outsiders except for the strictly controlled visiting room. The Department of Corrections rejected the News-Democrat's attempts to get a tour of the prison.

But complaints about life inside Tamms abound in a mountain of federal lawsuits.

One complaint described "an atmosphere of terror and brutality." Another detailed how staff punishes inmates, including the mentally ill, by shutting off water for toilets and drinking, taking away personal possessions including clothing and restricting the diet to tasteless nutraloaf.

In each of these cases, the Department of Corrections responded that any measures taken were proper and part of the prison's strict discipline policy.

One of the most vivid descriptions came from former Tamms inmate Jon Giles, who sometimes uses the name Mustafa Afrika.

Giles, who spent four years in Tamms before he was paroled last year, said heard what he believes were guards choking Anthony Gay after he had been strapped down. Giles took the unusual step of filing official grievances on behalf of Gay and another inmate he said was ignored for hours after cutting himself, even though he wrote messages for help in blood on his cell wall.

Giles produced copies of the signed and dated grievances, which were rejected by prison officials. He said that from a temporary cell next to the one that contained the strap-down bed that held Gay, he saw guards put on gloves and helmets and then order a nurse to leave the area. He said the guards entered Gay's cell.

"I heard this muffled sound," Giles said, "He got a gasp out and screamed my name, 'Mustafa, they're trying to kill me.'"
http://www.bnd.com/homepage/story/865378.html

Link to yesterday's article on Tamms: http://www.bnd.com/news/local/story/865377.html

Posted by lois at 09:39 PM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2009

Story and Editorial: Trapped in Tamms: In Illinois' only supermax facility, inmates are in cells 23 hours a day

Opinion: Why Tamms Matters to All
Sunday, Aug. 02, 2009

Many people who read today's front-page story about the Tamms supermax prison probably won't have much empathy for Faygie Fields, Chris Marcum and the other inmates discussed. So what if murderers and violent criminals are kept in solitary confinement for years on end?

But Illinois residents should care -- if not for the inmates, then for themselves.

We're a nation that disavows cruel and unusual punishment of criminals, and most reasonable people would agree that keeping someone in solitary confinement 23 hours a day for 10 years or more -- the fate of 54 of the Tamms inmates -- is cruel and unusual. They don't get any phone calls, or education or religious services; just walls.

The people who created Tamms never envisioned such extended stays; they thought inmates would be sent there for a year at most. Their idea was to deter violence in prisons, but a union spokesman for state prison guards said violence actually has increased in the past decade.

Not only is Tamms not accomplishing its objective, but it seems to be creating new problems. Keeping inmates in solitary confinement for years causes many of them to either develop mental problems, or to worsen existing conditions. Many of these men eventually will be released back into society.

Gov. Pat Quinn has ordered Michael Randle, his new director of the state Department of Corrections, to investigate Tamms. Good. People who commit crimes deserve to be punished, but the state needs to be smart and humane on how it goes about it.
http://www.bnd.com/editorial/story/866411.html
Story follows.....
www.yearten.org (Tamms Year Ten Organizing Committee)

Trapped in Tamms: In Illinois' only supermax facility, inmates are in cells 23 hours a day
Sunday, Aug. 02, 2009
BY GEORGE PAWLACZYK AND BETH HUNDSDORFER - News-Democrat
Belleville News Democrat
PART I
Faygie Fields' escape from years of solitary confinement on the toughest wing of Illinois' only state-run supermax prison began with food.

He claimed there were rat droppings in his rice, bugs in his beans and poison in his Tylenol.

Guards at the supermax Tamms Correctional Center in the southern tip of Illinois told Fields to cut it out. He wasn't going to fake his way to the easier prison mental health unit. It was all an act, they said. He had tried it before.

Reports from other lockups, where Fields was often held in solitary, laid out his dismal disciplinary history. He threw Kaopectate, milk cartons, urine, tomatoes, Kool-Aid, a food tray. He grabbed at keys. He pulled away from handcuffs. Fields was just plain bad, the reports concluded.

What the supermax staff didn't know because records were not initially forwarded was that while in his teens, Fields had been committed four times to Chicago-area mental hospitals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and collected disability payments because of mental illness. Untreated schizophrenics can result in violent actions. Fields was sentenced to state prison in 1984 at age 25 for shooting a man to death during a drug deal.

According to the Illinois Department of Corrections, Fields is among the "worst of the worst," an extremely violent inmate who cannot be safely held anywhere but at Tamms, a maximum discipline and security prison.

But critics of the prison say Fields is a victim of a deeply flawed policy that punishes mentally ill inmates for behavior they cannot control by placing them in solitary confinement for long periods, in many cases 10 years or more.

Such punishment, some critics say, amounts to torture worse than that experienced by suspected terrorists at the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

After his transfer 11 years ago to Tamms, Fields coped in ways bizarre and self-destructive common to many inmates held in continuous solitary confinement. He sliced his arms and throat with bits of glass, metal and paint chips. A prison doctor who stitched him up once testified he didn't always inject anesthetic because the skin of many Tamms inmates became numb from massive scarring from repeated self-mutilation.

Fields smeared excrement in his cell so often that maintenance men painted it with an easier to clean coating. He swallowed glass. Prison officials charged him $5.30 for tearing up a state-owned sheet to make a noose to kill himself.

And then in 2004, after he had been held alone and often naked in a segregation cell for nearly six years, two psychiatrists called to testify in an ongoing lawsuit about conditions at the prison examined him and his medical records and said Fields was a schizophrenic who needed immediate treatment. They also reviewed a long-ignored 1999 report by psychiatrist Dr. Bernard Rubin, a former director of the Illinois Department of Mental Health, diagnosing Fields a year after his arrival at Tamms as a paranoid schizophrenic whose condition was deteriorating. The MacArthur Justice Center of Chicago filed the lawsuit on behalf of Fields and three other Tamms inmates.

Two Illinois Department of Corrections psychiatrists did not find Fields to be a schizophrenic. The prison's supervising psychologist, Kelly Rhodes, countered that Fields was trying to fake his way to easier time. Under oath, Rhodes described self-mutilation as a game.

"They'll compete with each other to see who can cut because it's fun," she said, according to a deposition.

The lawsuit resulted in a court order moving Fields in 2005 to the Tamms mental health unit where, like all inmates at the supermax, he is held in solitary but receives treatment.

The psychiatrists who testified on his behalf said Fields' multiple convictions for aggravated assault against guards resulted from behavior symptomatic of his mental illness.

If he hadn't been charged with crimes in prison, Fields could have been paroled in 2004 after serving 20 years of a 40-year sentence. But Fields must serve all the extra time for throwing food, urine and committing other offenses against guards. That amounts to 34 years, or 54 years total that he must serve before becoming eligible for parole in 2038, at age 79.

Ten years of solitary

Illinois has about 45,000 state prisoners. The state built Tamms to reduce violence among prisoners statewide by taking the "worst of the worst" and holding them in solitary confinement at one location for about a year, or until their behavior improved.

But 54 inmates at Tamms have been held in continuous solitary confinement for more than 10 years, according to an investigation by the Belleville News-Democrat. They include 39 like Fields who have been held continuously since they were transferred there in 1998, the year the prison opened.

Many others have been held for seven, eight or nine years. All Tamms inmates are held in solitary. They spend 23 hours a day in their cells. In March, the torture watchdog group Amnesty International issued a statement citing Tamms:

"The harsh conditions of isolation endured by many prisoners for years on end appear to be unnecessarily punitive and may breach international standards for humane treatment," it said.

George Welborn, Tamms' first warden, defended the prison's treatment of prisoners.

"It's very, very hard time. ... Is it constitutional incarceration? Yes it is. The court cases to this point have shown that. We're not beating them. We're not starving them," he said.

Shortly after Gov. Pat Quinn appointed Michael Randle as the new director of the Illinois Department of Corrections in June, Quinn directed him to investigate Tamms. Randle said after spending a day at Tamms, he believed it held highly dangerous prisoners who could not be imprisoned elsewhere. Records show that the majority of Tamms inmates are convicted murderers and that a small number have murdered staff and inmates at other prisons.

"I am not comfortable at this point having those offenders out of Tamms," he said during a telephone interview.

Randle would not say whether he considers 10 years and more in solitary confinement to be cruel. He conceded that harsh conditions such as not allowing telephone calls, religious services or education programs might be eased.

"There are things we are going to continue to look at in terms of giving offenders an avenue to demonstrate the appropriate conduct to earn their way out of Tamms," he said.

The News-Democrat's investigation found that Tamms may not only house the "worst of the worst.'' Prison and court records also raised questions about the prison medical staff's ability to identify inmates with serious mental problems who need treatment.

The investigation showed:

* Of 247 Tamms inmates listed June 30 on the prison's roster, 138 had not been convicted of a crime after entering the prison system.

* Of the remaining 109 inmates convicted of a crime after entering prison, 55 committed assaults such as throwing body wastes and spitting on or struggling with guards, and possessing contraband or homemade weapons -- acts that did not lead to serious injury and can be attributed in some cases to mental illness and a need for self-protection.

* Of the more than 250 inmates transferred to Tamms since 1999, records provided by the Department of Corrections show that only six who passed through the mental health screening process were placed in the prison's Special Treatment Unit for seriously mentally ill prisoners, despite a 2005 U.S. Department of Justice study that shows that 15-23 percent of state prison inmates are seriously mentally ill. Department of Corrections chief counsel Ed Huntley would not provide information about the total of inmates Tamms staff rejected for mental health reasons who were returned to other lockups.

* Sixteen inmates at the supermax entered the prison system for relatively minor crimes, such as car theft, forgery, burglary and drug offenses, but incurred huge amounts of additional time -- 92 years in one case -- for in-prison crimes including guard assaults and possessing a shank, or homemade knife. State law requires this time be served consecutively, or after the original sentence.

Tamms, a 500-bed, $70-million cluster of concrete buildings in Alexander County, is smaller than some county jails. The state keeps it half full so that there is room to transfer inmates if a riot occurs elsewhere.

Many of its inmates live in segregation or the disciplinary part of the prison.

Information from the Department of Corrections shows that from Jan. 1 to June 30, Tamms transferred 15 inmates to other prisons. But of this number, three inmates were within a few months to a year from parole and had to be transferred under a regulation that prohibits Tamms prisoners from being released into the public directly from the supermax.

A 2001 study by Southern Illinois University Carbondale graduate student Chad Briggs questioned the value of Tamms as a deterrent to violence. He concluded that despite sending inmates to the supermax, the rate of assaults on guards throughout the prison system either stayed the same or increased.

Prison violence has increased in recent years, said the guards' union spokesman Anders Lindall of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Too few guards and prisoner overcrowding are to blame, he said.

"The state tells us they can't track the data, even on a facility-by-facility basis, but based on the anecdotal evidence that we've seen from our members, violence has increased," Lindall said.

The Tamms Year Ten Committee, a confederation of activists supported by at least two Chicago area state representatives, is also monitoring conditions at the prison. One of the state representatives is Julie Hamos, D-Evanston, who has introduced a bill to improve conditions at Tamms.

"It is a form of insanity to put people in a place that provokes mental illness and then waste taxpayers' money to treat the symptoms," said committee member Laurie Jo Reynolds. "Or worse yet, releasing them without treatment. ... Either they went in crazy, or they go crazy once they are there."

Extended isolation

Solitary confinement beyond 30-90 days invariably leads to mental breakdown and behavior that becomes worse, not better, according to Dr. Terry A. Kupers of the Wright Institute, a clinical psychology graduate school in Berkeley, Calif. Kupers is one of three psychiatrists who diagnosed Fields as a schizophrenic.

"Anything in solitary longer than three months, what it does is the individual feels hopeless. One of the universal fears that people in supermaxes tell me is, 'I'm going to die in here,'" said Kupers, who has conducted hundreds of court-ordered interviews of men in long-term isolation, including Tamms inmates.

"They know they can't control their behavior enough, or please their wardens enough to ever get out," he said. "Twenty-three hours a day alone in a cell causes many inmates to brutally attack themselves.

"In the adult male population of the United States, self-mutilation occurs only in solitary confinement," he said. "It's an epidemic across the country. They're not faking."

In a prison population such as Tamms, where most inmates are murderers, Chris Marcum of Granite City might seem out of place. At age 20, he was sentenced in Madison County Circuit Court to six years for burglary with parole after three years.

But Marcum, now 32, got nine years added to his sentence because he possessed a shank and committed other in-prison crimes. In Tamms he was known as a "cutter." His left arm is covered front and back from forearm to biceps with long, whitish scars.

"I just wanted to feel something. It was the only way I coped with, at the time, with being incarcerated. You lose all sense of everything. It helped me with what I was going through, but it hurt a lot," he said.

Unlike some cutters, he said he did not handle his body wastes.

"I've seen in other prisons inmates cut on themselves, but there wasn't that many people doing it. But at Tamms, every wing I went on there was at least one inmate that had a glass shield on his door, played with his feces and cut on himself."

The shields prevent inmates from throwing body wastes through any of about 400 dime-sized holes in their cell doors.

His mother, Nancy Marcum, would visit him in the Tamms visiting room, where the inmate is behind Plexiglas and chained to a concrete block. She said her son, "kept his arms under the table so I couldn't see. When I found out this was happening, all I could do was cry."

In several lawsuits challenging conditions at Tamms, prison officials have testified that self-mutilation is not a symptom of serious mental illness because the inmate can stop at will.

Chicago attorney Jean Snyder, the lead attorney in the lawsuit involving Faygie Fields, said, "What kind of a guy is slicing up his penis and his arms to get out of prison? Is it an answer to say he could stop it if he wanted to?"

Explosive situation

When he was 7 years old, Tamms inmate Jerome Moore used drugs. At age 10, he was confined to a state mental ward. At 11, he was selling drugs and living on the street. He was shot that same year and spent weeks in a hospital. Sent to juvenile detention at 13, Moore was suspected of but never charged with a double homicide. At age 17, Moore was sentenced to state prison for attempted murder. In 2000, at age 19, he was sent to Tamms.

Forensic psychologist Michael E. Althoff, of Carbondale, outlined this history of Moore in a 2005 mental evaluation. Yet, despite documented mental illness, prison officials regarded Moore as a "malingerer" who faked symptoms.

What was different in Moore's case was that besides the finding of "malingering," Althoff confirmed a diagnosis of "intermittent explosive disorder," uncontrollable rage totally out of proportion to a perceived insult or threat.

Moore faced a maximum of 23 years for attempted murder but now must serve at least 38 years. The extra time came from assaults on guards -- incidents that, except for one, did not include a weapon or result in serious injury but instead consisted of throwing food and body wastes or twisting away from handcuffs.

Psychiatrist Dr. Stuart Grassian of Chestnut Hill, Mass., who was on the staff of Harvard Medical School for nearly 30 years and has written widely about the effects of solitary confinement, said inmates like Moore are likely to continue to commit impulsive violence as long as they are kept in solitary confinement. He said prison mental health staff often have distorted views of supermax inmates.

"There's a tremendous pull toward seeing everything that you're looking at as bad behavior that needs to be punished, rather than recognizing that it's actually a response to mental illness," Grassian said. "People tend to think of them (supermax inmates) as the James Cagneys of the prison system. They're not. They are actually the wretched of the earth. ... The paradigm (model) in the prison system is if you punish bad behavior enough it'll get better. That's obviously a paradigm that doesn't work."

Marcum, the former Tamms inmate from Granite City, said he remembers a lot of behavior that caused guards to react, but none more bizarre than when inmate Anthony Gay of Rock Island ate his own flesh. The incident is corroborated in federal court documents.

"I was in the infirmary for 11 days because I was on a hunger strike and he was there on suicidal watch," Marcum said. "And every four hours they came around and took my vitals. And he did it right in front of the window when I was standing there at my cell getting my vitals checked. He just cut a little piece of his skin off and ate it. Right in front of them and they didn't do nothing except go in his cell and search for the object he used to cut on himself."

Tamms' first warden

Welborn, Tamms' first warden, hadn't expected the reporters who showed up at his door in Anna, 20 miles north of the prison in Tamms. He regarded them warily. But when Welborn, who helped design Tamms, heard one of them say, "Darrell Cannon says hello," he smiled and said, "How is DC?"

Welborn and Cannon, a murderer convicted in Cook County, formed an unlikely alliance at the maximum security Menard Correctional Center in Chester. Welborn was the warden; Cannon was an inmate who, he said, helped Welborn ease tension between gang members and guards.

Cannon said he was astounded in 1998 to be rousted out of his Menard cell and shipped to the newly opened supermax at Tamms. When he got to Tamms, Cannon said Welborn came to his cell and told him, "Hey look. You do one year down here and if you don't have any tickets, no disciplinary problems, after that you'll be shifted outside again."

But Cannon did nine years at Tamms and got out only after a federal judge ordered his parole following testimony that crooked Chicago detectives set him up on the murder charge.

Welborn, who retired in 2002, said he never expected inmates to be held at Tamms for 10 years or more.

"I don't lose a lot of sleep over those guys who have been there 10 years ... (but) I think they should have been given the opportunity to go back to a reduced security facility and then, if they screw up again, it's right back to Tamms. It was not intended to be a place where guys would be there for eight to 10 years."

In a lawsuit deposition, Welborn disputed allegations that the policy of holding prisoners alone amounted to solitary confinement.

"This isn't like throwing a guy in a closet," he testified.

Cannon disagreed.

"It was total solitary confinement. There were times I would wake up shaking. It would be my system trying to, I don't know, go haywire. I would have to get up off that concrete bed and go to the sink and run some cold water and wait until the sink fills up and then throw the water all over me," he said. "And I would have to talk to myself and say, 'Hey, look. Do not break. You can't let this happen.'"

Cannon said he never engaged in self-mutilation but knew of many inmates who did.

"I would walk the floor in circles. And I may do that for two hours straight," he said.

He set aside a special night for the music of his youth.

"Saturday night was dedicated to all the old songs. Blue Moon. Stand By Me ... all those old songs I could think of. I would try to remember the words. I would sing just loud enough where I could hear myself."

Back to Tamms

Richard Conner, a murderer doing life, attempted to hang himself in his cell at Tamms in December, but wound up instead in a coma at Heartland Community Hospital in Marion.

Although the Department of Corrections won't talk about it, members of the Tamms Year Ten Committee believe Conner tried to kill himself a few weeks earlier by slitting his wrists.

After recovering, the prison system sent Conner, 38, to its Dixon Psychiatric Unit and then on to the maximum security Stateville Correctional Center at Joliet. And there, on April 2, guards opened the cell that Conner shared with Jameson S. Leezer and found Leezer dead. Leezer, a car thief, was 18 days from parole.

An autopsy showed that Leezer had been strangled, and Conner, the only other person in the locked cell, was the obvious suspect. Instead of returning him to the prison system psychiatric hospital at Dixon, authorities sent Conner back to Tamms.

No decision has been made on whether to prosecute Conner for Leezer's murder. A Department of Corrections directive issued on May 11 stated that any Tamms inmate transferred out must be held in a single cell.

In another incident, guards found Robert Foor, 33, dead on June 23 in his cell in the Tamms Special Treatment Unit, or mental ward. He was convicted of robbery and burglary in 1994 and given nine years but accrued eight years of extra time because of in-prison convictions.

Debbie Elsoff of Malta, Ill., Foor's mother, said that an autopsy did not determine how her son died. She said that when she informed prison officials that she could not afford to pay for her son's cremation or to have his body shipped home, they said they would cremate him there but could not turn over his remains because of state law.

"I cried all night when I heard that," said Elsoff.

Later, a non-profit group agreed to pay for Foor's cremation, and his remains were sent to his mother.

Malcolm Young, who until recently was the director of the prison reform organization The John Howard Association, said the policy at Tamms to use extreme discipline to respond to problems that many consider are caused by mental illness causes psychological deterioration, even worse behavior and sometimes suicide.

"It is not a dirty place. It's not a hole in the ground with mice and rats and everything else," he said, "But it is just total isolation and it operates to purposely deprive the men that are there from contact with other people."

Young, a lawyer at Northwestern University's Bluhm Legal Clinic, said even the way inmates are moved to the yard reinforces the debilitating effect of solitary confinement. The yard represents the one hour a day when inmates are not in their cells, yet they are still alone in a concrete box with a roof of steel mesh that half covers the sky.

Inmates head to the yard handcuffed and shackled inside a special caged chute with two guards outside the wire keeping pace.

"It's just the mechanical way they do it. It's like a ballet that emphasizes the separation between the prisoner and any other human being," he said. "The design of the place. The way the windows are situated too high to see out of. All of it just drives home that you are in a totally sterile environment as is possible to put you in and keep it legal."

For more than eight years, Nancy Meyer of Elgin has corresponded with Tamms prisoners. She often drives the 700-mile round trip to visit about a dozen men there she has come to know well.

Meyer said she sends money to inmates and contacts family members who often haven't heard about their loved ones for years. Some tell her not to call again.

Of the inmates on her list, Faygie Fields is her favorite. She says that even though Fields is a grown man and a convicted murderer, something about his optimism, even cheerfulness, makes her heart go out to him. In his Tamms mugshot, Fields is smiling.

"I see that face and he smiles and I say, 'Faygie, how are you doing? You're not hurting yourself anymore because if you are I won't come to see you.' He always says he isn't, but I know he will."

In a handwritten letter dated April 6, Fields used a plus sign for the word "and," capital letters for emphasis and dropped question marks in odd places.

While the sentences were fragmented and the grammar vague, the message was clear: "Please know that Tamms is driving ME CRAZY all of them keep saying none of us can leave here. But keeps all here? + in a Eternal Twilight Zone that has no ending?"
http://www.bnd.com/news/local/story/865377.html

Posted by lois at 03:54 PM | Comments (0)

July 31, 2009

New law allows Oklahoma private prisons to import maximum-security inmates from other states

New law allows Oklahoma private prisons to import maximum-security inmates from other states
By Associated Press
July 29, 2009
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Private prisons in Oklahoma soon could be housing maximum security inmates from other states under a new law that was approved in the waning days of the 2009 legislative session.

The language inserted in an omnibus corrections bill changes state policy that previously allowed only minimum and medium security from other states to be housed in state prisons.

House author Randy Terrill says several safeguards were put in place, including a policy that allows the Oklahoma Department of Corrections to review and approve inmates and the facilities where they will be housed.

But Judith Greene, director of the criminal justice research institute Justice Strategies, says such a policy change is a "recipe for disaster."

http://www.kfsm.com/news/sns-ap-ok--importinginmates,0,6212297.story

Posted by lois at 04:37 PM | Comments (0)

June 19, 2009

ACLU sues over 'secretly created' fed prison unit for Muslim and other prisoners with "disciplinary cases"

ACLU sues over 'secretly created' fed prison unit
June 19, 2009

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union sued the government Thursday over the creation of a special unit at the federal prison in Terre Haute, claiming it was created in secrecy and keeps mostly Muslim prisoners in stark isolation.

The ACLU says about 40 other prisoners, mostly Muslims, are being held in a "secretly created" Communication Management Unit in which they have no contact with other prisoners, limited contact with the outside world and no physical contact with family members.

"Designed to house prisoners viewed by the government as terrorists, they were established in violation of federal laws requiring public scrutiny and today are disproportionately inhabited by Muslim prisoners — many of whom have never been convicted of terrorism-related crimes," the ACLU said in a news release.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd defended the legality of the unit and said it did not target Muslims. He said the department was reviewing the lawsuit.

Dean said the Bureau of Prisons followed federal rules in creating the special unit to closely monitor prisoners' outside contacts. He said "race, country of origin or religious beliefs" are not factors in who is placed in the unit.

In addition to those convicted of terror-related crimes, the unit also is designed to hold certain disciplinary cases and sex offenders who try to contact their victims.

The ACLU said unit prisoners cannot have any physical contact with visitors, who can visit only on weekdays and talk by telephone while separated by partitions. Most other federal prisoners can kiss and shake hands with their visitors.

Communication Management Unit prisoners also can have only one 15-minute telephone call per week, except on legal matters, and cannot participate in prison programs with non-unit inmates, the ACLU said.

The complaint alleged the Bureau of Prisons, in creating the Terre Haute unit in 2006, took steps to avoid public scrutiny that violated federal notice and comment requirements.

The ACLU highlighted the treatment of Sabri Benkahla, a 34-year-old Virginia man serving a 10-year sentence for his 2007 convictions for obstruction of justice and lying about training with militants in Pakistan.

He was acquitted in 2004 of charges of aiding the Taliban with a U.S. group that prosecutors said trained for jihad with paintball guns.

Benkahla cannot even hug his 6-year-old son, according to the lawsuit, filed three days before Father's Day in the Terre Haute federal court.

"He's in incredibly restrictive conditions in which anyone would miss his family and opportunities to have contact with the outside world," said David Shapiro of the ACLU's National Prison Project.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jGARhyEhMTnL2It3HF3YN56ZU-bwD98TB66O1

Posted by lois at 08:51 AM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2009

Life on Permanent Lockdown By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella---(The Angola 3)

""The use of so-called extended lockdown has grown exponentially since the 1980s and is now an almost routine part of the American criminal justice system. The practice has been denounced by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, among others. Yet it has never aroused much public opposition, even among progressives who are outraged by reports of psychological abuse from Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib."

"For the past decade, the Angola 3 have also challenged the use of solitary confinement in a civil lawsuit in federal court, arguing that it violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment." For years, this case went nowhere. But on April 3, a federal magistrate judge at the US District Court in Baton Rouge allowed the lawsuit to proceed. It will likely be heard in the fall, and if the court makes a broad ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, it could potentially affect the more than 25,000 prisoners who live in complete isolation in supermax prisons or lockdown units around the country."

Mother Jones
Life on Permanent Lockdown
By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella | Thu June 4, 2009 4:00 AM PST

Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox are believed to have been held in solitary confinement for longer than any inmate in America—37 years, to be precise, nearly all of them spent in 6-by-9 cells at Louisiana's notorious Angola prison. For 23 hours a day, they pass the time in their cells as best they can. For one hour, they are allowed out to take a shower or a stroll along the cell block. Three days a week, they can use that hour to exercise alone in a fenced yard, as long as the weather is good.

Wallace and Woodfox were originally sent to Angola for armed robbery offenses in the early 1970s. When a young guard named Brent Miller was stabbed to death in 1972, Wallace and Woodfox were convicted of his murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, although, as courts have since acknowledged, there were numerous flaws with their trials: faulty evidence, manufactured testimony, and bribed witnesses, as well as inadequate legal representation and discriminatory jury selection. Along with another prisoner, Robert King, the men became known as the Angola 3, and for three decades they protested their innocence in court, maintaining that they had been targeted because they had helped found a Black Panthers chapter at Angola and were organizing for better conditions at the prison.

In recent years a federal judge ordered Louisiana to release Woodfox and give him a new trial; another judge recommended a new trial for Wallace. (King was released in 2001 when a judge overturned his conviction, after he had spent 29 years in solitary.) Yet the state has mounted endless appeals and procedural roadblocks to keep the pair locked away. Wallace and Woodfox are now 68 and 62, respectively.

After my requests to interview both men were denied, I began a correspondence with them. Their letters reveal a sense of resolve amid the bleakness of their situation. "I use stacks of books for exercise and thereafter I am either writing or reading. I have no time for foolishness. It's really that serious. I am in a struggle against the state of Louisiana on two strategic fronts, and hear me when I tell you they are not fighting fair," Wallace wrote to me recently. "The sense of hopelessness is endless and if not fought can break a person! (I bend, but don't break!)" Woodfox wrote.

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Atul Gawande made a persuasive case that solitary confinement is a form of torture. He cited lab studies in which baby monkeys raised in isolation became "profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves." Humans, it turns out, experience similarly acute anguish when deprived of social contact. When Gawande examined the cases of prisoners who had been kept alone for prolonged periods, he found that they disintegrated, mentally and physically. They became depressed, hallucinated, were unable to remember basic facts, and in some instances became catatonic. "Without sustained social interaction," Gawande concluded, "the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury."

The use of so-called extended lockdown has grown exponentially since the 1980s and is now an almost routine part of the American criminal justice system. The practice has been denounced by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, among others. Yet it has never aroused much public opposition, even among progressives who are outraged by reports of psychological abuse from Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.

For the past decade, the Angola 3 have also challenged the use of solitary confinement in a civil lawsuit in federal court, arguing that it violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment." For years, this case went nowhere. But on April 3, a federal magistrate judge at the US District Court in Baton Rouge allowed the lawsuit to proceed. It will likely be heard in the fall, and if the court makes a broad ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, it could potentially affect the more than 25,000 prisoners who live in complete isolation in supermax prisons or lockdown units around the country.

Most recent attempts to challenge the use of solitary confinement in court have failed, although none of the prisoners involved have been isolated for as long as Wallace and Woodfox. American courts have tended to define "cruel and unusual punishment" as conditions that deprive a prisoner of "basic human needs." In the case of the Angola 3, the state of Louisiana seeks to define these needs narrowly as "adequate food, sleep, clothing, shelter or medical attention," and has insisted that prisoners in solitary are provided with all of these things. In response, the Angola 3's lawyers argue that "the conditions of extended lockdown must be considered both cumulatively and durationally." Years in solitary have certainly deprived Woodfox and Wallace of adequate exercise and sleep, they say. More significantly, they also urge the court to acknowledge "social contact and environmental stimulation as basic human needs."

Wallace and Woodfox have, say their lawyers, endured both physical injury and "severe mental anguish and other psychological damage" from living most of their adult lives in lockdown. According to medical reports submitted to the court, the men suffer from arthritis, hypertension, and kidney failure, as well as memory impairment, insomnia, claustrophobia, anxiety, and depression. Even the psychologist brought in by the state confirmed these findings. When US Magistrate Judge Docia Dalby allowed the Eighth Amendment lawsuit to proceed, she said that the men had been isolated for "durations so far beyond the pale that this court has not found anything even remotely comparable in the annals of American jurisprudence."

Dalby also allowed the lawyers to expand their case—to challenge not only how the men are being confined, but why. Wallace and Woodfox are not being kept in solitary as a disciplinary or safety measure, their lawyers contend. Prison records show that the pair has had no serious disciplinary violations for more than 20 years. The only reason ever given for their continued isolation, in every one of the 90-day reviews they have had over the past three decades, is "nature of original reason for lockdown." When the federal judge ordered Woodfox released in 2008, he described him as a "frail, sickly" man with "an exemplary conduct record." The lawyers have assembled compelling evidence that the men have been isolated for more than 30 years for their beliefs, not their behavior, and that therefore their First Amendment rights have been violated, too. In other words, their lawyers plan to argue that Wallace and Woodfox are essentially political prisoners.

This is not an entirely new legal argument, but Wallace and Woodfox happen to have unusually strong evidence to support it, mostly in the form of public comments by Angola's warden, Burl Cain. For instance, when the judge decided to allow this claim to move forward, she cited an affidavit taken from a New Orleans schoolteacher who questioned Cain at a public event in 2000:

I started out the conversation by saying something like: "I was wondering if you could tell me anything about the 'Angola 3'?" "You mean Woodfox?" Cain responded. "I know all about them." He continued, "it's not obvious" that they should be let out of extended lockdown, they were "not good men," they "haven't reformed their political beliefs," and would be disruptive to the prison environment. Cain characterized the three inmates as violent and said they would incite other inmates to violence if let into the general prison population.

At one point, I asked, "So they're political prisoners?" Cain responded, "Well, yes. Well no, I don't like the word political."

And in a deposition last year, Cain states that Wallace and Woodfox are "still hooked up" to "Black Panther revolutionary actions." Even if Woodfox were not guilty of the murder of the prison guard, Cain says, he would still keep him in solitary. "I still know he is trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates…I would have me all kinds of problems, more than I could stand."

Now, the Angola 3's lawyers have been granted the right to file an amended claim and conduct further discovery, which will focus in part on gathering more evidence that Wallace and Woodfox are being kept in solitary confinement not because of what they have done or what they might do, but because of what they believe. Finding examples probably won’t be difficult. Louisiana attorney general James "Buddy" Caldwell, an ambitious Democrat elected in 2007, has characterized the Angola 3 to the press as political radicals and calls Albert Woodfox "the most dangerous man on the planet."

In March of 2008, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, paid a visit to Angola and met with Wallace and Woodfox. Four days later the two men, along with a handful of other prisoners, were moved out of lockdown cells and into a new "maximum security dormitory" that appeared to have been created expressly for them. Compared with others in the general prison population, they still faced serious restrictions. Yet it offered them a level of human contact that the two men had scarcely known since they were in their 20s. They were able to converse face to face, after decades of communicating through notes and third parties. "Every once in a while he'll put his arm around me or I'll put my arm around him," Albert wrote to a newsletter distributed to Angola 3 supporters. "It's those kind of things that make you human."

By the fall, Albert Woodfox's conviction had been overturned, and the court had ordered him released on bail while the state's appeal of this decision was pending. However, Caldwell said that he opposed the release "with every fiber of my being." Woodfox had been planning to stay with his niece while on bail. But his lawyers uncovered evidence that the state had emailed the neighborhood association of the gated community where she lived to inform them that a murderer was moving in next door. In December, Caldwell convinced the conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals to stay Woodfox's release on bail.

By that time, both men had been thrown back into isolation, to an even harsher section known as the "dungeon"—tiny, windowless cells that they were allowed to leave for only 15 minutes a day, rather than an hour, to shower in an adjacent space. They had allegedly violated prison rules by conducting a three-way call and giving an interview to a prison radio broadcast. Negotiations in their Eighth Amendment case ground to a halt. They had experienced a mere eight months of what had passed as comparative freedom.

Then, in March this year, Wallace and Woodfox were subjected to a move by the state that added to the pain of their predicament: They were forcibly separated from one another, not by a wall or a few tiers of cells, but by 75 miles of Louisiana's alluvial plain. One morning in March, Albert Woodfox woke up to discover that Herman Wallace was gone from Angola. Wallace had managed to make a phone call to Jackie Sumell, an artist and pivotal member of the dedicated Angola 3 activist community. He explained that he'd been transferred to Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, a two-hour drive down the Mississippi, below Baton Rouge. Wallace reported that a warden had told him that Hunt marked a new beginning for him, and that he might even be introduced into the facility's general population, ending his years of solitary confinement for good.

Two months later, he is still in lockdown, with no sign of getting out. I was denied permission to visit either man, but Wallace explained in a letter that the separation has made their legal battle even more challenging. "My presence here is designed to completely separate me from Albert. Such separation is designed to disrupt our effectiveness winning court decisions after court decisions. The move also makes matters 10 times worse for our attorneys who have to travel from one facility to the next to gather meaningful information. Albert and I can no longer iron out our thinking to make rational decisions for our attornies [sic] to embrace." Woodfox, meanwhile, offered a more poignant analysis of their separation: "There is an emotional toll, one that I would equate to the breaking up of a family during slavery in America. The pain and loss is beyond explanation."

In my correspondence with the two men, what struck me most was how lucid and determined they remained, despite their long years of isolation. In my most recent letter to Woodfox, I asked whether he thought his struggle in the courts would ever result in justice. He replied:

Who knows? Justice for me is abstract! The due process of the court is abstract. The law is abstract. To apply objective thought to the courts can drive you insane. I have no desire to go insane…

Justice means freedom for me, raises more questions than it answers. While I am a self educated man I am 62 years old. No past for the last 40 years. So how will I live?

While there are a lot of potentials, its not guarantees. For the last 40 years I have no bills to pay. No social obligations or responsibilities. I have made no social contributions and that saddens me greatly. Add to that I am African American and an ex-con! In a nutshell, justice for me means more questions than answers. (I am up to the challenge!)

*Among the activists who took up the cause of the Angola 3 were the late Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop (and a former Mother Jones board member), and her husband, Gordon. The Roddick's family charity, the Roddick Foundation, contributed funding for this story.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/06/life-permanent-lockdown

Posted by lois at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2009

Supermax prisons not super enough?

Supermax Prisons in U.S. Already Hold Terrorists

By Carrie Johnson and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, May 22, 2009

In news conferences, speeches and debates this week, lawmakers from both parties, as well as the director of the FBI, have sounded alarms about moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to federal prisons, where they could launch riots, hatch radical plots or somehow be released among the populace.

"No good purpose is served by allowing known terrorists, who trained at terrorist training camps, to come to the U.S. to live among us," said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.).

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said Tuesday, before saying he was open to changing his position, "Part of what we don't want is them be put in prisons in the United States."

But the apocalyptic rhetoric rarely addresses this: Thirty-three international terrorists, many with ties to al-Qaeda, reside in a single federal prison in Florence, Colo., with little public notice.

Detained in the supermax facility in Colorado are Ramzi Yousef, who headed the group that carried out the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993; Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted of conspiring in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; Ahmed Ressam, of the Dec. 31, 1999, Los Angeles airport millennium attack plots; Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, conspirator in several plots, including one to assassinate President George W. Bush; and Wadih el-Hage, convicted of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya.

Inmates in Florence and those at the maximum-security disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., rarely see other prisoners. At Leavenworth, the toughest prisoners are allowed outside their cells only one hour a day when they are moved with their legs shackled and accompanied by three guards.

"We have a vast amount of experience in how to judge the continued incarceration of highly dangerous prisoners, since we do this with thousands of prisoners every month, all over the United States, including some really quite dangerous people," Philip D. Zelikow, who was counselor to Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and executive director of the 9/11 Commission, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.

For many of the most serious terrorists and violent criminals, Justice Department and prison officials impose special restrictions, allowing few visitors, for example, and closely monitoring mail. The inmates also are kept in solitary confinement.

But on Wednesday, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told the House Judiciary Committee about his "concerns about providing financing to terrorists, radicalizing others with regard to violent extremism, the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the United States. . . . If it's Florence or something, I think it would be very difficult for the person to get out and very difficult for the person to undertake any activity. However . . . there are individuals in our prisons today . . . who operate their gangs from inside the walls of prison."

Two years ago, an official from the Federal Bureau of Prisons told the House Committee on Homeland Security that authorities were monitoring inmates who might try to spread extremist ideologies, screening clerics and moving terrorist inmates to special facilities in Colorado and Terre Haute, Ind. The bulk of al-Qaeda-affiliated convicts in the United States are housed in those two facilities, law enforcement officials said yesterday.

Still, one economically pressed community in Montana is bucking the trend of "not in my back yard." Some residents in Hardin are volunteering to open their unused, 464-bed Two Rivers Regional Detention Facility to the detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The City Council recently passed a resolution in support.

But Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) put his foot down. "We're not going to bring al-Qaeda to Big Sky Country -- no way, not on my watch," he told Time magazine this month.

Staff writer Spencer S. Hsu, research editor Alice Crites, and staff researchers Madonna Lebling and Julie Tate contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/21/AR2009052102009_pf.html

Posted by lois at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2009

PA: Gary Tucker, a prisoner held in control unit found not-guilty of assault on a guard

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
HRC-FedUp! Courthouse Update
Tucker Found Innocent!
Prisoner beats false charges with HRC help
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gary Tucker Found Non-guilty! HRC and Family Support the Deciding Factor

Torture survivor Gary Tucker, a state prisoner currently confined in 23-hour control unit lockdown at SCI Frackville, was found not-guilty of assaulting a prison guard by an all-white jury at the Cumberland County courthouse in Carlisle, PA on Thursday morning.

In an emotional trial which featured gripping testimony by Gary and six other state prisoners-all of whom testified via videoconference-testified that it was in fact Mr. Tucker who was assaulted during the incident in question, and that he only responded to the guards actions to defend himself.

HRC/Fed Up! organized courthouse support and provided witness testimony when Bret Grote took the stand to affirm Mr. Tucker's version of events and speak of the organization's work exposing human rights violations in PA prisons.

In January of 2008 Gary's cell door was opened in the Special Management Unit at SCI Camp Hill after he and a guard had a heated argument. Mr. Tucker exited his cell prepared to defend himself with bars of soap in a sock. After chasing one guard away from his cell he was jumped from behind, subdued, handcuffed, and then dragged into a cell out of camera view and beaten bloody. Mr. Tucker suffered a laceration requiring stitches, lost two teeth, and had a bruised, swollen, and bloody face.

Mr. Tucker filed an excessive force grievance. On June 18, 2008 he was informed that it was denied. The next day guards under the command of Unit Manager Chris Chambers began denying him lunch and dinner. After a week of this he was then denied all three meals for two weeks. He only began receiving food again after several prisoners contacted HRC/Fed Up!, reporting that SMU staff were attempting to starve Gary to death. An action alert was sent out and the prison eventually yielded to the pressure.

Seven months after the January assault the District Attorney's office of Cumberland County brought charges against Gary, claiming he assaulted a guard. The trial began Monday, May 18, 2009.

Mr. Tucker plans on pursuing a lawsuit against Camp Hill and the DOC for the hell they put him through.

A longer article and analysis will be forthcoming.

Posted by lois at 10:15 PM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2009

Tamms: Scrutiny Promised For Illinois' Supermax Prison

Scrutiny Promised For Illinois' Supermax Prison
05-16-09 07:22 PM
Huffington Post
ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Tamms Correctional Center's first warden made no apologies for christening the tough southwest Illinois prison a home for a "very unhappy inmate population." Critics wasted no time dubbing it an inhumane endeavor.

Eleven years later, the debate over the lockup where the worst offenders spend 23 hours a day in their cells remains unchanged, but Gov. Pat Quinn expects a newly minted Department of Corrections chief to take a long look at the super maximum-security prison where inmates are meant to serve hard time.

Quinn on Thursday tapped Michael Randle, second in command of Ohio's prison system, as Illinois' new department head. The Chicago-born Randle won't start his new job until next month, but Quinn already has made clear one assignment will be to examine prisoner treatment at Tamms.

"I'm going to ask Director Randle to meet with all of those who are concerned about the issue of Tamms in deep southern Illinois in Alexander County," Quinn said. "It is an issue we have to listen to everyone on, but Director Randle will make the final decision on what is best and recommend that to me."

Those who question the humaneness of typically giving Tamms' populace no more than an hour a day outside 7-by-12-foot cells square off against the prison's backers who call the segregation essential to safely containing the most dangerous of a 45,500-inmate, 28-prison state system.

"We have a very unhappy inmate population," Tamms' first warden, George Welborn, proudly declared in 1998.

State Rep. Brandon Phelps, a Democrat whose district includes the prison and its 242 inmates in long-suffering Alexander County, argued this week that Tamms "doesn't have to be messed with."

"Those people have earned their way to Tamms - when they were around people, they murdered them, they raped them," Phelps said.

Opponents say Tamms warehouses mentally ill inmates and isolates others for so long that they develop psychological issues. One state lawmaker has introduced legislation to limit terms at Tamms to one year in most cases, bar seriously mentally ill inmates from being sent to Tamms and make it more difficult to keep inmates there indefinitely.

Amnesty International, a leading human rights organization, recently has found Tamms "may breach international standards for humane treatment" and the prison has drawn numerous lawsuits alleging the inmate mistreatment.

"I can tell you there is concern when it comes to mental health and how you treat offenders in certain levels of confinement," Randle said this week. "The issue of Tamms as it relates to mental health is something I would have to look at once I get there. If, in fact, there are serious concerns about that, then I would make the appropriate recommendations to the governor for changes."

State figures show Illinois has sent more than 540 prisoners to Tamms in 11 years, amounting to just .14 of 1 percent of the people who have gone to Illinois prisons in that time. But much of the current attention has focused on long-term inmates - 156 who've been there at least eight years, 69 of them for more than a decade.

"We're not trying to close Tamms," said State Rep. Rep. Julie Hamos, the suburban Chicago Democrat behind the legislative push to change the prison, including allowing an inmate to earn increasingly less-isolated conditions for good behavior. "To leave them in that setting 10 years or longer is inhumane, in my estimate, and a human rights violation. It just cannot be condoned."

Phelps counters that he's seen nothing unfair or inhumane during his handful of visits to Tamms, which is located the identically named community he says "is dying on the vine" economically and doesn't need anything happening to the prison or its jobs. The prison has 275 employees, down more than 100 from just six years ago.

"I've heard the argument that the inmates are in confinement 23 hours a day and need to be around more people. When I heard that, I was beside myself," Phelps fumed. Hamos' legislation, he adds, "is talking about trying to make some of the worst criminals better. But some of them there don't care. They're never going to behave."

Corrections department spokesman Derek Schnapp says the state would "like to have no inmates at Tamms, but we feel Tamms has a purpose."

Backers of the prison have legal precedent on their side. In an Ohio case, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found in 2005 that the state's "first obligation must be to ensure the safety of guards and prison personnel, the public and prisoners themselves."

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, found "prolonged confinement in supermax may be the state's only option for control of some inmates," including those assigned to the Ohio prison built in 1998 after a deadly inmate riot five years earlier at a state prison.

"Courts must give substantial deference to prison management decisions" against the "brutal reality of prison gangs," Kennedy added.

Still, the justices expressed some concerns about the harsh conditions, with Kennedy writing that inmates "are deprived of almost any environmental or sensory stimuli and of almost all human contact." Lights were always kept on in the cells, he said, and the treatment was more harsh than that of death row inmates.

The court did not address the issue of whether the detentions are unconstitutionally cruel.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/16/scrutiny-promised-for-ill_n_204183.html

Posted by lois at 11:14 PM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2009

Real Cost of Prisons Comix wins National Council on Crime and Delinquency PASS Award

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The National Council on Crime and Delinquency
Announces
The 2008 PASS Award Winners
Oakland, CA, March 20, 2009

The National Council on Crime and Delinquency is pleased to announce the 2008 Winners of its respected PASS Awards (Prevention for a Safer Society). NCCD honors the media’s success and vital role in illuminating the people and programs that uncover the root causes of crime and those that promise to protect our most precious resource—our youth—against involvement in crime.

A critical link in successful policies related to youth and justice is the education of the public. The media is uniquely positioned to be this link, and we gratefully acknowledge their efforts to fulfill that responsibility. Each year the PASS Awards honor media professionals in the fields of print, literature, broadcast media, television, and film in recognition of thoughtful and factual coverage of the issues. Special consideration is given to those stories that highlight solutions to criminal and juvenile justice and child welfare problems.

NCCD is the nation's oldest private organization working to attain responsive and effective criminal justice, juvenile justice, and child welfare systems. For over 100 years, NCCD has been committed to promoting criminal justice strategies that are fair, humane, cost-effective, and uncompromising in public safety. The issues that have defined NCCD since its inception are the need for a separate and humane justice system for children, alternatives to incarceration, and the fundamental connection between social justice and public safety.

For more information on NCCD, please visit our website at www.nccd-crc.org

FILM
Ice T Presents “25 to Life” Deloss Pickett, Michael Dallum
“At the Death House Door” Steve James, Peter Gilbert

LITERATURE
American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment by Sasha Abramsky

Chasing Justice by Kerry Max Cook, Sandra Kaye Pressey, Kerry Justice Cook, Peter Hubbard

From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary King by Robert Hillary King and Andrea Gibbons

I’ll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison by Walley Lamb

Letters From the Dhamma Brothers by Jenny Phillips, Pariyatti Press, Ron Cavanaugh

Maximum Security: The True Meaning of Freedom by Alan Gompers

Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration by Paul Wright, Tara Herivel and Dianne Wachtel

Stanley Tookie Williams Street Peace Series by Stanley Tookie Williams and Barbara Becnel

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix by Lois Ahrens, Kevin Pyle, Sabrina Jones, Susan Willmarth, Ellen Miller-Mack and Craig Gilmore

MAGAZINE
San Jose Mercury News
“A Painful Choice for Moms in Prison” Edwin Garcia, Karen Borchers, Miller-McCune
“Is This the Future of the War on Drugs?” by Vince Beiser,John Mecklin

NEWSPAPER
East Valley Tribune “Reasonable Doubt” by Ryan Gabrielson, Paul Giblin, Patti Epler
Long Beach Press-Telegram “Lots of Answers, but No Easy Fixes” byWendy Thomas Russell andTracy Manzer
Seattle Weekly “Neverminded” by Laura Onstot and Mike Seely
The Daily Review “Educate to Break Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline” by Tammerlin Drummond
The Sacramento Bee “Unprotected” Marjie Lundstrom, Sam Stanton, Autumn Cruz, Mitchell Brooks
The Village Voice “Teen Murders at Rikers Jail” by Graham Rayman, Tony Ortega
The Washington Post “Rehabilitating Juvenile Offenders” by Robert Pierre, Carol Morello Westword
“Stand and Deliver” byAdam Cayton-Holland, Patricia Calhoun, Anthony Camera

RADIO
American Radioworks -“Gangster Confidential" Michael Montgomery and Catherine Winter
KALW Radio “Prisons in Crisis: A State of Emergency in California” JoAnn Mar, Alyne Ellis
KQED/Forum “Prisoner Health” by Scott Shafer, Nick Vidinsky andDan Zoll

TELEVISION/ VIDEO
HBO - “The Wire, Season 5” by David Simon, Nina Kostroff Noble, Ed Burns, Joe Chappelle.Karen L.Thorson
SoCal Connected/KCET -“Inside Locke High” Angela Shelley andAlexandria Gales, Brett Wood, Michael Bloecher,Bret Marcus
NBC/Wolf Films “Law and Order: SVU - Confession” Dick Wolf, Neal Baer, Ted Kotcheff, Peter Jankowski, Arthur Forney, Judith McCreary

WEB
AlterNet -“Meet Gus Puryear” by Silja J.A. Talvi and Jan Frel
City Limits -“A Ballot’s Breadth Away from Rejoining Society” by Karen Loew, Curtis Stephen, Rosie McCobb
City Limits “Debating How to Police a Challenging Population” Karen Loew, Tram Whitehurst

Posted by lois at 09:30 PM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2009

Amnesty International: USA: Conditions must be improved at Tamms Correctional Center in Illinois

Document - USA: Conditions must be improved at Tamms Correctional Center in Illinois
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
PUBLIC STATEMENT
AI index: AMR 51/042/2009
25 March 2009
USA: Conditions must be improved at Tamms Correctional Center in Illinois
According to Amnesty International’s information, prisoners at Tamms are confined alone for 23 or 24 hours a day in sparsely equipped concrete cells, with no work or group educational or recreational programs. All meals are taken in the cells. Prisoners exercise alone for a maximum of 5-7 hours a week in a high-walled, bare, partially-covered yard with no view apart from a small section of sky. The cell doors are made of heavy gauge perforated steel and are difficult to see through, compounding the sense of isolation. The narrow horizontal windows in each cell are positioned too high to see outside, unless the prisoner stands on his bed.

Contact with the outside world is also severely restricted, with prisoners denied phone calls and allowed only non-contact visits, conducted through a thick glass screen and intercom system. Prisoners are chained to the floor during visits and some have their wrists shackled together, allowing little movement. Despite the stringent security measures, prisoners are reportedly subjected to strip searches, including body cavity searches, before and after each visit. Because of the conditions imposed, and the remote location of the facility, many prisoners reportedly receive visits only rarely.

The prison was designed to house inmates considered too disruptive or dangerous to remain in the state’s general prison population, while providing a means by which prisoners could move back to less restrictive facilities if their behaviour improved. However, Amnesty International is concerned by the reported secrecy and lack of transparency in current procedures for transferring prisoners to and from Tamms, and the absence of any external oversight of such decisions. According to prison monitoring bodies, many prisoners are unaware of why they have been denied requests to transfer out of Tamms. More than 80 prisoners (around a third of the total) are believed to have been held in the facility for at least ten years, many since it opened in 1998, without any reasonable means of gaining release from their indefinite solitary confinement.

Some prisoners have alleged that they were transferred to the prison in retaliation for filing repeated complaints about their treatment. Others reportedly remain in the prison for failing to renounce alleged gang affiliations which they state would put themselves or their families in danger; others claim they were erroneously assigned gang member status but the internal review process does not allow them to challenge this effectively.

Amnesty International is also concerned by reports that a significant number of prisoners currently housed in Tamms suffer from mental illness or psychological problems which are exacerbated by the harsh conditions of isolation. Prisoners have been described as engaging in disturbed behaviours such as self-mutilation, smearing faeces on cell surfaces, throwing bodily liquids or howling. It is alleged that seriously mentally ill prisoners, or those with histories of mental illness, have been sent to Tamms despite regulations which allow for the exclusion of such individuals from the facility.

There is a significant body of evidence in the USA and elsewhere that prolonged isolation can cause serious psychological and physical harm, particularly if accompanied by other deprivations such lack of external stimuli, confinement to an enclosed space and inadequate exercise. Such conditions can have a severe impact on individuals with no pre-existing health problems, and may cause particular harm and suffering in the case of those who are already mentally ill.

Amnesty International recognizes that it may sometimes be necessary to segregate prisoners for disciplinary or security purposes. However, it is concerned that the current conditions at Tamms, taken cumulatively and applied over a prolonged period, are incompatible with the USA’s obligations to provide humane treatment for all prisoners.

The USA has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 10 of which requires that “all persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and respect for the inherent dignity of the human person”. The Human Rights Committee (the treaty monitoring body) has further emphasized that the absolute prohibition of torture or cruel inhuman or degrading treatment under international law “relates not only to acts that cause physical pain but also to acts that cause mental suffering” and has stated that prolonged solitary confinement may amount to torture or other ill-treatment. Both the Human Rights Committee and the United Nations (UN) Committee against Torture have criticized the excessively harsh conditions of isolation in some US supermax facilities.

Amnesty International believes that Bill HB2633, if enacted, would be an important step to providing fairer standards, accountability and oversight of the operation of Tamms. The organization is also urging the authorities to alleviate conditions for all prisoners who remain at the facility, including improving the exercise facilities, reviewing visitation conditions and providing some opportunity to participate in rehabilitation programs.

Posted by lois at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2009

OT: Legislative Bureau Audit Finds Treatment of Mentally Ill Prisoners Inadequate for Women Especially

Audit finds problems with mentally ill inmates
By SCOTT BAUER | Associated Press Writer
March 25, 2009
Chicago Tribune
MADISON, Wis. - At a time when Wisconsin is taking steps to avoid a federal lawsuit over its handling of mentally ill inmates, an audit released Wednesday identified even more improvements needed in the prison system.

The Legislative Audit Bureau's recommendations include better screening of incoming inmates, enhanced training for corrections officers who deal with mentally ill inmates and improved planning for when they are released.

Department of Corrections spokesman John Dipko said the department would implement all of the audit's recommendations.

Corrections Secretary Rick Raemisch said in a letter to auditors that his department faces significant challenges. Providing effective treatment in prison required prioritizing needs, using resources wisely, and emphasizing rehabilitation and treatment, he said.

Legislative Audit Committee Co-Chair Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, D-Alma, called the report disturbing.

"Mental illness can be managed," she said. "But the audit provides evidence this is not happening to the extent it should."

Wisconsin's mentally ill inmate population has been booming. While the total inmate population increased 3.9 percent between 2006 and 2008, the percentage of mentally ill inmates went up 14.3 percent. Last June, nearly 31 percent of the state's 22,451 inmates were identified as mentally ill.

The state's care of mentally ill female inmates has been a problem for years.

In 2006, the U.S. Justice Department declared the lack of mental health care at Taycheedah Correctional Institution in Fond du Lac, the state's largest women's prison, violated inmates' constitutional rights. The state agreed in September to make improvements to avoid a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit.

Federal investigators who toured Taycheedah in 2005 found mentally ill inmates locked in isolation cells and given psychotropic drugs without a doctor's supervision.

Under the agreement with the U.S. Justice Department, state corrections officials have up to four years to make improvements or face a lawsuit.

The state committed to building an $11 million, 45-bed addition for mentally ill women at the Wisconsin Resource Center in Winnebago. It is scheduled to be done in 2011.

The Department of Corrections has requested $7.6 million to build more treatment space at Taycheedah. Gov. Jim Doyle's proposed budget requests 149 more positions and $6.6 million to operate the addition at the Wisconsin Resource Center and to provide more services at Taycheedah.

The audit showed that the state spent nearly $60 million on mentally ill inmates in the 2007 fiscal year.

Among the report's findings:

-- The prisons don't have enough psychiatrists or psychologists to meet national standards.

-- Group and individual therapy is limited, although psychologists do monitor mentally ill inmates on a regular basis.

-- Correctional officers deliver most medications. In neighboring states, medical staff deliver most drugs.

-- Clearer policies, more centralized decision-making, and more detailed record-keeping could ensure the Wisconsin Resource Center runs more efficiently.

-- Mentally ill inmates accounted for more than 90 percent of special placements due to self-harm between July 1, 2005, and June 30, 2008. Those placements require prison workers to check on inmates every 15 minutes.

-- Mentally ill inmates accounted for nearly 80 percent of assaults on staff in the past three years. Those assaults resulted in $874,200 in worker's compensation awards to staff in that time.

-- The Department of Corrections could strengthen its policies to ensure inmates receive disability and medical benefits in a timely way after leaving prison.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-wi-inmatementalhealt,0,1483471.story

Posted by lois at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2009

"Resistance Behind Bars- The Struggles of Incercerated Women" by Vikki Law

I just finished reading "Resistance Behind Bars" written by Vikki Law. In case you don't know about it or haven't had the chance to I recommend you buy a copy and read it.
I will quote a little from the introduction in which Vikki writes about her response to the comment: "Women (in prison) don't organize."
"I began to search for stories---and women--who would disprove this assertion. I found mentions of lawsuits, and using various state department of corrections' websites looked up their address addresses and wrote them letters asking if they would share their experiences with me." And "To ensure that I was representing their struggles accurately and to give them the opportunity to add, update or delete any of the tales they do not want to share with the public, I sent each woman draft after draft of the chapters her voice and experience(s) appeared in. "
The voices of women form form the majority of the book which took 8 years to complete. The chapters reflect the concerns of the women with whom Vikki corresponded and include Barriers to Basic Care, Mothers and Children, Sexual Abuse,Education, Women's Work, Grievances, lawsuits and the Power of the Media. Other chapters focus on Breaking the Silence, Resistance Among Women in Immigrant Detention and an Historical Background.
The book is written in plain English. It frames resistance by women very differently than the kinds of resistance by men prisoners which has come to define "resistance."
The book is published by PM Press and you can order a copy on-line (https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=91) or I am sure your local bookstore can order it for you.

Posted by lois at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2009

The New Yorker: Annals of Human Rights Hellhole The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?

Annals of Human Rights
Hellhole
The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?
by Atul Gawande March 30, 2009, The New Yorker

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.

He happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of importing them from India. Because he didn’t know how to raise infant monkeys, he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants—in nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy, disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.

At first, Harlow and his graduate students couldn’t figure out what the problem was. They considered factors such as diet, patterns of light exposure, even the antibiotics they used. Then, as Deborah Blum recounts in a fascinating biography of Harlow, “Love at Goon Park,” one of his researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to their soft blankets. Harlow wondered whether what the monkeys were missing in their Isolettes was a mother. So, in an odd experiment, he gave them an artificial one.

In the studies, one artificial mother was a doll made of terry cloth; the other was made of wire. He placed a warming device inside the dolls to make them seem more comforting. The babies, Harlow discovered, largely ignored the wire mother. But they became deeply attached to the cloth mother. They caressed it. They slept curled up on it. They ran to it when frightened. They refused replacements: they wanted only “their” mother. If sharp spikes were made to randomly thrust out of the mother’s body when the rhesus babies held it, they waited patiently for the spikes to recede and returned to clutching it. No matter how tightly they clung to the surrogate mothers, however, the monkeys remained psychologically abnormal.

In a later study on the effect of total isolation from birth, the researchers found that the test monkeys, upon being released into a group of ordinary monkeys, “usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by . . . autistic self-clutching and rocking.” Harlow noted, “One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later.” After several weeks in the company of other monkeys, most of them adjusted—but not those who had been isolated for longer periods. “Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially,” Harlow wrote. They became permanently withdrawn, and they lived as outcasts—regularly set upon, as if inviting abuse.

The research made Harlow famous (and infamous, too—revulsion at his work helped spur the animal-rights movement). Other psychologists produced evidence of similarly deep and sustained damage in neglected and orphaned children. Hospitals were made to open up their nurseries to parents. And it became widely accepted that children require nurturing human beings not just for food and protection but also for the normal functioning of their brains.

We have been hesitant to apply these lessons to adults. Adults, after all, are fully formed, independent beings, with internal strengths and knowledge to draw upon. We wouldn’t have anything like a child’s dependence on other people, right? Yet it seems that we do. We don’t have a lot of monkey experiments to call upon here. But mankind has produced tens of thousands of human ones, including in our prison system. And the picture that has emerged is profoundly unsettling.

Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the “soul-destroying loneliness,” as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact.

The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we’ve learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement—from the journalist Terry Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, “Den of Lions,” recounts his seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Anderson was the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press when, on March 16, 1985, three bearded men forced him from his car in Beirut at gunpoint. He was pushed into a Mercedes sedan, covered head to toe with a heavy blanket, and made to crouch head down in the footwell behind the front seat. His captors drove him to a garage, pulled him out of the car, put a hood over his head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape. For half an hour, they grilled him for the names of other Americans in Beirut, but he gave no names and they did not beat him or press him further. They threw him in the trunk of the car, drove him to another building, and put him in what would be the first of a succession of cells across Lebanon. He was soon placed in what seemed to be a dusty closet, large enough for only a mattress. Blindfolded, he could make out the distant sounds of other hostages. (One was William Buckley, the C.I.A. station chief who was kidnapped and tortured repeatedly until he weakened and died.) Peering around his blindfold, Anderson could see a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. He received three unpalatable meals a day—usually a sandwich of bread and cheese, or cold rice with canned vegetables, or soup. He had a bottle to urinate in and was allotted one five- to ten-minute trip each day to a rotting bathroom to empty his bowels and wash with water at a dirty sink. Otherwise, the only reprieve from isolation came when the guards made short visits to bark at him for breaking a rule or to threaten him, sometimes with a gun at his temple.

He missed people terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”

He was stiff from lying in bed day and night, yet tired all the time. He dozed off and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved activity of almost any kind. He would watch the daylight wax and wane on the ceiling, or roaches creep slowly up the wall. He had a Bible and tried to read, but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He observed himself becoming neurotically possessive about his little space, at times putting his life in jeopardy by flying into a rage if a guard happened to step on his bed. He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all the mistakes he’d made in life, his regrets, his offenses against God and family.

His captors moved him every few months. For unpredictable stretches of time, he was granted the salvation of a companion—sometimes he shared a cell with as many as four other hostages—and he noticed that his thinking recovered rapidly when this occurred. He could read and concentrate longer, avoid hallucinations, and better control his emotions. “I would rather have had the worst companion than no companion at all,” he noted.

In September, 1986, after several months of sharing a cell with another hostage, Anderson was, for no apparent reason, returned to solitary confinement, this time in a six-by-six-foot cell, with no windows, and light from only a flickering fluorescent lamp in an outside corridor. The guards refused to say how long he would be there. After a few weeks, he felt his mind slipping away again.

“I find myself trembling sometimes for no reason,” he wrote. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to lose my mind, to lose control completely.”

One day, three years into his ordeal, he snapped. He walked over to a wall and began beating his forehead against it, dozens of times. His head was smashed and bleeding before the guards were able to stop him.

Some hostages fared worse. Anderson told the story of Frank Reed, a fifty-four-year-old American private-school director who was taken hostage and held in solitary confinement for four months before being put in with Anderson. By then, Reed had become severely withdrawn. He lay motionless for hours facing a wall, semi-catatonic. He could not follow the guards’ simplest instructions. This invited abuse from them, in much the same way that once isolated rhesus monkeys seemed to invite abuse from the colony. Released after three and a half years, Reed ultimately required admission to a psychiatric hospital.

“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.

And what happened to them was physical. EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.

On December 4, 1991, Terry Anderson was released from captivity. He had been the last and the longest-held American hostage in Lebanon. I spoke to Keron Fletcher, a former British military psychiatrist who had been on the receiving team for Anderson and many other hostages, and followed them for years afterward. Initially, Fletcher said, everyone experiences the pure elation of being able to see and talk to people again, especially family and friends. They can’t get enough of other people, and talk almost non-stop for hours. They are optimistic and hopeful. But, afterward, normal sleeping and eating patterns prove difficult to reëstablish. Some have lost their sense of time. For weeks, they have trouble managing the sensations and emotional complexities of their freedom.

For the first few months after his release, Anderson said when I reached him by phone recently, “it was just kind of a fog.” He had done many television interviews at the time. “And if you look at me in the pictures? Look at my eyes. You can tell. I look drugged.”

Most hostages survived their ordeal, Fletcher said, although relationships, marriages, and careers were often lost. Some found, as John McCain did, that the experience even strengthened them. Yet none saw solitary confinement as anything less than torture. This presents us with an awkward question: If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?

Recently, I met a man who had spent more than five years in isolation at a prison in the Boston suburb of Walpole, Massachusetts, not far from my home. Bobby Dellelo was, to say the least, no Terry Anderson or John McCain. Brought up in the run-down neighborhoods of Boston’s West End, in the nineteen-forties, he was caught burglarizing a shoe store at the age of ten. At thirteen, he recalls, he was nabbed while robbing a Jordan Marsh department store. (He and his friends learned to hide out in stores at closing time, steal their merchandise, and then break out during the night.) The remainder of his childhood was spent mostly in the state reform school. That was where he learned how to fight, how to hot-wire a car with a piece of foil, how to pick locks, and how to make a zip gun using a snapped-off automobile radio antenna, which, in those days, was just thick enough to barrel a .22-calibre bullet. Released upon turning eighteen, Dellelo returned to stealing. Usually, he stole from office buildings at night. But some of the people he hung out with did stickups, and, together with one of them, he held up a liquor store in Dorchester.

“What a disaster that thing was,” he recalls, laughing. They put the store’s owner and the customers in a walk-in refrigerator at gunpoint, took their wallets, and went to rob the register. But more customers came in. So they robbed them and put them in the refrigerator, too. Then still more customers arrived, the refrigerator got full, and the whole thing turned into a circus. Dellelo and his partner finally escaped. But one of the customers identified him to the police. By the time he was caught, Dellelo had been fingered for robbing the Commander Hotel in Cambridge as well. He served a year for the first conviction and two and a half years for the second.

Three months after his release, in 1963, at the age of twenty, he and a friend tried to rob the Kopelman jewelry store, in downtown Boston. But an alarm went off before they got their hands on anything. They separated and ran. The friend shot and killed an off-duty policeman while trying to escape, then killed himself. Dellelo was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He ended up serving forty years. Five years and one month were spent in isolation.

The criteria for the isolation of prisoners vary by state but typically include not only violent infractions but also violation of prison rules or association with gang members. The imposition of long-term isolation—which can be for months or years—is ultimately at the discretion of prison administrators. One former prisoner I spoke to, for example, recalled being put in solitary confinement for petty annoyances like refusing to get out of the shower quickly enough. Bobby Dellelo was put there for escaping.

It was an elaborate scheme. He had a partner, who picked the lock to a supervisor’s office and got hold of the information manual for the microwave-detection system that patrolled a grassy no man’s land between the prison and the road. They studied the manual long enough to learn how to circumvent the system and returned it. On Halloween Sunday, 1993, they had friends stage a fight in the prison yard. With all the guards in the towers looking at the fight through binoculars, the two men tipped a picnic table up against a twelve-foot wall and climbed it like a ladder. Beyond it, they scaled a sixteen-foot fence. To get over the razor wire on top, they used a Z-shaped tool they’d improvised from locker handles. They dropped down into the no man’s land and followed an invisible path that they’d calculated the microwave system would not detect. No alarm sounded. They went over one more fence, walked around a parking lot, picked their way through some woods, and emerged onto a four-lane road. After a short walk to a convenience store, they called a taxi from a telephone booth and rolled away before anyone knew they were gone.

They lasted twenty-four days on the outside. Eventually, somebody ratted them out, and the police captured them on the day before Thanksgiving, at the house of a friend in Cambridge. The prison administration gave Dellelo five years in the Departmental Disciplinary Unit of the Walpole prison, its hundred-and-twenty-four-cell super-maximum segregation unit.

Wearing ankle bracelets, handcuffs, and a belly chain, Dellelo was marched into a thirteen-by-eight-foot off-white cell. A four-inch-thick concrete bed slab jutted out from the wall opposite the door. A smaller slab protruding from a side wall provided a desk. A cylindrical concrete block in the floor served as a seat. On the remaining wall was a toilet and a metal sink. He was given four sheets, four towels, a blanket, a bedroll, a toothbrush, toilet paper, a tall clear plastic cup, a bar of soap, seven white T-shirts, seven pairs of boxer shorts, seven pairs of socks, plastic slippers, a pad of paper, and a ballpoint pen. A speaker with a microphone was mounted on the door. Cells used for solitary confinement are often windowless, but this one had a ribbonlike window that was seven inches wide and five feet tall. The electrically controlled door was solid steel, with a seven-inch-by-twenty-eight-inch aperture and two wickets—little door slots, one at ankle height and one at waist height, for shackling him whenever he was let out and for passing him meal trays.

As in other supermaxes—facilities designed to isolate prisoners from social contact—Dellelo was confined to his cell for at least twenty-three hours a day and permitted out only for a shower or for recreation in an outdoor cage that he estimated to be fifty feet long and five feet wide, known as “the dog kennel.” He could talk to other prisoners through the steel door of his cell, and during recreation if a prisoner was in an adjacent cage. He made a kind of fishing line for passing notes to adjacent cells by unwinding the elastic from his boxer shorts, though it was contraband and would be confiscated. Prisoners could receive mail and as many as ten reading items. They were allowed one phone call the first month and could earn up to four calls and four visits per month if they followed the rules, but there could be no physical contact with anyone, except when guards forcibly restrained them. Some supermaxes even use food as punishment, serving the prisoners nutra-loaf, an unpalatable food brick that contains just enough nutrition for survival. Dellelo was spared this. The rules also permitted him to have a radio after thirty days, and, after sixty days, a thirteen-inch black-and-white television.

“This is going to be a piece of cake,” Dellelo recalls thinking when the door closed behind him. Whereas many American supermax prisoners—and most P.O.W.s and hostages—have no idea when they might get out, he knew exactly how long he was going to be there. He drew a calendar on his pad of paper to start counting down the days. He would get a radio and a TV. He could read. No one was going to bother him. And, as his elaborate escape plan showed, he could be patient. “This is their sophisticated security?” he said to himself. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.

One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,” he writes. “Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.

Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with “irrational anger,” compared with just three per cent of prisoners in the general population. Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy. Many prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fantasies.

“There were some guards in D.D.U. who were decent guys,” Dellelo told me. They didn’t trash his room when he was let out for a shower, or try to trip him when escorting him in chains, or write him up for contraband if he kept food or a salt packet from a meal in his cell. “But some of them were evil, evil pricks.” One correctional officer became a particular obsession. Dellelo spent hours imagining cutting his head off and rolling it down the tier. “I mean, I know this is insane thinking,” he says now. Even at the time, he added, “I had a fear in the background—like how much of this am I going to be able to let go? How much is this going to affect who I am?”

He was right to worry. Everyone’s identity is socially created: it’s through your relationships that you understand yourself as a mother or a father, a teacher or an accountant, a hero or a villain. But, after years of isolation, many prisoners change in another way that Haney observed. They begin to see themselves primarily as combatants in the world, people whose identity is rooted in thwarting prison control.

As a matter of self-preservation, this may not be a bad thing. According to the Navy P.O.W. researchers, the instinct to fight back against the enemy constituted the most important coping mechanism for the prisoners they studied. Resistance was often their sole means of maintaining a sense of purpose, and so their sanity. Yet resistance is precisely what we wish to destroy in our supermax prisoners. As Haney observed in a review of research findings, prisoners in solitary confinement must be able to withstand the experience in order to be allowed to return to the highly social world of mainline prison or free society. Perversely, then, the prisoners who can’t handle profound isolation are the ones who are forced to remain in it. “And those who have adapted,” Haney writes, “are prime candidates for release to a social world to which they may be incapable of ever fully readjusting.”

Dellelo eventually found a way to resist that would not prolong his ordeal. He fought his battle through the courts, filing motion after motion in an effort to get his conviction overturned. He became so good at submitting his claims that he obtained a paralegal certificate along the way. And, after forty years in prison, and more than five years in solitary, he got his first-degree-homicide conviction reduced to manslaughter. On November 19, 2003, he was freed.

Bobby Dellelo is sixty-seven years old now. He lives on Social Security in a Cambridge efficiency apartment that is about four times larger than his cell. He still seems to be adjusting to the world outside. He lives alone. To the extent that he is out in society, it is, in large measure, as a combatant. He works for prisoners’ rights at the American Friends Service Committee. He also does occasional work assisting prisoners with their legal cases. Sitting at his kitchen table, he showed me how to pick a padlock—you know, just in case I ever find myself in trouble.

But it was impossible to talk to him about his time in isolation without seeing that it was fundamentally no different from the isolation that Terry Anderson and John McCain had endured. Whether in Walpole or Beirut or Hanoi, all human beings experience isolation as torture.

The main argument for using long-term isolation in prisons is that it provides discipline and prevents violence. When inmates refuse to follow the rules—when they escape, deal drugs, or attack other inmates and corrections officers—wardens must be able to punish and contain the misconduct. Presumably, less stringent measures haven’t worked, or the behavior would not have occurred. And it’s legitimate to incapacitate violent aggressors for the safety of others. So, advocates say, isolation is a necessary evil, and those who don’t recognize this are dangerously naïve.

The argument makes intuitive sense. If the worst of the worst are removed from the general prison population and put in isolation, you’d expect there to be markedly fewer inmate shankings and attacks on corrections officers. But the evidence doesn’t bear this out. Perhaps the most careful inquiry into whether supermax prisons decrease violence and disorder was a 2003 analysis examining the experience in three states—Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota—following the opening of their supermax prisons. The study found that levels of inmate-on-inmate violence were unchanged, and that levels of inmate-on-staff violence changed unpredictably, rising in Arizona, falling in Illinois, and holding steady in Minnesota.

Prison violence, it turns out, is not simply an issue of a few belligerents. In the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness—a nice formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn’t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens. Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.

It wasn’t always like this. The wide-scale use of isolation is, almost exclusively, a phenomenon of the past twenty years. In 1890, the United States Supreme Court came close to declaring the punishment to be unconstitutional. Writing for the majority in the case of a Colorado murderer who had been held in isolation for a month, Justice Samuel Miller noted that experience had revealed “serious objections” to solitary confinement:

A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover suffcient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.

Prolonged isolation was used sparingly, if at all, by most American prisons for almost a century. Our first supermax—our first institution specifically designed for mass solitary confinement—was not established until 1983, in Marion, Illinois. In 1995, a federal court reviewing California’s first supermax admitted that the conditions “hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable for those with normal resilience.” But it did not rule them to be unconstitutionally cruel or unusual, except in cases of mental illness. The prison’s supermax conditions, the court stated, did not pose “a sufficiently high risk to all inmates of incurring a serious mental illness.” In other words, there could be no legal objection to its routine use, given that the isolation didn’t make everyone crazy. The ruling seemed to fit the public mood. By the end of the nineteen-nineties, some sixty supermax institutions had opened across the country. And new solitary-confinement units were established within nearly all of our ordinary maximum-security prisons.

The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all. At the same time, other states had just a tiny fraction of their inmates in solitary confinement. In 1999, for example, Indiana had eighty-five supermax beds; Georgia had only ten. Neither of these two states can be described as being soft on crime.

Advocates of solitary confinement are left with a single argument for subjecting thousands of people to years of isolation: What else are we supposed to do? How else are we to deal with the violent, the disruptive, the prisoners who are just too dangerous to be housed with others?

As it happens, only a subset of prisoners currently locked away for long periods of isolation would be considered truly dangerous. Many are escapees or suspected gang members; many others are in solitary for nonviolent breaches of prison rules. Still, there are some highly dangerous and violent prisoners who pose a serious challenge to prison discipline and safety. In August, I met a man named Robert Felton, who had spent fourteen and a half years in isolation in the Illinois state correctional system. He is now thirty-six years old. He grew up in the predominantly black housing projects of Danville, Illinois, and had been a force of mayhem from the time he was a child.

His crimes were mainly impulsive, rather than planned. The first time he was arrested was at the age of eleven, when he and a relative broke into a house to steal some Atari video games. A year later, he was sent to state reform school after he and a friend broke into an abandoned building and made off with paint cans, irons, and other property that they hardly knew what to do with. In reform school, he got into fights and screamed obscenities at the staff. When the staff tried to discipline him by taking away his recreation or his television privileges, his behavior worsened. He tore a pillar out of the ceiling, a sink and mirrors off the wall, doors off their hinges. He was put in a special cell, stripped of nearly everything. When he began attacking counsellors, the authorities transferred him to the maximum-security juvenile facility at Joliet, where he continued to misbehave.

Felton wasn’t a sociopath. He made friends easily. He was close to his family, and missed them deeply. He took no pleasure in hurting others. Psychiatric evaluations turned up little more than attention-deficit disorder. But he had a terrible temper, a tendency to escalate rather than to defuse confrontations, and, by the time he was released, just before turning eighteen, he had achieved only a ninth-grade education.

Within months of returning home, he was arrested again. He had walked into a Danville sports bar and ordered a beer. The barman took his ten-dollar bill.

“Then he says, ‘Naw, man, you can’t get no beer. You’re underage,’ ” Felton recounts. “I says, ‘Well, give me my ten dollars back.’ He says, ‘You ain’t getting shit. Get the hell out of here.’ ”

Felton stood his ground. The bartender had a pocket knife on the counter. “And, when he went for it, I went for it,” Felton told me. “When I grabbed the knife first, I turned around and spinned on him. I said, ‘You think you’re gonna cut me, man? You gotta be fucked up.’ ”

The barman had put the ten-dollar bill in a Royal Crown bag behind the counter. Felton grabbed the bag and ran out the back door. He forgot his car keys on the counter, though. So he went back to get the keys—“the stupid keys,” he now says ruefully—and in the fight that ensued he left the barman severely injured and bleeding. The police caught Felton fleeing in his car. He was convicted of armed robbery, aggravated unlawful restraint, and aggravated battery, and served fifteen years in prison.

He was eventually sent to the Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum-security facility in Joliet. Inside the overflowing prison, he got into vicious fights over insults and the like. About three months into his term, during a shakedown following the murder of an inmate, prison officials turned up a makeshift knife in his cell. (He denies that it was his.) They gave him a year in isolation. He was a danger, and he had to be taught a lesson. But it was a lesson that he seemed incapable of learning.

Felton’s Stateville isolation cell had gray walls, a solid steel door, no window, no clock, and a light that was kept on twenty-four hours a day. As soon as he was shut in, he became claustrophobic and had a panic attack. Like Dellelo, Anderson, and McCain, he was soon pacing back and forth, talking to himself, studying the insects crawling around his cell, reliving past events from childhood, sleeping for as much as sixteen hours a day. But, unlike them, he lacked the inner resources to cope with his situation.

Many prisoners find survival in physical exercise, prayer, or plans for escape. Many carry out elaborate mental exercises, building entire houses in their heads, board by board, nail by nail, from the ground up, or memorizing team rosters for a baseball season. McCain recreated in his mind movies he’d seen. Anderson reconstructed complete novels from memory. Yuri Nosenko, a K.G.B. defector whom the C.I.A. wrongly accused of being a double agent and held for three years in total isolation (no reading material, no news, no human contact except with interrogators) in a closet-size concrete cell near Williamsburg, Virginia, made chess sets from threads and a calendar from lint (only to have them discovered and swept away).

But Felton would just yell, “Guard! Guard! Guard! Guard! Guard!,” or bang his cup on the toilet, for hours. He could spend whole days hallucinating that he was in another world, that he was a child at home in Danville, playing in the streets, having conversations with imaginary people. Small cruelties that others somehow bore in quiet fury—getting no meal tray, for example—sent him into a rage. Despite being restrained with handcuffs, ankle shackles, and a belly chain whenever he was taken out, he managed to assault the staff at least three times. He threw his food through the door slot. He set his cell on fire by tearing his mattress apart, wrapping the stuffing in a sheet, popping his light bulb, and using the exposed wires to set the whole thing ablaze. He did this so many times that the walls of his cell were black with soot.

After each offense, prison officials extended his sentence in isolation. Still, he wouldn’t stop. He began flooding his cell, by stuffing the door crack with socks, plugging the toilet, and flushing until the water was a couple of feet deep. Then he’d pull out the socks and the whole wing would flood with wastewater.

“Flooding the cell was the last option for me,” Felton told me. “It was when I had nothing else I could do. You know, they took everything out of my cell, and all I had left was toilet water. I’d sit there and I’d say, ‘Well, let me see what I can do with this toilet water.’ ”

Felton was not allowed out again for fourteen and a half years. He spent almost his entire prison term, from 1990 to 2005, in isolation. In March, 1998, he was among the first inmates to be moved to Tamms, a new, high-tech supermax facility in southern Illinois.

“At Tamms, man, it was like a lab,” he says. Contact even with guards was tightly reduced. Cutoff valves meant that he couldn’t flood his cell. He had little ability to force a response—negative or positive—from a human being. And, with that gone, he began to deteriorate further. He ceased showering, changing his clothes, brushing his teeth. His teeth rotted and ten had to be pulled. He began throwing his feces around his cell. He became psychotic.

It is unclear how many prisoners in solitary confinement become psychotic. Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist, has interviewed more than two hundred prisoners in solitary confinement. In one in-depth study, prepared for a legal challenge of prisoner-isolation practices, he concluded that about a third developed acute psychosis with hallucinations. The markers of vulnerability that he observed in his interviews were signs of cognitive dysfunction—a history of seizures, serious mental illness, mental retardation, illiteracy, or, as in Felton’s case, a diagnosis such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, signalling difficulty with impulse control. In the prisoners Grassian saw, about a third had these vulnerabilities, and these were the prisoners whom solitary confinement had made psychotic. They were simply not cognitively equipped to endure it without mental breakdowns.

A psychiatrist tried giving Felton anti-psychotic medication. Mostly, it made him sleep—sometimes twenty-four hours at a stretch, he said. Twice he attempted suicide. The first time, he hanged himself in a noose made from a sheet. The second time, he took a single staple from a legal newspaper and managed to slash the radial artery in his left wrist with it. In both instances, he was taken to a local emergency room for a few hours, patched up, and sent back to prison.

Is there an alternative? Consider what other countries do. Britain, for example, has had its share of serial killers, homicidal rapists, and prisoners who have taken hostages and repeatedly assaulted staff. The British also fought a seemingly unending war in Northern Ireland, which brought them hundreds of Irish Republican Army prisoners committed to violent resistance. The authorities resorted to a harshly punitive approach to control, including, in the mid-seventies, extensive use of solitary confinement. But the violence in prisons remained unchanged, the costs were phenomenal (in the United States, they reach more than fifty thousand dollars a year per inmate), and the public outcry became intolerable. British authorities therefore looked for another approach.

Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, they gradually adopted a strategy that focussed on preventing prison violence rather than on delivering an ever more brutal series of punishments for it. The approach starts with the simple observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence.

So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed “Close Supervision Centres,” prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, “contact visits,” and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to track the results and enable adjustments based on the data.

The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in “extreme custody” than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.

In this country, in June of 2006, a bipartisan national task force, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, released its recommendations after a yearlong investigation. It called for ending long-term isolation of prisoners. Beyond about ten days, the report noted, practically no benefits can be found and the harm is clear—not just for inmates but for the public as well. Most prisoners in long-term isolation are returned to society, after all. And evidence from a number of studies has shown that supermax conditions—in which prisoners have virtually no social interactions and are given no programmatic support—make it highly likely that they will commit more crimes when they are released. Instead, the report said, we should follow the preventive approaches used in European countries.

The recommendations went nowhere, of course. Whatever the evidence in its favor, people simply did not believe in the treatment.

I spoke to a state-prison commissioner who wished to remain unidentified. He was a veteran of the system, having been either a prison warden or a commissioner in several states across the country for more than twenty years. He has publicly defended the use of long-term isolation everywhere that he has worked. Nonetheless, he said, he would remove most prisoners from long-term isolation units if he could and provide programming for the mental illnesses that many of them have.

“Prolonged isolation is not going to serve anyone’s best interest,” he told me. He still thought that prisons needed the option of isolation. “A bad violation should, I think, land you there for about ninety days, but it should not go beyond that.”

He is apparently not alone among prison officials. Over the years, he has come to know commissioners in nearly every state in the country. “I believe that today you’ll probably find that two-thirds or three-fourths of the heads of correctional agencies will largely share the position that I articulated with you,” he said.

Commissioners are not powerless. They could eliminate prolonged isolation with the stroke of a pen. So, I asked, why haven’t they? He told me what happened when he tried to move just one prisoner out of isolation. Legislators called for him to be fired and threatened to withhold basic funding. Corrections officers called members of the crime victim’s family and told them that he’d gone soft on crime. Hostile stories appeared in the tabloids. It is pointless for commissioners to act unilaterally, he said, without a change in public opinion.

This past year, both the Republican and the Democratic Presidential candidates came out firmly for banning torture and closing the facility in Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture. For a Presidential candidate, no less than for the prison commissioner, this would have been political suicide. The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement—on our own people, in our own communities, in a supermax prison, for example, that is a thirty-minute drive from my door.

Robert Felton drifted in and out of acute psychosis for much of his solitary confinement. Eventually, however, he found an unexpected resource. One day, while he was at Tamms, he was given a new defense lawyer, and, whatever expertise this lawyer provided, the more important thing was genuine human contact. He visited regularly, and sent Felton books. Although some were rejected by the authorities and Felton was restricted to a few at a time, he devoured those he was permitted. “I liked political books,” he says. “ ‘From Beirut to Jerusalem,’ Winston Churchill, Noam Chomsky.”

That small amount of contact was a lifeline. Felton corresponded with the lawyer about what he was reading. The lawyer helped him get his G.E.D. and a paralegal certificate through a correspondence course, and he taught Felton how to advocate for himself. Felton began writing letters to politicians and prison officials explaining the misery of his situation, opposing supermax isolation, and asking for a chance to return to the general prison population. (The Illinois Department of Corrections would not comment on Felton’s case, but a spokesman stated that “Tamms houses the most disruptive, violent, and problematic inmates.”) Felton was persuasive enough that Senator Paul Simon, of Illinois, wrote him back and, one day, even visited him. Simon asked the director of the State Department of Corrections, Donald Snyder, Jr., to give consideration to Felton’s objections. But Snyder didn’t budge. If there was anyone whom Felton fantasized about taking revenge upon, it was Snyder. Felton continued to file request after request. But the answer was always no.

On July 12, 2005, at the age of thirty-three, Felton was finally released. He hadn’t socialized with another person since entering Tamms, at the age of twenty-five. Before his release, he was given one month in the general prison population to get used to people. It wasn’t enough. Upon returning to society, he found that he had trouble in crowds. At a party of well-wishers, the volume of social stimulation overwhelmed him and he panicked, headed for a bathroom, and locked himself in. He stayed at his mother’s house and kept mostly to himself.

For the first year, he had to wear an ankle bracelet and was allowed to leave home only for work. His first job was at a Papa John’s restaurant, delivering pizzas. He next found work at the Model Star Laundry Service, doing pressing. This was a steady job, and he began to settle down. He fell in love with a waitress named Brittany. They moved into a three-room house that her grandmother lent them, and got engaged. Brittany became pregnant.

This is not a story with a happy ending. Felton lost his job with the laundry service. He went to work for a tree-cutting business; a few months later, it went under. Meanwhile, he and Brittany had had a second child. She had found work as a certified nursing assistant, but her income wasn’t nearly enough. So he took a job forty miles away, at Plastipak, the plastics manufacturer, where he made seven-fifty an hour inspecting Gatorade bottles and Crisco containers as they came out of the stamping machines. Then his twenty-year-old Firebird died. The bus he had to take ran erratically, and he was fired for repeated tardiness.

When I visited Felton in Danville last August, he and Brittany were upbeat about their prospects. She was working extra shifts at a nursing home, and he was taking care of their children, ages one and two. He had also applied to a six-month training program for heating and air-conditioning technicians.

“I could make twenty dollars an hour after graduation,” he said.

“He’s a good man,” Brittany told me, taking his arm and giving him a kiss.

But he was out of work. They were chronically short of money. It was hard to be optimistic about Felton’s prospects. And, indeed, six weeks after we met, he was arrested for breaking into a car dealership and stealing a Dodge Charger. He pleaded guilty and, in January, began serving a seven-year sentence.

Before I left town—when there was still a glimmer of hope for him—we went out for lunch at his favorite place, a Mexican restaurant called La Potosina. Over enchiladas and Cokes, we talked about his family, Danville, the economy, and, of course, his time in prison. The strangest story had turned up in the news, he said. Donald Snyder, Jr., the state prison director who had refused to let him out of solitary confinement, had been arrested, convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison for taking fifty thousand dollars in payoffs from lobbyists.

“Two years in prison,” Felton marvelled. “He could end up right where I used to be.”

I asked him, “If he wrote to you, asking if you would release him from solitary, what would you do?”

Felton didn’t hesitate for a second. “If he wrote to me to let him out, I’d let him out,” he said.

This surprised me. I expected anger, vindictiveness, a desire for retribution. “You’d let him out?” I said.

“I’d let him out,” he said, and he put his fork down to make the point. “I wouldn’t wish solitary confinement on anybody. Not even him.” ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande

Posted by lois at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2009

New book: Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women
By Vikki Law
PM Press
Now available

In 1974, women imprisoned at New York’s maximum-security prison at
Bedford Hills staged what is known as the August Rebellion. Protesting the brutal beating of a fellow prisoner, the women fought off guards, holding seven of them hostage, and took over sections of the prison.

Why do activists know about Attica but not the August Rebellion?
Resistance Behind Bars documents collective organizing and individual
resistance among women incarcerated in the U.S. and challenges the reader to question why these instances and efforts have been ignored and why many assume that women do not organize to demand change. It fills the gap in the existing literature, which has focused mostly on the causes, conditions and effects of female imprisonment.

Women have significantly disrupted the daily operations of their prison to protest injustices and demand change. More often, however, they have employed less visible means such as forming peer education groups, clandestinely organizing ways for children to visit mothers in distant prisons and raising public awareness about their conditions.

By emphasizing women's agency in resisting individually as well as organizing collectively against their conditions of confinement, Resistance will spark further discussion and research on
incarcerated women's actions and also galvanize much-needed outside support for their struggle.

About the Author:
Victoria Law is a writer, mother, and photographer. She is also the co-founder of Books Through Bars—NYC and publisher of the zine Tenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison. Her new book, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press, 2009), is the culmination of 8 years of research, writing and listening to the stories of incarcerated women.

Product Details:
Published by PM Press
ISBN: 978-1-60486-018-4
Pub Date: February 2009
Format: Paperback
Page count: 260
Size: 6 by 9
Subjects: Women’s Studies, Penology, Prisons, Prison Abolition
Ordering information: https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=91/

For more about the book and upcoming events: http://resistancebehindbars.org

"Written in regular English, rather than academese, yet full of fire, this is an impressive work of research and reportage. I hope you're able to get this to a greater audience, and that it sparks
awareness and resistance. Well done!" –Mumia Abu-Jamal

"There are too few books written about womyn in prison. Many focus on these womyn as victims only. But this book is different. Its focus is on the herstorical resistance of womyn prisoners! This is necessary information for all of us to have in our consciousness, especially our abolitionist consciousness." --Bo (r.d.brown), former political prisoner, founding mother of Out of Control: Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners and volunteer with the
Prison Activist Resource Center

“Excellently researched and well documented, Resistance Behind Bars is a long needed and much awaited look at the struggles, protests and resistance waged by women prisoners. Highly
recommended for anyone interested in the modern American gulag.” --Paul Wright, former
prisoner, founder/publisher of Prison Legal News and editor of Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor and Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration

“Victoria Law's eight years of research and writing, inspired by her unflinching commitment to listen to and support women prisoners, have resulted in an illuminating effort to document the
dynamic resistance of incarcerated women in the United States.” --Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz,
historian, feminist, indigenous rights activist, author, most recently of Roots of Resistance: History of Land Tenure in New Mexico

Posted by lois at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2009

Tamms: Illinois' highest-security prison a study in isolation

From the Los Angeles Times
Illinois' highest-security prison a study in isolation
The state's most dangerous inmates live with sparse human contact, no jobs and little chance for education at Tamms.
By Gary Marx

February 28, 2009

Reporting from Tamms, Ill. — A few times a week, Joseph Dole stands in a back corner of the outdoor recreation area at Tamms Correctional Center, straining to catch a ray of sunlight.

"About four feet gets sun," said the rail-thin Dole, who is serving a life sentence for murder. "You can only get it if they call yard between 11 and 1. I just stand there. You feel warm, you feel refreshed."

Another murderer, Adolfo Rosario, said he hadn't shaken anyone's hand since his transfer to Tamms 11 years ago. "There is no contact at all, none," he said.

"The hardest part is the isolation," said Tyrone Dorn, serving time for carjacking. "It's like being buried alive."

The so-called supermax section of the prison was built in the 1990s to house Illinois' most dangerous inmates. Human-rights activists persistently criticize it. The long isolation of supermax prisons, opponents say, drives inmates to mental illness -- when the inmates aren't already ill.

Legislation introduced last week in Illinois would prohibit the seriously mentally ill from being sent to Tamms' supermax incarceration and would make it more difficult to keep inmates there indefinitely.

The state Department of Corrections opened up this world to a reporter and photographer for the first time in years, allowing them a glimpse at life for the 245 supermax inmates.

Harsh conditions

For at least 23 hours a day, prisoners are in solitary confinement in 7-by-12-foot cells. Meals are shoved through a hole in cell doors.

For the rare visits from relatives and friends, inmates are strip-searched, chained to a concrete stool and separated from visitors by a thick glass wall.

There are no jobs and limited educational opportunities.

Inmates tell of using "fishing lines" fashioned from string in blankets to pass notes to other inmates and of developing a sign language to talk to each other.

Some observers liken Tamms' supermax to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Prison officials hail it as a success. Assaults against inmates and staff at other prisons have dropped, they say, because the most disruptive offenders are in Tamms.

Officials note that Tamms' supermax sector has been at just half its capacity during its 11 years, saying they've been selective about who is housed there.

Tamms -- which also includes a 200-bed minimum-security unit -- costs $27 million a year to run. That's about $60,000 for each inmate, almost triple the state average.

"What price do you put on staff safety?" asked Sergio Molina, executive assistant to the state prison director.

Psychiatric unit

A dozen supermax prisoners -- the most mentally ill, with disorders including schizophrenia and manic depression -- stay in a section called J-Pod.

(Some prisoners outside J-Pod also are prescribed psychotropic drugs.)

J-Pod inmates who behave well get to watch TV from glass cages about the size of phone booths. On journalists' recent visit, four were watching as the sitcom "One on One" blared.

"They love Rachael Ray," said Rita Lehkar, an activity therapist. "She has a real bubbly personality. . . . Next week they are going to watch the movie 'Lost in Space.' "

In one cage was child rapist John Spires, who says he hears voices telling him to hurt himself and others.

He is serving a 240-year sentence at Tamms.

"I'm OK with that," Spires said.

"That way I know I won't hurt anyone.

"I get tired of hurting people."

Even critics praise the care at J-Pod, but they say mentally ill inmates shouldn't be at Tamms, because the isolation is harmful.

One inmate attempted suicide several months ago.

Another prisoner, Marcus Chapman, hung himself in 2004 by braiding pieces of his jumpsuit.

"Tell all the guys on J-Pod I'm sorry!" Chapman wrote in a suicide note, court records show.

"I just couldn't take it anymore. I'm now free."

'Can't do anything'

Upstairs in a tower, corrections officer Patrick Trokey sits at an electronic board that controls 60 cell doors.

When he worked at Pontiac, a maximum-security prison, "I was scared," he said.

"Here, these guys are secure. They can't do anything."

Inmates, sensing a crowd of visitors in the control tower, began to shout.

"Come down here and learn the truth!" one inmate yelled.

"They don't clean the showers! They just cleaned them for the first time yesterday in six months because you guys are coming here!"

Many prisons resemble small towns, as inmates hustle to jobs or classes, play hoops in the yard or head to the chow hall.

Tamms' corridors are barren of foot traffic, eerily quiet except for the occasional clang of metal doors shutting. When inmates are moved, they are restrained in leg chains and handcuffs and guarded by two officers.

Critics say the dearth of educational programs and jobs should worry the public. More than a quarter of Tamms inmates are to be freed within a decade.

Stays are long

While acknowledging that a few inmates need to be held in the strictest conditions because they are so dangerous, critics contend most prisoners could be safely housed at one of the state's three maximum-security prisons.

Yet more than a quarter of the inmates have been at Tamms since its opening in 1998.

Even George Welborn, its first warden, said Tamms had abandoned its original goal to keep most inmates for no more than a couple of years.

Before he retired several years ago, Welborn said superiors sometimes didn't follow his recommendation to transfer out inmates who had passed muster.

"And that policy has been maintained since I left," he said.

Prison officials said even well-behaved inmates need to remain at Tamms if they continue to hold sway over a street gang or pose a threat.

Molina contended that officials regularly reviewed whether inmates should remain at Tamms.

Since 2005, officials said, 66 inmates have been moved to less restrictive prisons.

For longtime inmates at Tamms, the biggest challenge is to stay busy and avoid "bugging out" -- losing touch with reality.

Dorn, who was transferred to Tamms after prison assaults, passes the time reading the Koran and playing chess with an inmate housed upstairs in the same wing.

They shout out moves to each other.

"This place takes a toll on your entire body from a mental and physical standpoint," he said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-illinois-prison28-2009feb28,0,4430105.story

Posted by lois at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2009

THE PEOPLE’S AGENDA: VIRGINIA PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY

THE PEOPLE’S AGENDA

Adopted unanimously Jan. 10, 2009, by the VIRGINIA PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY

In this time of deepening economic crisis, the working people of Virginia are looking to the government to protect our interests. Instead, it is the Big Banks and Corporations that are receiving bail-outs, while we are faced with more layoffs, more cutbacks and more attacks on our standard of living. Obviously, the rich and powerful have their representatives. The working people need ours.

On Jan. 10, 2009, nearly 100 representatives from dozens of organizations and communities throughout Virginia met in Richmond to found a People’s Assembly to protect and promote the interests of working-class people and communities of color. After much discussion and listening to each other’s concerns, the delegates unanimously adopted this People’s Agenda which we are presenting to the Virginia General Assembly. Our first demands are the following:

Don’t Balance the Budget on the Backs of Virginia’s Workers!

We demand a Moratorium on Cutbacks, Layoffs, Evictions & Foreclosures!

We know there are alternatives to cutting the state budget. Virginia’s 6% corporate tax rate is the 7th lowest in the country and hasn’t been raised in more than 30 years. Raise it! Reinstate parole for Virginia prisoners so the state’s prison population can be reduced. Close the barbaric and unnecessary Red Onion SuperMax prison. No more state money to promote slavery-defending Confederate traitors. Bring home Virginia members of the National Guard and Reserves now stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, we demand the following:

LABOR

No layoffs of public employees — Remove all legal restrictions to the right to collective bargaining and the right to organize (HJ-60) — Pass a living wage bill — Create permanent, sustainable employment for all Virginians willing and able to work; promote “green” jobs — Equal pay and pay equity for women and people of color — Provide economic protection for retirees — Promote equal opportunity in all facets of state government — Support passage of the federal Employee Free Choice Act — Support repeal of the federal Taft-Hartley Act — Support the repeal of the federal NAFTA and CAFTA trade treaties

BLACK COMMUNITY

Remove barriers to effective support of the development and sustenance of neighborhood, community-based initiatives that will effect youth development, continuing education and/or job skills — Promote training and apprenticeships and small business and nonprofit organizational development to meet the needs of the community — ake Juneteenth an “Emancipation Day” state holiday; form a state-level Juneteenth Commission to coordinate cultural and educational programs — Increase procurement contracts to minority-owned businesses — For every dollar spent on Confederate culture commemoration, a matching dollar should be spent to fund Black culture and achievement commemoration, especially in regards to science, math and history

IMMIGRANT RIGHTS

Declare a moratorium on anti-immigrant raids, deportations and foreclosures — Respect the right of residents to remain with their families — Prohibit local enforcement of the Delegation of Immigration Authority Section 287(g) Immigration and Nationality Act — Prohibit public funding for the implementation of UNJUST migratory laws — Prohibit the use of abstract and nonspecific legal terminology like “reasonable suspicion” and “probable cause” that allow racial profiling and indiscriminate arrests — Prohibit police from using individual interpretation of laws for their own implementation — Stop linking illegal immigration and terrorism — Respect the human rights of immigrant detainees and prevent inhumane treatment — Prohibit detention centers like the planned Farmville Detention Center — Enforce and expand labor & wage protection laws — Allow in-state tuition for undocumented Virginia residents — Allow people to obtain a driver’s license or identification without presenting a Social Security number, to prevent arrests, criminal records and deportations — Allow all Virginia residents to benefit from social programs -- health, education and other social services; no denial because of lack of a Social Security number — Prohibit public service workers from denouncing people because of their migratory status — Prohibit the use of the term “illegal alien” and any official use of discriminatory terms or concepts against people of color or immigrants

EDUCATION

Restructure public education to focus on critical thinking and practical life skills along with promotion of both higher education and vocational training, rather than test-taking skills to the exclusion of all others — Include worker and labor history in public education — Include partnerships with local initiatives in the standard curriculum for skills building and self-sufficiency — Build in vocational learning connected to local employment industries starting in middle school — Improve accuracy of the history and social studies curricula — Improve relevancy of civics in public schools curriculum by providing hands-on engagement with local government and school board processes from kindergarten through 12th grades

HEALTH CARE

Support universal health care — Promote real access to health care — Protect access to safe abortions and birth-control — Stop the privatization of health care services — No cutbacks in Medicare — No cutbacks in the WIC program — Provide for realistic explanation of patients’ legal medical rights — Stop stigmas based on morals related to health care — Stop the closing of the Commonwealth Center for Children and Adolescents — Legalize needle exchange — Provide condoms in prisons — Make “queer bashing” a hate crime — While paying proper attention to child welfare, allow people to freely parent and give birth in any method they prefer, including those in prison and on welfare

PRISONER ADVOCACY

Pass the Prisoner Literacy and Rehabilitation with “EARNED” Sentence Credit Allowance for Virginia state prisoners under the non-parole sentencing law who seek an “earned” second chance in society — Parole Board Oversight Committee to ensure fair and responsible parole for 9,000 prisoners remain incarcerated 13 years after parole abolishment. Remove barriers to medical care in prisons and jails — Recognize the right of prisoners to education — Revamp state law to allow for the speedy restoration of civil rights of convicted felons — Close the Red Onion SuperMax prison — Reform drug crime laws — Raise the pay for public defenders assigned to indigent defendants.
VPA Real Prison Reform Representatives:
Janet (Queen Nzinga) Taylor: OneRastaQueen@hotmail.com
Cassandra (Imani) Shaw: Shawthesavvy1@aol.com
Lillie (Ms. K) Branch-Kennedy: RIHD23075@aol.com

STUDENTS

Make academic programs and faculty/staff wages the first financial priorities — Protect and expand tuition financial aid programs — Ensure academic diversity through equal support for academic programs — Ensure job security and fair pay for faculty and staff — Create a more democratic system of oversight at the state level and in universities — Promote college and university expansion that takes into account the needs of the host communities

ANTI-WAR

Bring Virginia GIs and National Guard members home now — Support veterans when they get home — End the “poverty draft” and fund alternatives to military service; fund “green” civilian corps with same benefits as military service — Divest state funds from Israel until it complies with UN resolutions — Mandate truth and full disclosure in recruiting — Forbid military recruiters from entering public schools — Make higher education affordable

OTHER

Raise the state corporate tax rate — Repeal the Dillon Law — Redraw Virginia’s voting districts so they are equitable and not based on race — Promote ecology and environmental conservation and protection; increase spending on state parks — Cancel the Wise County power plant — Stop coal extraction while meeting the economic needs of the people of Appalachia — Ensure available, affordable housing — Make Virginia friendlier to small businesses.

VIRGINIA PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY
PO Box 38441, Richmond, VA 23231
Web: www.RichmondJwJ.org

Posted by lois at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2009

Guantanamo and U.S. Control Units

Statement by Lois Ahrens on the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights given at commemorative event in Northampton, MA Dec 12 2008

Yesterday leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee released a report stating that Donald Rumsfeld bore major responsibility for torture at Guantanamo and Abu Gharib.

Speaking today, I must call your attention to this same kind of torture that goes on every day in U.S. prisons. President Obama can take the lead in ending this inhumane practice in Federal Prisons and call for the Justice Department to investigate the inhumane practices which go on in every state.
Solitary confinement of prisoners exists under a range of names; isolation, control units, supermax prisons, the hole, SHUs, administrative segregation or maximum security. Prisoners are placed in these units by prison authorities not as a result of a specific crime. They are used for punishment, for behavior modification, as retribution for political activism. Once in them, it is very hard to get out.
Solitary confinement includes
• confinement behind a solid steel door for 23 hours a day
• limited contact with other human beings
• infrequent phone calls and rare non-contact family visits
• grossly inadequate medical and mental health treatment
• restricted reading material and personal property
• physical torture such as hog-tying, restraint chairs, and forced cell extraction
• mental torture such as sensory deprivation, permanent bright lighting, extreme temperatures, and forced insomnia
Practices used in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were developed here and used every day.
In 1985 there were a handful of control units across the county. Today more than 30,000 people in them. Prisoners are often confined for months or even years, with some spending more than 25 years in segregated units.
Increasingly isolation units house the mentally ill who struggle to conform to prison rules. An independent investigation from 2006 reported that as many as 64% of prisoners in SHUs were mentally ill. Contrary to media driven perception that control units house "the worst of the worst', it is often the most vulnerable prisoners, not the most violent who end up in extended isolation.
Article 5 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” On this day of Commemoration of the Declaration of Human Rights, I ask each of us to take a stand against daily torture of thousands of men and women here in the U.S. and demand an end to prison isolation and segregation units.

Posted by lois at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2008

Camp Hill PA: Torture in Solitary Confinement Uit

STATE CORRECTIONS
Do special units go too far?
They're designed for toughest inmates, but opponents say they're misused
Friday, December 12, 2008
BY PETE SHELLEM
Of The Patriot-News

They're the worst of the worst in the state prison system.

Fifty-five men out of 48,900 inmates whose behavior led them to the hole beyond the hole have been placed in one of the two Special Management Units in the Department of Corrections.

The department says it's an incentive program for inmates who have racked up so much disciplinary time that they could spend more than a decade in the solitary confinement of the Restricted Housing Unit.

It's also a solitary confinement unit, but the program could get them back into the general population in two years if they follow the rules.

But several groups are calling it a torture chamber where inmates are denied food, showers and yard time and are subjected to death threats and beatings.

Bret Grote, an investigator for the Human Rights Coalition/Fed Up, said the department uses the pretext of disciplinary problems to put the inmates in the SMU. In reality, Grote said, they are being placed there in retaliation for filing lawsuits and grievances.

"The Department of Corrections is going to claim these are the problem prisoners who have assaultive histories," Grote said. "There's no way to justify that."

However, a random background check of some of the inmates in the unit shows they are incarcerated for violent crimes, and at least one has been convicted four times of assaulting guards.

The group has asked Gov. Ed Rendell to conduct an investigation into the claims, which are based on complaints from the inmates and their families.

Grote said one inmate was transferred to Camp Hill's SMU after he failed to sign an affidavit that would prevent him from pursuing grievances against guards who posted photographs of lynchings in his cell. Grote claimed another inmate was starved for three weeks for filing an excessive-force grievance against guards.

Grote said the Pittsburgh-based FedUp was organized three years ago as the result of abuses seen at a Virginia prison by an artist promoting a poster program for prisoners. A group called the Anarchist Black Cross Paralegal Services in Texas has also called for an investigation of the SMU at Camp Hill.

Department of Corrections press secretary Susan McNaughton said the department has investigated the complaints the organization has raised in the past and will review those investigations since the allegations have been raised again along with any new claims.

She said past reviews have found the claims were unsubstantiated.

William DisMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, an agency which advocates for prisoners, said he had just become aware of the allegations and declined comment on the specifics of the cases.

But he said he didn't think the SMU was a viable program. He is pleased Pennsylvania uses it infrequently compared to other states.

"I don't think it's a good program because I don't think you teach anybody anything by punishing them into submission," he said.

McNaughton said the unit is designed to give problem inmates the chance to get back into general population and wipe their disciplinary slates clean by progressing through phases that progressively offer more privileges.

Inmates subjected to the program have repeatedly demonstrated violent, disruptive or threatening behavior, McNaughton said. The inmates are screened by staff members, including a psychiatrist or psychologist, to ensure they don't have mental health issues suited to the prison's mental health unit.

The program has been in place at Camp Hill since 1992 and at Fayette since last year. At Camp Hill, 373 of 587 inmates successfully completed it, McNaughton said.

She said complaints about showers and yard time being withheld might be attributable to the inmates not cooperating with the program, possibly posing a threat or refusing on their own.

"We take every allegation of abuse or employee wrongdoing seriously," McNaughton said. "The DOC has an Office of Professional Responsibility that is directed by the secretary to investigate such matters."

PETE SHELLEM: 255-8156 or pshellem@patriot-news.com
http://www.pennlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news/122905323590690.xml&coll=1

Posted by lois at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

November 25, 2008

A Victory in PA: Pittsburgh jury awards $185K to state prisoner

From the Human Rights Coalition---FedUp! Chapter
Andre Jacobs, a captive of SCI Fayette in the PA DOC, was awarded $185,000 in compensatory damages by a jury today for violations of his constitutional rights while being hled in the Long Term Segregation Unit in SCI Pittsburgh in 2003.

Andre represented himself at trial, and prevailed despite being forced to wear a remote-controlled electro-shock stun belt throughout that was controlled by DOC staff. Two of Andre's witnesses testified to Judge Conti that prison guards working the Special Management Unit (SMU) in Camp Hill threatened them for their participation in the case, with both testifying that C/O Uler assaulted one of the witnesses.

In the first of three upcoming jury trials (the other two are scheduled for January and February) in Federal Court, Mr. Jacobs out-lawyered the state's attorneys throughout, eventually winning guilty verdicts against Lt. Gregory Giddens, ex-Captain Thomas McConnel, and Superintendent's Assistant Carol Scire.

Don't believe the hype: Andre never broke the hand of a federal marshal, but rather was beaten unconscious by federal marshals while in cuffs and shackles after he violated a direct order not to speak by having the criminal audacity to tell his grandmother, Elizabeth, that he loved her. To cover up their criminal assault they charged Andre with assault under federal statutes.

Here is an article from the Pittsuburgh although it repeats the same official slander: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_599980.html
Human Rights Coalition - FedUp! Chapter
5125 Penn Ave Pittsburgh, PA 15224
hrcfedup@gmail.com
www.thomasmertoncenter.org/fedup/

Here's the article....
Pittsburgh jury awards $185K to state prisoner
By Jason Cato
Pittsburgh TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, November 24, 2008

A federal jury today awarded $185,000 to a state prison inmate who represented himself in a civil trial against the state Department of Corrections and several employees.

Andre L. Jacobs, 26, claimed that prison guards at SCI-Pittsburgh illegally confiscated and destroyed about 150 pages of his legal documents after discovering they were part of a lawsuit against them. After deliberating for three days, eight jurors returned a unanimous verdict against two guards and a prison spokeswoman.

The jury found that former Capt. Thomas McConnell and Lt. Gregory Giddens interfered with Jacobs' access to the courts by taking his legal papers. Those men, along with prison spokeswoman Carol Scire, retaliated against Jacobs and conspired to violate his civil rights, the jury concluded. Giddens also defamed Jacobs by harming his reputation and causing mental anguish and humiliation, the jury ruled.

"I didn't ask for any money (at first). I didn't ask for any guards to be punished," Jacobs said last week while delivering closing arguments following a three-week trial before U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti. "The only thing I asked for throughout the whole process was that my legal documents be returned so I could proceed with my legal matters."

The jury exonerated 10 corrections employees, including state corrections Secretary Jeffrey A. Beard.

Department of Corrections officials could not be reached for comment.

Jacobs claimed staff at the state prison in Woods Run in September 2003 confiscated his legal documents from another inmate helping with his case. The next day, Jacobs said guards searched his cell and seized more documents.

He accused prison employees of creating fake documents and conducting bogus investigations to refute his claims against them. Court records show Jacobs was accused of refusing an order, possessing contraband and loaning or borrowing property following the seizures, which resulted in 30 days' confinement.

During an impassioned closing argument, Jacobs urged the jurors to send a message.

"Within the Department of Corrections, prisoners have no voice. Prisoners have no avenue for valid claims or relief," he said. "You are the only voice. You are the only ears for prisoners."

Assistant Attorney General Scott Bradley told jurors that Jacobs was using this lawsuit "as a ploy" to revisit his criminal case by smearing correctional employees.

"If all the defendants were lying, why wouldn't all of their testimony be the same?" Bradley asked. "Why would there be inconsistencies?"

Jacobs, originally from Harrisburg, has been in state custody since 1998, when he was 15 years old, according to court documents. He is serving five to 18 years in state prison. Details of his original conviction are unclear.

He is currently being held at the state prison in Fayette County.

In 2006, Jacobs was convicted of attacking federal marshals inside the U.S. District Courthouse, Downtown, following another civil trial that he lost. Prosecutors said Jacobs used his handcuffs during the March 2005 assault outside an elevator to injure a marshal's wrist. He was sentenced to 17 years and five months in federal prison, to run concurrently with his state time. If he is released from state prison early, he would have to serve out the remainder of the federal term.

Jacobs has two additional civil cases pending against the Department of Corrections and its employees. They are tentatively scheduled to go to trial next year.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_599980.html

Posted by lois at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2008

MA: The Catastrophic Failure of Corrections by by John Feroli, Old Colony prison, Bridgewater, MA.

The Catastrophic Failure of Corrections
by John Feroli, Old Colony prison, Bridgewater, MA.

“The state, whether we like it or not, is in loco parentis
and serves as one of the most powerful
moral teachers we have.”
-Justice Brandeis-

The Technical Assistance Report on Suicide Prevention within the Massachusetts Prison System, February 2007 reports that, “…the suicide rate within the Massachusetts Department of Corrections during the past 10 years was 26.9 deaths per 100,000 inmates. According to the most recent national data the suicide rate in the federal, state and private prisons throughout the country during 2002 was 14 deaths per 100,000 prison inmates. As such, the suicide rate within the MA DOC was almost double the national average during this 10 year period, and several times greater than the national average in 2006.” Following this report there have been additional suicides in the Massachusetts prison system.

While these statistics are alarming, little if anything has been done to curtail the suicide rate, especially in the maximum security Souza-Baranowski prison in Shirley, MA. Prison officials there have recently adopted or allowed a number of questionable and even risky practices that defy logic and common sense.

In an effort to reduce costs the mental health director and MHM Services, the agency that provides mental health care to prisoners discontinued all prescriptions for Adderall, Ritalin, Klonopin and other necessary psychotropic medications Without reason or warning inmates were advised by Dr. Fletcher that their meds were stopped. Another mental health clinician, Nurse Johnson claimed it was for, “security reasons,” because, “men are being raped for their meds.” But considering that these drugs are crushed, placed in a cup of water and then consumed in view of a c.o. who inspects the inside of each mouth, it is obvious that Ms. Johnson was not being truthful.

Because this move has directly contributed to prisoners’ instability, repeated trips to the Special Management Unit (SMU) by inmates whose medication had been discontinued, and has created an angrier and a more volatile population that endangers the lives of both staff and prisoners, one must wonder why the DOC is allowing the health care agency to control the atmosphere inside Massachusetts prisons.

Another new directive has recently been issued by the director of the health care services, Russell Phelps. While inmates have always had to be evaluated by a mental health clinician prior to being moved to the SMU, in the past there have always been a physician available. Not so at SBCC where there are no therapists on site on weekends. So from Friday afternoon until Monday morning prisoners are kept naked with only a large vest secured with Velcro, under 24 hour watch in an empty cell until cleared to be moved to the segregation unit. Even if a prisoner’s issue is a minor one, and has never had suicidal ideations or exhibited irrational behavior he will be held for up to 72 hours without even a bar of soap, a toothbrush or toothpaste.

Once he is approved to be taken to the segregation unit he’s again placed in an empty cell. This time he will only be allowed on item for the first 24 hours. He will not receive a book, a Bible or rosary beads. He will not be allowed a pen, a pencil or a writing pad. And he won’t get a shower, a phone call or even cosmetics. But he will be given a bedroll. In other words, after days of psychological torture this prisoner, who may be suffering from mental illness, substance abuse issues or withdrawal symptoms, is given absolutely nothing except a set of sheets with which to hang himself.

It is important to mention two very significant points: 1) Every prisoner who has committed suicide in the SMU has hung himself, and; 2) Every inmate is given a manual containing a complete and comprehensive set of rules and regulations which govern the SMU. And nowhere in this or any other manual is it written or even hinted that prisoners are not entitled to anything for the first 24 hours in the segregation unit.

It is absolutely imperative that these arbitrary policies be addressed. Are Superintendent Thomas Dickhaut, and Deputies Bruce Gelb and Anthony Mendonsa so inept as not to have the capacity to understand the potential consequences of their mindless and oppressive rules? Or are they intentionally aiding and even causing the suicides that are being committed in the SMU? In either case, their actions are inexcusable.

Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, formerly at Harvard has researched the mental damage solitary confinement inflicts on healthy people. But what about the prisoners suffering from mental illness? Professor Grassian told Time Magazine this year, “We’re taking criminals who are already unstable and driving them crazy.”

A U.S. Justice Department study in 2006 says that upwards of 2/3 of all prisoners report mental health problems. Why? According to criminologist Bernard Harcourt in a January 2007 New York Times op-ed piece entitled, “The Mentally Ill Behind Bars,” “Over the past 40 years the United States dismantled a colossal mental health complex and rebuilt an enormous prison, bed-by-bed.”

While bills to establish both an inspector general office to review charges of staff misconduct and an external oversight board to review general practices and policies languish in the legislature, rogue prison officials continue to overclassify the mentally ill to maximum security where their condition worsens dramatically.

Globe correspondent Michael Naughton, in an April 23, 2007 article wrote, “An independent study of the state’s handling of inmates at risk of committing suicide.” “The report, commissioned after a sharp increase in prisoner suicides, concluded that prison policies and practices were contributing to the problem.” What’s worse is that SBCC was never needed in the first place.

Dr. Michael W. Forcier testified before the Joint Committee on Public Safety on October 28, 203. Professor Forcier, a sociologist with over 25 years’ experience in the criminal justice and corrections arena testified, “I will never forget that I was called by Associate Commissioner Ernest Vandergriff who asked: ‘Based on your research findings what types of security level beds should the DOC be requesting?’ I responded, “Minimum Security.” One week later I learned that the DOC had requested 1,000 maximum security beds, and hence came Souza-Baranowski.”

Now, to perpetuate the fraudulent necessity of maximum security beds the DOC has decided to double-bunk some of the cells in that violent and hostile prison, which will obviously make that maximum security warehouse more dangerous for both staff and inmates.

Built to house, “the worst of the worst,” and, “only the most incorrigible,” SBCC is home to men serving multiple and consecutive first and second degree life sentences for murdering cellmates and other inmates prior to being transferred to that facility. There are also men there who are still awaiting trial dates and have yet to be convicted of a crime, men serving county jail sentences who should be in a House of Detention, and men whose point-based score is so low the belong in medium and even minimum security. Which was another serious issue addressed by the Harshbarger Commission following the murder of defrocked and overclassifed priest, John Geoghan.

The Boston Globe reported in a May 2, 2007 edition that State Legislators were seeking assurances from prison officials that they were taking greater precautions with mentally ill prisoners to prevent further suicides. One proposed solution is more funding for better training of guards, including a new protocol to check on potentially suicidal prisoners, and inmates in the SMU every 15 minutes instead of every half hour.

The reason this “band-aid” approach will fail is because guards and prison officials can’t be trained to care and have compassion for other human beings.

In his capacity as a lieutenant at MCI Concord, now Deputy Superintendent of Operations at SBCC, Bruce Gelb, placed human feces in a box and offered it to a mentally handicapped inmate who was constantly missing his door for lock-in. He told the inmate that it was a box of donuts.

In May 2008, a county jail inmate Sage Edenjacques, who had been in the SMU at SBCC for several months told a c.o. on the tier, “I’m sick of this @#$%, and I’m tired of waiting on you mother%$&@*%s! I’m gonna hang it up! The guard responded, “I’ll get you a rope.” The prisoner replied, “I’m not f’n with you! I’ve got a razor in my mouth.” The c.o. was saying “Yeah, yeah, yeah, as he walked off the tier. He never returned to check on the inmate. And fortunately, the prisoner, who was in the cell next to me did not attempt to hurt himself.

Even though additional funding had been approved to implement even stricter measures for guards to follow, as of June 2008, security rounds were still being conducted every half hour in the SMU. But instead of pretending to be able to curb suicides by making rounds more frequently in the segregation unit, in the interest of common sense, why not change the oppressive and punitive conditions that are causing feelings of hopelessness, despair and anger? Because if and when a prisoner has made up his mid to take his own life, the only thing a guard can do is cut him down after he’s hung himself.

The critical issue at stake is there are human beings locked away in these so-called “correctional” facilities, and they’re dying on an unprecedented scale. And those that aren’t killing themselves are returning to the community at a rate of 20,000 per year. How they return is determined by the way they’re treated while they are incarcerated.

State Legislators and concerned constituents have argued for decades for the creation of a citizen’s advisory and oversight committee to monitor the DOC’s treatment of prisoners, and its policies. And while administrators and guards promise transparency and claim to be the epitome of all that is honorable, professional and committed to positive change, they have continued to fight aggressively against the proposal. So why are they trying so hard to conceal what’s really going on inside Massachusetts prisons? For one reason, offenders are coming out of prison much worse than when they went in. So, of course, officials don’t want anyone to know that MA prisons only make offenders more violent.

The bottom line is that the citizens of the Commonwealth are paying with their taxes for every facet of the prison industry, from the construction of each cell to the wages of employees, and have every right to see for themselves how their billions are being spent. But because prison officials have been allowed to subvert rules and regulations, cut corners and abuse the mentally ill for so long, some members of the community are also paying with their lives, their property and their peace of mind as released offenders take out their rage and frustration on an unsuspecting society.

This agency that has the audacity to refer to itself as a Department of “Correction” has been creating any angry and violent underclass unabated for decades and releasing them directly to the community from maximum security. No one is asking to be coddled. But the DOC and prison officials must be held to the same degree of accountability as offenders. And until a citizens advisory & oversight panel is established to hold administrators responsible for their counterproductive and dangerous policies, both the prisons and the community will remain unsafe as society and the mentally ill continue to pay the toll.

Post Script

The Catastrophic Failure of Corrections was written in an effort to educate legislators, the media and the concerned citizens of the Commonwealth about the Massachusetts prison system. It is the hope of all prisoners that someone in a position of leadership will have the courage and the integrity to take a close look at SBCC and the officials in charge there, do the right thing and make the necessary changes.

Superintendent Thomas Dickhaut, the Deputies Anthony Mendonsa and Bruce Gelb are in a position of authority at SBCC, with the ability and the means to improve the quality of life of offenders and make it possible for them to become a responsible and productive asset to their communities following release. Instead, they have chosen to become a sort of infectious disease, intentionally inflicting emotional and psychological harm, and then sending into the community an angry and potentially dangerous ticking time bomb.

Commissioner Harold Clarke claimed that he wanted to be out front inside prisons, out front in the community, and he wanted to monitor the relationship between staff and offenders. Mr. Clarke has visited SBCC but has never spoken to a single inmate. Instead, officials there work round the clock prior to his arrival waxing floors and painting walls. So it appears that the Commissioners’ main concern is how shiny everything is, rather than the issue of suicides and the atmosphere at that facility.

Until the concerned citizens affected by crime demand accountability for the rogue officials, and until Commissioner Clarke actually makes public safety, and reentry & reintegration a priority, instead of a lot of hot air, people in prison and out in society will continue to die. And “corrections” will continue to be a catastrophic failure.

Copies of this article have been sent to various newspapers and publications, State Representatives, Legislators, Prison Officials, members of the Public Safety Committee, the Governor, Attorneys and concerned constituents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

John Feroli is currently being housed at the Old Colony prison in Bridgewater, MA.

Posted by lois at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2008

NY : Two Decades in Solitary

U.S. torture machine.

September 23, 2008
Two Decades in Solitary
By JOHN ELIGON
New YOrk Times

He is one of New York’s most isolated prisoners, spending 23 hours a day for the past two decades in a 9-by-6-foot cell. The only trimmings are a cot and a sink-toilet combination. His visitors — few as they are — must wedge into a nook outside his cell and speak to him through a 1-by-3-foot window of foggy plexiglass and iron bars.

In this static existence, Willie Bosket, 45, seems to have gone from defiant menace to subdued and empty inmate.

It was 30 years ago this month that a state law took effect allowing juveniles to be tried as adults, largely in response to Mr. Bosket’s slaying of two people on a New York subway when he was 15. He served only five years in jail for that crime because he was a juvenile, sparking public outrage. But shortly after completing his sentence, Mr. Bosket was arrested for assaulting a 72-year-old man.

He once claimed to be at “war” with prison officials. He said he laughed at the system and claimed to have committed more than 2,000 crimes as a child. He set fire to his cell and attacked guards. Mr. Bosket was sentenced to 25 years to life for stabbing a guard in the visitors’ room in 1988, along with other offenses, leading prison authorities to make him virtually the most restricted inmate in the state.

Now Mr. Bosket, who has gone 14 years without a disciplinary violation, does mainly three things: read, sleep and think.

“Just blank” is how Mr. Bosket described his existence during a recent interview at Woodbourne Correctional Facility, about 75 miles north of Manhattan. “Everything is the same every day. This is hell. Always has been.”

He is scheduled to remain isolated from the general prison population until 2046.

Mr. Bosket’s seclusion is part of a bigger debate over the confinement of troublesome inmates and the role of the prison system. Some say that Mr. Bosket’s level of seclusion is draconian, that he should be given an opportunity to rejoin the general population.

“He is a very dangerous person; he’s killed people,” said Jo Allison Henn, a lawyer who helped represent Mr. Bosket roughly 20 years ago when he fought unsuccessfully to have some of his restrictions removed. “I’m not saying he should be released from custody entirely, just the custody that he is in. It is beyond inhumane. I don’t think that too many civilized countries do that.”

But proponents of Mr. Bosket’s restrictions say he has proved to be something of an incorrigible danger to prison guards and other inmates and cannot be trusted in the general population. He is evaluated periodically, meaning he could rejoin the general prison population before 2046, said Erik Criss, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections.

“This guy was violent or threatening violence practically every day,” Mr. Criss said. “Granted, it has been a while, but there are consequences for being violent in prison. We have zero tolerance for that.”

From 1985 to 1994, Mr. Bosket was written up nearly 250 times for disciplinary violations that included spitting on guards, throwing food and swallowing the handle of a spoon, according to prison reports.

Few, if any, of the state’s current inmates have been in disciplinary housing longer than Mr. Bosket, said Linda Foglia, a spokeswoman for the corrections department.

Mr. Bosket says he wakes up at 7:15 every morning and gets a visit from a counselor at 8. At 9, he gets his first of three doses of medication for asthma and high cholesterol, he said. Lunch comes at 11:30, followed by more medication at 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.

He is entitled to three showers a week. Other than one hour of recreation a day, also solitary, he may leave his cell only for medical visits and haircuts. The recreation area measures 34 feet by 17 feet, surrounded by nearly 9-foot-high walls with bars on the top. Mr. Bosket said he was chained to a door during his recreation time and could not walk more than six feet, but corrections officials disputed that account, saying he was allowed to roam freely during his hour like other inmates.

And while other prisoners in isolation are escorted to a visiting room when they have guests, he must stay in his cell, speaking through the plexiglass.

Most of his waking hours, he said, are spent reading books, magazines, newspapers and anything else he can get his hands on. His favorite magazine, he said, was Elle.

“It’s very colorful,” he said. “It keeps me up to date on technology and the world.”

Mr. Bosket has long been known as a paradox, a man of charm and extraordinary intelligence but also of inexplicable fits of rage.

“It was like a terrifying metamorphosis when this spark within him went off, and you could see the rage in him building,” said Robert Silbering, a former prosecutor who tried Mr. Bosket for the subway murders. “I never have seen anything like that before or afterward.”

The killings led Gov. Hugh L. Carey to sign a law allowing people as young as 13 to be tried as adults for murder. Mr. Bosket said he saw it as something of an honor that he could drastically change a justice system that he said made him a “monster.”

“If I’m the perfect example, then I’ve been taught well,” he said.

At the sight of a recent visitor, Mr. Bosket cheerfully nodded and, revealing a small gap between his front teeth, gave a friendly, “Hi, how’s it going?”

He spoke with the aura of a professor, using deliberate gestures and emphasizing the ends of many words. He often spoke in metaphors and used stories and quotations to explain his philosophies.

As he contemplated his words, Mr. Bosket often folded his right arm across his bulging stomach and lay the fingers of his left hand across his mouth and nose. He sometimes rocked in his chair.

Despite his bleak situation, Mr. Bosket refused to concede defeat: “I’m not broken down and never will be.”

His life has always been empty, he said.

“I grew up with nothing,” he said. “I was born with nothing. I still have nothing. I will never have nothing. Forty-five years of living the way I have lived, I like ‘nothing.’ No one can take ‘nothing’ from you.”

Mr. Bosket, who has spent all but two years in some form of lockup since he was 9, also said he had formed a “breastplate” from a lifetime of incarceration.

“I’ve become so callous to the poking of the sword that, literally, instead of bleeding to death, the blood was drained and I became absent of concern, void of emotions, cold — plain cold to the degree that not much affects me anymore,” he said.

Yet Mr. Bosket did hint at something of a life of suffering.

“If somebody came to me with a lethal injection, I’d take it,” he said. “I’d rather be dead.”

His change from vicious to quiescent, Mr. Bosket said, was a calculated move. Growing up in Harlem, Mr. Bosket said, his heroes were revolutionaries like Huey Newton and Assata Shakur. He said he believed blacks needed to use violence to survive in the 1970s and ’80s.

But in 1994, he said, he sensed a change in society. “Blacks don’t need to go and attack to get their message across,” he recalled thinking.

He said that he also wanted young people to see positive in his life, and that continued violence could be counterproductive.

“I don’t believe at this point it’s strategic for me to be aggressive or violent,” he said. “I’ve made my point.”

“I’m not proud of a lot of the things I’ve done,” he added.

Mr. Bosket’s sister, Cheryl Stewart, 51, said her brother had expressed remorse in letters.

“What was done was wrong, and if he could redo it, he wouldn’t do it again,” she said. “He knows what was done was wrong and is just sorry for what all has went down.”

Though she corresponds with her brother, Ms. Stewart said she had not visited him in 23 years because it was difficult to see him so confined. Mr. Bosket is lucky to receive more than two visits a year.

Adam Mesinger, a television and movie producer, said he had visited Mr. Bosket seven times over the past four years and is shopping a script for a movie about Mr. Bosket’s life. He said that Mr. Bosket had always been warm and open with him and that he would consider him a friend.

“I have no fear of him,” Mr. Mesinger said. “I don’t think he would ever harm me. I don’t think he ever really wants to harm anybody.”

But not even Mr. Bosket would say that his days of violence are behind him.

“When you’re in hell,” he said, “you can’t predict the future.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/nyregion/23inmate.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=nyregion&adxnnlx=1222180005-i7AWCYLvpfVktjHtF/H7ow&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

August 11, 2008

StopMax: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons Heats Up

StopMax: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons Heats Up
By Jessica Pupovac, AlterNet
Posted on August 11, 2008, Printed on August 11, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/94257/

"When I left Angola," says Robert King Wilkerson, who spent 29 years in solitary confinement in Louisiana's notorious Angola State Penitentiary for a crime he was later found innocent of, "I said, 'I may be free of Angola, but Angola will never be free of me.'" Since his release seven years ago, the vow has taken him to rallies, churches and talk shows across the globe. Earlier this summer, it brought him to Philadelphia for the first-ever StopMax Conference, where he told stories, analyzed the state of the American prison system and collaborated with a throng of like-minded activists determined to "end the use of solitary confinement and related forms of torture in U.S. prisons."

Wilkerson is a former member of the Black Panther Party and one of the Angola Three. He spent more than 30 years in prison for the killing of a prison guard, along with two other former Black Panthers -- Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace -- before being exonerated by the state of Louisiana in February 2001. Woodfox and Wallace still languish in prison. They are the longest-held prisoners in solitary isolation to date in the United States.

On a Friday early this summer, Wilkerson addressed a crowd composed of both supporters and curious passers-by outside Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, which opened its doors in 1829 as the first institutionalized experiment in long-term solitary confinement. Over the past 40 years, with modern advances enabling an unprecedented level of isolation and control, the practice has been systematized, standardized and forced upon thousands of people across the country, from murderers to drug addicts and petty thieves.

Wilkerson was one of many modern-day solitary survivors who brought focus and momentum to the StopMax Conference, organized by the American Friends Service Committee. Bonnie Kerness, Prison Watch coordinator for the AFSC, said that over the past two decades, the organization has received an "astounding" number of letters from people in solitary confinement describing the abuse that occurs in their desolate cells. She told AlterNet that "they describe in excruciating detail," among other things, "the uses of devices of torture -- forced medication, restraint beds, restraint chairs …"

"And now we're also starting to hear from juveniles," she says, "so it's almost at a point where, how could we not respond?"

According to Kerness, alongside the piles of letters from prisoners, the AFSC has seen a corresponding rise in phone calls it receives from people around the country wanting to know more about the issue of solitary confinement and looking for ways to help friends and family in isolation stay mentally strong and combat the abuse. The conference, then, she says, was "a natural way to move forward."

The crowd that assembled at Philadelphia's Temple University for the StopMax Conference included a motley crew of about 400 people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Members of the United Church of Christ dined alongside dreadlocked media activists. Traditional Aztec dancers rubbed shoulders with psychologists and doctors. Native American religious leaders joked around with young college students and black-clad anarchists. An older, soft-spoken lawyer and community activist co-facilitated a workshop on the New Jersey Department of Corrections gang unit program with a prominent leader in the Almighty Latin Kings and Queens Nation.

All of these people and hundreds more spent three days strategizing, comparing notes and working toward a common goal: to end the use of solitary confinement running rampant, and largely unchecked, in the U.S. prison system.

Prison Nation

The United States has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, at 2.2 million people as of 2006, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. At any given time, an estimated 10 percent of those prisoners are being held in isolation, according to a new analysis of prison data compiled by Dr. Terry Kupers, a mental health adviser to prison facilities and a leading expert on the effects of solitary confinement. That translates into roughly 220,000 local, state and federal prisoners held in solitary confinement at any given moment.

Although U.S. prisons have always used isolation as a form of punishment, it wasn't until the 1980s and 1990s that a new kind of penitentiary -- the "supermax" -- began imposing it wholesale as a long-term population management strategy. The skyrocketing prison population, ushered in by the "war on drugs," made isolation an attractive option for prison officials eager to control their inmates, legislators eager to appear "tough on crime," and prison industry executives eager to build more technologically sophisticated, and thus lucrative, institutions.

Sometimes referred to as "secured housing units," "special management units" or "control units," supermax facilities are considered by critics to be modern dungeons, where inmates are locked away for 23 to 24 hours a day, fed through small slits in their cell door, and often monitored by cameras in lieu of prison guards. Prisoners have little to no outdoor activity, and temperatures inside their cells can fluctuate between freezing cold and unbearable heat, depending on the season. While many prisoners endure these conditions for a year or two, others remain, uncertain of how to earn their way out, for 10, 15 or, in Wilkerson's case, 29 years. With no meaningful educational opportunities to stimulate the mind or rehabilitative programs geared toward easing re-entry, the system has been repeatedly denounced by international bodies, including the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, who in 1996 called the system "cruel, inhuman and degrading."

Nonetheless, according to the AFSC, 44 states as well as the federal system continue to operate supermax facilities to this day.

Although the supermax is billed as a maximum-security facility for the "worst of the worst," it is too often the troublemakers and rabble-rousers who land there, at the pleasure of the prison officials who transfer them out of general-population facilities. Over-represented among supermax inmates are "jailhouse lawyers" -- those who file lawsuits, advocate on behalf of themselves and other prisoners, or otherwise irritate prison guards. Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois openly admits this on its Web site, stating that the Tamms control unit houses "some of the most litigious inmates in the department's custody."

Since people are sent to supermax facilities because of their behavior inside prison walls, rather than offenses committed on the outside, many of the prisoners in supermax prisons are thus serving time for relatively small crimes, such as possession of drugs or burglary. For example, David Tracy, a 20-year-old prisoner who hung himself in a Virginia supermax in 2000, was serving a two-and-a-half year sentence for selling drugs at the time of his death.

Tracy's case, sadly, is not unique. The suicide rate in supermax facilities is often twice that of general population facilities. Despite the fact that only about 10 percent of the prison and jail population is held in isolation at any given time, according to the Correctional Association of New York, more than 40 percent of completed suicides occur in segregation. In part this is due to the fact that, within the prison population, the most over-represented group in isolation is prisoners who are mentally ill. At some institutions, such as Indiana's Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, officials have admitted that the mentally ill comprise "over half" of their supermax population. According to David Fathi, director of the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch, this has much to do with the dismantling and underfunding of numerous social services -- most notably large, public mental health institutions -- that coincided with the rise of the supermax prison. People with mental illnesses, particularly those with impulse control problems, tend to be among the most bothersome in a normal prison setting, and guards, usually ill-equipped to deal with mental illness, have a penchant for sending them to supermaxes, which Fathi calls an "asylum of last resort." (For more on the mental health effects of supermax prisons, see "Torture in Our Own Backyards.")

Resistance on the Outside

The rise of supermax prisons has long been accompanied by a growing movement to shut them down.

The use of long-term solitary confinement was systematized in October 1983, when the murder of a guard at the Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois led prison officials there to "lock down" the entire facility, keeping prisoners in their cells 23 hours a day and severely limiting their movement and communication with each other and the outside world. Resistance to those policies sprung up almost immediately -- both behind prison walls and on the outside, through a group called the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown. Two years later, the AFSC published a pamphlet highlighting and denouncing what was happening inside Marion. It did not realize at the time that what was occurring marked the beginning of a trend in prison management. As "The Lessons of Marion" was distributed across the country, the AFSC effectively became a polestar for prisoners trapped in extreme isolation, as well as for loved ones on the outside who wanted to understand what was happening and advocate for them.

As "control units" were constructed in different areas around the country, local organizations sprouted up organically to denounce their existence as inhumane and destructive. Among them was California Prison Focus, started in 1990 by lone activist and physician Corey Weinstein, who set about to document and denounce the conditions at the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison in Northern California. Today, the organization is going strong, with a combined volunteer and paid staff of more than a dozen. With a strong presence at the StopMax Conference, California Prison Focus continues to be a vocal advocate for prisoners' rights.

As local initiatives grew, a national push began to form. In 1994, the AFSC spearheaded the National Campaign to Stop Control Unit Prisons, bringing together pockets of resistance from Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Three years later, with the help of dozens of letters sent back and forth from prisoners who were successfully withstanding life in solitary confinement, the campaign produced a "survivor's manual," which, according to Kerness, is still requested thousands of times each year.

Former Prisoners and Family Members at the Forefront of the Movement

Resistance to long-term solitary confinement, fueled by a string of recent victories and driven by former inmates and their family members, has been heating up for years. At the StopMax Conference in Philadelphia, it came to a rolling boil. Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, a former member of the Black Liberation Army who was imprisoned in Marion and released in 1985, has been speaking out against solitary confinement and the prison industry ever since. He told AlterNet in Philadelphia, "Our prospects for victory are better, because if we do this correctly, we could possibly bring hundreds, thousands, even millions of people into the struggle." In truth, the rising rates of incarceration have drawn more and more families and loved ones to the cause, and thanks to the Internet and other advancements in communication technology, activists are able to educate one another and further disseminate the message.

But still, the effects of supermax prisons are felt far beyond the organizations that were represented in Philadelphia. The majority of family members continue to feel disempowered and disenfranchised -- creating an additional challenge for activists. "We're going to have to go into the communities and educate people as well," Komboa says. "Our consciousness is not the same as people in the 'hood. … We've got to let them know what's happening, get agitation and activation out of that."

The Chicano Mexicano Prison Project has been working on that front in San Diego since 1993, through publication of a quarterly newsletter, Las Calles y La Torcida, and dozens of workshops and teach-ins aimed at exploring the impact of the prison industrial complex on Raza communities.

"Most prisoners don't know why they are in prison, and most parents think their kids deserve to be there," Ernesto Bustillo, educator and member of the CMPP, told attendees at the group's conference workshop. Part of the CMPP's mission, then, is to "raise political and social consciousness of Raza prisoners, educate the Raza community as to the realities of the prison system."

Friends and Families of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children, which also held a workshop at the StopMax Conference, is working on the same front in Louisiana, reaching out to and educating parents in low-income communities on how to advocate for their children and understand the dynamics of the prison system, with the goal of shutting off the "school-to-prison pipeline."

Meanwhile, groups like the Friends and Families of Prisoners' Emergency Response Network, led by a proactive community of family and friends of prisoners in Pennsylvania, is working to document the experiences of people inside the prison system while building a network of people ready to make noise whenever any one of their loved ones behind bars is suffering a legal or medical emergency.

One of the crucial strengths of these organizations is that for many, the driving forces behind their work are current and former prisoners and their family members. Gale Muhammad, the StopMax Campaign family organizer and a key driving force behind the conference, is one of them. She says she became active in the cause in 1997 while advocating for her late husband, Tarik Mohammed, who fell ill in isolation and died that year. She says she is driven by a desire to not let Tarik's death be in vain, and by her determination not to let their son, who is currently incarcerated, meet a similar fate. "I'm still here," she yelled to the crowd at the conference's opening celebration. "I'm here because we have got to save our children."

Creating Change

Chicago organizer Laurie Jo Reynolds, of the Tamms Year Ten Campaign, came with an agenda: to learn about places where activists have had success in achieving humane conditions in supermax facilities and apply those lessons to her fight to do the same at Tamms Correctional Center's closed maximum-security facility (CMAX). Tamms Year Ten persuaded the Illinois General Assembly Prison Reform Committee to hold a public hearing on April 28. That hearing led lawmakers to introduce a bill on May 24 that would put an end to indefinite sentences at Tamms CMAX, remove people with mental illness from isolation and establish clear criteria, and time limits, for assignment in the facility.

Similar legislation was passed in New York in January of this year after a six-year battle led by Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement, a coalition of more than 60 organizations in the New York area. The new law bans solitary confinement for people with psychological disabilities. However, at the urging of the New York State Correctional Officers Union, discretion is allowed "if an inmate is going to hurt himself or others."

"This is a victory -- and we have to celebrate our victories," Alexandra Smith, a New York organizer, said during a panel titled "Counter-Abuse Campaigns and Resistance Strategies." "But it is a partial victory, and so we have to remain vigilant."

Other localities face more resistance to reform. AFSC's Prison Justice Program Coordinator Matthew Lowen, in Tucson, says there is little hope for winning the support of state lawmakers, who "tend to be cowboys," so he and his colleagues have instead entered into a round of discussions directly with the Arizona Department of Corrections. The Tucson AFSC office compiled and released an in-depth study on the overuse of solitary confinement in the state, which gave the group some bargaining power with state corrections officials, which Lowen hopes to leverage for meaningful reforms from within.

Meanwhile, other groups have taken their battles to the legal front.

In 2007, a lawsuit brought forth by the American Civil Liberties Union and the law firm Holland & Knight against the Mississippi Department of Corrections succeeded in overhauling an overzealous system that, at the time the lawsuit was filed, was holding more than 1,000 prisoners in long-term isolation at the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, in Parchman, Miss. Through what attorney Steve Hanlon of Holland & Knight called "beat(ing) them up successfully in the courts, and then bring(ing) them to the table to negotiate," the legal advocates were able to slash that number to 130, with more prisoners still being weeded out and transferred.

The victory was born of a strategy that brought together an array of experts across various fields, including James Austin of the JFA Institute, a D.C.-based justice and corrections research and consulting firm. Austin, who has a long history in prison work, examined Parchman's placement system, or lack thereof, and developed a precise set of entry and exit criteria that everyone -- wardens and advocates alike -- could agree on. He then applied those criteria to the prison population. According to Austin, the new system included clear definitions of what constitutes good behavior and incentives (such as recreational time or access to a television) for conforming to those guidelines. The Parchman experiment, then, significantly reduced the supermax population simply by creating a centralized, defined, prison-wide assignment process to replace the process lacking in accountability that prevails at most supermax facilities and simply leaves placement up to the guards, with little or no opportunity to challenge that placement or identify its basis.

In Philadelphia, Austin spoke at a workshop on "The Successful Overhaul of Mississippi's Supermax Prison," saying that all he did was help Mississippi prison officials "understand that when you give incentives to prisoners in a normal, humane way, it makes for a safer place." "That's not advocacy," he said, "that's science." Austin was also one among a team of experts who similarly restructured the supermax system in Ohio in 2003, and, he says, "they have not had one prisoner come back."

The Fight Against Supermax Prisons Continues

Strategies like the ones described at the StopMax Conference have led to a successful reduction in the number of supermax prisoners and have helped remove mentally ill prisoners from their ranks. But they still fall short of the campaign's ultimate goal: abolishing solitary confinement. Multiple legal challenges claiming that prolonged isolation is "cruel and unusual punishment," and thus a violation of the Eighth Amendment, have failed. For example, in Madrid v. Gomez, a 1995 case filed on behalf of more than 3,000 prisoners at California's Pelican Bay State Prison Security Housing Unit, federal district court Judge Thelton Henderson ruled that "while the conditions in the SHU may press the outer bounds of what most humans can psychologically tolerate," they were not "cruel and unusual." However, in his decision, Henderson did rule that mentally ill prisoners should not be placed in isolation. Since that case, every federal court to weigh in on the issue has followed suit and has found solitary confinement unconstitutional in the case of the severely mentally ill, while deferring the ultimate decision about the isolation of mentally sound prisoners to the states.

However, one high-profile case revisiting the question of whether extended isolation qualifies as "cruel and unusual punishment" was recently determined to have "merit to proceed" by the United States Supreme Court. In a pending civil case, the Angola Three are challenging the conditions of their confinement as well as what they call the "sham" review process that allowed them to be held in isolation for so many years. Wilkerson, Woodfox and Wallace v. the State of Louisiana et al is still pending and could have far-reaching consequences.

"At one time I thought that which was legal was ultimately moral," Wilkerson told conference attendees in Philadelphia. "But my years -- my 29 years in solitary confinement and my 31 years serving time for a crime that the state knew I hadn't committed -- has taught me a lesson: that legality and morality are not friends. Legality does not equal morality."

Wilkerson pointed out to the crowd at the StopMax Conference that slavery and other abhorrent practices of racism, classism and sexism have also been legal at certain periods in history, but that, through the hard work of those who believe in equality and justice, they, too, were abolished.

"Abraham Lincoln gets credit, and other politicians get credit, for abolishing slavery," he continued, "but it really wasn't Lincoln. You know, Lincoln only did the will of the people. It was the abolitionists, people who looked at slavery and saw it as being something that was terrible."

"That is why it is so important that the struggle continues."

Jessica Pupovac is an adult educator and independent journalist living in Chicago.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/94257/

Posted by lois at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

July 09, 2008

Conviction Overturned After 36 Years in Solitary For "Angola 3" Member Albert Woodfox

COALITION TO FREE THE ANGOLA THREE
July 8, 2008

Conviction Overturned After 36 Years in Solitary For "Angola 3" Member Albert Woodfox
Federal Judge Rules Flawed Trial Lead to Wrongful Conviction in Case of Prison Guard's Murder
Lawyers Call on Prosecutors to Forgo Retrial, Release Men Immediately

In response to a Federal judge's decision overturning the conviction of Albert Woodfox, one of the two "Angola 3" members who remain in prison, lawyers for the men called on the State Attorney General's office to drop any further appeals and release the men immediately. Woodfox and fellow inmate Herman Wallace have been imprisoned since 1972 for the murder of prison guard Brent Miller. They spent 36 years of that time in solitary confinement.

In response to a Federal judge's decision overturning the conviction of Albert Woodfox, one of the two "Angola 3" members who remain in prison, lawyers for the men called on the State Attorney General's office to drop any further appeals and release the men immediately. Woodfox and fellow inmate Herman Wallace have been imprisoned since 1972 for the murder of prison guard Brent Miller. They spent 36 years of that time in solitary confinement.

"Herman and Albert were convicted of a crime based on false evidence. Now, a judge has overturned that conviction. They must be released immediately. They are men in their 60s who've spent the last 36 years of their lives in prison for a crime they did not commit. No further legal delay should rob them of even another day of their lives," said Chris Aberle, a lawyer for Woodfox.

"The state has already stolen nearly four decades of Albert Woodfox's life. The injustice in this case is unfathomable. How can Louisiana continue to imprison a 61 year old man after a federal judge has ruled that he shouldn't have been convicted in the first place? This case calls up the brutality and racism of an older Louisiana. The state needs to move forward. Albert must be released," said Nick Trenticosta, also a lawyer for the men.

The third member of the Angola 3, Robert King, was released in 2001 after a judge overturned his conviction. King had spent 29 years in solitary confinement for a separate crime.

www.Angola3.org

Posted by lois at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2008

Free Speech Radio News Report on StopMax Conference

Free Speech Radio News Report on StopMax Conference
An estimated 20,000 people in the United States live in concrete cells, 6 foot by twelve foot wide for 23 hours a day. With their lives on lockdown, these prisoners are deprived of educational programs, adequate physical and mental health services and have little contact with their families or other inmates. Denouncing these conditions as human rights violations and utterly failed policy, hundreds of people gathered in Philadelphia at the Stop Max Conference to put an end to Solitary Confinement. Andalusia Knoll reports from the conference.
http://www.fsrn.org/content/solitary-confinement-disputed/2473

Posted by lois at 09:14 PM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2008

Wyo sends minimum-security inmates to max security prison

Thursday, 08 May 2008

Wyo sends minimum-security inmates to max security prison

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) Sixteen minimum-security inmates from Wyoming are among the more than 100 inmates the state has sent to a maximum-security Virginia prison that has been the target of human rights complaints over the years.

Some civil liberties groups say Wallens Ridge State Prison, in Big Stone Gap, Va., is inappropriate for minimum-security inmates. Virginia built the prison in the late 1990s as a ''supermax'' facility exclusively for the most dangerous inmates, but downgraded it to a maximum-security prison in 2002.

''It boggles the mind why you would send a minimum-security prisoner to a place like Wallens Ridge,'' Jamie Fellner, senior counsel with Human Rights Watch in New York City, said Wednesday.

T

The state of Connecticut removed its inmates from Wallens Ridge in 2001 following the deaths of two of them there. One of the Connecticut inmates died after being shocked repeatedly at the prison with a stun gun. The state of Connecticut paid $1.1 million to settle a lawsuit from his family over the incident and the state of Virginia paid $350,000.

Connecticut paid an additional $750,000 in 2002 to the estate of a mentally ill inmate who committed suicide at Wallens Ridge despite having less than a year left to serve in prison.

Bob Lampert, director of the Wyoming Department of Corrections, said Wednesday that he expects some of the state's minimum-security inmates now assigned to Wallens Ridge will be moved from the prison shortly.

Wyoming announced in March that it had contracted with Virginia to house 300 inmates, split between Wallens Ridge and another, medium-security prison in Virginia. Lampert said corrections staff have been reviewing the security classification of each inmate to see which of the two prisons would be most appropriate for them.

Lampert said it's necessary for Wyoming to house some of its male inmates out of Wyoming until the state completes construction of the new state prison in Torrington in the next couple of years. And he said Wallens Ridge will offer Wyoming inmates more educational and other programs than the private prison in Oklahoma that used to hold Wyoming's overflow prisoners.

Asked if any minimum-security inmates will be assigned to Wallens Ridge permanently, Lampert said that would be decided on a ''case by case basis.'' He said a minimum-security inmate could be sent there if they had a documented conflict with another inmate that the department had already housed at the other Virginia prison.

Lampert said his office has received letters from inmates questioning why they were sent to Wallens Ridge. He said that his office has responded to them that the classification process is ongoing.

Linda Burt, director of the ACLU in Wyoming, said Wednesday that her office has received numerous complaints from inmates' families about their relatives being sent to Wallens Ridge.

''Just basically the attitudes of the guards, that the guards are really extraordinarily tough, and angry, and that's the kind of information that we had gotten before for years,'' Burt said of the reports the ACLU has received about conditions at Wallens Ridge.

Burt said inmates' families should tell state officials, including legislators, the governor and the Department of Corrections, if they're unhappy that relatives are being held in the Virginia facility.

Lana Corcoran of Sheridan wrote a letter to the Casper Star-Tribune last month complaining about Wyoming's decision to send minimum-security inmates to Wallens Ridge. Attempts to reach her for comment on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

''Help! Please get our inmates out of Wallens Ridge Supermax prison in Virginia,'' Corcoran wrote. ''We have boys in there that were only convicted of minor offenses.''

In response to a request from The Associated Press, the Wyoming Department of Corrections this week provided a list of the number of Wyoming inmates sent to Wallens Ridge, their current security classifications and the offenses that resulted in their incarceration.

Melinda Brazzale, spokeswoman for the corrections department, said Tuesday that the department would not release the names of the 108 inmates it sent to Wallens Ridge because of security concerns.

While 16 Wyoming inmates classified as minimum or minimum-restricted were at Wallens Ridge as of Tuesday, there were only two maximum security inmates from the state there. Most of the inmates, 75 out of the 108, were classified as ''close'' and ''close-restricted,'' a classification between medium and maximum.

http://cbs4denver.com/coloradowire/22.0.html?type=local&state=WY&category=n&filename=WY--WyomingInmates.xml

(© 2008 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Posted by lois at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

April 27, 2008

"Buried Alive: Solitary Confinement in Arizona's Prisons and Jails"

"Buried Alive: Solitary Confinement in Arizona's Prisons and Jails" by Caroline Isaacs and Mathew Lowen. AFSC Arizona
The report is the first attempt to catalog the use and impacts of solitary confinement for adults and juveniles in the Arizona Department of Corrections, the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections and the Maricopa County Fourth Avenue Jail. The report is part of the national AFSC StopMax Campaign
http://www.afsc.org/az/documents/buried-alive.pdf

Posted by lois at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

April 26, 2008

Guantánamo: Detainees’ Mental Health Is Latest Legal Battle

April 26, 2008
Detainees’ Mental Health Is Latest Legal Battle
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
NY Times Page 1

Next month, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was once a driver for Osama bin Laden, could become the first detainee to be tried for war crimes in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. By now, he should be busily working on his defense.

But his lawyers say he cannot. They say Mr. Hamdan has essentially been driven crazy by solitary confinement in an 8-foot-by-12-foot cell where he spends at least 22 hours a day, goes to the bathroom and eats all his meals. His defense team says he is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks, talks to himself and says the restrictions of Guantánamo “boil his mind.”

“He will shout at us,” said his military defense lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. Brian L. Mizer. “He will bang his fists on the table.”

His lawyers have asked a military judge to stop his case until Mr. Hamdan is placed in less restrictive conditions at Guantánamo, saying he cannot get a fair trial if he cannot focus on defending himself. The judge is to hear arguments as soon as Monday on whether he has the power to consider the claim.

Critics have long asserted that Guantánamo’s climate-controlled isolation is a breeding ground for madness. But turning that into a legal claim marks a new stage for the military commissions at Guantánamo. As military prosecutors push to get trials under way, they are being met with challenges not just to the charges, but to Guantánamo itself.

Pentagon officials say that Guantánamo holds dangerous men humanely and that there is no unusual quantity of mental illness there. Guantánamo, a military spokeswoman said, does not have solitary confinement, only “single-occupancy cells.”

In response to questions, Cmdr. Pauline A. Storum, the spokeswoman for Guantánamo, asserted that detainees were much healthier psychologically than the population in American prisons. Commander Storum said about 10 percent could be found mentally ill, compared, she said with data showing that more than half of inmates in American correctional institutions had mental health problems.

With their filings, Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers are setting the stage for similar challenges to the procedures of Guantánamo in some 80 expected war crimes cases, lawyers for other detainees say. “The issue of mistreatment of prisoners, the miserable lives they live in these cells, will come up in every case,” said Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer for 35 detainees.

The case of Salim Hamdan is already a landmark because the Supreme Court used an earlier case against him to strike down the Bush administration’s first military commission system in 2006. But that case, like most of the legal battles over Guantánamo, did not affect conditions there.

Detainees lawyers argue that the effects of intense isolation have gradually turned the prison camp into something of a highly fortified mental ward. Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers say his place as one of the best-known detainees has not spared him.

In more than six years of detention, Mr. Hamdan has had two phone calls to his family and no visits. He has been disciplined, legal filings say, for having a Snickers bar that was given to him by his lawyers and for possessing too many socks.

“Conditions are asphalt, excrement and worse,” he wrote his lawyers in February. “Why, why, why?”

At Guantánamo, there are no family visits, no televisions and no radios. A new policy will for the first time permit one telephone call a year.

In the cells where Mr. Hamdan and more than 200 of Guantánamo’s 280 detainees are held, communication with other detainees is generally by shouting through the slit in the door used for the delivery of meals. Mail is late and often censored, lawyers say.

Conditions are more isolating than many death rows and maximum-security prisons in the United States, said Jules Lobel, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who is an expert on American prison conditions.

The military prosecutors declined to comment on the claims about Mr. Hamdan’s condition. As is common at Guantánamo, their legal filings were not made public before the scheduled court date. But defense filings released by Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers recited some prosecution arguments.

The prosecutors argued that the way that Mr. Hamdan was being held did not constitute solitary confinement in part because “detainees can communicate through the walls.” They said that Mr. Hamdan had denied having mental problems and that he was no model detainee, spitting at guards, threatening assault and throwing urine.

Speaking generally, Commander Storum said, detainees are enemy combatants held safely. “We are holding the right people,” she added, “in the right place, for the right reasons, and doing it the right way.”

Prosecutors have said Mr. Hamdan, now about 39, helped Mr. bin Laden elude capture after the 2001 terror attacks. He is charged with transporting weapons for Al Qaeda and being a bin Laden bodyguard and driver.

In recent weeks, his case has drawn wide notice because the defense asserted that senior Pentagon officials exerted improper influence over military prosecutors and pressed cases for political reasons. Hearings on that issue, also scheduled for next week, may expose the internal workings of the military commissions. The former chief Guantánamo prosecutor, Col. Morris D. Davis, who has become a critic of the way the war crimes system is run, is slated to testify for Mr. Hamdan.

But the claim about Mr. Hamdan’s mental health could expose the workings of Guantánamo. According to military statistics, three-quarters of the detainees have been held recently in two “camps” that look much like American prisons. Camp 5 and Camp 6, heavily guarded concrete buildings, hold men who have yet to face trial. Behind a heavy door, each cell has a handful of sanctioned items including a cup and a Koran.

Officials concede that the daily two hours of recreation in a chain-link pen is sometimes offered in the dark. From inside their cells, detainees cannot see the outdoors. From the exercise pens they sometimes can see only a sliver of sky.

Michael E. Mone Jr., a Boston lawyer, visited a client last month in Camp 5, where Mr. Hamdan is held. Mr. Mone said his client, an Uzbek detainee, asked why he could not be held in a place where he could see the sun.

This winter, lawyers for Abdulghappar Turkistani, a detainee in Camp 6, received a letter describing life there. “Losing any contact with anyone,” he wrote, “also being forbidden from the natural sunlight, natural air, being surrounded with a metal box all around is not suitable for a human being.”

Reporters are not permitted to interview detainees, and some international groups, like Amnesty International, have been denied access to detainees.

In leaked reports in 2004 investigators for the International Committee of the Red Cross, who do see detainees, said their treatment, including solitary confinement, amounted to torture. But the Red Cross usually keeps its conclusions private.

As a result, much of what is known about current conditions at Guantánamo comes from lawyers, who visit regularly under tight restrictions. Many describe the men as depressed or delusional. Some, they say, show obvious signs of what some of them call Guantánamo psychosis.

Four detainees are believed to have committed suicide in 2006 and 2007, but the military has never released the official details.

Some of the men are increasingly paranoid and some are losing touch with reality, said Rebecca P. Dick, a Washington lawyer who visited two Afghan detainees in March. “One client said, ‘I’m talking to the ceiling now,’ ” Ms. Dick recalled.

Six detainees, according to military officials, are now on hunger strikes. They are fed liquid nutrition through tubes inserted in their nostrils daily.

Mr. Stafford Smith said one of his clients, a hunger striker, was fixated on a mathematical formula that he believed proves that he will be the next to die.

Another detainee, Mr. Stafford Smith said, has smeared feces on his cell walls. “When I asked him why he was doing it, he told me he had no idea,” Mr. Stafford Smith said.

Last month a lawyer for nine detainees who are members of China’s Uighur ethnic minority told a Congressional committee that one of them, Huzaifa Parhat, said that life at Guantánamo was like having already died. The lawyer, P. Sabin Willett, said Mr. Parhat asked the lawyers to pass on a message. He told them to tell his wife to remarry.

Military officials often dismiss such descriptions as accounts by gullible lawyers manipulated by terrorists trained to make false claims of mistreatment.

Detainees’ lawyers say the military methodically understates the mental illness at Guantánamo for public relations reasons.

In military commission proceedings in recent weeks, there have been hints that some of the men facing charges may be deteriorating psychologically.

A military lawyer for a Sudanese detainee said her client appeared frantic and asked that he be evaluated.

When a judge asked a Saudi detainee the name of a lawyer, the detainee’s answer was: “I have been here for six years. Thank God I can even still remember the names of my own family.”

But Mr. Hamdan’s case is the first in the current system to try to air fully the claim that Guantánamo is warping the minds of the men held there.

Commander Mizer said Mr. Hamdan talked unendingly about his desire to moved to Camp 4, the only place at Guantánamo where detainees are permitted to live communally. Camp 4 is believed to house 50 or fewer detainees who officials classify as highly compliant. Mr. Hamdan blames his lawyers for failing to get him out of Camp 5, Commander Mizer said, and will talk only about that. “He refuses to talk about his case,” he said.

The trial is now set to begin on May 28. But twice in recent months, Commander Mizer said, Mr. Hamdan has said he was dismissing Commander Mizer from the case. “He said, ‘I don’t ever want to see you again,’ ” Commander Mizer said.

There is only one subject, he said, that Mr. Hamdan discusses: Getting out of his cell in Camp 5 at Guantánamo Bay.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/washington/26gitmo.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2008

Supermax lockups adjust to decreasing demand

Supermax lockups adjust to decreasing demand

By JULIE CARR SMYTH AP Statehouse Correspondent
Published on Saturday Apr 05, 2008

Kunta Kenyatta struggles to describe the 33 months he spent in the tight four walls of a super-maximum security cell at the Ohio State Penitentiary.

"It's extreme isolation, sensory deprivation. It's hard to explain really," said Kenyatta, 39, out since 2001.

Supermax prisons _ where inmates spend roughly 23 hours a day locked in soundproofed cells _ were trendy when Ohio cut the ribbon on its angular, steel-bedecked penitentiary April 9, 1998.
A decade later, the winds favoring ultrasecure incarceration have shifted.

Virginia and Wisconsin downgraded supermax prisons to maximum security in 2002. Virginia made the change at its notorious Wallens Ridge State Prison just four years after the facility was built.

A large portion of the population of Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, another supermax prison, was converted to less restrictive maximum security status last year. Ohio now also houses death row and lower security inmates at its penitentiary.

The scenario has been repeated across the country, where early legal challenges prompted states to remove most mentally ill prisoners from supermax units and states recognized quickly that the prisons were expensive to operate and difficult to staff.

"In a nutshell, it just became clear that they were not working," said David Fathi, director of U.S. programs at Human Rights Watch. "They were more trouble and expense than they were worth."

Supermax prisons were built to house inmates convicted of serious crimes who caused trouble in prison, including gang activity, subversive behavior or violence against staff. Ohio's went up after the deadly 1993 Lucasville prison uprising.

Dave Johnson, the penitentiary's first warden, recalls a kind of super-maximum space race among state corrections departments at the time, each wanting their facility to be the first, the biggest or the best. The first inmates arrived at Ohio's prison in May 1998.

"I got a call one morning and the man on the other end said, 'I don't know you but I already hate you,'" Johnson recalled. "It was the warden from the Illinois Supermax, and we had gotten our accreditation before he did."

Johnson said the Supermax was viewed as much safer than the Lucasville prison.

"Philosophically, the big thing that we wanted to avoid was an atmosphere of retaliation, where inmates would do something, staff would retaliate, then inmates would retaliate, then things would spiral downhill," he said. "It started out right away (at the Supermax) where staff would be safe, so they wouldn't be fearful of inmates, wouldn't dread coming to work, and it was a very positive, upbeat environment."

In Maryland, prisons had also become deadly, said Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Its Supermax was built in the wake of two prison guard murders, one in a prison a touring judge labeled "the innermost circle of hell."

At the peak of the supermax craze in 2000, more than 30 states were operating one or more supermax prisons, holding an estimated 20,000 prisoners, according to a National Institute of Corrections study and research by Human Rights Watch. By 2006, the number of prisoners held in supermax custody had fallen to 2,378 in 10 states, according to statistics from the American Correctional Association.

Ohio's Supermax provides a prime example. Only 53 of 553 inmates are held in the extreme isolation.

The cell of a supermax inmate measures 89.7 square feet, enough room for a ledge for his cot, a small desk and stool, a set of three small bookshelves (one used for the TV), and a toilet and sink. Inmates are allotted a 15-minute shower and one hour for exercise each weekday. Meals and most routine medical care take place in the cell. All visits with outsiders are non-contact.

On a recent day, some inmates released for their hour reprieve from isolation were dashing end-to-end in a cellblock, some were doing vigorous pull-ups, push-ups and knee bends, while others were just talking.

"Just to endure the conditions takes a very strong person or else a person who can retreat into a very narrow place," said Alice Lynd, part of a husband-wife attorney team from Niles that has fought Ohio's Supermax in court. "You lose any interest in staying alive. There's no ability to concentrate, you don't get normal feedback."

With the prisons' popularity waning, states also found that there were not enough ultra-bad inmates to justify all the glistening new ultra-high security cells _ conceived, Fathi says, "not by corrections professionals, but by politicians trying to look tougher on crime than the next person."

Walter Dickey, a former Wisconsin prisons chief who served as court monitor in a challenge to the state's former Supermax, the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility, said the excess capacity remains a problem.

"Because there's a bed shortage overall in most prison systems, there's pressure to use supermax beds because they're the only empty beds in the systems," said Dickey, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

"That was an issue with our state's Supermax, and one that most corrections departments need to look in the eye. And it's not easy to look it in the eye because it's not easy to know what to do."

Virginia's Wallens Ridge is now nearly full _ housing 1,150 maximum-security inmates in 1,200 available beds. By contrast, 795 of the 1,200 beds available at the state's remaining Supermax, Red Onion, are in use, said Virginia Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor.

Corrections professionals were also divided over how extensively to use supermax, something that state law generally leaves up to their discretion. Ohio's penitentiary created two tiers of security for its supermax inmates after the Lynds' litigation had begun _ allowing the better behaved ones slightly more mobility and more access to perks such as library books and commissary items.

"I look at 10 years ago and we had one purpose: to protect and serve, to take the worst of the worst," said Marcus Hill, a member of the prison's program staff. "Now you can tell how far we've come. We ask the inmate, 'What are your needs?' Before, we gave them their needs."

Kenyatta, sentenced to 30 years for robbery and attempted murder, said the "worst of the worst" label stings.

"They say these are the worst people, that they couldn't get along in society," said Kenyatta, who now chairs the prisoner advocacy group CURE-Ohio. "Well, I'm out here in society and I'm very successful. I have my own business, a lot of charitable causes and everything."

Despite the prisons' evolution, Dickey doesn't believe the Supermax will disappear.

"We wanted to make them as good as we could. There were some people who wanted to make them as bad as possible in hopes they would be shut down," he said.

"But I think there's the potential now to have the best of both worlds, to have those who straight out do bad things be segregated but not to have it be so onerous on the people who are in there."

http://www.ohio.com/news/ap?articleID=478064&c=y

Posted by lois at 10:24 PM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2008

'Angola 2' Leave Solitary Cells in La. After 36 Years....changing cells is not enough!

Listen to the story....
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89140779

'Angola 2' Leave Solitary Cells in La. After 36 Years
by Laura Sullivan
Morning Edition, March 27, 2008 • Two former Black Panthers imprisoned in Louisiana are out of solitary confinement for the first time since the 1970s. State corrections officials say Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were moved into a "maximum security dormitory" earlier this week. Louisiana prison officials once said the men, known as the Angola 2, would never be moved.
Nick Trenticosta, lawyer for Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, two of the "Angola Three," issued the following statement in response to Louisiana State
Penitentiary's decision to move his clients from solitary confinement to a separate dormitory:

"Herman and Albert need to be released from prison because they are innocent: they were framed for a murder they did not commit.

"After thirty-six years of solitary confinement, recent media scrutiny, a press conference by Louisiana House Judiciary Committee Chairman Cedric Richmond, and a visit by
U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers have caused the Angola prison authorities to panic and move the two men into new quarters without informing them or their lawyers about the terms of their new situation at the prison.

"We will redouble our efforts to gain justice and therefore freedom for Wallace and Woodfox. Changing their cells is not enough."

Posted by lois at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2008

Supermax Subscriptions at Tamms Supermax

Hello all,
Two weeks ago, Supermax Subscriptions sent a mailing asking every man incarcerated at Tamms C-Max unit if they would like to receive magazine subscriptions: free gifts from people with surplus airline award miles that they'd like to exchange for gift subscriptions. Tamms C-Max is a no contact, permanent solitary confinement prison in Southern Illinois. The men have been there for years on end — many for ten years. They have no communal activity, no phone calls, no programs, no education, no work, no librarian, and virtually no reading.
Already, over ten percent of the population has replied to our mailing. The magazine requests are pouring in and we have men who would like to receive everything from Newsweek to the Wall Street Journal to Horse Illustrated. Clearly the need for reading materials is dire and we are excited to start the process of helping these guys out.
Here's where you come in.
1) If you have award miles on Delta or American Airlines, please contact us at:
supermax@temporaryservices.org
Tell us how many miles you would like to donate. The minimum number needed for the least expensive subscription is 400 miles.

2) We will then send you the name, inmate number and address of a prisoner(s), along with his/their subscription requests.

3) You can then log in to your award miles account, find the page that lets you give a gift subscription, fill in the prisoner's information and send them the magazine(s) they've requested. Note that the prisoner will not see your personal information or even who gave them the subscription unless you send them a postal letter. The gift subscription interface can only send the gift recipient an email note, and prisoners at Tamms do not have access to the internet.

4) After you send a gift subscription to a prisoner, PLEASE email us and tell us the name of the prisoner(s) and the magazine(s) you sent. At this point we will note that they have been taken care of to avoid people sending out duplicate subscriptions.

Thank you for your interest and possible participation! If anything is unclear, please don't hesitate to ask!

all the best,

Supermax Subscriptions
[Tamms Poetry Committee, Sarah Ross, Temporary Services (Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, Marc Fischer)]
More about Supermax Subscriptions: http://www.temporaryservices.org/supsub.html

More about activism against Tamms: http://www.YearTen.org/

Major article about abuses at Tamms on Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/story/80440/

Posted by lois at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2008

Torture in Our Own Backyards: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons

Torture in Our Own Backyards: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons
By Jessica Pupovac, AlterNet
Posted on March 24, 2008

Imagine living in an 8-by-12 prison cell, in solitary confinement, for eight years straight. Your entire world consists of a dank, cinder block room with a narrow window only three inches high, opening up to an outdoor cement cage, cynically dubbed, "the yard." If you're lucky, you spend one hour, five days a week in that outdoor cage, where you gaze up through a wire mesh roof and hope for a glimpse of the sun. If you talk back to the guards or act out in any way, you might only venture outside one precious hour per week.

You go eight years without shaking a hand or experiencing any physical human contact. The prison guards bark orders and touch you only while wearing leather gloves, and then it's only to put you in full cuffs and shackles before escorting you to the cold showers, where they watch your every move.

You cannot make phone calls to your friends or family and must "earn" two visits per month, which inevitably take place through a Plexiglass wall. You are kept in full shackles the entire time you visit with your wife and children, and have to strain to hear their voices through speakers that record your every word. With no religious or educational programs to break up the time or elevate your thoughts, it's a daily struggle to keep your mind from unraveling.

This is how Reginald Akeem Berry describes his time in Tamms Correctional Facility, a "Supermax" state prison in southern Illinois, where he was held from March 1998 until July 2006. He now works to draw attention to conditions inside Tamms, where 261 inmates continue to be held in extreme isolation.

Once exclusively employed as a short-term punishment for particularly violent jailhouse infractions, today, 44 states hold "supermax" facilities, or "control units," designed specifically to hold large numbers of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. A concept that spread like wildfire in the 1990s, today an estimated 20,000 prisoners live in these modern-day dungeons, judged to be "unmanageable" by prison officials and moved from other penitentiaries to the nearest supermax.

Life in supermax institutions is grueling. Inmates stay in their cells for at least 23 hours per day, and never so much as lay eyes on another prisoner. While many live under these conditions for five years, others continue, uncertain of how to earn their way out, for ten, 15, or even 20 years.

The effects of such extended periods of isolation on prisoners' physical and mental health, their chances of meaningful rehabilitation, and, ultimately, on the communities to which they will eventually return are coming under increasing fire, from lawyers, human rights advocates and the medical professionals who have treated them. Bolstered by growing concern over the U.S.' sanctioning of torture, and the effect that has on the country's international standing, their calls to action are gaining ground. In 2000, and again in 2006, the United Nations Committee Against Torture condemned the kind of isolation imposed by the U.S. government in federal, state and county-run supermax prisons, calling it "extremely harsh." "The Committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to," they stated, "the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

"Sending someone to a supermax is punishment"

Defense attorney Jean Maclean Snyder, who has represented several Tamms prisoners, says the U.N. declaration is dead-on. "It is suspected that many [Tamms] prisoners have been sent there in retaliation for filing lawsuits about prison policies; because serious mental illnesses cause them to be disruptive; or simply because wardens at other prisons do not like them," she wrote in 2000, shortly after the original declaration was issued. Allan Mills of the Uptown People's Law Office in Chicago, IL thinks that the ambiguity surrounding how and why inmates are sent to supermax facilities constitutes a violation of due process. "Sending someone to a supermax is punishment," Mills told AlterNet, "and before someone gets punished, they have a right to a fair hearing." "Just like if you were to get a traffic ticket, you have a right to say 'I didn't do it' and bring witnesses, and the police would have to come and testify against you," he said. "The same should go for prisoners who are being subjected to this horrendous long-term confinement." Mills claims he has "tracked a pattern of prisoners being sent to Tamms because of them filing grievances or lawsuits and being jailhouse lawyers."

Assistant Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) Director Sergio Molina told AlterNet that, "Their behavior is their input," and although he claims the decision to transfer an inmate to Tamms is made on a "case-by-case basis," he wasn't able to expand further on the process.

Reginald Berry says he believes he was sent there for being "influential," among the general prison population. A former five-star leader of Chicago's infamous Vice Lords gang, he says he had the opportunity to turn in the "pistol" in a murder case, in return for a five-year sentence. However, he says, cooperating with the police against a fellow Vice Lord would have been "against the code," -- so instead he fought a first-degree murder charge in court and wound up with a 33-year jail sentence.

At first, life in Illinois state penitentiaries -- he was transferred to several over the years -- was manageable, since, in his words, "the animals were running the zoo." Through what he describes as a vast web of corruption and incompetence, "the guys who was the beast of the place were being rewarded by the warden," and were granted preferential job placements and access to coveted programs. "Might made right."

Following a series of prison riots and attacks on staff in the early 1990s (neither of which Berry had ever witnessed or been involved in) the Illinois General Assembly decided to construct the Tamms Closed Maximum Security Facility, or "CMAX." With a price tag of $72 million, Tamms CMAX opened its doors on March 10, 1998. The prison is capable of housing up to 500 of the department's "most disruptive, violent and problematic inmates," according to an IDOC brochure. IDOC also claims it costs approximately $60,000 per inmate per year to keep the facility running, a figure over three times higher than the per-inmate annual cost at other IDOC facilities.

Berry says that although he heard supermax rumors swirling throughout the jailhouse, he never imagined that he would end up in one. As he tells it, he hadn't been involved in a violent altercation for years. Nonetheless, "they came back and punished all the guys they had given fringe benefits to, and I had been one of those brothers." Days after the Tamms facility opened, ten police officers in full riot gear came to his cell and escorted him out. One of those guards offered him what would be his last cigarette for the next eight years, before putting him on an IDOC van and sending him off to Tamms.

"Many of these inmates have become psychotic"

The moment he arrived at Tamms, Berry says, he knew "it was a different world." All his belongings were immediately confiscated, right down to his underwear. He was then cavity searched before being escorted, in full shackles and leg irons, to his cell. "Imagine if you've been smoking 20 years," he says. "Overnight you can't smoke no more, overnight you can't talk to your kids no more." The coffee was gone. Work and educational programs were gone. Human interaction was out of reach. Guards barked orders and harassed him.

After about a month of sitting in his cell, he began to hear other inmates' mental health slipping. "You get these guys and they don't know how to acclimate so they start cutting themselves up," he recalled, adding that some would go so far as "taking a pen and sticking it all the way up into their penis," or even worse, attempting suicide.

One expert on the effects of solitary confinement, Dr. Terry Kupers, who consults prison agencies on mental health services, says it is not uncommon for "psychiatric symptoms [to] emerge in previously healthy prisoners … in this context of near-total isolation and idleness." Psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Stuart Grassian concurs. In 2005 he told the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons that he had evaluated of "scores of inmates" who "psychiatrically deteriorated during the course of their confinement in solitary." "Many of these inmates," he said. "have become psychotic, and many have engaged in self-injurious and self-mutilatory behavior."

Annibal Santiago, who has been incarcerated at Tamms since 1998, describes how it feels from the inside: "The mentally ill prisoners drive the normal prisoners crazy by screaming, crying, yelling into the pod at all hours of the day and night for days non-stop, by banging on toilets, doors, walls, and/or by shaking or kicking the doors so hard that it sounds like rumbling thunder, flooding the wing with toilet water, and by throwing feces at other prisoners or inserting feces into the air vents so that the whole wing receives a dose of the smell for months." "The constant bombardment of unrelenting stress takes its toll like a flurry of well-placed punches on a tired boxer's head," he wrote in a survey compiled by Tamms Year Ten Campaign, and activist group working to shut down the facility.

The Innocent Victims

Berry says that when he was first sentenced, he told his wife, Denise, that he would understand if he had to let her go. "I told her, you didn't commit this crime, you had no part of it and I love you enough not to punish you with the hardships that's to come," he recounted. But she didn't. When he was transferred to Tamms, six hours south of Chicago, she moved the family to nearby Springfield so that they could visit as often as possible. Since the Illinois General Assembly approved funding for Tamms with IDOC's claim that it would serve as nothing more than a temporary, one-year-long "shock treatment" for problem inmates, Mrs. Berry thought it would be temporary move. However, two years later, when it became clear that IDOC had no intention of transferring Berry in the foreseeable future, the family moved back to Chicago. Denise says she wasn't prepared for how difficult it would be to see her husband deteriorate so rapidly at Tamms, after having spent ten years in the general prison population. It was particularly hard for his teenage son, who watched as his father grew emaciated from a meager diet and lack of exercise and saw dark circles form under his eyes from lack of sunlight. "What I had a problem with, being an inmate's wife," Denise says, "was how they degraded the inmates." She described her husband being shackled and forced to sit on a small cement stool for the duration of their visits. When officers would deny him a trip to the restroom, encouraging him to instead prematurely end their visit, she says it made her feel like an accomplice to his suffering.

Berry says one thing that kept him going was keeping his family at the forefront of his mind. It bothered him that Tamms prisoners were only allowed to keep 15 pictures in their cells. "Every time my wife sent me pictures, she'd send me sets of 24, and I'd say, 'ok, I got to decide right here which ones I want,' because if you get caught with more than that they can give you a ticket and send you back down to seg [disciplinary segregation, a unit in which inmates have only one shower and one yard visit per week]." Inmates remain in 'seg' for a minimum of 90 days and are not allowed visits for the duration. Once, says Berry, in what would be a devastating error, he tried to mail a picture to his son rather than throw it away. Because in the photo his son's hat was tilted to one side, the officers gave Berry a disciplinary ticket, allegedly for participating in gang-related activity. "My heart dropped to my knees," he says, "I told them, 'ya'll let this picture in here!'"

The violation earned him a ticket to "seg" for six months -- months that were tacked onto his sentence, which had been reduced for "good time." The decision meant that Berry's sentence would effectively be extended, forcing him to miss his youngest son's college graduation. "I was thinking, 'You missed the eighth grade graduation, you missed the high school graduation, you've got to make this college graduation," Berry recalls. According to Denise, prison officials told her that if she could get proof that the people in the picture -- Berry's brother, Michael, his oldest son, Reggie Jr, and Willie Ware Jr., his nephew -- were not affiliated with gangs, they would reconsider his punishment. "I had to obtain their birth certificates," she says. Denise went to 28th Ward Representative Anazette Collins's office, as did the three men, with their IDs. Their efforts proved futile. In the end, she says, "all this was compiled and sent to Tamms and they did nothing."

Berry's son, Joe, graduated in May of 2006. Berry got home four months later. "I missed my son's graduation," he said, "and it crushed me."

Long-Term Effects

A 2007 Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP) report lists family ties as integral to rehabilitation and successful re-entry into the general community. However, for many Tamms inmates, the lack of phone access, a prohibitive visitation process, and the distance from Chicago, where two-thirds of Tamms inmates are from, makes it nearly impossible to maintain those ties. The scheduling and approval process at Tamms requires weeks of planning and multiple rounds of paperwork. If a visitor arrives late for their appointment, they are forced to begin the process all over again. With no public transportation near the site, the process become more than some people can handle -- or realistically afford.

The BoP also cites access to educational and vocational programs -- especially for minority populations -- as another key element in prisoner rehabilitation. Yet no such opportunities exist in supermax prisons, other than upper-level, self-guided study for the few inmates who have "earned" it.

According to a March 2008 study published in Prisons Journal, "the rapid expansion of the supermax has occurred despite no empirical evidence substantiating its effectiveness or value." Yet Tamms is just one portion of the billions of dollars that have been invested in supermax prisons. IDOC officials confirmed that they do not collect separate recidivism [or return] statistics for Tamms prisoners -- an alarming admission for prisoners, their families, and the broader community that many critics say points to a massive cover-up surrounding the human cost of supermax facilities.

As Paul Beachamp, a Tamms prisoner since 2002, puts it, "What happens when you lock up a dog in a cage for years at a time and constantly harass the dog and treat it bad while it's in the cage? Do you actually think that dog will act right once you let it out?" Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Corrections and Rehabilitation, issued a similar warning before a Senate hearing in 2006. "The experiences inmates have in prison -- whether violent or redemptive -- do not stay within prison walls, but spill over into the rest of society," he said. "Federal, state, and local governments must address the problems faced by their respective institutions and develop tangible and attainable solutions."

Meanwhile, a range of alternative responses have yet to be explored. A 2006 national survey of 601 prison wardens, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and administered by the Urban League, showed 62.5% of wardens agreeing or strongly agreeing that "staff training" would be an "effective alternative to supermax prisons." It was the number one choice selected in the survey. Other popular alternatives, in order of preference, were to "use segregation cells in each prison facility," "provide targeted rehabilitative services," and "provide opportunities for spiritual development."

Prison activists across the country are working to shed light on this. Enlisting the support of lawmakers and lawyers who share their concern over the treatment of supermax prisoners -- and the rationale behind it -- they are fighting for legal precedents that would bring more services to supermax prisons, grant prisoners more mobility and opportunity and, ultimately, shut the facilities down. The Tamms Year Ten Campaign is one such coalition; it recently persuaded the Illinois House of Representatives to hold a hearing, scheduled for April 28th, to consider arguments for and against the effectiveness and legality of Tamms.

Reginald Berry is part of that movement in Chicago, organized under the banner of the Tamms Ten Year campaign, which works to draw attention to the 88 prisoners who have been at Tamms since the day it opened its doors. Today, in addition to raising awareness of conditions inside supermax prisons, he's also working to cut off the "school-to-prisons pipeline" in his community by sharing his experiences in Tamms with Chicago teenagers, through an organization he founded, "Saving Our Sons."

Berry's work is one of the reasons he counts himself among the lucky ones. After spending eight years in a facility where he was told he would have to "relinquish everything, even your personality," Berry has done more than survive; he has thrived, and he is fighting back. Within the current debate over state-sanctioned torture abroad, his voice is an important reminder of the cruel, unusual, and too-often ignored contradictions of our own criminal justice system.

Jessica Pupovac is an adult educator and independent journalist living in Chicago.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/80440/

Posted by lois at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2008

"Through The Wire" by Charlotte Hill O'Neal after a visit with Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace

This poem was written in March 2008, after a first time visit to Brother Albert Woodfox and Brother Herman Wallace, political prisoners who have been locked down unjustly for 40 years in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, 36 of those years spent in solitary confinement.

This poem is dedicated to them, their strength and perseverance and their FREEDOM!

Through the Wire
by
Charlotte Hill O’Neal

I heard the tambourine tinkle of the shackles before my eyes met their faces,
one
with the cool calm demeanor of Malcolm
the other,
with the bob and weave energy of Ali

I was astonished by their ram rod stature as they crouched
with backs to that slit in the doorway,
in easy grace and Zen composure
in a dance like, practiced motion,
that served for easier release of the cold steel handcuffs binding them
or
was that steel hot and fiery,
powering and releasing electrified surges of Shango energy
to
pumped up cut muscles and solar powered minds
and
to fingers
leaving sweat trails of wisdom on dog eared law books,
searching for ‘that’
that others might have missed

And
their strength shone through the heavy mesh wire separating us
Wire that achieved the exact opposite of intended purpose
failing to dim the brilliance of their spirits
as they stood there,
let loose from their bonds,
tall and relaxed and smiling in greeting
that
changed that tiny walled space of confinement
into
an Airy Room
a
Living Room
a
Sitting Room
a
Front Room
(or whatever you like to call it),
filled with light
and ferns
and fragrant incense
and herb smoke
and crowded book shelves
and internet pings
and soft jazz purring
and wet splashes of laughter out by the pool
(with its Panther tiled bottom)

The prison doors seemed open and wide
and surely, I felt,
at any moment
wooden trays full of hot tea and fresh brewed coffee
or
maybe mango juice with crushed ice and mint leaves,
would appear,
to refresh our palates
and
dampen the light sweat on our fingertips
that touched and scraped at the wire

And meanwhile,
we stumble and bump into each others words
and
enjoyment of the four-way conversation,
nicking and flecking and cutting right through years
of
‘not knowing’ each other
but
‘knowing’ still
and
acknowledging and making real
that notion that a Panther meets no stranger down paths of shared existence,
only
brother-sister-comrades…
and Universe,
and
a unique sameness under it all

And
the wire opens
like soft paper flower petals
bright with visions of dusty roads and crackling cornfield sounds
and
migrating animal feet
and
parting clouds off Kilimanjaro
that we (Pete and me), see with our eyes
through
their dreams
through
our eyes,
visions that have been kept jarred up tightly, for years

And
they (Herman and Albert),
screw the lid off slowly…
finally…themselves…

At last
catching the sharp pungent aroma of three decades of bottled up dreams
and
tamped down tears
and
plumped up hope
and
wild wet laughter,
finally released with a rocket engine
WHOOSHHHHH!!
of
FREEDOM
flying right out that heavy metal wire

And
the wire becomes a curtain woven of hand corded soft fleece
snagging and unraveling slowly…
carefully…
untangling nightmares of confinement
unraveling…
undoing…
and
it moves lightly (that curtain)
and sways
and shivers
under the force of their dreams
of
FREEDOM realized…
at last

Charlotte O'Neal is a poet, artist, musician, community activist and co-founder of the United Afrian Alliance Community Center. She and her husband Pete O'Neal, are former Black Panthers from Kansas City who have lived in Tanzania for 35 years. They continue to serve their community through the programs of the UAACC which include a school, recording studio, radio station and cultural exchange programs.

Posted by lois at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2008

ID: House approves $70 million for maximum security prison for mentally ill prisoners

House approves funding to plan for mental health facility

The Associated Press, Edition Date: 03/18/08
Idaho Statesman

BOISE, Idaho ‹ The House has approved $3 million in funding to draw up plans for a maximum security facility for mentally ill prisoners and others in Idaho.

House lawmakers voted 66-4 Tuesday to begin planning for the estimated $70 million, 300-bed structure.

The building would house both mentally ill prisoners who need treatment as well as violent mentally ill people who have been found unfit to stand trial.The two populations would be kept separate and tended to by different state agencies.

The Joint Finance Appropriations Committee has recommended that the state issue bonds for the facility, which could open as soon as 2013.
The proposal will now move to the Senate.

http://www.idahostatesman.com/531/story/327100.html

Posted by lois at 06:04 PM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2008

Angola 3 Story featured on NBC News

NBC ran this last night-
Angola 3 Story

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#23661740

Posted by lois at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2008

MA: Breakdown: The Prison Suicide Crisis (3 articles)

3 articles in the Boston Globe
BREAKDOWN | THE PRISON SUICIDE CRISIS
A system strains, and inmates die
December 9, 2007
This story was reported by Globe Spotlight Team members Beth Healy, Michael Rezendes, Francie Latour, Jonathan Saltzman, and editor Thomas Farragher.
It was written by Healy.
First of three parts

His mother couldn't understand how he got the shoelaces.

After all, everyone knew Jarred Aranda was in danger. He had just tried to kill himself in jail.

Now, the handsome 27-year-old, with a to-do list in his pocket and a smile that hid his troubles, was being evaluated for mental illness at the state prison hospital in Bridgewater. He should have been safe there.

Locked up for stealing sneakers and violating probation, Aranda was deeply depressed. His mind was ravaged by crystal meth and other drugs his mother had begged him to quit. He'd been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and he was hearing voices.

But he told prison doctors he didn't want to die, and they believed him. Then they forgot about him.

No one from the prison clinical staff checked on him for 10 days. When a doctor finally did show up again, Aranda said he felt hopeless, and couldn't sleep. But the next day, he was allowed to walk into a shower, unattended, for 17 minutes. He had a set of shoelaces with him.

When an officer found him hanging from the shower door and sounded the "Code 99" alert last March, Aranda became the next in a series of 15 suicides in Massachusetts state prisons since early 2005. The deaths were coming at an alarming pace, roughly triple the rate in other states.

Last year alone, seven inmates killed themselves, and another's attempt left him brain dead; four have taken their lives so far this year.

Department of Correction officials say the suicides are random and unrelated. But a Globe Spotlight Team investigation of the deaths and detailed reconstruction of how they occurred found that they were far from random.

Most of the suicides came after careless errors and dangerous decisions by correction officials and the staff at UMass Correctional Health. And the trail of violence is far wider than the number of dead would indicate, as hundreds more inmates each year have wounded themselves or attempted suicide.

In fact, such incidents are soaring.

So common has it been to find a man with a makeshift noose around his neck that some correction officers have taken to carrying their own pocket tools to cut them down. The tally of suicide attempts and self-inflicted injuries - 513 last year and more than 3,200 over the past decade - tells a story of deepening mental illness and misery behind the walls of the state's prisons, despite repeated calls for better training of officers and safer cells for mentally troubled inmates.

The Globe found that background screens were botched as inmates arrived at prison. Medical and mental health records went missing or were never reviewed. Security rounds were skipped. Inmates in distress were punished for behavior that amounted to a cry for help, or at least a signal that greater precautions were needed.

"You're taking people who are vulnerable and can't cope in society," said Dr. Carl Fulwiler, a psychiatrist who consults to prisons and is an assistant professor at University of Massachusetts Medical School, "and putting them in the worst situation imaginable."

The Department of Correction guards the details of these events in secrecy, revealing little to the public, or even to the families of the suicide victims.

But internal investigative reports obtained from other prison sources by the Globe show that, in case after case, the suicides occurred at times when inmates were predictably at risk - within days or hours of arriving at prison, being sent to isolation, or withdrawing from drugs. Or, as with Jarred Aranda, in the tenuous period after a prior suicide attempt.

Aranda's grandfather was the first to get the call that he was dead. Then his mother.

"Who let him go in the shower alone?" Leslie Aranda would later ask tearfully. "I thought he was safe."

A system under strain

They are people whom society has, in many cases, written off.

Among the 15 suicides, almost all of them men, half were criminals convicted of murder or rape. Some were small-time thieves or drug dealers. A few hadn't been convicted of anything; they were in prison awaiting trial. The one woman was in only to detox.

Virtually all of them were troubled long before they were locked up, with mental health issues or drug abuse dating back to their youth. They and others like them increasingly are populating prisons in Massachusetts and across the country.

Today, one-quarter of the state's 11,000 prisoners are being treated for some kind of mental illness, up from 15 percent in 1998. It's a legacy, in part, of the elimination of many state mental institutions in the 1980s and half the state's detox beds in 2004. In June, there were 1,097 inmates taking antipsychotic medications, up from 595 in December 1998.

The suicides are just the most visible signs of a system under strain. State taxpayers spend $55 million a year on medical and mental health care for inmates in the state prisons, and nearly half a billion dollars for all prison costs. And while troubled inmates are dying and hundreds more are trying to die, most will serve their sentences and one day be released - often sicker than when they arrived.

"That's the danger of the larger prison culture we're creating," said Dr. Scott A. Allen, a former prison physician in Rhode Island and now co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University. "As a society now, we've taken mental health problems into this prison setting, and we're dealing with them in a punitive way."

The casualties are people like Andrew Armstrong, 22 and mentally ill, who hanged himself eight hours after being locked in an isolation cell for getting into a fight.

Or Nicole Davis, 24, who was found hanging after asking for medical help all night; she was depressed and detoxing, alone in her cell.

Or Nelson Rodriguez, 26 and mentally retarded, who killed himself in MCI-Cedar Junction's dungeon-like "10-Block" wing, despite warnings by the mental health staff that solitary confinement would likely harm him. New rules put in place after his death have proved far from foolproof: In July, a mentally ill man killed himself in 10-Block, prompting the US Marshals Service to investigate and to remove some federal detainees from the Walpole prison.

Case study in disaster

Anthony Garafolo is a case study in how a difficult situation can turn to disaster at the Department of Correction.

The 46-year-old Ludlow native, admitted to MCI-Shirley in June of 2006, had spent a third of his life behind bars, convicted time and again of stealing to support a drug habit. In one 1990 robbery, he took a bullet in the back that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

He was an angry man in prison, and often hard to handle.

Garafolo had been emotionally broken since being abused by a notorious priest at age 15. And he was depressed at the disability that left him using a wheelchair and made basic bodily functions a difficult chore. Over the years, he racked up a stack of disciplinary reports for breaking rules and verbally abusing prison staff. He had twice before tried to kill himself in prison, once while in isolation.

On June 19 last year, he was caught in a downward spiral that was steep and violent. It was 90 degrees outside the walls of the prison that day, and behind the thick, locked door of Garafolo's prison infirmary room, it felt even hotter.

A wound had reopened after a recent surgery - an ulcerated sore from sitting long hours in a wheelchair. He had a fever and kept asking for pain medication, records show. He couldn't reach the sink for water. He was filthy and needed to bathe, but the shower in the corner of his room wasn't wheelchair-accessible.

And he wasn't making his care any easier, angrily banging on his door, shouting and cursing at the staff.

No doubt, the recent change in his prison circumstances had also inflamed him. Garafolo had gone from an unshackled interlude at UMass Memorial Medical Center for surgery - a comparatively happy time with family visits and a birthday celebration - to a stopover in the locked-down wing of the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Boston, to the infirmary at Shirley.

And for reasons top department officials cannot explain, at Shirley he was being held in segregation - the prison regime for troublemakers - meaning he was in isolation for 23 hours a day with no basic privileges, no phone calls, no TV. And, it seemed to Garafolo, no air. Despite his pleas, the officers on duty would not unlock the food trap in his door, about the size of a large mail slot, according to his cell-block neighbor, Miguel Perez, who said he was allowed the small bit of ventilation.

When Garafolo's mother visited, she had to talk to him through a glass window - a punishment reserved for segregated prisoners.

"I couldn't touch him," said Lorraine J. Jaillet, who last saw her son three days before his death. "He was crying. I've never seen so many tears."

Virtually every safety measure that might have helped Garafolo in the last six days of his life failed, prison records show.

First, the booking officer at Shirley looked up Garafolo's suicide-attempt history but did not tell the mental health staff what he found. Second, his prison records didn't arrive with him that night, so the intake nurse never examined them. She relied on Garafolo to say if he had any mental health issues, and he said no.

Third, the medical staff failed to alert mental health clinicians that Garafolo had been prescribed psychiatric medication at the hospital. MCI-Shirley's mental health director, Merleen Mills, told department investigators she was away when Garafolo arrived and didn't know he was there until his fifth day. Records show that no one from her staff went to see him.

That was particularly troubling, given the dangerous confusion over Garafolo's segregation status. Reports filed by correction officers say he was being protected from inmate enemies. But that was not reflected in the official prison record. As a result, Garafolo was never seen by a mental health clinician, as required when an inmate is segregated, to ensure he can handle the psychic strains of isolation.

It seemed everyone knew Garafolo was in crisis except the jailers and medical staff charged with his care. His half-brother, Dennis, also incarcerated at Shirley at the time, heard Anthony was in trouble and managed to visit him briefly. A sympathetic officer unlocked the slot in the door, Dennis Garafolo recalled, so he could reach his arm through it. Anthony just held his hand and cried.

"The way I saw that room, it was like being in the hole," Dennis Garafolo said, using prison slang for isolation.

For the last 20 hours of his life, Anthony Garafolo lashed out at staff members and beat on his door. He threatened to harm the wife and children of a sergeant, and demanded to be sent to another prison. When Garafolo smashed his cell window, his neighbor, Perez, feared for him.

The commotion stretched into the early-morning hours, but no one called the mental health staff, records show. Not the captain who threatened Garafolo with four-point restraints. Not the nurses, who had to have him shackled to give him care. Not the officers who had him locked down in segregation.

At 5:56 a.m. on June 20, Garafolo was found hanging from a sheet tied to the shower knob - a long reach from his wheelchair.

A handwritten letter by his bed said: "I can't fight any longer. . . . I going crazy just being in here this long. Don't let this happen to nobody again."

To this day, Lorraine Jaillet insists her son did not kill himself and plans to sue the Department of Correction. Family and friends say Garafolo would not have ended his life without writing to his mother. A pastor who visited Garafolo several times, Paul Suckling of the United Church of God in Worcester, was stunned. "There was frustration, sometimes depression, but nothing close to suicide," Suckling said.

His brother Dennis said, "Either my brother was pushed to that, or he felt doomed."

Desperation in isolation

Emotional desperation is common among those in isolation. It makes even healthy people sick and has a disastrous effect on people with mental illness, according to psychiatrists familiar with the effects of solitary confinement.

"It leaves you alone with your own delusions," said Dr. Matthew P. Dumont, a Cambridge psychiatrist. "It is actually the stupidest and most dysfunctional thing to do to a mentally ill prisoner."

And yet it remains a common form of discipline. In October, there were 345 inmates segregated in Massachusetts prisons, not including those held in other isolated settings, like Garafolo's infirmary room. Nationally, there were 80,870 segregation beds in 2000, following a political push, begun in the mid-1990s, for harder time for convicts and more maximum security cells, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, a research group.

But the Spotlight investigation found that, even as the suicide rate climbed, the prison system continued to rely on this dangerous tool, saying it had no alternative for violent inmates. Nine of the Massachusetts's suicides since 2005 have involved inmates held in isolation.

Dr. Robert B. Diener, a psychiatrist and medical director at Bridgewater State Hospital, regularly sees men who have been in isolation at Walpole, kept in a 9-by-6-foot cell 23 hours a day. He said it is psychologically unhealthy for inmates to be confined that way for long periods.

"They're deprived of normal life experiences," he said. "They can become outrageous."

Even a short period of isolation can be too much for some. It was for Miguel Velasquez.

He was not a convict but rather a federal detainee awaiting trial on gun possession charges when he arrived at MCI-Cedar Junction, the maximum security facility in Walpole, just over a year ago. He had a history of mental illness for which he was being treated, and his behavior behind bars had been generally good.

But then in July he punched another inmate. The price for that would be steep: a trip to the infamous 10-Block isolation unit, home to some of the system's most difficult prisoners. Facing that prospect, Velasquez snapped, records show. He resisted a mandatory strip search, then angrily refused to put his clothes back on. And so he was shackled and marched naked down the hallway to a tiny, windowless cell, according to written reports of the incident.

An officer locked the door with bars, and then, as punishment, shut the outer, solid door as well. Velasquez, 33, was dead three hours later, having hanged himself with a piece of the shirt he wouldn't wear. He was the third inmate in two years to take his life behind a solid door in 10-Block.

The last hours of Velasquez's life were marked by two critical failures by prison and medical staff, the department's preliminary suicide report says.

The nurse who cleared Velasquez for isolation did not examine his mental health records, according to the report. Then, the officer who closed the solid door of his cell door did so without telling his commander or ensuring that mental health clinicians were notified, as department rules require.

His death alarmed Miriam Conrad, the lawyer in the federal defender's office who had represented Velasquez. "Pretrial detainees have a basic right, as well as a constitutional right, to be treated humanely," she said.

The US Marshals Service was paying the Department of Correction $90 a day for Velasquez's "housing, safekeeping, and subsistence." Yvonne Bonner, the acting US Marshal in Boston, said Velasquez's assignment to the state's bleakest prison was purely by chance.

"It's an old facility. It's a depressing site," Bonner said. But, she observed, "I would think being in segregation would be the safest place they could be."

When first contacted by the Globe, Bonner said her office had no plan to probe Velasquez's death beyond a cursory review of the Department of Correction's report. But after learning from the Globe of the errors reflected in prison documents, Bonner reopened the investigation. She said that no federal detainees would be placed at Cedar Junction until the investigation was completed. Several detainees with known mental health issues have since been moved to other prisons.

James R. Bender, the Department of Correction's deputy commissioner, said staff members who failed to follow protocol in the Velasquez case could be disciplined.

A man unraveling

Glen Bourgeois lasted four months in 10-Block.

He landed at Walpole in August 2006 after getting caught in a relationship with a female employee at Old Colony Correctional Center and for having a hacksaw and other contraband in his cell. At 44, he had served 21 years for his role in a murder during a robbery, and he had allegedly been planning to escape. Bourgeois had recently lost hope about his appeal attempts, according to a friend of his and correction officers, and was grappling with the life sentence ahead of him.

In letters to his brother, Bourgeois complained about the oppressive boredom of "the hole." He read books and newspapers, and wrote letters to a pen pal.

For the most part, Bourgeois didn't give correction officers trouble in his final months. But the preliminary prison report on his suicide describes a man falling apart.

Bourgeois complained of panic attacks soon after arriving at 10-Block, saying the noise made him want to bash his head against a wall. But when a clinician came to see him, he said he was "all set."

Twice Bourgeois refused orders to allow the solid door of his cell to be closed, once sticking his arm through the bars to block it. For that he was to receive further punishment: No radio until mid-December and no telephone calls until Jan. 21, 2007, a date he wouldn't live to see.

By October, Bourgeois had been suffering from migraine headaches for two months. He was prescribed Prozac for stress.

In November, Bourgeois went on a hunger strike, but records show he wasn't seen by mental health, as required. They did finally visit him on Nov. 16, for the 90-day mental status checkup required for all inmates in segregation.

On Dec. 27, Bourgeois was found hanging at 4:34 a.m. No one could see him do it because his solid door was closed. Prison officials say he asked for it to be shut, for quiet.

Bourgeois's brother, Michael Hook-DiMarino, was disturbed when he saw the text of his brother's suicide note, a note he said prison officials had told him did not exist. "Consider my sentence paid in full," it said. "I did the only thing I felt I could do to stop my headaches. I have plan this for almost a month, there was no one I could ask for help without being put in worse living conditions than I am in already."

With Bourgeois's death, Hook-DiMarino lost the last member of his immediate family. He said of his brother: "You have to pay for your crime. But you're still human."

A sentence without a crime

The warning signs are often obvious. But prison staff, hardened by what they consider inmates' manipulative behavior, can be blind to them.

Last December, Nicole Davis was sent for detox to MCI-Framingham, the state women's prison, for 30 days. She was not serving a sentence for a crime.

Her family had filed court papers to have Davis civilly committed, to help her shake the drugs she had been addicted to for years - and to head off the arrest warrants she was facing for several open theft cases, and for using a credit card her boyfriend had stolen.

Her parents had hoped to commit her to a private facility. And Davis's lawyer argued to send her to a New Bedford treatment center used by the state as an alternative to prison for women in detox. But Judge Robert G. Harbour at Taunton District Court felt she should be sent to a "secure facility."

"The judge told us she'd be safe at Framingham," said Nicole's mother, Rosamond.

But that was not to be. Judge Harbour told the Globe, "It's something that I'll never forget."

The detox regime was primitive. Coming down off heroin, the antianxiety drug Klonopin, and possibly other substances, Davis was locked in a room at night, with correction officers periodically watching her door. She told a mental health clinician that she had been depressed since the death of her baby boy, Nathan, in foster care seven months earlier.

She denied feeling suicidal, according to prison records. But her parents said they saw real distress on their visit Dec. 19, the day after Davis's 24th birthday. Davis begged them not to leave.

"She said, 'I want you to stay because if you don't stay, I have to go back up in the hole,' " her mother recalled. Davis hated to be alone, her father said.

That night, Davis was left alone in a spartan cement cell in the infirmary. She was kept there after alleging that a male officer had groped her. It was a claim the officials doubted, according to the investigative report of her death.

Around midnight, Robert and Rosamond Davis were awakened by police at their Norton home. They called MCI-Framingham, as directed, and soon heard prison Superintendent Lynn M. Bissonnette tell them their daughter had died in a "bizarre incident," Robert Davis recalls.

Throughout her last evening alive, Nicole Davis repeatedly asked for medical care, Dr. Philip DeChavez said in the department's suicide review. The staff checked on her but thought she was just seeking drugs or attention. At 10:29 p.m., an officer found her, sitting on the cell floor with a sheet around her neck.

Clinicians and staff members involved in Davis's suicide review mulled some fundamental questions. Might inmates undergoing drug or alcohol withdrawal be at risk to themselves once they're sober? Should they have a new mental health check-up after detoxing?

The panel members decided such assessments would not help. However, Bissonnette, the superintendent, did propose that women no longer be left alone. According to the report, she was concerned that heightened feelings of isolation could "result in an increase risk of self-harm."

"The women," Bissonnette told the Globe, "can't tolerate it."

At great risk

Sean Turner was another left to fight through detox on his own.

Turner was alone in a cell at MCI-Concord, withdrawing from daily intravenous heroin use without proper medical oversight on the day he took his life.

According to the Department of Correction's own procedures, Turner should not have been admitted to Concord at all on July 11, 2005. At that time, the old prison on Route 2 had no beds for inmates going through withdrawal. The department's review of Turner's suicide says, "MCI Concord does not have detox protocols in place and all detox patients are transferred to infirmary sites or the local hospital for care." But, it goes on to say, "Mr. Turner was released to population," meaning to an ordinary cell.

When Turner, 47, arrived at Concord that night - awaiting trial on motor vehicle and drug charges - he was experiencing nausea from withdrawal. A physician reviewed his intake report, and the nurse ordered detox medication, according to the department's reports. But she did not write a progress note or notify the on-call physician of the detox plan.

Over the next two days, Turner was quiet, according to inmates interviewed by the department. He sat alone in the chow hall, played dominoes, and went to the library, they said, but he was depressed and fearing a long prison term.

On the morning of July 13, Turner went to the medication line at 8 a.m., an inmate said, but was turned away. He took a shower about 10:30 a.m., went to lunch, and was seen lying on his bunk at 1:45 p.m. An inmate says he asked Turner for stamps at 2:10 p.m.

At 2:30 p.m., when most inmates were out in the yard and his cellmate was away at court, Turner was found hanging from a sheet attached to a wall vent. He'd had plenty of time to do it: Two correction officers on duty failed to make their scheduled hourly rounds that afternoon, according to department investigators' review of a prison videotape. The officers lied in the investigative interview, claiming they had made the rounds. They received 30-day suspensions.

"I just can't imagine that they would put anyone in his circumstance into a room and just leave them," Turner's mother, Dianne Hawkes, said of her eldest child, a smart student with a knack for mechanics, woodworking, and photography. "I think they were completely negligent."

Aside from the physical dangers, psychiatrists and prison officials say detoxing can bring on severe depression. For some inmates, it's the first time they've been sober in months or years, and they find themselves suddenly facing the reality of incarceration, said Karin T. Bergeron, superintendent at Bridgewater State Hospital.

"Many of these men are at great risk for suicidality," she said.

Falling through the cracks

That was certainly the case for Jarred Aranda. By the time he arrived at Bridgewater last spring, he'd been at the Bristol County jail in North Dartmouth for three months.

Aranda was in the midst of the longest stretch of sobriety he'd experienced in recent memory, he told a Bridgewater psychiatrist, and he was feeling poorly. He had all but forgotten the comforts of his youth: the house with the big lawn, the swimming pool, the dinners in his grandmother's kitchen. He hadn't wanted his mother or sister to see him at Bristol County, where he stole a correction officer's lunchbox and fought with him. He tried to hang himself with shoelaces, then cut his wrist with a plastic knife.

Days later he spent his first night at Bridgewater, alone in a treatment unit, but under frequent watch. The next day, he was removed from seclusion but kept under close observation. Two days later, he was sent to a less restrictive area.

That's when Aranda fell through the cracks. No one took responsibility for him for nearly two weeks, according to the department's records.

On his last full day alive, Aranda told a psychiatrist his depression was getting worse. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being worst), he felt like a seven or eight. The doctor prescribed Lithium and Seroquel for Aranda's bipolar symptoms and Wellbutrin for depression. It's unclear if Aranda took the medication; he had refused it since arriving at the hospital.

Just a few days before, Aranda's father and stepmother had visited him. They said he talked about the future, about changing his life. He didn't complain; he never wanted his family to worry.

But on the night of March 30, prison records show, Aranda took the laces out of his roommate's sneakers. And headed for the shower.

Left in uncertain hands, a haunted life ends tragically

December 10, 2007

Second of three parts

This story was reported by Globe Spotlight Team members Francie Latour, Michael Rezendes, Beth Healy, Jonathan Saltzman, and editor Thomas Farragher. It was written by Latour.

To the teen mother who struggled to raise him, he was slow, abnormal, and often out of control.

To the counselors who tried to steer him from trouble in Springfield, he was a child trapped in the body of a pudgy young man, the charmer who couldn't count the change in his own pocket.

And to prison clinicians who knew him behind bars, he was, above all, a "frequent flier," their code for inmates who require the constant attention of the mental health staff.

By the time Nelson Rodriguez walked through the heavy metal doors of state prison in 2004, convicted in a stabbing case, he had long since been diagnosed as mentally retarded and mentally ill - a man unable to grasp even the most basic concepts.

But as an inmate, the 26-year-old Rodriguez was routinely punished for acting out in ways he could not control. Time and again, his jailers used the same blunt tools - isolation and loss of basic privileges - to deal with him.

The discipline never improved his behavior; in fact, he got worse. It ran directly against warnings by prison clinicians. But it kept coming - for him as for many of the mentally ill who have overwhelmed the prison system.

During 18 months in state custody, the young man with the lazy eye and troubled mind spent a quarter of his time - about 145 days - in solitary confinement.

On Dec. 20, 2005, five days after his last transfer into the forbidding Walpole prison unit known as 10-Block, Rodriguez's isolation was pressed to the extreme. Officers shut an outer solid door over the bars of his cell and walked away.

Sometime in the next four hours, Rodriguez tied a strip of bed sheet to the metal cover around his cell's smoke detector. He wrapped the other end around his neck, and hanged himself.

When it comes to suicide behind bars, it is impossible to expect total prevention, state Department of Correction officials say. With some determined inmates, Associate Commissioner Veronica Madden said, "It seems that they really wanted to die."

But the death of Nelson Rodriguez in cell 49 is not that kind of story. Rather, his is the story of the kind of inmate now flooding the corrections system: the mentally ill for whom prison is increasingly the asylum of last resort. The Globe Spotlight team dwelled in depth on his short life and sorry end as a way to understand why men like Rodriguez wind up behind bars and why too many die there.

Rodriguez was a man-child with a hard-wired inability to learn at the mercy of a system where punishment and more punishment is often the only real response to inmates with little or no ability to control their behavior.

It is a practice that amounts, in some cases, to an invitation to give up on life.

"He is someone who definitely should not have been put in isolation because of his condition. There's no question about that," said Terry Kupers, a national specialist on mental illness in prisons, who reviewed Rodriguez's records. "Putting [mentally ill inmates] in segregation and then closing the solid door to their cell is like asking them to commit suicide."

Madden told the Globe that Rodriguez's suicide was a tragedy, for him, his family, and for her department.

"This was a deeply troubled young man presenting with a very complex set of circumstances in a very noncomplex system that we run," she said.

Madden also said that she had not known that Rodriguez was mentally retarded.

"We hear now that he was mentally retarded," she said. "I don't have any documentation on that. Did that come up in court? Where was that prior?"

In fact, court records and internal reports are peppered with references to Rodriguez's mental retardation. Those records include a 2006 suicide review in which Madden herself was an observer. They stretch back to Rodriguez's first contact with the Department of Correction in 2003, and among those who treated him it was anything but a secret.

"You could talk to him about skills and ways to cope and strategies, but he wouldn't retain it," said one of Rodriguez's former clinicians, who treated him for about a year and who asked not to be named because of department policies that forbid discussing inmates. "He didn't have the skills to say, 'If I'm good for three more days, I'll be out of [solitary confinement].' He just couldn't do that."

Instead, Rodriguez lashed out - and fell apart.

Yet he wasn't on the radar screen of the mental health staff as a high-risk inmate, according to one internal Correction Department review obtained by the Globe.

At Walpole, no one in charge seemed to know anything about a doctor's warning that placing Rodriguez in solitary confinement posed a serious danger to his mental state, and to his safety.

Instead, after he cut his arms and throat, he was sent to one of the most restricted and bleak holding units Walpole had to offer: 10-Block.

"He'd never make it there," Rodriguez's former clinician said of Rodriguez's transfer. "I mean, he didn't make it there, obviously."

A troubled child

When he was a little boy, Nelson Rodriguez was haunted by a monster. It tormented his dreams and lurked around corners.

At age 10, he told a psychologist that the monster would kill his friends, eat his mother, and throw him into water burning with fire. Naturally, he gave the monster a name: Freddy, as in Freddy Krueger, the horror movie serial killer.

If Rodriguez's fantasy world was horrific, his boyhood reality was filled with frustration and pain.

His IQ was well below normal. He had a seizure disorder, and tests strongly suggested some form of brain damage. As he approached his 11th birthday, he still wet his bed. And he had no friends. Instead, his peers taunted him mercilessly.

All the while, the mother he dreamed that Freddy would devour was at once the focus of all the boy's devotion, and his rage.

Mildred DeJesus, 18 years old when she gave birth to Rodriguez, couldn't handle her son's violent outbursts, or any of the burdens of raising a child who, in her words, "was not normal." After Rodriguez began exhibiting strange, hypersexual behavior - exposing himself and preying on his toddler stepbrothers - DeJesus grew desperate. Ultimately, she signed over custody of her son to the state.

To his relatives in Springfield, it was clear what had happened. In an interview, Rodriguez's aunt, his grandmother, and his youngest half-brother described young Nelson as a torment, even as they acknowledged that his disability and mental illness were to blame.

"You wanted to trust him," said Dezi Rodriguez, who at 20 has just begun to forgive the brother who once menaced him. "You wanted to give him a chance, but you couldn't."

When told that Rodriguez would speak of his mother with longing to almost anyone he would meet, all three looked up, stared, and fell silent. "Believe me," Mary DeJesus, Rodriguez's aunt, said finally of her sister, who died of AIDS in 1999. "She would try so hard to love that kid."

As Nelson grew into adolescence, little changed. Clinicians still saw traits bordering on psychosis. At 17, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for six weeks. He bounced erratically between foster families and group homes.

And in a system already awash with unwanted children who soon grow into unwanted teenagers, Rodriguez became his own worst enemy: He was just smart enough to know he did not want to be labeled "retarded," and just verbal enough to try to convince people that he wasn't.

Jim Nash, a Springfield-area advocate for the disabled, was one of several counselors who took Rodriguez in for short periods of time as a young adult. Rodriguez was 18 at the time, but, with his goofy grin and impossible naiveté, he struck Nash as more like his own two toddlers than as a young man.

"He was able to posture and hold himself and look like some regular dude walking down the street," Nash said. "But in reality, there was nothing below the surface. There was no good framework for how to face the world."

At a critical period, between the ages of 18 and 22, Rodriguez's posturing fooled many of those charged with determining his future. In 1999, clinicians and the courts deemed him competent to care for himself without a guardian.

To the frustration of advocates, Rodriguez was in a social services limbo. He was too old for DSS services and would not ordinarily be eligible for services from the Department of Mental Retardation until age 22, although local DMR caseworkers tried to intervene.

At the same time, no one could force him to accept help. That was key, because Rodriguez was fed up with services, rules, and restrictions.

Jason Nelson, a part-time counselor and Comcast worker who lives in Chicopee, was one of the last people to help Rodriguez, and one of the most determined. In the year he spent as Rodriguez's guardian, he faithfully drove him to his night job washing dishes at a local restaurant and coaxed him to take the medications Rodriguez hated.

But after a year of hostile, unexplained outbursts from Rodriguez, Jason Nelson found himself hitting the same brick wall Rodriguez's mother had reached years earlier.

"I was at my wit's end," he said. "I was emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted from it."

Rodriguez was spiraling. Between 1997 and 2002, he was in and out of coun ty jail on various misdemeanors - petty larceny, breaking and entering, property damage.

Inexorably, he was slipping into the growing ranks of the wandering mentally ill, whose outbursts and episodes eventually lead to arrest, prosecution, and prison.

A changing diagnosis

For years, Rodriguez had been fascinated by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Something about a cartoon team of mutant reptiles, isolated from society and trained as warriors, clearly spoke to him. And he obsessed over martial arts. One day in the early summer of 2003, while living at a Springfield homeless shelter, he began taking kung fu classes. Then he bought a sword at a local pawn shop.

The next day, Rodriguez used the sword to stab another homeless man in the stomach inside the shelter's bathroom. It's unclear how the conflict began, but, according to police and witnesses, the scene was bloody. The victim, 29-year-old Marcus Roberts, arrived at the hospital holding in his intestines with a towel.

Roberts recovered fully. But despite an unusually passionate appeal by a court-appointed lawyer, this would not be another misdemeanor for Rodriguez. "He wasn't crazy, but he was retarded," said David Burgess of Concord, who asked the judge to send his client to a county jail instead of prison. "He's not as culpable as I would be, or you would be, if we pulled a knife on somebody."

Still, even Burgess could not argue with the judge's bottom line: A person should be able to enter a shelter and not have to worry about being stabbed. The court sentenced Rodriguez to four to seven years.

He was now in the hands of a prison system that struggles to adequately treat or even track mentally ill prisoners and has little capacity to deal with the mentally retarded.

"We don't have enough expertise," said Dr. Kenneth L. Appelbaum, the former mental health director for the UMass Correctional Health, which served the prison population until this summer. "And we don't have the services that those people need in the system. It is, in my opinion, a significant unmet need."

In Rodriguez's case, it was worse than that.

An internal staff review of his death, obtained by the Globe, said clinicians focused far too much on whether Rodriguez was really mentally ill, instead of realizing the danger he posed to himself.

"Despite the fact that his entire mental health history was well documented within the medical record," the report said, "the mental health clinicians at MCI-Cedar Junction seemed to either underemphasize, or simply be unaware of, some of the more critical information contained within his record."

That record, one of distress and breakdown, began even before Rodriguez had been officially sentenced to serve state time.

In November 2003, while still awaiting trial in a county jail in Ludlow, he tried to hang himself, an incident that landed him at Bridgewater State Hospital, the prison system's facility for the mentally ill.

The doctor who evaluated him concluded that while Rodriguez was not profoundly mentally ill, he was a danger to himself. Using italics in her report to stress her point, she noted that clinical staff and correction officers should be aware of the "very real, very substantial" risk of self-harm.

By June 2004, and convicted of the crime, he was an inmate at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, the state's modern maximum-security facility in Shirley. There, his outbursts triggered escalating punishment. He broke his food tray, exposed himself, and repeatedly attacked officers. As a result, he was kept in isolation.

By October 2004, Rodriguez was back for further observation at Bridgewater, where, his relatives say, prison officials should have recognized the severity of his illness and kept him for treatment indefinitely. And for a moment, it looked like that might happen.

In a report correction officials themselves say was crucial, the doctor who evaluated Rodriguez, David W. Holtzen, found that Rodriguez was hallucinating, had thoughts of suicide, was suffering from major depression, and was losing his grip on reality. Holtzen not only wanted Rodriguez admitted, he also wanted a court order to force Rodriguez to take antipsychotic medications.

Then something changed.

About two weeks later, Holtzen evaluated Rodriguez again and deemed him no longer seriously mentally ill but rather "antisocial" and "bored." According to an internal review of Rodriguez's suicide, Holtzen changed his mind after members of Rodriguez's treatment team said they believed Rodriguez was improving.

But Bridgewater's own records show that Rodriguez was still deeply unwell. Shortly after the reevaluation, officers at Bridgewater reported he was punching the cell walls and acting out of control. Despite those warning signs, Rodriguez was back in prison 72 hours after the new diagnosis. And his disciplinary record worsened again.

Through representatives of UMass Correctional Health, Holtzen declined to comment about the change in diagnosis, citing privacy laws of patients. A UMass spokesman called Holtzen's assessment "reasoned."

Even though Holtzen's interpretation of Rodriguez's behavior had changed radically, the doctor did warn that if Rodriguez was placed in conditions akin to solitary confinement, his mental health would be in jeopardy.

"[Holtzen] clearly puts in the chart: Watch this guy, he's a serious suicide risk," said Terry Kupers, the national specialist on mental illness in prisons. "From that moment on, this is a person who should have been tracked."

Instead, the Department of Correction kept losing track of Nelson Rodriguez.

Off the radar screen

By the spring of 2005, Rodriguez began bracing himself for life inside the state's toughest prison: MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole.

The clinicians at Souza-Baranowski understood his problems and even found him likeable. But prison officials transferred him after finding themselves overwhelmed by his chronic misconduct.

His state of mind was clear in a letter he wrote to his grandmother, Elsie "Bita" Miranda, and his brother Lorenzo Rodriguez. Using almost no punctuation, he wrote: "I'm trying really hard to survive in jail. . . . My tears been rolling down my cheekbone like crazy. . . . Look I'm gonna be moving to another jail is called Walpole. . . . Pray for me please."

At Walpole, he quickly slipped off the radar screen. His name never appeared on the prison's risk list. And his lengthy mental health history did not catch the attention of the two people at Walpole most responsible for his mental health care: his assigned clinician and her boss, Erika Grandberg, MCI-Cedar Junction's mental health director.

Grandberg would later tell investigators that she knew nothing about the prior warnings that more isolation could hurt Rodriguez or should, at least, trigger more vigilant care. She also defended Rodriguez's absence from the risk list, saying, "At the time, he wasn't somebody who we considered high risk."

But in two months at Walpole, Rodriguez just couldn't follow the rules. He was cited for various outbursts.

Still reasoning like a child, Rodriguez tried to appeal the punishments in the only way he knew how. In November, a month before his suicide, he pleaded to have his television, telephone, and visitation privileges restored. "They don't understand that I'm mildly mentally retarded," records say he told a clinician. "I got a dangerous mind. I can cut myself, hang myself." But nothing came of the appeals.

Rodriguez was 19 months into his prison sentence. He was due for an update on his treatment plan, but the deadline came and went without one, according to the department's review. Rodriguez's clinician told investigators that she had updated it, but that the plan "was not in his chart and she does not know where it went."

In early December, Rodriguez cut his arms and throat, triggering an emergency medical call. He spit on responding officers and bit one of them, records show, and was shackled by his arms and legs. Two days later, he was put on a 15-minute interval watch - a clear sign that he was a high risk for suicide.

And then prison officials decided to send Rodriguez to 10-Block. The prospect led him to further unravel.

On Dec. 14, 2005, a prison psychiatrist discontinued two medications Rodriguez was taking - Remeron, an antidepressant, and Seroquel, an antipsychotic drug - while upping his dosage of a third drug, a mood stabilizer. Department records reviewed by the Globe provide no explanation for the adjustment. The very next day, Rodriguez entered Cell 49 in 10-Block, a foreboding 60-bed, two-story unit where inmates are confined to closet-size cells 23 hours a day.

His brief time in custody had been as volatile as any inmate's. But when Rodriguez underwent a routine assessment as 10-Block's newest guest, the clinician's words had the uneventful tone of a weather report. "Stable, no evidence of psychosis, delusions, or hallucinations. Monitor [patient] per Treatment Plan, [as needed]."

Five days later, officers sounded an alert - Code 99, inmate hanging. They entered Cell 49 and removed the ligature from around Rodriguez's neck. They carried his body down the tier to a landing on the second floor. Chest compressions were begun. An ambulance was called. A Walpole rescue team responded.

He was pronounced dead at 4:44 p.m.

Investigators would later conclude that there were 22 officers assigned to patrol 10-Block that day; 11 of them were responsible for the upper tiers that included Rodriguez's cell. But no one made the required half-hour checks on Rodriguez for four hours, even though the log book for that day contained entries indicating the proper rounds had been made.

And in its review of his suicide, officials seemed to struggle to explain how an inmate like Rodriguez - mentally retarded with a well-chronicled history of dangerous misconduct - could be described as an inmate "not on the radar screen."

The answer, they concluded, may lie in Cedar Junction's operating ethos.

"Due to the overall culture of the institution, mental health staff at MCI-Cedar Junction have a rather high threshold for how they assess and address an inmate's acting-out behaviors and overall mental health status," the confidential internal review concluded.

Conclusions like that ring hollow for people who still remember Rodriguez as the child trapped in a man's body, the inmate who could never learn the rules.

"He never had a chance to have a childhood," Jason Nelson, his former guardian, told state lawmakers three months after his death. "To place a man in a maximum-security prison that is not equipped or staffed to help or even understand the type of mental illness Nelson was plagued with is beyond my understanding."

Part 3
BREAKDOWN THE PRISON SUICIDE CRISIS
Guards, inmates a volatile dynamic

December 11, 2007

Last of three parts

This story was reported by Globe Spotlight Team members Jonathan Saltzman, Michael Rezendes, Beth Healy, Francie Latour, and editor Thomas Farragher.

It was written by Saltzman and Farragher.

On a damp Saturday last fall, Scott A. Flaherty collected a stack of papers and notebooks that chronicled his decade as a state correction officer and set them ablaze in a cemetery near his home in Randolph.

Flaherty had liked his first eight years at MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole, but his last two had turned hellish. He hoped the graveyard bonfire would exorcise memories of his work behind the walls of the state's toughest prison.

Especially his memory of what happened there one night in late 2000.

Shortly before 10 that November night, a deeply disruptive inmate lay shackled to a concrete slab in a cramped cell. As Sergeant Flaherty stood watch, a captain and three other officers swept in, the captain grabbing, as he went by, a foam cup that Flaherty had been using to catch tobacco juice and sunflower seeds.

Flaherty said he watched as the captain tilted the cup over the mouth of the prisoner. Sickened, he turned away. But he could hear the parting admonition to the 33-year-old inmate, Hakeem Obba: If you don't behave, my officers will pour [excrement] down your throat.

"Because I can do anything I want to you," Captain Ronald R. Picard told Obba, according to a four-page complaint Flaherty filed with supervisors.

Two months later, Obba hanged himself with elastic from his underpants and bed sheets.

Flaherty, now an investigator for the State Police in Bristol County, said it would be wrong to draw a straight line from the alleged abuse of Obba - which Picard was punished for, but denies - to his suicide. But the larger point was hard to miss: Some correction officers, he said, are unfit to deal with the mentally ill or deeply troubled inmates who are increasingly their charge. The result is an incendiary dynamic between inmates and officers, a climate ripe for abuse.

"The inmate was restrained. He had no way to defend himself," said Flaherty, 37, one of two officers who reported the incident. "It would be akin to a police officer raping somebody. There's no gray area there."

The treatment of Obba - who was in four-point restraints for nearly 40 hours over four days - is one of the most flagrant of the cases examined by the Globe of abuse of inmates whom prison officials or prisoner advocates say had acute mental problems.

But it is hardly an isolated example. A Spotlight Team investigation into a recent surge in prison suicides and suicide attempts found other cases in which correction officers, with scant training in how to handle the burgeoning number of mentally ill in prison, brutalized, mistreated, or neglected inmates.

Indeed, as prisons increasingly become the asylum of last resort for the mentally ill - with the closure of state hospitals and the deinstitutionalization of their residents - desperation, frustration, and violence are rising on both sides of the cell door.

About 50 times a month, according to department statistics, members of its staff are assaulted by inmates. And, at the same time, the correction department has disciplined scores of officers for assault and other misconduct involving inmates.

As the number of inmate suicides has soared to roughly three times the national rate, prison officials say correction officers deserve credit for saving dozens of inmates who attempt suicide. Still, it is not hard to find cases where officers abused mentally ill prisoners.

In a 2004 episode at MCI-Cedar Junction, a correction officer twice punched a handcuffed inmate in the head as the prisoner lay face-down on the floor, giving him a bloody eye. The incident was captured on videotape, and the state fired the correction officer. But a civil service panel reduced the punishment to a 90-day suspension, in part because the prison superintendent was merely demoted for using excessive force in an unrelated incident. The prison system is appealing the reduced punishment in the courts.

In September 2006, prison officials sustained a complaint by an inmate that correction officers at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center locked him in a shower cell overnight in 2004 and shoved feces and urine into the stall with a mop. The prisoner -who suffers from panic disorder, depression, and possible bipolar disorder, according to medical records - has cut his own Achilles tendon and repeatedly swallowed razor blades, batteries, and push pins.

"I understand that when people do bad things, they have to go and pay for them," said Amelia Bargoot, the sister of the inmate, Eric R. Bargoot, a convicted bank robber. "But there's a difference between torture and rehabilitation."

Well-trained correction officers are crucial for recognizing suicidal inmates and preventing many deaths, according to Lindsay M. Hayes, a national specialist in prison suicide prevention hired by the state in 2000 to study Bridgewater State Hospital. Because many suicides take place at night and on weekends, when mental health clinicians have gone home, correction officers are the only ones who can intervene.

However, when Hayes returned to the prisons late last year for a follow-up study, he found that the state had ignored his recommendation to increase suicide-prevention training for new officers from two and a half to eight hours. Prison officials said they have since complied.

Still, the volcanic cellblock dynamic scares relatives and friends of prisoners.

"Between mental illness and the fact that these people have committed crimes, they're going to throw them away," said Kathleen Connolly, who worries that her boyfriend and father of her two children, mentally ill inmate John Nowell, will never make it out of Walpole alive.

"We'll take his dead body out of there," she said. "He's not going to make it. He does not belong in there. Either someone is going to kill him or he's going to kill himself."

The DDU

The place where Hakeem Obba died and where John Nowell now lives, sits at the extreme end of the gone-to-seed Walpole complex, just minutes and a world away from Gillette Stadium, the gleaming home of the New England Patriots.

It is a walled-off, cinder block bunker where inmates are locked up 23 hours a day. From a glass-paneled, high-tech silo at its inner core, correction officers monitor the inmates' every move on video screens. Prisoners can leave their cells for an hour of exercise in cages that are the human equivalent of small, fenced-in dog runs.

Prison officials call the bunker the Departmental Disciplinary Unit, or DDU for short.

The solitary confinement inmates who live there have a nickname for it, too: the hole.

Its 124 cells are reserved for "the worst of the worst," inmates who earn their spot in the system's most secure unit by assaulting correction officers or other inmates, or by committing other serious misconduct. It is a place, some officers say, where inmates feel they have nothing to lose by lashing out, because there is no place worse to go.

Correction officers who spoke to the Globe under the condition of anonymity, citing department rules that restrict their ability to speak to the media without permission, said a thick emotional callous is a virtual job prerequisite.

"It's a survival tool," one officer said. "That's exactly what it is."

But the officers did not hesitate to confirm what many maximum-security prisoners in solitary confinement told the Globe: Sometimes, in anger and frustration, they taunt inmates who threaten to kill themselves, telling them: "Hang it up!"

"You can't help it, it just comes out," said one Walpole officer who guards prisoners in an isolation block. His message to inmates he feels are using threats of suicide to gain leverage? "You know what? Do it!"

Or, said a Cedar Junction colleague assigned to a segregation unit where some of the toughest cases are confined, frustrated officers will respond to a threat of imminent suicide this way: "I'll be back in 10 minutes. Twenty maybe."

The officers, three 20-year veterans from a medium-security facility in Bridgewater and two relative rookies who work at MCI-Cedar Junction, said they are easy scapegoats when something goes wrong. They said they have become marginalized by mental health clinicians who no longer listen to what they have to say. They do stressful work that, they said, almost nobody wants.

"Morale has never been this low," one veteran officer said in an interview. "I've never seen guys despise coming to work. . . . They treat you like you're a guard at a mall."

A good night at Walpole, they said, is when everyone on the cellblock is breathing when they walk in, and everyone is breathing when they walk out.

Given the frustrations and dangers the correction officers confront, there is little reservoir of empathy for inmates who arrive with or descend into psychosis.

"We do have a lot of frequent fliers who swallow nails, spikes, glass," said Steve Kenneway, president of the 5,000-member Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union. "If you leave a light bulb laying around, they'll eat that, too. I mean they will just put everything in their system and then they'll tell you because it's their way of manipulating where they're going to be housed. There are definitely some inmates who are crazy, and they need help. They need treatment."

But treatment is not the responsibility of Kenneway's union members. They are trained to maintain safety and security.

"Let's think about why the person's sitting in the cell for 23 hours a day locked down," he said. "Because he murdered somebody. Stabbed an officer. Did something so egregious inside the prison system that now he has to be locked away even from the inmate population. So I'm never going to sympathize with the inmate. That's not my job."

Lack of sympathy is one thing. Urging self-destruction is something else.

Prison officials said such conduct is not tolerated and would be met with swift discipline if substantiated. Staff members have been suspended for making "derogatory comments" to inmates, they said. But the department could not supply an instance in which action was taken against an officer for encouraging an inmate's suicide or expressing glee after a hanging.

Correction officials say they do want to know who posted a jubilant message on a website used by MCI-Cedar Junction officers after a former inmate was found dead of a drug overdose shortly after he left prison earlier this year.

"Released last Thursday and found dead in Somerville Saturday. Hooray!" the Aug. 14 anonymous message read.

Prison management has disciplined staff for a wide array of other offenses.

From January 2003 to June 2007, the prison system's Office of Investigative Services investigated 1,126 allegations of serious misconduct by employees, some of which remain open cases, department statistics show.

Most of the cases involved correction officers. The alleged offenses ranged from 73 assaults - on inmates, employees, and civilians - to 98 cases of sexual misconduct with inmates, female and male.

Prison investigators sustained 312 allegations, more than a quarter of the 1,126. Because of the gravity of the offenses, the vast majority of those cases then went to hearings before the commissioner, who has the authority to issue significant punishments, ranging from an unpaid suspension of more than a week to termination.

The prison system ultimately fired 112 correction officers from January 2003 to June 2007, according to department statistics. But correction officers often appeal firings to the state Civil Service Commission or arbitrators - and some win back their jobs.

Sometimes correction officers have been found to be neglectful rather than abusive.

In 2005, for example, prison investigators found that correction officers failed to make required checks on three inmates who killed themselves at prisons in Walpole, Concord, and Shirley. Two of the inmates were severely mentally ill, and the third was undergoing withdrawal from a heroin addiction.

In two of the deaths, officers said they had made required checks but were contradicted by prison videotapes.

One of the suicides was that of Andrew Armstrong, who was serving 15 years for assault with intent to murder after a home invasion, and who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He had made two previous suicide attempts and was discharged from Bridgewater State Hospital four days before his death.

Before he hanged himself, he used a bar of soap to scrawl a message near the stainless steel mirror in his cell.

"Dust in the wind," it read.

'I'm not an animal'

No episode more starkly illustrates the toxic relationship between seriously troubled inmates and correction officers than the encounter between Obba and Picard.

And none more boldly underscores what can happen when the officers' cellblock code of solidarity is violated than what happened later between Picard and Flaherty.

Obba was one of the most disruptive prisoners at Cedar Junction, records show. He urinated on the floor. He spread feces on his walls. He was cited 210 times for misconduct in the hole.

But he never received a thorough mental health evaluation in prison, a psychiatrist retained by his family to advise them on a wrongful death suit said. He said Obba's behavior was so extreme it should have raised red flags for prison mental health staff.

Once, when a correction officer was passing out coffee to inmates in solitary confinement, Obba reached through the grill of his cell and stabbed him in the neck.

"There, deal with that, mother [expletive]," he said, according to department records. For that attack, he received 13 to 15 years on top of his sentence, three to five years for breaking and entering.

On Nov. 12, 2000, after officers said they saw Obba smear the door and window of his cell with feces, they received permission to shackle his wrists and ankles until he agreed to stop his disruptive behavior.

"This is cruel," he said in comments captured on videotape provided to the Globe by the correction officers' union. "This shouldn't be for a dog. . . . I'm a human being. . . . I'm not an animal."

Flaherty came on duty at 3 p.m. on Nov. 14 and volunteered to relieve an officer who had Obba on an "eyeball watch." Flaherty said his job was to monitor Obba through the window of his cell and to note his condition in a log every 15 minutes.

Flaherty, a Randolph native, had joined the department in 1992 at the age of 21. Like many correction officers, he hoped to use the job as a stepping-stone to a career as a police officer. But he said he ended up enjoying the rigors of the work - it required a combination of firmness, common sense, and fairness - and the camaraderie with other officers.

His view of correction, he said, was influenced by his granduncle, George F. McGrath, who was former governor John A. Volpe's correction commissioner in the early 1960s.

"He believed that inmates are going to get out some day, and you've got to give them programs to prepare them for when they get out," Flaherty said. "He was progressive, and I wanted to be like that."

Instead, what Flaherty found at Walpole, he said, was a bureaucracy that crushed idealism and muzzled dissent. Officers who cozied up to top prison officials enjoyed choice job assignments and got away with abusing inmates and staff, he said. Those without influential benefactors struggled for years to get off the night shift.

"We used to call it the Department of Corruption and Favoritism," he said.

Picard joined the Department of Correction in 1987 after working about a year as a part-time Bellingham police officer. He was ultimately promoted to captain, a job in which he oversaw about 20 officers.

Around 9:50 p.m., the captain and three other officers entered the observation ward, according to the incident report Flaherty filed. As the three underlings surrounded the inmate, Flaherty said, Picard tipped the cup of spit over Obba's mouth.

"It actually sickened me," Flaherty recalled in a sworn deposition he gave in April in the wrongful death lawsuit filed by Obba's family. "I turned away. I couldn't look."

The four officers left the cell, and Picard handed the cup back to Flaherty. One of the officers bragged, "You could hear [Obba's] jaws clenching," Flaherty wrote in his complaint to supervisors.

After Picard and his coterie were gone, Obba shouted to Flaherty, "Tell the Captain if he pours [expletive] in my mouth, I'll kill him and his family," Flaherty recalled in his complaint. He could have disciplined Obba for the threat but opted not to. "I probably would have said the same thing," he said in his deposition.

Flaherty said he agonized about whether to report the alleged abuse.

He had filed a complaint about Picard only four months earlier because the captain accused him of faking an illness when it turned out that Flaherty had a fever of 103 and strep throat, he said. Picard retaliated by giving him lousy assignments, leading scores of shackled inmates to showers and mopping the hallways, Flaherty said.

Flaherty got so uneasy that he began carrying a small notebook to record any problems with Picard and his allies.

But Flaherty said he felt he had no choice but to report the treatment of Obba.

"Picard was just sadistic," Flaherty said in an interview. "He thought this was the way to rule. Sometimes you have to use force in the prison. It's just the dynamics. But the way I was schooled, once you're in restraints, it's over."

In response to Flaherty's complaint, prison officials began an internal investigation. Picard and two officers who accompanied him into the cell, Lieutenant Edward Marvelle and Sergeant Edward Mack, denied that anyone threatened Obba or poured anything on him. Marvelle told the investigator that Flaherty had been overheard in the past saying he was out to get Picard, according to the investigator's report.

But another officer, James E. McParlin Jr., who was assigned to the control room and said he could see Obba through the window, backed Flaherty's account. He said in his own incident report that he saw Picard extend his arm and tilt a foam cup over Obba's head.

"What happened that day was totally wrong," McParlin told the Globe. "You're in four-point restraints. You can't do anything. That's torture."

The department, citing internal records, said Obba confirmed Picard's threat but told investigators the cup's contents did not enter his mouth.

Before the Department of Correction completed its internal investigation, Obba hanged himself in his cell on the observation ward in the DDU.

Not long afterward, the inquiry into the alleged abuse concluded that Picard had threatened Obba and interfered with the investigation

Posted by lois at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2008

Supermax Subscriptions

Supermax Subscriptions seeks to connect the surplus of well-traveled citizens to a population that never goes anywhere: prisoners in American supermax prisons.

As most of you know, frequent flyer miles often expire before it is possible to save enough of them for a free airline ticket, seating upgrade, or other costly prize.

Supermax Subscriptions asks people with these surplus miles to exchange small quantities of unused miles for magazine subscriptions to supermax prisoners. For as few as 300 miles, you can give the gift of a yearly magazine subscription to a prisoner with little or no reading material.

The first goal of Supermax Subscriptions is to provide every prisoner in Tamms C-MAX supermax prison with at least one magazine subscription. Men in Tamms are in their cells 23-24 hours a day in permanent solitary confinement. The men have been there for years on end—many for ten years. They have no communal activity, no phone calls, no programs, no education, no work, no librarian, and
virtually no reading (mostly children’s books). A magazine subscription is one way to give these men your support. Your gift will not be taken for granted.

In conjunction with the Tamms Year Ten campaign, we are kicking-off the Supermax Subscriptions project on the day of the ten-year anniversary of the opening of Tamms supermax prison. Together, we will sign letters to each man in Tamms C-MAX, asking them to pick their magazine preferences. Please join us—each handwritten signature will show them that someone on the outside knows and cares about their situation.

This project is a collaborative effort by Tamms Poetry Committee, Sarah Ross, Temporary Services, and you!

CONTACT US: supermax@temporaryservice.org
FURTHER INFORMATION: www.YearTen.org

Coming Soon: Participating prisoners! Watch this page (http://www.temporaryservices.org/supsub.html)to learn which Tamms prisoners will participate and how to send them gift subscriptions.

Airlines: Check these airlines to sign up for a mileage awards plan, check your travel mile balance and to find out how to redeem miles for magazine subscriptions: American Airlines (http://www.aa.com/), Delta (http://www.delta.com/home/index.jsp), other airlines may apply.

Overview of Prisoners' First Amendment Rights (download a copy in PDF form:
http://www.temporaryservices.org/rights.pdf)

Posted by lois at 04:20 PM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2008

NY State DOC Commissioner on Prison Closings

http://www.docs.state.ny.us/PrisonClosure.html

DOCS TESTIMONY OF BRIAN FISCHER, COMMISSIONER
NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONAL SERVICES

Before SENATE STANDING COMMITTEE ON CRIME VICTIMS, CRIME AND CORRECTION
JANUARY 30, 2008
Prison Closures
Introduction

The decision to close correctional facilities was not made lightly, and as expected, it has raised many questions. The most obvious ones are:

Why these facilities?
Could we not save money in other ways?
Can we maintain the community crews that provide labor to municipalities and not-for-profit organizations? What will happen to the facilities after they are closed? What can the local communities expect in terms of assistance?

Before I address these issues, allow me to put the situation into context.

I am responsible for approximately 95,000 employees and prisoners spread out over 70 facilities across the state, and the Department¹s budget has reached the $3 billion mark to the taxpayers of New York.

As the Commissioner, I must be concerned with the safety and security of everyone, while being a realistic fiscal manager. There are limits to our funding and limits to our staffing.

Given the decrease of more than 9,000 inmates in the past eight years, the continued decline projected for the future, and the budget needed to cover what is mandated of the Department, along with the reality of the fiscal problems facing the State, I made the decisions I know are necessary, understanding that I could not avoid the hardships those decisions would bring.

Realities Facing the Department:

a 13 percent overall decrease in the number of inmates since 1999. an 18 percent decrease in medium security inmates. a 47 percent decrease in minimum security inmates. an 18 percent increase in maximum security inmates. I should stress that while original projections for this Fiscal Year estimated that there would be about 62,800 inmates under custody by March 31, 2008, we are already at 62,250 today, 550 fewer than expected. Our projected census as of March 31, 2009, was set at 62,200 and it is clear even today that we will be significantly lower than that.

Shifting Priorities:
The Department has changed, both in the demographics of our inmates and in the responsibilities we must fulfill. We must:

provide 1,600 program slots for all 8,000+ mentally ill inmates, including highly structured and staff intensive units for mentally ill inmates who must be segregated from the general inmate population as required by a court settlement and the new SHU-Exclusion statute. provide 1,200 program slots to deliver services to the 6,000 sex offenders as required by the Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act of 2007. add new re-entry programs at facilities that can be tied into County Re-Entry Task Force Committees to deal better with the 28,000+ inmates that will be released in the coming year. add a new Parole re-entry program with the Division of Parole and the Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services to keep Parolees in the community rather than returning them to long-term prison stays, thereby changing the pattern of recycling offenders through the judicial and correctional systems.

Why These Facilities:

We began the process by looking at which facilities could not be closed given their size, program elements and inmate population. We also looked at the reasons some facilities were previously identified for closure. In the end, we carefully considered the following factors:

Location

We looked for facilities in close proximity to other facilities to make transfers easier for staff, and enabling employees at the facilities slated for closure to transfer without having to relocate where possible.

We did not want to close more than one facility in any one geographical area.

Cost
Underutilized facilities are more costly in comparison to fully utilized ones.

Functionality

We need to maintain multi-disciplinary facilities, whereas facilities with limited functions were more suitable for closure. Key elements in our consideration relate to treatment and scope of services provided.

Capital Construction
We considered future capital improvement needs.

Agency Impact
We considered overall impact to agency operations.
We considered the ability to relocate inmates.
Two of the three correctional camps we selected were identified in past years for closure ­ Pharsalia and McGregor. We added the third camp, Gabriels, because the number of camp-eligible inmates has continued to decline and the decline is projected to continue.

We arrived at the choice of Hudson, understanding the impact its closing would have on the local community, comparing it with other small medium correctional facilities. Hudson's bed capacity (422) is lower than that of other medium security facilities, making the transfer of inmates easier from the agency's point of view. Hudson's need for capital improvements ­ nearly $21.8 million over the next five years - was also a major consideration, particularly in comparison to other facilities.

Alternatives to Saving Money:

The cost of the Department is driven by several factors: the number of inmates, the type of services that must be provided and the number of employees needed to program inmates and maintain safe and secure facilities. It is the decrease in the number of inmates in the system that allows for savings to be generated by closure and the redeployment of staff.

Over the years, the Department has saved money by "down sizing" the number of beds needed to handle the inmate population. As a result, there are many dormitories in minimum security facilities that are empty and not staffed. To move inmates into such unstaffed units would result in an increase in cost, not a savings. By closing the facilities we have selected, we will move inmates to dormitories where vacancies already exist in units already properly staffed.

Community Crews:

While some communities close to a correctional facility have enjoyed the work done by inmate community crews at no cost to the municipalities, there has been a cost to the taxpayers of New York. Community crews cost, on average, up to $60,000 per year. Those costs have continued to rise as staff salaries, equipment and gasoline costs have increased.

The work done by every community crew operating out of a facility designated for closure is being reviewed. Where possible, and keeping cost in mind, community crews will be relocated to neighboring facilities so some work can continue. We must keep in mind, however, that the community crews were never meant to replace work done by local communities, but merely to assist. While some communities have clearly profited by having community crews in their area, there are many more communities who have never been provided such assistance.

Re-Use of Facilities:

Key to the statute that details how the agency can close a facility is the requirement that alternative uses for each facility are to be considered. To that end, the Department will work closely with the State Department of Economic Development, as well as local representatives, to consider how the facilities might be used for purposes other than correctional facilities. One of the primary reasons for publicly announcing the closures a year in advance was to reach out to other agencies and local groups to begin the process of evaluating what the land and structures might be used for in the future.

Posted by lois at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2008

NY: Bill limits solitary confinement. Spitzer expected to approve measure passed by Legislature removing mentally ill inmates from isolation

Bill limits solitary confinement
Spitzer expected to approve measure passed by Legislature removing mentally ill inmates from isolation

By RICK KARLIN, Capitol bureau
First published: Wednesday, January 16, 2008

ALBANY -- Lawmakers passed a long-debated measure Tuesday to remove mentally ill prison inmates from solitary confinement and at least one of the prime sponsors says he's confident Gov. Eliot Spitzer will sign it after negotiators resolved some lingering issues.

The measure passed on Tuesday would require that most inmates with serious mental illnesses be placed in treatment units rather than kept in Special Housing Units, or SHUs. Additionally, the Department of Correctional Services would have to conduct periodic mental health assessments of any inmates who are assigned to SHUs.

The bill's sponsors estimate 12 percent of the state's prison population, about 8,000 inmates, have serious mental illness.

The Senate passed a similar bill last year, but the legislation died in the Assembly after Spitzer expressed concerns about the measure as it was written and time ran out on negotiations.

This year's bill, however, is the result of negotiations that address the governor's concerns, said Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry, D-Queens, who has pushed for the measure along with Sen. Michael Nozzolio, R-Seneca Falls.

The compromises include a clause that allows use of a SHU if an inmate presents an "overarching security concern," Aubry said.

Spitzer spokeswoman Christine Anderson declined comment on the governor's plans, but Aubry said he was confident Spitzer will sign the measure.

Many elements of the bill would not take effect until two years after the state builds residential mental health units, but no later than July 1, 2011.

This year's budget includes more than $50 million for construction and $4 million for staffing in the Office of Mental Health and Department of Correctional Services. By 2010-11, $29 million will be added to the budget to implement the program, Spitzer spokesman Matt Anderson said.

Prison reform and mental health advocates say SHUs are cruel and have led to suicides. Some prison officials and correction officers have expressed concern about safety and the extra training they should have in order to deal with some mentally ill inmates. The issue has been before the Legislature for at least five years.

"Placing prisoners in solitary confinement has been an inhumane form of punishment for those already suffering with severe psychiatric disabilities," said Leah Gitter of Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement.

Gannett News Service contributed to this report.
http://timesunion.com/AspStories/storyprint.asp?StoryID=655570

Posted by lois at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2008

Parents, relatives call for independent investigation of deaths at RHUs in PA

Huntingdon PA Daily News Staff Writer
January 6, 2008
By GEORGE GERMANN
Parents, relatives, friends and prison-rights advocates are calling for an independent investigation into suicide deaths that happened within the past six months in the Restricted Housing Unit (RHU) at SCI Smithfield. About two dozen participated in a vigil Saturday at the state prison in an effort to gain support for such an investigation.
Inmate suicides do occur, but what is troubling is the fact that of the over two dozen-plus prisons operated by the state Department of
Corrections, fully one-third of those suicides took place in the
Smithfield prison's RHU.

"We are seeking to raise awareness and an outside oversight into the
conditions at Smithfield," Naimi Black of the American Friends Service
Committee - a Quaker organization - told The Daily News. "Three suicides

in six months should be a red flag."

Prior to Saturday's vigil, Lisa Hollibaugh, the spokesperson for SCI
Smithfield, told The Daily News the deaths were unfortunate, but said,
"there was nothing more staff could have done."All policies and procedures were followed," said Hollibaugh. "There is a review of all deaths" that happen in a prison.She also stated that any time an inmate alleges abuse, the allegation is"taken very seriously by the
institution and the DOC (Department of Corrections)."

But the raw data concerning the number of inmate suicides at the
Smithfield prison are discomforting. Of the nine inmate suicides in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections system, three occurred at

Smithfield between June and December. There were two suicides at
Rockview and one each at Albion, Greene, Muncy and Waymart.
One of the organizers of the vigil was Angelina Zheng, whose brother,
Joe Holguin, is reported to have hanged himself Oct. 29.
"He was on his way home," said Zheng. "My brother did not want to die." Zheng said that she received letters from her brother warning that something may happen to him. "He said, don't let them get away with it." The other inmate suicides at Smithfield include Joe Kapa Jr. June 25 andClifford Finney Dec. 2.Evelin Finney said her son claimed in letters that he may be murdered at the prison.

Relatives said that all of the inmates who committed suicide had mental health issues."What we want is an independent investigation," said Zheng. "These people are in pain," she said of the others at the vigil.

Joe Kapa Sr. said his son was only a couple of months away from being
released and had been in prison for over a decade. He questions why his son would commit suicide so close to being released.

Those at the vigil also claimed they were harassed by a prison
corrections officer Saturday.Prison staff had cordoned off an area in a field across from the prison, an area that would have held thousands.

Posted by lois at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2007

NY: Solitary confinement bill could get new life in 2008

Star Gazette
Elmira, NY
Solitary confinement bill could get new life in 2008
December 22, 2007

By Cara Matthews

ALBANY -- Lawmakers and the governor reached an agreement this year to prohibit solitary confinement for severely mentally ill state-prison inmates in most cases.

But the year will end almost certainly without its passage because the Assembly hasn't returned to vote on it.

Mental-health advocates said Friday they were still hoping the Assembly might come back this year.

They have been calling Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's office to ask for a vote. Otherwise, they would like it passed early next year.

"We're going to be ever vigilant because in Albany, it's not over 'til it's over," said Harvey Rosenthal, executive director of the New York Association for Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services.

The Assembly, Senate and Gov. Eliot Spitzer developed compromise legislation this summer because the first bill that passed faced an almost certain veto.

This year's Senate approval of the bill will still stand in 2008. The Assembly has not ruled out reconvening this year, but it appears unlikely.

The Mental Health Association of New York State had hoped to see passage this year, but, "Every indication we have is that they remain fully supportive, and when they come back early next year, hopefully we'll see a ... bill," said Glenn Liebman, head of the group.

The Assembly fully expects the bill to be passed and enacted, said Sisa Moyo, a spokeswoman for Silver, D-Manhattan. The governor is expected to sign the legislation.

If approved, the measure would require the state Department of Correctional Services to set up residential treatment units for inmates with serious psychiatric illnesses.

The inmates would be offered at least four hours of therapeutic programming and/or treatment out of their cell a day, five days a week. The original legislation would have banned solitary confinement -- also called the box.

Opponents of the box said isolation in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell and lack of treatment worsen psychiatric conditions and punish inmates for behaviors connected with their illnesses.

Serious mental illness affects about 12 percent of the prison population in the state, or some 8,000 inmates, according to the bill's sponsors.

Besides treating mentally ill inmates more humanely, the legislation would make prisons safer, sponsors have said.

Correction officers would get training on working with prisoners who have psychiatric disabilities.

The state Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities would monitor the program.

The governor was considering a veto of the first bill because it would be costly, the prisons would lose some discipline control measures and he believed an April settlement of a lawsuit filed on behalf of mentally ill inmates rendered legislation unnecessary.

The settlement with the state called for giving severely mentally ill inmates in the box at least two hours a day of out-of-cell treatment, developing residential programs for about 400 prisoners in this population and other changes.

To comply with the settlement, this year's budget includes more than $50 million for construction and $2 million each to the state Office of Mental Health and the Department of Correctional Services for staffing.

If the pending legislation passes, the budget will include an extra $12 million in 2008-09, $19 million in 2009-10 and $29 million in 2010-11, Spitzer spokesman Matt Anderson said.

Other provisions of the bill:

€Severely mentally ill inmates would be diverted or taken out of solitary if the term of the isolation could be more than 30 days.

€Inmates in the box who have minor mental illnesses or who don't need much intervention would be assessed by a clinician within 14 days.

The state would have 14 days to decide if a prisoner found to have severe mental illness should be removed from solitary.

€Prison officials could keep inmates in isolation if removing them could risk safety and security.

€Inmates with mental illness who remained in solitary would receive out-of-cell therapeutic care at least two hours a day, five days a week.

There would be a lag time for much of the bill of two years from when the first residential mental-health unit built by the prison system was completed, but no later than July 1, 2011.

http://www.stargazettenews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071222/NEWS01/71
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