The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

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 inmate