“New York’s Black Sites”: New Article About Solitary Confinement in State Prisons

by | July 12, 2012

The latest issue of The Nation, which went up on the web today and hits newsstands in a week or so, includes a long story by us on solitary confinement in New York State prisons. The article includes information on how, in this “blue” state, the system works to maintain the highest level of “disciplinary confinement” in the country, and one of the highest levels of isolated confinement overall. It includes interviews with current and former prisoners, a former corrections officer, lawyers, and advocates. Be sure to read through to the end for some remarkable writing by an inmate who has been in solitary in New York for close to 25 years. The piece begins this way:

Johnny Tremont’s trip to solitary confinement started with having too many postage stamps. Until then, he’d been a model prisoner. When Tremont (whose name in this article has been changed at his request) entered the New York prison system at age 20, he was a well-spoken kid from an upstate college town who excelled at pretty much anything he put his mind to. In high school, he’d put his mind to dealing cocaine. Once he was sent to Five Points Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in the Finger Lakes region, he put his mind to keeping his nose clean and getting what he could out of his fifteen-year sentence. He enrolled in every program available, quickly earned his GED and then started tutoring other prisoners working toward theirs.

To relieve the monotony, Tremont sometimes bet on sports with other inmates, using the common prison currency of postage stamps. “I was on my way to pay the guy who won a pool between a few friends,” he recalls, when he was caught with 200 stamps, well over the allowable number. This earned him a month in “keeplock”—round-the-clock confinement to his own cell. His cellmate was also on keeplock, and when Tremont could no longer stand the crowding and idleness, he talked a guard into letting him out to go to his prison job. Caught playing basketball instead, he was sent to twenty-eight days in “the Box.”

“The Box” is how New York prisoners refer to solitary confinement. Less colloquially, it’s the SHU (pronounced “shoe”), for Special Housing Unit, the state’s euphemism for its isolation cells. Officially, New York places prisoners in “disciplinary” or “administrative” segregation, but regardless of the label, the conditions are the same as in prisons across the country: twenty-three hours a day in a cell the size of the average suburban bathroom.

A common misconception is that solitary confinement is a punishment of last resort, reserved for inmates who present a threat of violence or escape. The reality—especially in New York, which has the highest generic xanax not working rate of “disciplinary segregation” in the country—is that it’s very much a punishment of first resort, doled out for minor rule violations as well as major offenses. In New York, the most common reason for a stint in solitary is creating a “disturbance” or “demonstration.” This can mean anything from mouthing off to guards to fomenting a riot, and it often involves inmates with psychoses or other psychiatric problems. Second is “dirty urine”—testing positive for drugs of any kind. In a prison system where 85 percent of inmates are in need of substance-abuse treatment, drug use alone can get you up to ninety days in solitary, and a year if it happens multiple times. Other infractions include refusing to obey orders, “interfering with employees,” being “out of place” and possession of contraband—not only a shiv but a joint, a cellphone or too many postage stamps.

With some 80,000 prisoners in solitary, the United States leads the world in isolating its citizens as well as incarcerating them. Though growing local and national movements are fighting solitary confinement as costly, dangerous and fundamentally inhumane—and though states from Maine to Mississippi have taken steps to reduce its use—in this bluest of states, the prison system is in effect rigged to keep its plentiful isolation cells filled, and thousands of inmates spend weeks, months, years, even decades in solitary. On any given day, there are about 4,500 men, women and children in some form of isolated confinement in New York State prisons. (In New York City’s jails, run under a separate system, there are close to 1,000 more.)

Twenty-eight days is a relatively short sentence in a state where prisoners can spend decades in the Box. But either way, conditions are so extreme, says Tremont, “there’s more of a difference between being in solitary confinement and being in general population than there is between being in prison and being in the free world.” In general population, he says, “you do your programming, go to meals, talk to people, and you can still manage to feel like a human being.” In the Box, “you’re like an animal in a cage.”

“We call it ‘no-touch torture,’” says Bonnie Kerness, who heads the American Friends Service Committee’s Prison Watch Project. “No one who has ever experienced more than the briefest time in solitary would call it anything else, because it was designed to destroy the mind and break the spirit.” While a lot of New Yorkers “are concerned with the torture that’s gone on in Iraq and Afghanistan or at Guantánamo,” she adds, “they’re living with black sites in their own backyards.”

Read the rest here. (Special thanks to our wonderful editor Liliana Segura.)

COMMENTS POLICY

Solitary Watch encourages comments and welcomes a range of ideas, opinions, debates, and respectful disagreement. We do not allow name-calling, bullying, cursing, or personal attacks of any kind. Any embedded links should be to information relevant to the conversation. Comments that violate these guidelines will be removed, and repeat offenders will be blocked. Thank you for your cooperation.

3 comments

  • Bella Dee

    Fred, you have to pray!

  • FRED WIEDMER

    WHAT DO I DO TO SEEK HELP FROM MENTAL ILLNESS FROM SOLITARY CONFINEMENT,I WAS IN NEW YORK PRISONS 3 TIMES AND EVERY TIME WAS WORSE THAN THE LAST NOW AT 49 I CAN NOT FIND A JOB I AM ALWAYS ANGRY AND DEPRESSED AND FEEL THERE IS NO WAY TO HAVE A NORMAL LIFE,MY DRIVERS LICENSE IS REVOKED WHICH MAKES IT EVEN MORE DIFFICULT TO FIND A JOB AND I AM ALWAYS PARANOID AND FAIL AT EVERYTHING I DO AND CAN NOT COMPLETE ANY TASK IN A TIMELY MANNER THERE IS CLOSE TO NO HELP FOR PEOPLE LIKE MYSELF AND I AM STUCK LIVING ON FOOD STAMPS AND WELFARE AND THIS IS NOT ENOUGH FUNDS TO DO ANY THING TO MOVE FOREWORD IN LIFE,AND PUT THE PAST BEHIND ME,BECAUSE THE SYSTEM DOESN’T ALLOW YOU TO DO SO THIS WILL ALWAYS HAUNT YOU IN ONE FORM OR ANOTHER,IF YOU HAVE THE ANSWERS PLEASE CONTACT ME ASAP,I FEEL I HAVE NOTHING TO LIVE FOR ANY LONGER SO THE NEW YORK PRISON SYSTEM HAS SUCCEEDED IN TAKING ANOTHER LIVE THIS IS HOW THIS SYSTEM IS DESIGNED TO WORK,I AM BEAT DOWN AND HAVE LOST ALL HOPE AND MY SPIRIT IS LIKE A GHOST

  • Francis

    Once religious people on own will lived in a cell in order to find God and to put things straight within their soul. This might have been the original idea when religious people wish an offender should remorse publicly. Both ideas have been turned into the wrong by the great hidden persuader. Only if people recognize society lose one’s way of fairness and truth nation with world wide highest prisoner rate will change one’s opinion.

Leave a Reply

Discover more from Solitary Watch

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading