Mumia Abu-Jamal Challenges Death Row Solitary Confinement and Life Without Parole

September 16, 2012 By 5 Comments
Guest Post by Bret Grote

In a story that has received scant attention so far, former death row occupant, political prisoner, and world-renowned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal filed a legal challenge to the imposition of a sentence of life without parole. Mumia is basing his case, in part, on the idea that his thirty years in solitary confinement on Pennsylvania’s death row pursuant to an unconstitutional death-sentence is in gross excess of the quantum of state-inflicted pain and suffering permitted under the Eighth Amendment to theU.S. Constitution. He is asserting that thirty years of torture entitles him to immediate release from prison.

The case of the Commonwealth v. Abu-Jamal has been up and down the state and federal appellate courts for three decades now. Last December, after the United States Supreme Court had declined to reverse a lower court’s ruling that the death sentence was unconstitutionally imposed upon Mumia, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams announced he would not seek the death penalty in a new penalty phase hearing. This meant that Mumia would be re-sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for a crime he has always maintained he did not commit.

After the imposition of a sentence by a court, a criminal defendant has ten days to file a post-sentence motion challenging the lawfulness of the sentence. As reported by Linn Washington, Mumia was almost deprived of this right when Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas judge Pamela Dembe sentenced him on August 13 to life without parole without notifying him or his lawyers or even holding a sentencing hearing.

The last-minute motion filed on August 23 echoes a statement made by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu last December calling forMumia’s release from prison in part because “For three decades, Mumia has been held in a windowless, bathroom-sized cell and denied any physical contact with his family or with members of his community. This is in violation of the U.S.’s own Constitution.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Constitution, death row, Eighth Amendment, featured posts, guest posts, lawsuits/litigation, life without parole, Pennsylvania, race, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , , , ,

Tamms Supermax Prison Closure Temporarily Halted

September 10, 2012 By 9 Comments

On September 4th, Alexander County Circuit Court Judge Charles Cavaness  temporarily halted Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s plan to close the Tamms supermax prison, where hundreds of inmates have been held in solitary confinement. The ruling came days after an arbitrator ruled that the Governors plan was in violation of union contracts. Prison union employees with the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees filed a lawsuit to block the closure of Tamms. The AFSCME has argued that closing the supermax facility would “destabilize the entire prison system, worsen dangerous overcrowding and put the safety of employees, inmates, youth and the public at risk.”

Critics have countered that Tamms currently holds only about 180 inmates, and that many of them would be more accurately described as “the sickest of the sick” in terms of their mental health rather than “the worst of the worst.”

Governor Quinn has cited budgetary concerns as chief among his reasons for closing down Tamms. Despite only housing approximately 400 inmates (half of whom in the supermax unit), Tamms has cost taxpayers over $20 million annually to operate.

One former Tamms inmate, Brian Nelson, described his experience at Tamms this way,

I spent 12 years in solitary confinement and I was never told why I was placed in solitary. I am a human being and every day I still struggle with the trauma being held in that gray box. I wake screaming at night. I can’ get it out of my head some days. Solitary confinement in my opinion is worse than being beaten. That I spent twelve years in such conditions in America is appalling.

On August 8th, Tamms inmates, represented by Alan Mills and Nicole Schult of the Uptown People’s Law Center, filed a motion urging the court to allow inmates to present evidence of the negative psychological impact of supermax incarceration. [Read more...]

Filed Under: corrections industry, cost/budget issues, Illinois, lawsuits/litigation, psychological effects, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , ,

California Justice: Three Strikes and Sixteen Years in Solitary

September 7, 2012 By 23 Comments

The San Francisco Chronicle today ran an op-ed called “The Crime of Punishment at Pelican Bay State Prison.” The author is Gabriel Reyes, who has spent 16 years in solitary confinement (and whose artwork is featured on the left). The brief, powerful piece begins this way:

For the past 16 years, I have spent at least 22 1/2 hours of every day  completely isolated within a tiny, windowless cell in the Security Housing Unit  at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City (Del Norte County).

Eighteen years ago, I committed the crime that brought me here: burgling an  unoccupied dwelling. Under the state’s “three strikes” law, I was sentenced to  between 25 years and life in prison. From that time, I have been forced into  solitary confinement for alleged “gang affiliation.” I have made desperate and  repeated appeals to rid myself of that label, to free myself from this prison  within a prison, but to no avail…

Unless you have lived it,  you cannot imagine what it feels like to be by yourself, between four cold  walls, with little concept of time, no one to confide in, and only a pillow for  comfort – for years on end. It is a living tomb. I eat alone and exercise alone  in a small, dank, cement enclosure known as the “dog-pen.” I am not allowed  telephone calls, nor can my family visit me very often; the prison is hundreds  of miles from the nearest city. I have not been allowed physical contact with  any of my loved ones since 1995. I have developed severe insomnia, I suffer  frequent headaches, and I feel helpless and hopeless. In short, I am being  psychologically tortured. [Read more...]

Filed Under: California, civil liberties/civil rights, Constitution, human rights, lawsuits/litigation, psychological effects, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , , , ,

Judge Rules Against Colorado Supermax That Keeps Prisoners Indoors for Years

August 30, 2012 By 7 Comments

We’ve written at length about the case of Troy Anderson, a prisoner with mental illness who has spent more than ten years in solitary confinement at the Colorado State Penitentiary. This past April, a Federal District Court in Denver heard a case brought on Anderson behalf by students at the University of Denver Law School’s Civil Rights Clinic. As we wrote, “it was his untreated mental illness that first landed him at CSP, Anderson contends, and now the same symptoms are keeping him there indefinitely. Without proper treatment, he is unable to convince corrections officials that he’s fit for the general prison population. This catch-22, his lawyers say, condemns him to an effective life sentence under conditions that are increasingly being denounced as a form of torture—particularly when applied to mentally ill prisoners.” The suit claimed that Anderson’s treatment violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment and its guarantee of due process. Among other things, his lawyers pointed out that it has been more than a decade since Anderson had “felt the sun on his back.”

Westword‘s Alan Prendergast, who has also followed the case closely, reported earlier this week on the judge’s ruling in the case:

In what amounts to a landmark decision, a federal judge has ruled that the conditions of solitary confinement at the Colorado State Penitentiary constitute “a paradigm of inhumane treatment” and must change — notably, so that inmates locked down in their cells 23 hours a day can have at least three hours a week of natural light, fresh air and outdoor exercise. “The Eighth Amendment does not mandate comfortable prisons, but it does forbid inhumane conditions,” U.S. District Judge Brooke Jackson wrote in an order issued last Friday.

CSP has an interior courtyard that could be modified to permit outdoor exercise for inmates, Jackson notes. But since it opened in 1993, the state supermax has permitted its high-security inmates only to exercise in an odd-shaped room on each tier equipped with a chin-up bar; small holes allow some fresh air from outside to reach the room. Calling CSP “out of step with the rest of the nation” — even the notorious federal supermax in Florence allows its inmates outdoor recreation in individual cages — Jackson declared that prison officials must provide its charges with “meaningful exposure” to natural light and air.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Colorado, Constitution, due process, Eighth Amendment, lawsuits/litigation, mental illness, solitary confinement, supermax prisons

Teen Dies in Solitary in Georgia Jail After Alleged Medical Neglect

August 17, 2012 By 37 Comments

In a particularly horrendous story out of Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports today on the death of a 17-year-old in solitary confinement in a small-town jail last year. The teen’s mother has now named the town, its police department, the jail’s nurse and doctor, and four correctional officers in a federal lawsuit claiming wrongful death and civil right violations, based on allegations that her son’s serious medical condition was ignored.

Fabian Avery III weighed 153 pounds when he was transferred from the Fulton County jail in late February 2011 to alleviate overcrowding. The 17-year-old was found dead nearly a month later in an isolation cell at the Mize Street Municipal jail in the south Georgia town of Pelham, his 6-foot-1-inch frame shriveled to 108 pounds, according to reports…

Avery died of appendicitis and complications from a bowel obstruction, according to investigative documents compiled by the GBI [Georgia Bureau of Investigation].

He had been arrested in December 2010 on armed robbery charges and was transferred to Pelham on Feb. 15, 2011.

The complaint claims that Avery first reported being ill on Feb. 24, 2011 and was given minimal attention. While he complained of nausea, stomach pains, vomiting and lower back pains, as well as frequently vomiting and defecating on himself, the lawsuit claims jail staff did little to help get Avery the necessary care…

Avery was found dead on the morning of March 18, on a mattress on the floor of his 6-by-10-foot isolation cell.

According to the AJC, the GBI’s investigation found that the teenager had been placed in “the hole” after he first reported being sick, ”because he began frequently soiling himself and not cleaning up or showering.” The jail’s nurse reportedly “suggested that Avery might have been faking some of his symptoms,” despite his apparent extreme weight loss.

The defendants’ attorney told the AJC: “This is an unfortunate case…If [the jail staff] had any indication that he needed any more medication, it would have been provided.”

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Georgia, lawsuits/litigation, prison health care, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , ,

Political or Gang Activity? “New Afrikan” Inmates in Solitary Confinement

August 7, 2012 By 28 Comments

Three “New Afrikan”  inmates in California Security Housing Unit’s (Pelican Bay and Corcoran State Prison’s) have recently written to Solitary Watch criticizing their continued isolation for being members of the Black Guerilla Family, the only black prison gang in California that will lead to placement in the SHU.

According to Mutope Duguma (legal name James Crawford) at Pelican Bay, it’s his political views “that got me placed in solitary confinement and labeled a BGF member, which I am not, but in order to place you in solitary confinement IGI/ISU/OCS have to label you a BGF if you’re a New Afrikan.”

He has been in solitary for over a decade. “My cell has a concrete slab bed, the cell is white with a concrete brick slab for TV holding. Toilet and sink connected all in one and the steel front panel door and a white painted wall in front. No trees. No animals. No sun. No life. Just prisoners isolated from the world,” he writes.

Life for men in the SHU is bleak, reports Duguma., “I get up at 5:30 AM, go to the yard when my rotation comes around for 90 minutes, then I am back in my cell for the rest of the day.”

Inmates labeled BGF are routinely validated on the basis of their political views. In a June 2012 ruling, the California Court of Appeals found that Duguma’s political writings were wrongly used to prevent outgoing mail to the San Francisco Bay View newspaper.  Duguma referred to himself as a “New Afrikan Nationalist Revolutionary Man.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: California, due process, lawsuits/litigation, race, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , , ,

Bureau of Prisons Chief Sends Memo to Federal Inmates, Urging Them Not to Kill Themselves

August 4, 2012 By 6 Comments

The Atlantic‘s Andrew Cohen, who has been reporting extensively on a lawsuit challenging solitary confinement and mental health care at the ADX Florence, the federal super-supermax in Colorado, has obtained a copy of a memo sent to all federal prisoners last month. Cohen’s own commentary on the memo is trenchant, so we are republishing excerpts from his article, which includes quotation from the memo. The full memo can be read here on the Atlantic‘s website.

Faced with two new federal lawsuits alleging prisoner mistreatment and abuse, one of which chronicles in grim detail the 2010 suicide of an inmate at the Supermax facility in Colorado, the Federal Bureau of Prisons last month sent an extraordinary “Suicide Prevention” memo to “all Bureau Inmates.” Charles E. Samuels, Jr., director of the BOP, urged prisoners “unable to think of solutions other than suicide” not to “lose hope” and urged them to “be willing to request help from those around you.”…

[The memo] is dated July 20, 2012, one month after a class-action lawsuit was filed against federal officials alleging that they have violated the constitutional rights of prisoners by refusing or failing to provide even the most basic treatment for mentally ill prisoners at the Colorado facility. This lawsuit came one month after prison officials were sued over the suicide of an ADX Florence inmate, Jose Martin Vega, who had hanged himself in his cell after allegedly failing to get proper mental health treatment.

The memo concludes with a quotation from Albert Einstein: “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.” This would seem a cruel joke when directed at men whose past, present, and future consist of  absolute isolation a bare concrete cell. (Read, for example, Thomas Silverstein’s description of his 10,000+ days in extreme solitary confinement–a condition that he has little to no prospect of ever changing.)

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Constitution, federal prisons, lawsuits/litigation, mental illness, politics of punishment, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , ,

Shutting Down a Supermax: An Interview With Alan Mills of the Uptown People’s Law Center

July 16, 2012 By 3 Comments

Alan Mills is the Legal Director of the Uptown People’s Law Center in Chicago, Illinois.  The Center has been involved in ongoing litigation on behalf of Illinois prisoners challenging the procedures used to send inmates to Tamms, the state’s supermax facility.  Shortly after Illinois Governor announced plans to close Tamms, he spoke with Solitary Watch about the path that led him to prisoner’s rights work and the Tamms litigation.

Thanks for agreeing to talk to us.  You’ve done a lot of prisoner’s rights work; can you tell us about your background and how you got involved in this sort of litigation?

Oh, man.  [Laughs.]  You may have to edit it down.  It comes from my youth I suppose—my mother was very active in the Civil Rights Movement in Baltimore in the mid-sixties.  One of my first memories is stuffing envelopes for a demonstration.  And during that process she became interested in jails, and then when I was in college she spent a lot of time working on prison and jail issues in Maryland.  So that’s an issue I’ve been interested in since I was a little kid.

Then once I got to the People’s Uptown Law Center, the Law Center has always had the firm belief that people who are in prison need to be treated as members of your community.  We are a community-based law center, and people go to prison from the community and people from prison come back into the community.  It’s silly to deal with them as totally separate entities.  From our community work, we represent a lot of the families from which people go to prisons, so they continue to write us.  So the correctional institutions have always been part of the mission of the Uptown People’s Law Center.  We’ve always considered them as part of the mission that we serve.

In the early 1980s I started work at the Law Center as a volunteer.  In 1981 we were contacted by one former uptown resident who was in a hellacious setting in the old Joliet prison, which was built before the Civil War.  He complained that he and another prisoner had been taken out and—they had been gassed, essentially, and plywood was placed in front of their cells and they passed out.  They came fairly close to dying.  He wanted to sue.  We found him a lawyer for that and [the case] grew from there, and the [two main plaintiffs] claimed they hadn’t been given meaningful access to the courts.  And if you want to do advertising in prison, do a case about access to the courts, because you get contact with all the jailhouse lawyers throughout the system.  So from there our practice really grew, and we do dozens and dozens of prisoner cases. [Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, cost/budget issues, due process, featured posts, Illinois, lawsuits/litigation, politics of punishment, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , , , ,

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

July 12, 2012 By 2 Comments

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 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.) [Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, corrections industry, cost/budget issues, due process, featured posts, juveniles, lawsuits/litigation, legislation, mental illness, New York, politics of punishment, psychological effects, race, retaliation, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , , ,

Demonstrators Protest Solitary Confinement and Brutality in New York City’s Jails

July 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

Yesterday morning, members of the Jails Action Coalition (JAC), a newly formed grassroots activist group that opposes the expansion of solitary confinement and other abuses in New York City’s jails, held a demonstration outside a meeting of the city’s Board of Corrections. Chanting, “We demand prisoners’ rights, together we stand, together we fight!” and “Jobs and education, not incarceration!” protesters from the Bronx Defenders, Urban Justice Center, American Civil Liberties Union, Legal Aid Society, and other advocacy groups marched alongside affected family members and other concerned members of the community.

One man distributed pamphlets on solitary confinement in New York City jails. Curious pedestrians paused to watch as the words “People suffering by the hour, what do we do, fight the power” penetrated the routine sounds of Monday morning’s hustle and bustle near 51 Chambers Street in Manhattan.

Also in attendance was Sister Marion Defeis, who served for 23 years as a chaplain at the city’s jails. Last month, Sister Defeis publicly called for change in a commentary in the New York Daily News: “Recognizing that prolonged solitary confinement is a cruel form of punishment, people of faith and conscience must work to abolish this indefensible practice.” Yesterday she once again spoke out against the DOC’s use of punitive segregation, this time to a circle of JAC demonstrators as well as a number of passersby stopping to tune in.

Inside the meeting, a packed room of high-level officials from the Department of Corrections (DOC), including Commissioner Dora Schriro, sat around a table across from members of the Board of Corrections (BOC), an entity which “monitors conditions in the City’s jails, investigates serious incidents, evaluates the performance of the Department of Correction, reviews inmate and employee grievances, and makes recommendations in critical areas of correctional planning.”

At the commencement of the meeting, the BOC briefly mentioned the demonstration being conducted by the JAC while a JAC member walked around the room passing out literature on solitary confinement in New York City jails to attendees of the meeting. In addition, the BOC handed out recent op-eds on solitary confinement, information on the recent congressional hearing on solitary confinement, and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry’s recent briefing in which the group opposed the use of solitary confinement for juvenile offenders. The DOC, in turn, gave the BOC detailed information on their use of punitive segregation. Both parties agreed to table the main discussion on punitive segregation to ensure time to review all materials.

Over the last two years, the DOC has increased its use of punitive segregation at Rikers Island by 44 percent. With its total number of isolation cells now nearing 1,000, it has one of the highest rates of solitary confinement in the country. According to a recent article in City Limits, “For the last several years, union officials who represent jail workers have complained of an uptick in violence against their members. In 2010, there were 84 incidents of inmate assaults on staff resulting in serious injury, according to DOC statistics, up from 63 in 2009 and 53 in 2008.” (Complete DOC statistics on jail violence can be viewed on the agency’s website.) They argue that more solitary confinement cells are needed to enhance the safety of jail staff. [Read more...]

Filed Under: featured posts, human rights, juveniles, lawsuits/litigation, mental illness, New York, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , , ,
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