The Other Death Sentence: Aging and Dying in Prison

September 26, 2012 By 2 Comments

The title of this post is the title of a new article by James Ridgeway that appears on Mother Jones and New American Media. It begins this way:

William “Lefty” Gilday had been in prison 40 years when the dementia began to set in. At 82, he was already suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease and a host of other ailments, and his friends at MCI Shirley, a medium security prison in Massachusetts, tried to take care of him as best they could. Most of them were aging lifers like Lefty, facing the prospect of one day dying behind bars themselves, so they formed an ad hoc hospice team in their crowded ward. They bought special food from the commissary, heated it in an ancient microwave, and fed it to their friend. They helped him to the toilet and cleaned him up. Joe Labriola, 64, tried to see that Lefty got a little sunshine every day, wheeling his chair out into the yard and sitting with his arm around him to keep him from falling out.

But Lefty, who was serving life without parole for killing a police officer during a failed bank heist in 1970, slipped ever deeper into dementia. One day he threw an empty milk carton at a guard and was placed in a “medical bubble,” a kind of solitary confinement unit with a glass window that enables health care staffers to keep an eye on the prisoner. His friends were denied entrance, but Joe managed to slip in one day. He recalls an overpowering stench of piss and shit and a stack of unopened food containers—Lefty explained that he couldn’t open the tabs. Joe also noticed that the nurses in the adjoining observation room had blocked the glass with manila folders so they wouldn’t have to look at the old man…

Lefty Gilday was no ordinary inmate, but in one regard he typified a growing segment of America’s inmate population—geriatric prisoners. The United States leads the world in incarceration, with more than 2.2 million people in its prisons and jails, and the graying of this population is shaping up to be a crisis with moral, practical, and economic implications for cash-strapped governments. In recent years, a growing number of advocates—and even a handful of corrections officials and politicians—have dared to suggest that we consider setting some of these old-timers free.

As of 2010, state and federal prisons housed more than 26,000 inmates 65 and older and nearly five times that number 55 and up, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report. (Both numbers are significant, since long-term incarceration is said to add 10 years to a person’s physical age; in prison, 55 is old.) From 1995 to 2010, as America’s prison population grew 42 percent, the number of inmates over 55 grew at nearly seven times that rate. Today, roughly 1 in 12 state and federal prison inmates is 55 or older.

The trend is worsening. A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union estimates that, by 2030, the over-55 group will number more than 400,000—about a third of the overall prison population.

The article goes on to tell what it is like to grow old in prison, through the story of a group of aging lifers in Massachusetts. You can read the full article here, and view a powerful photo essay by Tim Gruber, shot inside a Kentucky prison’s nursing unit, here.

Filed Under: cost/budget issues, life without parole, Massachusetts, older prisoners, politics of punishment, sentencing, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , , ,

Voices from Solitary: High Tech Brutality

June 28, 2012 By 1 Comment

Robert “Saleem” Holbrook is serving life without parole in Pennsylvania for a crime committed when he was a juvenile. When he was 16, Holbrook was recruited by adults to serve as a lookout during a drug deal that escalated to robbery and then murder. Under the state’s mandatory sentencing laws, he was given LWOP–an experience he describes in an essay called “Crushed Against the Law: A Child Offender’s Encounter with Blind Justice,” published on the blog maintained for him by friends on the outside. It remains to be seen how the Supreme Court’s recent decision banning mandatory juvenile LWOP will affect his sentence. Holbrook has now been in prison for 17 years, and has spent many of those years in solitary confinement. He is a member of the Human Rights Coaltion, which opposes solitary confinement and other forms of abuse in Pennsylvania’s prisons. He wrote the following piece, titled “Control Units: High Tech Brutality” while in the “Special Management Unit” (SMU) at SCI Greene.  — Jean Casella

A prisoner’s whole existence, especially one in a control unit, is defined by numbers, statistics, and information transferred through an endless process of paperwork. When I go to the Program Review Committee here in the Special Management Unit (a control unit) at SCI Greene, my release to general population is repeatedly denied, they claim, because of a history of assaultive behavior. It is useless to defend myself against their rationale, yet I do to probe the predictable response of my captors.

Their justification for the continual confinement of myself and others in the SMU is based on the rational of a separate committee that determined I am an assaultive prisoner who has demonstrated the potential to harm others. Never mind the fact that this determination was made in another prison. Since a separate Administrative Committee determined that I am assaultive, I must therefore be assaultive. Their system of paper- work and statistics is never wrong; their committees are omnipotent and all knowing.

We the prisoners are mere spectators and captives to the process. Our presence is only necessary to secure our signatures on their paperwork or to say something that can be documented and used against us in future hearings. Our signatures place our consent on their paperwork. They permit us to seal our fate by certifying our consent of their process.

Every step of our day in the control unit is reduced to a methodical and omnipotent numbers system. I am housed in cell 23 on the 2nd tier. I receive 3 meals a day, 3 showers a week for 5 minutes each with 1 bar of soap, and 3 shaves a week with 1 razor that must be turned in after 15 minutes. I go to the yard 5 days a week for 1 hour a day with 1 prisoner per cage. I can only have 1 box in my cell containing only 2 pairs of socks, 2 t-shirts and 2 underwear. I can only have 4 books that must be exchanged on a 1 for 1 basis. I can only have 1 jumpsuit, 1 towel, 1 washcloth, and 1 toothbrush and toothpaste that are exchanged every 30 days on a 1 for 1 basis. I can only have 1 visit for 1 hour every week with only 1 visitor. The SMU Committee reviews my status every 30 days.

The prison officials tolerate no alternation in their process. There is no room for negotiation or compromise. The system must run smoothly. Dissent or resistance is crushed by the Correctional Response Teams dressed in futuristic battle fatigues. It is a ruthless war of attrition de- signed to grind a man down to his breaking point.

The previous method employed by the prison system to break prisoners was to break “bones.” They relied on brute force and unrestrained violence. This method did not sit well with the American public when it was exposed. It also tarnished America’s image in the world as a nation of high standards and values. The method was flawed in that it usually only strengthened prisoners’ resistance and made them stronger men. The prison system therefore directed its resources to develop a method of confinement that would destroy a prisoner’s mind and his will to resist.

The new assault was directed not against a prisoner’s body, but rather his mind and senses. The concept of a complete sensory deprivation and isolation was developed. This concept revolved around the ideas that if a prisoner is deprived of mental, physical, and emotional stimulation, his mind will inevitably turn inward and feed upon itself. With no outlet in an isolated environment, the mind is left to its own devices. The result is that a prisoner’s thoughts run out of control. Concentration becomes difficult and prisoners invent fantasies or images of themselves which they cocoon themselves in.

Some never emerge from this world they create. The mind will seek any relief available. It is not uncommon for men to talk to themselves for hours on end. Insanity and madness rule in a control unit. The units are filled with prisoner’s screams, outbursts and pleas for communication. A man’s nerves deteriorate right in front of his eyes. Each prisoner suffers his own personal hell. Everyone is affected in one way or another. Whether the experience affects him for the good or the bad depends upon the man. [Read more...]

Filed Under: human rights, juveniles, life without parole, mental illness, Pennsylvania, physical effects, psychological effects, race, retaliation, sentencing, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , , ,

“Occupy” Prison Protests in California Oppose Use of Solitary Confinement

February 21, 2012 By 4 Comments
Protestors outside the LA County Jail

Solitary confinement was very much on the agenda during yesterday’s “Occupy for Prisoners”protests at more than a dozen sites around the country. This was particularly true in California, where recent prisoner hunger strikes have called attention to conditons in the state’s all-solitary Security Housing Units (SHUs) and Administrative Segregation Units (ASUs).

The largest rally was staged at the east gate of San Quentin, north of San Francisco, which is the state’s oldest prison and the home of its death row. At least 700 people gathered there on Monday afternoon for a peaceful demonstration. As the Guardian reports:

The call to protest was issued by activists with the Occupy Oakland movement and was co-ordinated to coincide with waves of prison hunger strikes that began at California’s Pelican Bay prison in July. Demonstrators denounced the use of restrictive isolation units as infringement upon fundamental human rights…

Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer – the American hikers who were held for over a year by Iranian authorities – took part in demonstrations outside San Quentin prison in Marin County, California. Addressing the crowd, Shourd described the psychological impact of solitary confinement, saying her 14 and a half months without human contact drove her to beat the walls of her cell until her knuckles bled. Shourd noted that Nelson Mandela described the two weeks he spent in solitary confinement as the most dehumanising experience he had ever been through.

“In Iran the first thing they do is put you in solitary,” Fattal added.

Bauer said “a prisoner’s greatest fear is being forgotten.” He described how hunger strikes became the hikers’ own “greatest weapon” in pushing their captors to heed their demands. According to Bauer, however, the most influential force for changing their quality of life while being held in Iran was the result of pressure applied by those outside the prison. It was for that fact, Bauer argued, that “this movement, this Occupy movement, needs to permeate the prisons.”…

Demonstrators are broadly calling for the abolition of inhumane prison conditions, and the elimination of policies such as capital punishment, life sentences without the possibility of parole and so-called “three strikes, you’re out” laws.

Ironically–but perhaps predictably–prison officials responded to news of the impending protest by increasing restrictions on prisoners. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “San Quentin was placed on lockdown, meaning prisoners were kept in their cells,  in anticipation of the protest.”

While the rally was taking place at San Quentin, another group of about 100 advocates was demonstrating in front of the Los Angeles County Jail. Members of the National Religious Campaign Against  Torture (NRCAT), ACLU of Southern California, and California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement were there “to protest  long-term solitary confinement in American prisons, show support for  prisoners, and advocate for legislation that would limit the use of  solitary confinement,” according to a statement from NRCAT.

One attendee, NRCAT board member Virginia Classick, said that the event was “an opportunity to be in solidarity with family members” inside California’s prisons and jails, and to be “visible as part of the witness” to a practice that the religious coalition considers a form of torture. The group’s executive director, Rev. Richard Killmer, stated: “Long-term solitary confinement denigrates a person’s inherent dignity and hinders genuine rehabilitation.  As people of faith, we have been deeply concerned about prison conditions in California that led to the recent prisoner hunger strikes.”

Filed Under: California, death row, life without parole, sentencing, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Solitary Confinement in Virginia’s Prisons

January 9, 2012 By 3 Comments

For anyone who missed it, this front page article in Sunday’s Washington Post gives excellent coverage to the widespread use of solitary confinement in Virginia’s state prisons. It begins with a glance at one of the nation’s most notorious supermax prisons, Red Onion, and then goes on to discuss efforts to limit the use of solitary in Virginia–which include both a lawsuit and a possible legislative initiative.

At Red Onion State Prison, built on a mountaintop in a remote pocket of southwest Virginia, more than two-thirds of the inmates live in solitary confinement.

In a state where about 1 in 20 prisoners are held in solitary, Red Onion, a so-called supermax prison, isolates more inmates than any other facility, keeping more than 500 of its nearly 750 charges alone for 23 hours a day in cells the size of a doctor’s exam room…

As more becomes known about the effects of isolation — on inmate health, public safety and prison budgets — some states have begun to reconsider the practice, among them Texas, which, like Virginia, is known as a law-and-order state…

Now critics have set their sights on Virginia, where lawyers and inmates say some of the state’s 40,000 prisoners, including some with mental-health issues, have been kept in isolation for years, in one case for 14 years…

The Legal Aid Justice Center, which represents 12 inmates in isolation in Virginia, has requested an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, which recently launched a probe into a 1,550-bed Pennsylvania prison where inmates complain of long periods of isolation and a lack of mental-health treatment…

A group of legislators…have been visiting prisons, including Red Onion, to examine how their most violent inmates are treated. Del. Patrick A. Hope (D-Arlington), who is leading the effort, said he will urge the General Assembly to study ways to limit the use of solitary confinement and offer more treatment before inmates are released.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: corrections industry, lawsuits/litigation, legislation, mental illness, psychological effects, sentencing, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, Virginia Tagged With: ,

What the War on Terror Owes to the War on Crime

September 10, 2011 By 7 Comments

Long before the War on Terror, there was the War on Crime. And as much as 9/11 was a watershed event, many aspects of the nation’s response to the terrorist attacks find longstanding precedent in the American criminal justice system.

In his article “Exporting Harshness: How the War on Crime Helped Make the War on Terror Possible,” Georgetown Law professor and former public defender James Forman Jr. argues against the widely accepted notion that “the war on terror represents a sharp break from the past, with American values and ideals ‘betrayed,’ American law ‘remade.’” Forman continues: “While I share much of the criticism of how we have waged the war on terror, I suspect it is both too simple and ultimately too comforting to assert that the Bush administration alone remade our justice system and betrayed our values.” Instead, he believes, “our approach to the war on terror is an extension–sometimes a grotesque one–of what we do in the name of the war on crime”:

By pursuing certain policies and using particular rhetoric domestically, I suggest, we have rendered thinkable what would otherwise have been unthinkable. Moreover, as the world’s largest jailer, we are increasingly desensitized to the harsh treatment of criminals. We have come to accept such excesses as casualties of war—whether on crime, drugs, or terror. Indeed, more than that, we no longer see what we do as special, different, or harsh. Certain practices have become what David Garland calls “the taken-for-granted features of contemporary crime policy.” In part for this reason, despite the mounting evidence regarding secret memos, inhumane prison conditions, coercive interrogations, and interference with defense lawyers, the Bush administration’s approach to the war on terror went largely unchecked and unchanged. (H/T Prison Law Blog)

Berkeley professor Jonathan Simons, in his 2007 book Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy, also looks for the roots of these “excesses,” and locates them decades prior to the terrorist attacks. ”Fear of sudden and terrible violence was a major feature of American life long before September 11, 2001. The collapsing towers were only the latest–and most lethal–of a series of spectacular scenes of violence that have unfolded at the centers of our large cities since President Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas with a mail-order rifle in 1963.” In the subsequent decades, Simon writes, “American have built a new civil and political order, values like freedom and equality have been revised in way that would have been shocking…in the late 1960s, and new forms of power institutionalized and embraced–all in the name of repressing seemingly endless waves of violent crime.” Simon continues:

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, due process, Eighth Amendment, featured posts, immigrants, politics of punishment, sentencing, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, terrorism cases, torture Tagged With: , , , ,

“God’s Own Warden”: Inside Angola Prison

July 28, 2011 By 6 Comments

Editor’s Note: The latest issue of Mother Jones magazine includes James Ridgeway’s long article on Burl Cain, warden of the nation’s largest prison, and possibly its most notorious. The former slave plantation is known for the fact that 90 percent of its more than 5,000 prisoners will die behind bars, and also for holding two members of the “Angola 3″ in solitary confinement for nearly 40 years. More recently, it has also become known for the “miracle” wrought by its controversial warden, who is said to have transformed the prison with the help of Christianity.

It took the threat of an ACLU lawsuit for James Ridgeway to gain access to Angola. The resulting article offers an alternative narrative on the miracle at Angola. The opening section of the article follows; the full article can be read on MotherJones.com.

It was a chilly December morning when I got to the gates of Angola prison, and I was nervous as I waited to be admitted. To begin with, nothing looked the way it ought to have looked. The entrance, with its little yellow gatehouse and red brick sign, could have marked the gates of one of the smaller national parks. There was a museum with a gift shop, where I perused miniature handcuffs, jars of inmate-made jelly, and mugs that read “Angola: A Gated Community” before moving on to the exhibits, which include Gruesome Gertie, the only electric chair in which a prisoner was executed twice. (It didn’t take the first time, possibly because the executioners were visibly drunk.)

Besides being cold and disoriented, I had the well-founded sense of being someplace where I wasn’t wanted. Angola welcomes a thousand or more visitors a month, including religious groups, schoolchildren, and tourists taking a side trip from their vacations in plantation country. Under ordinary circumstances, it’s possible to drive up to the gate and tour the prison in a state vehicle, accompanied by a staff guide. But for me, it had taken close to two years and the threat of an ACLU lawsuit to get permission to visit the place.

I was studying an exhibit of sawed-off shotguns when I heard someone call my name. It was Cathy Fontenot, the assistant warden in charge of PR. Smartly dressed in a tailored shirt and jeans, a suede jacket, and boots with four-inch heels, she introduced me to a smiling corrections officer (“my bodyguard”) and to Pam Laborde, the genial head spokeswoman for the Louisiana department of corrections who had come up from Baton Rouge to help escort me on my hard-won tour of Angola.

Everyone was there except the person I had come to see: Warden Burl   Cain, a man with a near-mythical reputation for turning Angola, once   known as the bloodiest prison in the South,  into a model facility. Among  born-again Christians, Cain is revered  for delivering hundreds of  incarcerated sinners to the Lord—running the  nation’s largest  maximum-security prison, as one evangelical publication put it, “with an  iron fist and an even stronger love for Jesus.” To Cain’s more secular  admirers,  Angola demonstrates an attractive option for controlling the  nation’s  booming prison population at a time when the notion of  rehabilitation  has effectively been abandoned.

What I had heard about Cain, and seen in the plentiful footage of  him, led me to expect an affable guy—big gut, pale, jowly face,  good-old-boy demeanor. Indeed, former Angola inmates say that prisoners  who respond to Cain’s program of “moral rehabilitation” through  Christian redemption are rewarded with privileges, humane treatment, and  personal attention. Those who displease him, though, can face harsh  punishments. Wilbert Rideau, the award-winning former Angolite  editor who is probably Angola’s most famous ex-con, says when he first  arrived at the prison, Cain tried to enlist him as a snitch, then sought  to convert him. When that didn’t work, Rideau says, his magazine became  the target of censorship; he says Cain can be “a bully—harsh, unfair,  vindictive.”

“Cain was like a king, a sole ruler,” Rideau writes in his recent memoir, In the Place of Justice.  “He enjoyed being a dictator, and regarded himself as a benevolent  one.” When a group of middle school students visited Angola a few years  ago, Cain told them that the inmates were there because they “didn’t  listen to their parents. They didn’t listen to law enforcement. So when  they get here, I become their daddy, and they will either listen to me  or make their time here very hard.”

Another former prisoner, John Thompson—who spent 14 years on death  row at Angola before being exonerated by previously concealed  evidence—told me that Cain runs Angola “with a Bible in one hand and a  sword in the other.” And when the chips are down, Thompson said, “he  drops the Bible.”

Who is the man who wields so much untempered power over so many human  beings? I wanted to find out firsthand—but when I requested permission  to visit the prison and interview Cain, back in 2009, Fontenot turned me  down flat. Cain, she said, was not happy with what I had written about  the Angola Three, a trio of inmates who have been in solitary longer  than any other prisoners in America. Two years and much legal wrangling  later, I was here at Fontenot’s invitation, ready to see the Cain  miracle for myself…

Read the rest on MotherJones.com.

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, corrections industry, cost/budget issues, death row, Eighth Amendment, lawsuits/litigation, life without parole, Louisiana, media, older prisoners, physical effects, political prisoners, politics of punishment, popular culture, psychological effects, race, retaliation, sentencing, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , , ,

Voices from Solitary: The Meaning of “Life”

June 11, 2011 By 6 Comments

Joseph Dole is currently serving a life sentence without parole at Tamms state supermax prison in Illinois. For the past eight years, he has been in solitary confinement (under conditions described by Dole himself here, and detailed in recent newspaper exposés here and here). His writing has been honored by the PEN American Center’s Prison Writing Contest and appears in the book Lockdown Prison Heart.  This essay, which also recently appeared on the Prison Culture blog, was sent to us by The Real Cost of Prisons Project, which maintains an excellent archive of prisoner writings.

Rarely am I asked what it’s like to serve a life-without-parole sentence. Arguing for a death sentence for my first felony conviction, the State’s Attorney implored the judge not to allow me to spend the rest of my life on a virtual “vacation” in prison. I can unequivocally state that it is not vacation.

A life-without-parole sentence means a million things, because, as its name suggests, it encompasses a person’s entire remaining life.

It means enduring being reduced to a second-class citizen in the eyes of most  people. It means decades of discrimination from the courts and public. “Prisoner’” “inmate,” or “convict” each have a strictly pejorative use in the media or pop culture. Those terms become the sole defining characteristic of a man’s entire character.

It means that courts will turn a blind eye to any act against you unless it causes “atypical and significant hardship.” A free man may find protection in the courts from emotional and mental harm, but a prisoner can only find protection from “atypical and significant” physical harm, and that’s dependent on finding an objective and unbiased judge and enough citizens who can set aside their personal biases against prisoners to fill a jury box and render a fair verdict – a nearly impossible feat. So when you’re stripped naked and left in a concrete box with nothing but a toilet for four days without cause, as a prisoner you have no recourse in the courts. When you’re beaten to a bloody mess while handcuffed, as a prisoner you’re more likely to encounter a jury that will conclude you deserved what you got, regardless of the circumstances.

It means that after being “spared” the death penalty and receiving your life-without-parole sentence, you lack all the procedural safeguards against a wrongful conviction that a death sentence would have entailed, solely because you were found undeserving of immediate death. How ironic it is that the worse you are deemed to be, the better chance of proving your innocence and regaining your freedom.

It means a lifetime of censorship, where you’re told what books and magazines you can read, what movies can watch, even what hairstyles you can sport, and where every letter coming in or going out is subject to inspection.

It means a complete lack of privacy forever, and a complete indifference to your physical and medical health until someone fears being sued.

It means a constant, heightened risk of catching a deadly disease. You’re captive in an environment where staph infections run rampant, where people still die from tuberculosis, where the population has twice the rate of HIV infection compared to non-prisoners, and where up to forty percent are infected with hepatitis. An environment where there’s nowhere to run from many of these diseases because you’re forced to use communal toilets and showers.

It means three meals a day of the poorest quality food that the least amount of money can buy without killing the inmate population.

It’s a daily existence where trust is non-existent and compassion is not allowed. Not only is compassion viewed as a sign of weakness in the prison milieu, but it is, ironically, actively discouraged by the prison administration. If your neighbor is destitute and you want to assist him by giving him soap, paper, or even a snack to supplement the meager meals, you can only do so at risk of being written a disciplinary ticket for “trading and trafficking.”

It’s a never-ending pressure cooker where the stress and anxiety compound daily as you constantly have to watch your back. Soldiers returning from Iraq understand this. It’s a major factor in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The constant fear for your safety and the need for 24-7 situational awareness frays at your nerves.  Now imagine not a 12-month tour but a lifetime deployment.

It means you’re constantly being told that you aren’t worth rehabilitation and thus are ineligible for nearly every educational or vocational program. Your life sentence disqualifies you from any state or federal grants to pursue an education and even the Inmate Scholarship Fund (founded by a prisoner) has no qualms about telling you that you’re ineligible for a scholarship because you’re never going to get out and contribute to society.

It means convincing yourself daily that your life has value even when the rest of the world tells you you’re worthless. It’s a lifetime spent wondering what your true potential really is, and yearning for the chance to find out.

It mean decades of living with double standards, where any guard can call you every profanity ever invented without any fear of punishment, but where if you were to utter a single one in response, or say anything that even resembles insolence, you’ll be written a disciplinary ticket, lose privileges, such as phone calls and commissary, and be subjected to a month of disciplinary segregation.

It means the state constitution is irrelevant where lifers are concerned. Article 1, Section 11 of the Illinois Constitution states: “All penalties shall be determined both according to the seriousness of the offense and with the objective of restoring the offender to useful citizenship,” but the courts have decided that politics, revenge, and hatred of “criminals” trumps the constitution, and have thus rendered the above section essentially meaningless by their refusal to rule life-without-parole sentences unconstitutional, even if it is the defendants first felony conviction on a theory of accountability, as is my case. This also put the lie to the American maxim that everyone deserves a second chance.

It means that you’re especially vulnerable to incomprehensible punishments, such as a lifetime of disciplinary segregation. I was given indeterminate disciplinary segregation after being found guilty of my sole disciplinary infraction. That was 8 years ago, yet here I remain.  I’ve been told (on more than one occasion) that I will never be allowed out of indeterminate disciplinary segregation. So I will continue to endure conditions for the rest of my life which are known to cause mental illness after just 3 months.

It means that I will never tate another Hostess cake. Nor play softball or any group activity ever again. More importantly, it means that I will never have physical contact with another human being for the rest of my life, including my 11- and 12-year-old daughters.

It means being incapable of taking care of your grandparents and parents as they reach their final years.

It means missing out on every important event in your children’s lives, unable to raise them; impotent to protect them or assist them in any meaningful way.  It means they’ll grow up resenting you for the thousands of times they needed you and you weren’t there.

A life-without-parole sentence means constant contemplation of a wasted life. A continual despair as to your inability to accomplish anything significant with your remaining years. A life spent watching as each of your family members and friends slowly drift away from you leaving you in a vacuum, devoid of any enduring relationships.

It’s a persistent dashing of hopes as appeal after appeal is arbitrarily denied. It is a permanent experiment in self-delusion as you strive to convince yourself that there is still hope.

It’s a compounding of second upon second, minute upon minute, hour upon hour, of wasted existence, and decade upon decade of mental and emotional torture culminating in a final sentence of death by incarceration.

These, though, are simply futile attempts to describe the indescribable. It’s  like trying to describe a broken heart or communicate what it feels like to mourn the death of your soul mate. The words to convey the pain do not exist. When you’re serving a life-without-parole sentence it’s as if you’re experiencing the broken heart of knowing you’ll never love or be loved again in any normal sense of the word, while simultaneously mourning the death of the man you could have and should have been. The only difference is that you never recover, and can move on from neither the heart break nor the death because the pain is renewed each morning you wake up to realize that you’re still here, sentenced to life-without-parole. It’s a fresh day of utter despair, lived over and over for an entire lifetime.

Joseph Dole welcomes mail, and can be reached at K84446 Tamms CC, 8500 Supermax Rd., Tamms, IL 62988.

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, due process, Illinois, life without parole, physical effects, prison health care, psychological effects, sentencing, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, Voices from Solitary Tagged With: ,

Groups Urge Holder to Clean House at the Bureau of Prisons

May 19, 2011 By 9 Comments

A group of civil liberties and criminal justice reform groups is calling for a change in direction at the federal Bureau of Prisons, following the retirement of BOP head Harley Lappin, appointed during the Bush Administration. Under Lappin, the BOP continued to grow, adding new prisons and prisoners at a rate even higher than that of the states, according to analyses by the Sentencing Project and the Pew Center on the States.  Since 1995 alone, the number of federal inmates has more than doubled, to over 211,000. More than half of these prisoners are serving time on drug charges, and another 10 percent are held on immigration violations. In all, more than 72 percent are nonviolent offenders with no history of violence, and 34 percent are first-time nonviolent offenders.

Yet, as we wrote recently, the BOP’s FY 2012 budget request includes funds to open new maximum security prisons in Alabama and New Hampshire, and to acquire and renovate a new supermax prison in Thomson, Illinois, which would add and add up to 1,600 solitary confinement cells. It is in response to such plans that the consortium of groups is urging Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a reformer who will take the BOP in a different direction. According to an announcement issued by the 24 groups:

Two dozen more organizations have called on Attorney General Eric Holder to name a reformer to head the federal Bureau of Prisons. The position is vacant with the retirement of Harley Lappin. In a letter to Holder, groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, NAACP, and Sentencing Project urged the appointment of “an  individual with experience in systems reform and change. She or he must also have the courage and commitment to lower recidivism rates, improve conditions in BOP facilities, focus on rehabilitation and re-entry, and improve public safety through reforms in correctional practice and strategy.”

The groups said that currently, the prison bureau “functions at nearly 140%  capacity where prisoners are warehoused, rather than rehabilitated, and both staff and prisoners are routinely put at risk due to dangerous conditions. Unfortunately, the agency has not adapted its management strategy to take full advantage of the diverse population reduction authorities and cost-savings measures given to it by Congress, such as: expanded half-way house placement, compassionate release, and sentence reduction programs like good time and drug program participation. The consequence of this inaction is that the BOP has grown more bloated and more dangerous over time.” The American Bar Association, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and Human Rights Watch made similar
points to Holder in recent letters.

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Filed Under: cost/budget issues, federal prisons, politics of punishment, sentencing, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , ,

No Budget Cuts for Federal Prisons

April 13, 2011 By 8 Comments

In the midst of an epic budget battle that could transform the American landscape for decades to come, the White House and Republicans in Congress appear to agree on one point: Federal prisons need more money.

With more people and a higher percentage of the population locked up than any other country, the United States would seem more than ripe for cuts in both its incarceration rate and its prison spending. A number of states have initiated such measures, and a growing chorus of critics on the right and left are decrying the devastating fiscal costs of mass incarceration. Yet the Obama Administration’s combined budget requests for FY 2011 and FY 2012 call for a full 10 percent increase over 2010 levels in funding to the federal Bureau of Prisons, to more than $6.8 billion. The increase, says the BOP, is necessary to accommodate a still-growing federal inmate population. And the latest budget deal reached with Republican leadership indicates that this particular category of discretionary spending will emerge from the budget battles comparably unscathed.

There is ample precedent for an expansion of federal prisons under a Democratic administration. According to analyses by the Sentencing Project and the Pew Center on the States, the growth rate in the BOP’s population has far outstripped that of the states (which itself has increased by than 700 percent in the past 40 years). Federal growth was most dramatic during the Clinton years, when a host of new offenses were federalized: Since 1995 alone, the number of federal inmates has more than doubled, to over 211,000. More than half of these prisoners are serving time on drug charges, and another 10 percent are held on immigration violations. In all, more than 72 percent are nonviolent offenders with no history of violence, and 34 percent are first-time nonviolent offenders.

What’s more, the federal government is now bucking a state trend toward decreasing inmate levels and closing prisons. The Pew Center found that in 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, the overall state prison population fell for the first time in 38 years. States as tough on crime as Texas, Georgia, and Florida are now pushing reforms that range from lighter sentences to early release programs—all under the leadership of Republican governors. In contrast, the BOP population continues to rise, with an increase of 11,000 projected this year, according to Attorney General Eric Holder.

No wonder, then, that federal prisons are overcrowded, and the government is still opening new ones. According to the Justice Department’s FY 2012 budget request for the Bureau of Prisons:

The biggest challenge facing the BOP is managing the ever increasing federal inmate population and providing for their care and safety, while maintaining appropriately safe and secure prisons required to ensure the safety of BOP staff, inmates, and surrounding communities, which is why the requested base resources for BOP’s operations budget (S&E) and for modernization and repair are vital.

BOP anticipates finalizing the construction of Federal Correctional Center (FCI) Aliceville, AL, a secure female facility in FY 2012. This facility will add 1,792 more beds to rated capacity. Assuming the requested FY 2012 funding is received, the BOP will begin the activation process of FCI Berlin, NH and the acquisition and renovation process of administrative maximum U.S. Penitentiary (ADX USP) Thomson, IL. If realized, FCI Berlin, NH will add 1,280 beds and ADX USP Thomson, IL will be activated as a federal institution and add up to 1,600 high security cells after modifications.

The “activation” of the new ADX (“administrative maximum”) prison in 2012 depends upon the purchase of that prison in 2011 from the state of Illinois, and its retrofitting as a federal supermax. This has been by far the most controversial facet of the BOP’s future plans, since the new ADX in Thomson was originally proposed as a new home for Guantanamo detainees.

Obama’s plans to close Gitmo and move its residents to the American mainland were stymied by Congress, but the White House decided to buy Thomson nonetheless. In a letter sent just last week, Eric Holder assured Illinois’s Democratic Senator Dick Durban and Republican Senator Mark Kirk that “consistent with current law, we will not transfer detainees from Guantanamo to Thomson, or otherwise house Guantanamo detainees at Thomson. The Thomson facility would only house federal inmates and would be operated solely by the Bureau of Prisons.”

What the White House is calling for, then, is the creation of a second federal supermax on the model of the notorious Florence ADX in Colorado—a place where solitary confinement has been raised to a torturous art, and inmates seldom, if ever, see another human being. Conditions at this “Alcatraz of the Rockies” are so harsh that the European Court of Human Rights is currently refusing to extradite terrorism suspects to the United States lest they end up in ADX. Yet this new prison has also become the centerpiece of Obama’s plans for prison expansion. The letter from Holder to Durbin and Kirk continues:

As you know, the Department wishes to acquire the Thomson facility in order to provide critically needed high security bed space for the federal Bureau of Prisons. The current population of high security federal penitentiaries is 51 % above rated capacity, and continues to grow…I appreciate your leadership in addressing the dangers of prison overcrowding, and in fostering community support for the federal government’s acquisition of this unused state facility.

The President’s FY11 budget requested $237 million for the acquisition, renovation, and operation of the Thomson facility. However, under the FY11 Continuing Resolutions, the Department lacks sufficient money to purchase or activate Thomson using currently available funds. We look forward to working with you to obtain additional appropriated funds for this important and needed project.

So far, this new prison remains a sticking point in the latest budget deal. With $6.3 billion for the BOP, it includes much of the other prison funding requested by the White House, and represents a significant increase over 2010 levels. But it is still $239 billion below the White House’s 2011 request, and doesn’t contain funding for the Thomson purchase. Durbin and Kirk have not given up on the plan, however, and will continue pressing the Justice Department to come up with funds to finance the new prison.

The BOP’s standing in the House Republicans’ 2012 budget proposal is less clear. Budget Chair Paul Ryan’s ”Path to Prosperity” calls for more than $10 billion in cuts to programs that fall under the broad spending category “Administration of Justice.” The plan is more of a manifesto than an actual budget, and it doesn’t specify where these cuts should be made—though history would suggest that civil rights prosecutions and the like would be more obvious targets for Republican cuts than prison spending. In another rare show of bipartisan unity, House Judiciary Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX) and ranking member John Conyers (D-MI) have already joined in writing to the House Budget Committee, warning them against making cuts to federal law enforcement in 2012.

What belies all this agreement on increasing federal prison spending is a bipartisan trend, growing over the past several months, that calls for precisely the opposite. Fall 2010 saw the birth of the group Right on Crime, spearheaded by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and Ed Meese, making the “conservative case for criminal justice reform”—including a reduction in prison populations. Norquist also joined the NAACP last week to endorse its Smart and Safe Campaign for criminal justice reform, and publicize its new report Misplaced Priorities: Under Educate, Over Incarcerate. Another recently formed coalition, calling itself Smart on Crime, brings together the Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute, and Prison Fellowship with the Innocence Project and the ACLU. Smart on Crime advocates for criminal justice reforms that are “fair, accurate, effective, proven, and cost efficient,” and makes a particularly sharp critique of the “overcriminalization of conduct” and “overfederalization of criminal law.”

What think tanks and pundits do, of course, is quite a different matter from what elected officials are willing to undertake. Few politicians will risk being declared “soft on crime” in the next election. And in the end, the generous funding for prisons makes a grim kind of sense, in the context of a budget that slashes education, health care, and social services: A country that can’t spare the funds to properly educate its children or care for its sick, poor, or unemployed is destined to remain an incarceration nation.

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Filed Under: cost/budget issues, federal prisons, legislation, politics of punishment, sentencing, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fortresses of Solitude (Part 2)

March 1, 2011 By 1 Comment
Cañon City, Colorado, is the Solitary Confinement Capital of the Western World. Now, a Small Group Lawyers, Legislators, and Activists Is Challenging This All-American Form of Torture.
Part 2: Showdown at the Colorado State Penitentiary

Time passes slowly for the 750 prisoners at the Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP) on the outskirts of Cañon City. For years they were, like most supermax prisoners, virtually invisible to the public—but that has recently begun to change. CSP gained  notoriety last year as the subject of a documentary on solitary confinement by National Geographic Explorer. And now, a bill introduced in the state legislature, which seeks to curb the use of solitary, has made the state of Colorado—and CSP in particular–a focal point for a rising national movement against isolated confinement.

The men who inhabit CSP are more typical of supermax residents than those at ADX, and few of them would qualify as “the worst of the worst.” Prisoners from throughout Colorado’s correctional facilities land in administrative segregation, or “ad seg,” at CSP for fighting with other inmates or guards or for making threats or “compromising” or “intimidating” staff; for being identified as gang members; for having contraband (which can include not only weapons but cigarettes or “drug paraphernalia”); for attempting to escape, refusing a work assignment, “advocating facility disruption,” or generally posing a “serious management problem”—all on the say-so of prison officials. Prisoners are entitled to a hearing, but according to a 2005 study, 90 percent of these hearing result in the segregation requested by prison staff. Terms in solitary last an average of 18 months, but many stretch to years.

Whatever their violations of record, many prisoners find their way to CSP by exhibiting the symptoms of untreated mental illness. Since the 1980s, as budgets for social services have been slashed to the bone even as prison costs exploded, prisons have increasingly become the new asylums, and supermax isolation has become a substitute for appropriate mental health or substance abuse treatment for tens of thousands of prisoners. When the bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons issued its report in 2006, one of its primary recommendations was to “protect mentally ill prisoners” with disciplinary issues from being placed in solitary confinement, rather than in the “secure therapeutic units” where they belonged. To date, only a few states have made progress in this area–and they did so only when their hands were forced by lawsuits. According to a report from Human Rights Watch, which based its estimates on available data from the states, one-third to one-half of prisoners held in segregation suffered from mental illness. In Colorado, by the state’s own calculations, the figure in 2005 was 37 percent, up from 15 percent a decade earlier. The increase, according to the state’s report, had followed “a dramatic decline in mental health professionals and rehabilitation programs that were a casualty of budget cuts.”

Troy Anderson has spent 23 of his 40 years on earth behind bars—and the majority of those years in solitary confinement. His list of diagnoses includes ADHD, bipolar disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, anti-social personality disorder, cognitive disorders, a seizure disorder, and polysubstance dependence, and he has attempted suicide many times, starting at the age of 10. Now serving a 75-year sentence, Anderson has been seen periodically by prison psychiatrists, all of whom seem to concur that he is seriously mentally ill and needs therapy and medication. On at least one occasion, he briefly received treatment in a facility designed for prisoners with mental illness, and improved considerably. But he was taken from that facility and sent back to CSP, where his mental health treatment has been a fiasco of intermittent and inappropriate medications and scant therapy, sometimes conducted through a slot in his solid steel cell door.

[READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE]

[Go to Part 1: The Alcatraz of the Rockies]

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Colorado, Constitution, cost/budget issues, due process, Eighth Amendment, juveniles, lawsuits/litigation, legislation, mental illness, politics of punishment, prison health care, psychological effects, sentencing, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , ,
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