Federal Lawsuit Challenges Brutality in Solitary Confinement Unit at North Carolina Prison

May 18, 2013 By 1 Comment

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Lawyers at North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services have filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of eight people held in solitary confinement at Central Prison against officers and administrators at the facility. As reported by the Associated Press:

A federal lawsuit on behalf of eight inmates at North Carolina’s Central Prison alleges correctional officers used “blind spots” out of view of security cameras to beat handcuffed and shackled inmates.

An amended complaint filed last week in U.S. District Court by lawyers at North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services says the beatings occurred in Unit One, a cell block known as “The Hole” where inmates are kept in solitary confinement for disciplinary reasons.

The inmates’ abuse claims are supported by medical records documenting blunt-force injuries that occurred while they were segregated from other prisoners, including broken bones, concussions and an inmate who is still unable to walk months after his hip was shattered.

N.C. Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Pam Walker said the agency would not comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit names as defendants 21 correctional officers accused of participating in the abuse, as well as two wardens at the maximum security prison in Raleigh. The lawsuit alleges that former prison administrator Gerald J. Branker and current administrator Kenneth Lassister knew about the problems.

The suit seeks to eliminate this problem going forward, calling for the Court to order installation of surveillance cameras throughout the hallways of Unit One, stating “Given the history at Central Prison’s Unit One, these measures would benefit prison officials, prisoners, and the taxpaying public, and are required by the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

The article goes on to describe several instances of guard brutality:

One violent beating was Dec. 3, 2012, and left inmate Jerome Peters in a wheelchair, according to the lawsuit.

[Jerome] Peters, 48, was handcuffed and escorted by two correctional officers from his cell to an outdoor recreation area when the lawsuit said one of the guards punched him in the face while the other grabbed a leg and pulled him the ground. The lawsuit said a third correctional officer then helped the other two kick, stomp and punch Peters.

When they were finished, the lawsuit said the officers put shackles on Peters’ ankles and ordered him to walk. He couldn’t, the suit said, because his pelvic bone was broken…

Peters was taken to an emergency room and diagnosed with a broken right hip, and fractured bones in his hand and face. He also had blurred vision and numerous cuts and bruises, according to the lawsuit. He underwent surgery, but more than five months later is still unable to walk.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Eighth Amendment, human rights, lawsuits/litigation, physical effects, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , , , ,

“Millennium Bomber,” Scarred by 12 Years in Solitary, Is Sentenced to 37 More

October 26, 2012 By 10 Comments

A federal judge this week decried the effects of solitary confinement on a prisoner convicted on terrorism-related charges, who has spent 12 years inside ADX Florence supermax. The same judge then proceeded to sentence the prisoner in question to 37 more years, which will most likely be spent in the same torturous conditions. But these 37 years were in fact a lesser alternative to life sentence sought by federal prosecutors, who are angered by the prisoner’s decision to stop supplying them with evidence against other terrorism suspects. The Los Angeles Times reports:

A federal judge criticized the effects of solitary confinement Wednesday and refused to impose a life sentence on Ahmed Ressam, convicted in 2001 of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. Instead, the judge ordered the Algerian national to serve 37 years in prison.

U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour said Ressam’s decision to stop providing evidence against fellow Al Qaeda suspects was not “obstructionism,” as U.S. prosecutors argued in seeking a life sentence, but “a deranged protest” against the severe conditions of his imprisonment. The changes in Ressam as a result of his confinement for the last 12 years — alone in a cell the size of a small bathroom — were  “marked and stunning,” the judge said.

“It is my ethical responsibility not to hold him culpable for the harmful and involuntary consequences of that punishment,” the judge said. “I will not sentence a man to 50 lashes with a whip, and then 50 more for getting blood on the whip.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: federal prisons, psychological effects, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, terrorism cases, torture Tagged With: , , , , ,

Guantanamo “Is Not an Aberration”: How the War on Terror Came Home

July 6, 2012 By 3 Comments

An important new article by Laura Rovner and Jeanne Theoharis appears in the current issue of American University Law Review. Both Rovner and Theoharis have been deeply involved in the issue of solitary confinement: As director of the Civil Rights Clinic and the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, Rovner has overseen several challenges in the federal courts to the use of long-term solitary confinement, both at the federal supermax known as ADX Florence and at the Colorado State Penitentiary. Theoharis, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, is co-founder of Educators for Civil Liberties and has written and advocated on behalf of her former student Syed Fahad Hashmi. Arrested in 2006, Hashmi was held in pre-trial solitary confinement under “Special Administrative Measures” (SAMs) in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Detention Center for nearly three years before pleading guilty to conspiring to supply material support to a terrorist organization (largely in the form of clothing), after which he was again placed in extreme solitary confinement, at ADX Florence.

The Hashmi case forms the core of the new article, titled “Preferring Order to Justice.” Rovner and Theoharis point out that “In the decade since 9/11, much has been written about the ‘War on Terror’ and the rights violations of people detained at Guantanamo, in naval brigs, or subjected to rendition and torture in CIA black sites.” They continue:

In challenging these detentions, advocates for the detainees focused their efforts on federal court habeas review, and more recently, as prosecutions of Guantanamo detainees have resumed, many commentators have invoked the federal courts as exemplars of justice, contrasting them to military commissions. Because of the prioritization of advocacy around Guantanamo detainees, many human rights groups and advocates have been reluctant to scrutinize and to speak out against the practices used in those courts for fear of giving ammunition to conservatives and contradicting their own message to bring the Guantanamo detainees into the system. The federal courts are thus often referenced as the “gold standard” of American justice and held up to show what due process looks like when it is done right.

But todays federal courts are far from being “exemplars of justice,” the authors argue, especially when it comes to trying terrorism-related cases. Instead, while the attention of advocates has been focused on rights violations at “such places as Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Baghram,” the federal system here at home has been “similarly infected”–to such an extent that it now provides little real justice. [Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Constitution, due process, Eighth Amendment, federal prisons, human rights, physical effects, politics of punishment, psychological effects, race, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, terrorism cases, torture Tagged With: , , , , ,

Solitary Confinement on Trial in Colorado

April 30, 2012 By 2 Comments

Our latest piece over at Mother Jones concerns an important trial beginning today in Federal District Court in Denver, in which a prisoner with mental illness is challenging more than a decade in solitary confinement in the Colorado State Penitentiary. Also included is background on the groundbreaking work of the University of Denver’s Civil Rights Clinic; on the use of solitary confinement to warehouse the mentally ill; and on recent challenges to solitary in the state of Colorado. What follows is the beginning of the article; you can read the full piece on MotherJones.com.

Troy Anderson lives in Cañon City, a high desert town in a dramatic setting at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. But for more than a decade he has neither seen those mountains nor felt the sun on his skin. He spends 23 hours out of each day confined to an 8 x 12 isolation cell at the Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP)—one of the state’s supermax prisons—and the remaining hour in a bare exercise room. Well over half of his 42 years have been spent behind bars, most of them in what prison authorities euphemistically call “administrative segregation.” In practice, this means Anderson will remain in solitary confinement until prison officials feel it’s time to let him out.

Anderson has been in and out of jail since he was a juvenile on account of his erratic and sometimes violent behavior. In 2000, he was sentenced to 75 years for myriad charges stemming from two incidents in which he shot at police, the second time in an attempt to escape custody. Offenses committed in prison have landed him in “ad seg” at CSP. (His last disciplinary infraction was in 2005, when he was written up for somehow managing to get envelopes to another prisoner.)

But there’s more to the story. Anderson, like hundreds of other prisoners confined in isolation in Colorado—and thousands held in solitary across the nation—is seriously mentally ill. His diagnoses include bipolar disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, cognitive disorders, and a seizure disorder. He has attempted suicide many times, starting at age 10. He is seen periodically by prison psychiatrists, all of whom seem to concur that he needs therapy and medication. At CSP, however, his treatment has consisted of a fiasco of intermittent and inappropriate meds and scant therapy, typically conducted through a slot in his solid steel cell door.

Yet unlike most of those other prisoners languishing in solitary, Anderson is about to get his day in federal court. Beginning today, in a trial that could have broad implications for how states handle inmates with mental illness, Anderson’s lawyers will argue before the District Court in Denver that their client’s predicament violates his civil rights, under both the Constitution and federal law.

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.

Read the rest here.

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

Decision of Federal Judge Frees Prisoner from Solitary Confinement

March 2, 2012 By 6 Comments

“Prison walls do not form a barrier separating prison inmates from the protections of the Constitution,” wrote Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, quoting the U.S. Supreme Court, when she ruled last week that a federal prisoner should be released from solitary confinement. On February 24, Scheindlin, a U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York, ordered the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to remove inmate Viktor Bout from fifteen months of solitary in the Special Housing Unit of the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), a federal jail in lower Manhattan, and placed in the general population.

The story made the mainstream press, presumably because Russian-born Viktor Bout is a notorious international arms dealer known as the “merchant of death.” It is also noteworthy, however, for the judge’s refusal to defer to the BOP in determining whether there was justification for holding Bout in indefinite isolation.

Arrested in Thailand in 2008 and extradited to New York in November of 2010, Bout was immediately placed in solitary at MCC while awaiting trial. A year later, he was convicted of participating in conspiracies to acquire and sell weapons, provide material support to foreign terrorists, and kill American nationals. But the nature of his offenses, as Judge Scheindlin pointed out, does not exempt him from Constitutional protections. So when his lawyers challenged his solitary confinement, she weighed the facts–and the law–carefully, and decided in his favor.

In her opinon, which can be read in full here, Scheindlin begins by describing Bout’s prison conditions at MCC:

Essentially, Bout is in solitary confinement residing in a one-man cell in which he eats, sleeps, and washes. He spends 23 hours a day in this cell and is taken out for one hour of exercise per day in a room only slightly larger than his cell. He is alone for his exercise period. The cell has two small frosted glass windows that allow very little natural light or fresh air. Other than visits with counsel, trips to court, a family visit once a week, or trips upstairs to access to electronic evidence (during trial preparation), he does not leave his cell. While he has some limited access to commissary, it is far more restrictive than the commissary privileges available to general population prisoners. He is only allowed one telephone call a month, which is an SHU limitation. He has no interaction with other prisoners. When transported off the SHU, he is placed in full restraints.

In making her decision, the judge references the 1987 Supreme Court case Turner v. Safley, which ”outlined a four-factor test for evaluating whether a prison regulation that allegedly violates a constitutional right is reasonably related to a valid correctional objective”:

The court must consider first whether there is a “valid, rational connection” between the regulation and the legitimate governmental interest used to justify it; second, whether there are alternative means for the prisoner to exercise the right at issue; third, the impact that the desired accommodation will have on guards, other inmates, and prison resources; and fourth, the absence of “ready alternatives.”

Judge Scheindlin proceeded to apply these standards to Bout’s case. Even showing “judicial restraint” and giving due deference to prison authorities, she concluded, there was “no legitimate justification for holding Bout in such harsh conditions indefinitely.”

In conducting this rational basis review, deference is accorded to the BOP’s determination. The Supreme Court has noted that courts are “‘ill equipped to deal with the increasingly urgent problems of prison administration and reform’” and that “separation of powers concerns counsel a policy of judicial restraint.”

However, as previously noted, “[p]rison walls do not form a barrier separating prison inmates from the protections of the Constitution” and “‘[w]hen a prison . . . practice offends a fundamental constitutional guarantee, federal courts will discharge their duty to protect constitutional rights.’”

I conclude that there is no “valid, rational connection” between the BOP’s decision to keep Bout in the SHU for more than fourteen months and any “legitimate governmental interests put forward to justify it.” Solitary confinement is generally intended “as short term housing,” yet the Government here seeks to hold Bout indefinitely with hardly any human contact or mobility. “[I]t is well documented that long periods of solitary confinement can have devastating effects on the mental well-being of a detainee.”

The Government has put forward no legitimate justification for holding Bout in such harsh conditions indefinitely, and there is no rational basis for concluding that Bout presents a greater danger in general population than that posed by many other inmates at the MCC. Considering the Turner factors together, I find that Bout’s placement in the SHU is not “ ‘reasonably related’ to legitimate penological objectives” but rather is an “ ‘exaggerated response’ to [the BOP’s] concerns.”

Although I recognize that courts are loathe to interfere with questions of prison administration, an area in which the BOP is best suited to make decisions, I cannot shirk my duty under the Constitution and Turner to ensure that Bout’s confinement is not arbitrarily and excessively harsh.

If all judges were similarly unwilling to “shirk their duty under the Constitution,” and if all inmates in prolonged isolation had good lawyers with the resources to represent them, there would be a lot fewer prisoners in solitary confinement.

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Constitution, federal prisons, psychological effects, solitary confinement, terrorism cases Tagged With: , ,

New Resources on Solitary Confinement

January 12, 2011 By 4 Comments

Now available in our Resources section is a unique collection of U.S. court cases relevant to solitary confinement. This collection was compiled and annotated by Solitary Watch Research Associates Daniel H. Goldman and Ryan Brimmer. They are students at the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse, Washington & Lee University School of Law, which is our lead academic partner, working under the leadership of David Bruck.

The cases include:

> U.S. Supreme Court Cases

> Federal District / Circuit Court Cases

> State Supreme Court Cases

In the coming weeks we will be expanding and updating other parts of our Resources section to incorporate new materials provided by Washington & Lee, including law review articles, journal articles, and additions to our newspaper, magazine, and books pages.

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

The Prisoner’s Catch-22

July 10, 2010 By 12 Comments
Guest Post by Alan CYA #65085

Editors’ Note: We’ve written before about two laws from the 1990s that make it close to impossible for prisoners to challenge any injustices and abuses they encounter in various part of the American criminal justice system—whether in the courts or in prison itself. This guest post on the subject comes from a reader who has served time himself and also lost family members to the prison system, and can envision what it must be like to endure what is effectively a prisoner’s Catch-22. Alan provided us with the following biography:

Life on the mean streets of neighborhoods such as Hunters Point, San Francisco, or Pacoima, California is not conducive for raising a child and the proof of this is I ended up a ward of the state in the California Youth Authority system at the age of 12 and 16.

I do not claim innocence nor do I seek sympathy for my life experiences. It is what it is; I have run their cruel gauntlet and reemerged to find relative success in life. It helps me to daily remind myself of Booker T. Washington’s words: “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.”

However, I have not forgotten those that I left behind.

For as Solomon Burke sings “None of us are free if one of us is chained.”

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In her book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander writes: “The entrance to a new caste system can be found at the prison gate, because that is when you are branded a felon. Your life as you knew it before is over. All the forms of discrimination that is illegal for the rest of the country can then be practiced against you with impunity.” This impunity has always existed, in one form or another. But it has been extended and codified by two laws, both of them passed in the last 15 years.

The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) of 1996 requires that prisoners who wish to appeal their convictions by state courts must petition the federal courts within one year. In addition, inmates must make all their claims for relief at one time. It’s not difficult to see why these rules would run counter to the interests of real justice in many cases.

Imagine entering the horrifying new environment of prison, and still being forced to file these appeals immediately. That is assuming you are aware of the time-limit, know the law, and realize that your rights have been violated and your original conviction can be challenged. Even in this case, I think your immediate survival might be a higher priority.

State prisoners who are unaware of the one-year limitation simply lose their right of appeal. So do any prisoners who realize that their rights have been violated only after the year has been passed. This is a very likely scenario, since newly arriving prisoners rarely have the legal advice or background to understand these complex issues.

Compounding this problem is the fact that prisoners seeking federal review generally have no right to a lawyer and few have the funds to hire one independently. Consequentially, even those prisoners who are conscious of the time limit often file inadequate petitions of their own. If their efforts fail and they subsequently manage to come up with the money to hire a lawyer–by then it’s often too late.

But the obstacles to seeking justice do not end there. In the case of a Constitutional rights violation by a state court, its ruling can only be reversed if the state court’s application of the law was not just incorrect, but “unreasonable.” Even if the Supreme Court has spoken clearly about the right’s existence and nature, and the state appellate court misunderstood the law, if the state’s incorrect interpretation was “reasonable,” then its decision stands.

So your constitutional rights can be violated during your trial, then the state appellate court can compound this error by incorrectly reaffirming your conviction—but if the federal courts can still rule that the mistake was “reasonable,” you will not get a new trial.

In other words: Rank-and-file prisoners, who are statistically likely to be both impoverished and undereducated and are operating from behind bars, must know the law well enough to file their appeals quickly and correctly. But state appellate judges are not expected to know the law well enough to accurately interpret the rulings of the United States Supreme Court.

All of this is, of course, especially sad if it is a death penalty case. (But after all, this is exactly the motivation for the law in the first place: There’s a reason why it’s called the “Effective Death Penalty Act.”) Never mind that, as NYU Law professor Bryan Stevenson told Bill Moyers in a recent interview, “For every eight people who have been executed, we’ve identified one innocent person. If we will tolerate that kind of error rate in the death penalty context, it reveals a whole lot about the rest of our criminal justice system and about the rest of our society.”

Knowing all this can only deepen the prisoner’s distrust of the American justice system, and his anger will grow day by the day and with every humiliation and abuse that he endures. The rage that he feels is shared by many others, and together their voices ultimately lead to a confrontation with the men running these prisons. When the frustrated prisoners act out, even more draconian measures can be deployed against them. And if prisoners wish to challenge these harsh measures, another law waits to thwart all their efforts: The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), also passed in 1996.

Many guards have no doubt been emboldened by the PLRA’s restrictive rules to further violate the human rights of inmates in their care.  Yes, some prisoners, like some non-prisoners, do file frivolous law suits. But the PLRA has resulted in the dismissal of claims that no reasonable person would characterize as frivolous. That is because the law imposes filing procedures and requires hard-to-come-by documentation, combined with strict time restraints—all of which are so technically incomprehensible to the inmates that even constitutionally meritorious cases are often thrown out of court.

Is it right that persons who have been seriously abused should be denied legal recourse because others have filed frivolous cases? When they choose to seek justice, should they have to navigate a system obviously geared to make it next to impossible to have their grievance heard? A bedrock principle of international human rights law is the equality of all persons before the law. But in reviewing this act, Human Rights Watch has said that it is not aware of any other country in which national legislation singles out prisoners for a unique set of barriers to vindicating their legal rights in court. This is all the more alarming because the monitoring of conditions in prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities, in the U.S. is primarily left up to the federal courts.

The result of the PLRA is that fewer law suits have been filed by prisoners, and of those filed, fewer are being won. Many acts that would be treated as serious crimes if perpetrated upon those of us in the “free world” can legally be perpetrated upon prisoners under the tenets of this act. This includes any act that is deemed to produce only “mental or emotional injury.” Thus, the internationally recognized harm that is done to inmates in long-term solitary confinement is sanctioned and ignored, as is the emotional distress caused by the rape of inmates, whether by other prisoners or by guards.

All of this is of course exponentially more difficult for juveniles to manage. But sadly they, too, must navigate this maze of bureaucratic red tape, even as they struggle just to survive another day in adult prison.

In sum: The AEDPA gives prisoners little recourse if they fail to receive justice in the courts. And to complete the trap from which they are caught, the PLRA denies them recourse if they suffer injustice inside the prison walls.

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“If you don’t say it’s wrong then that says it right.”

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Constitution, death row, Eighth Amendment, guest posts, human rights, juveniles, lawsuits/litigation, legislation, politics of punishment, sexual assault, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Extradition to a Future of Total Isolation” Opposed by British Human Rights Lawyer

June 14, 2010 By 6 Comments

A reader recently called our attention to an long piece in the London Review of Books by Gareth Peirce, a British solicitor known for taking on high-profile–and often controversial–human rights cases. In the 1993 film In the Name of the Father, Peirce, played by Emma Thompson, is shown defending a group of Irish men wrongly convicted for bombings carried out by the IRA; more recently, she has represented Guantanamo detainees and other prisoners of the so-called war on terror.

In her May 13 article, Peirce argues against extraditing terrorism suspects from Europe to the United States. The extradition of several such suspects has been frozen for years while courts in the UK–and now the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg–determine “whether there is a serious risk that sending them to the US would be to deliver them up to flagrantly unfair trials, severe and prohibited ill-treatment, or the death penalty.” These determinations turn largely on the question of whether the suspects would be held indefinitely without trial or put before military tribunals, rather than tried in civilian courts. 

But Peirce argues that in today’s America, even the civilian criminal justice system is so compromised that ”almost every basic safeguard necessary to achieve a conventional fair trial for the accused has, in practice, long since been destroyed.” It is true that “no European state has been permitted to extradite in the absence of an assurance that conviction would not bring the death penalty.” But there is nothing to protect extraditees from “the grim reality of solitary confinement in a small sealed prison cell before and after trial, or sentences that could amount to a hundred years.” 

In a powerful condemnation of solitary confinement as it is currently practiced in the United States, Peirce asks:

But what of extradition to a future of total isolation? Can we comfortably, and within the law, contemplate sending men to that fate? Some of the men who currently await extradition are imprisoned in a small unit, where they are at least in the company of other human beings, and within the unit’s limits can talk, argue, study, cook, write, paint or exercise outdoors in whatever sunlight imprisonment in Worcestershire may afford them. This is not luxury. It is deprivation, of family life, of freedom and of hope. But once on American soil these men have been told by US prosecutors to expect total isolation. Each extraditee will be held under Special Administrative Measures until trial and then, on his anticipated conviction, in solitary confinement in a Supermax prison, ADX Florence in Colorado, potentially for life and without any prospect of parole. He will be confined in a cell 7 feet by 12 feet, with a moulded concrete bunk; his food will be delivered through a slot in the door; external communication, even with a doctor, will come via a closed-circuit television in his cell. For one hour in each day, he will be able to visit a small dark pit where he can exercise alone. His fellow prisoners (although he will not see them) will be ‘the most severely psychotic people’ the most experienced analyst of the effects of Supermax confinement, Terry Kupers, has seen in 25 years of psychiatric practice, and he will be likely, since the primary cause is isolation, to become one such himself. His solitary confinement can and perhaps will continue for life.

After his tour of America in 1842 Dickens wrote of the use of isolation in the American prisons he had seen: ‘I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.’ By the late 19th century, evidence of the devastating effects of solitary confinement on prisoners’ health had surfaced, and in 1890, the Supreme Court, considering the case of a death-row prisoner, echoed the language of today’s doctors: ‘A considerable number of the prisoners fell, even after a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide.’ In the 19th century, isolation was intended to provide an opportunity for the redemption of the prisoner’s Christian soul, but Supermax prisons emerged, penologists argue, from a powerful ‘rage to punish’ felt by many politicians and members of the public in the late 20th century. Craig Haney, one of those penologists, believes that the US now celebrates and often demands, rather than lamenting or merely tolerating, official cruelty and the infliction of pain in its criminal justice system. What once passed for ‘penal philosophy’ now amounts to little more than devising ‘creative strategies’ to make prisoners suffer.

Supermax confinement, built on the twin pillars of prolonged solitary confinement and extreme severity of conditions, is one of those strategies. The cells are carefully designed by architects to limit access to natural light, to eliminate stimulation or distraction, and reflect a total disregard for the principle that all prisoners are members of the human community. Although one US district court judge, in the case of Madrid v. Gomez in 1995, described conditions in a Supermax unit as pushing at ‘the outer bounds of what most humans can psychologically tolerate’ and in the case of mentally-ill prisoners has ‘the equivalent of placing an asthmatic in a place with little air to breathe’, no constitutional bar to their continuing use has been imposed by any court.

Even Denmark, a country considered by the UN special rapporteur on torture to be entirely compliant with every other human rights obligation, was warned following an inspection that to detain a suspect in solitary confinement, if it were done in the expectation that it might induce an admission of guilt, could constitute torture contrary to Article 3 of the [European] Convention [on Human Rights].* The same special rapporteurs have expressed particular concern about conditions in maximum security prisons in the US which violate internationally protected rights, but they can do no more than register concern since they have no right to conduct internal inspections. Despite continual recommendations by the UN Human Rights Committee that the US government should scrutinise conditions in Supermax prisons and implement minimum UN standards, there have been no changes in practice, and the federal government is building more such facilities. Human Rights Watch found in 2000 that there were nearly 20,000 prisoners held in complete isolation in the US, nearly 2 per cent of the prison population (by now unofficial figures range between 25,000 and 70,000).

Peirce goes on to consider how courts in London and Strasbourg have responded to brutal conditions in U.S, prisons, including the  prospect of permanent solitary confinement.

Such few judicial honours as can so far be awarded go to the extradition judge in [London] who so straightforwardly rejected the idea that a military commission conformed with the fair trial guarantees of the European Convention. On the isolation imposed by pre-trial SAMs he expressed extreme anxiety – ‘It is in relation to these that I find the greatest grounds for concern’ – and in the case of Abu Hamza, so disabled that he was likely if convicted to be imprisoned in ADX Florence only briefly before transfer to a prison hospital, he found that ‘but for that fact’ the brutal isolation would violate Article 3.*

When the same issue has been considered in the high courts, the judges have sidestepped the facts: ‘For a mature and sophisticated democracy that respects the rule of law, it would be unusual, to say the least, if one of its lawful and carefully prescribed methods of incarceration were to be condemned for giving rise to an automatic violation of Article 3.’ The inclusion of the word ‘automatic’ is intended to describe the protection that litigation provides for a prisoner once in solitary confinement, but the prospects for an effective challenge are non-existent; there is no funding for prisoner litigation in the US and administrative obstacles prevent even the most determined litigant having his case heard within ten years. In any event, even prisoners who have gone for years without speaking to anyone other than Federal Bureau of Prisons officials have not been able to establish a claim under the 8th Amendment to the constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, since human contact is not classified as a ‘single identifiable human need such as warmth, food or exercise’. Extreme isolation, even for life, is not considered under the US constitution to be a denial of the ‘minimal civilised measure of life’s necessities’.

Strasbourg, the European court of last resort, has been criticised in the past for a lack of imagination, or at least of judicial understanding, of the impact of solitary confinement on prisoners, and of having ‘too ready an acceptance of state interests’. On the one hand, it has been reluctant to judge actual solitary confinement regimes as being in violation of the Convention, but, on the other, it has reminded itself of the irreducible nature of Article 3: ‘States face very real difficulties in protecting their populations from terrorist violence … the Convention prohibits in absolute terms torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, irrespective of the conduct of the person concerned. The nature of the offence allegedly committed by the applicant is therefore irrelevant for the purposes of Article 3.’

But it is precisely the ‘nature of the offence’ that will condemn the extraditees to conditions of imprisonment and lengths of sentence that are an inevitable consequence of the civilian trials constitutionalists argue for, established as these practices have become within an entirely constitutional structure. Is indefinite military detention really any worse a prospect?

You can read the full article at the web site of the London Review of Books. Although most of the site requires a subscription to access, the LBR has made this and other important commentary by Gareth Peirce available to all readers.

* Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Constitution, Eighth Amendment, federal prisons, human rights, international, international agreements, politics of punishment, psychological effects, sentencing, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, terrorism cases, torture Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The End of Mississippi’s Notorious Supermax Unit

June 12, 2010 By 4 Comments

Even in a nation known for its draconian prison conditions and brutal lockdown units, the supermax portion of Mississippi’s state penitentiary stood out.  Critics and residents described it as a “horrific” and “wretched” place of “hopelessness and despair.” Or, as Chris Joyner described it last week in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger:  

Unit 32 was a nightmare, if sworn testimony and a string of violent deaths is a reliable measure.  

The supermax unit at the State Penitentiary at Parchman once held 1,000 men from gang leaders to petty thieves to seriously mentally ill inmates whose howls could be heard day and night. Prisoners were kept in isolation 23 hours a day, often behind full metal doors in stifling cells with broken lights, yet violence was common between inmates and guards and among the inmates themselves…  

[Unit 32] was home to hundreds of inmates with serious mental ailments including schizophrenia.   

MDOC [Mississippi Department of Corrections] officials often described it as place for the “worst of the worst.” But it also was home to property criminals or inmates convicted of drug crimes who had been sent to the unit for disciplinary infractions and given no way to earn their way back out.   

Parchman, a 20,000-acre penal plantation that epitomized Jim Crow justice, has a long history of abusing and degrading its prisoners. But now, at least, the hellhole that was Unit 32 will soon close its doors for good. As the Clarion Ledger reports:  

After instituting a host of reforms over the past 2 1/2 years, MDOC agreed Friday in U.S. District Court to remove the unit’s remaining prisoners as final settlement of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union seven years ago.   

“Unit 32, at a certain point, could not be reformed,” ACLU National Prison Project attorney Margaret Winter said. “It is truly a wretched place that cannot be made environmentally adequate.”…   

Under the agreement, MDOC will transfer seriously mentally ill prisoners from the unit to East Mississippi Correctional Facility in Meridian, a private prison specially equipped to deal with inmates with psychiatric problems, and the remaining Unit 32 prisoners to “appropriate housing” within the prison system.   

The story of Unit 32′s demise is a credit to the advocates who led a decade-long fight to reform or abolish the place. It may also provide a model for other fights against the use of solitary confinement in state and federal prisons across the country.  

The story was told in detail by Margaret Winters of the ACLU and Stephen F. Hanlon of the law firm Holland & Knight, which provided pro bono assistance in a series of Unit 32 lawsuits. Their 2008 article “Parchman Farm Blues: Pushing for Prison Reforms at Mississippi State Penitentiary” appeared in the American Bar Association’s journal Litigation. Winters and Hanlon describe how they first became involved, in 1998, in a suit on behalf of HIV-positive prisoners at Parchman, who lived in dismal conditions in a segregated AIDS unit. They began representing prisoners on Parchman’s death row in 2002, after a group of inmates staged a hunger strike to protest conditions. In their article, Winters and Hanlon describe their first visit to death row, which was located inside Unit 32, as “14 unforgettable hours of bedlam and hellish heat.”  

The death row prisoners described profound isolation, unrelieved idleness and monotony, denial of exercise, intolerable stench and pervasive filth, grossly malfunctioning plumbing, and constant exposure to human excrement. Each cell had a “ping-pong” toilet, allowing waste from one cell to back up into the toilet in the adjoining cell. The temperatures in the cells during the long Delta summers were lethal, with heat indexes, we later proved, of over 130 degrees Fahrenheit.   

The cells were so infested with mosquitoes that inmates had to keep their windows closed and their bodies completely covered even in the hottest weather. Leaking rainwater and foul water from flooded toilets on upper floors soaked inmates’ beds and personal items; prisoners weren’t provided clean water, soap, and other basic cleaning supplies, even when they were moved into a cell smeared with excrement by the previous tenants.   

Lighting in the cells was so dim that the prisoners couldn’t see to read, write, groom themselves, or clean their cells. They were denied basic medical, dental, and mental health care. They were exposed day and night to the screams and ravings of severely mentally ill inmates in adjoining cells.   

Winters and Hanlon knew that “in Mississippi, it is widely considered fitting that these prisoners should suffer as much as possible before their execution.”  (This despite the fact that because of defective trials, just as many of the state’s prisoners “are eventually released from death row as are executed.”)  But in 2003, Federal District Court Judge Jerry Davis ”entered an opinion and far-reaching injunction granting most of the relief” the prisoners’ lawyers had asked for.

Their next step, Winters and Hanlon write, was “to extend the relief we had won for the death row prisoners to the other 1,000 men in Unit 32.” These men were in basic administrative segregation–solitary confinement–for reasons ranging from disciplinary infractions to mental illness to a need for protective custody. They lived in conditions that were in some ways “even worse” than those on death row.  

The men in Unit 32 in administrative segregation were all locked down 23 to 24 hours a day in even more profound isolation and unrelieved idleness than on death row. There was a pervasive culture of violence and sadistic use of excessive force. Corrections officers gratuitously beat prisoners already in full restraints. Take-down teams forcibly extracted shackled prisoners from their cells, sprayed them with a chemical agent that causes vomiting and shortness of breath, and then assaulted them again.   

The combination of all these conditions was causing serious mental illness to emerge in previously healthy prisoners, and causing psychosis and complete mental breakdown in less healthy prisoners. Suicides and attempted suicides occurred with alarming frequency.   

This case was more complicated, because the it challenged not only conditions in Unit 32, but the MDOC’s system for “classifying” prisoners.  “Although Unit 32 is supposedly used to incarcerate the most dangerous and incorrigible offenders in the state,” Winters and Hanlon write, ”in reality, the vast majority of the men housed in Unit 32—for years, sometimes for decades—did not have the kind of criminal or institutional history that would justify incarceration under ‘supermax’ conditions.” Some prisoners were locked up in the unit “because they had special medical needs, were severely mentally ill, or had requested protective custody. And once classified to Unit 32, there was no emerging from it. Hundreds of prisoners were doomed to stay there forever.”

As Winters and Hanlon point out, federal courts have held that “prison officials had essentially unfettered discretion to classify prisoners and to confine them to whatever degree of isolation they saw fit.” But in 2005, under Judge Davis, the ACLU team and the MDOC hammered out a settlement that “incorporated all the relief” from the death row case, and “added provisions on excessive force, procedural due process, and classification.”

It would take several years, further hearings, and another settlement before the changes were fully implemented. But under the new classification system, more than 80 percent of the prisoners in Unit 32 were moved out of administrative segregation–some to the general population, others to mental health units. Those remaining in solitary received written plans telling them what they needed to do to earn their way out, and reviews every 90 days.

The process of reclassification at Parchman is described in detail in a 2009 article called “Beyond Supermax Solitary Confinement: Mississippi’s Experience Rethinking Prison Classification and Creating Alternative Mental Health Programs,” published in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior. Its lead author, Dr. Terry Kupers of Berkeley’s Wright Institute, is a leading expert on the psychological effects of solitary confinement, and was a key participant in the reform of Unit 32.    

None of this means that all is well in the Mississippi prison system–far from it. The state’s prisoners–including, no doubt, many of those moved out of Unit 32–still suffer from inadequate health care, overcrowding, and a host of other problems. But it seems like a significant victory, especially when it comes to challenging the excessive, arbitrary, and inhumane use of solitary confinement. In a press release issued by the ACLU, Margaret Winter said, “This facility was truly a dangerous and degrading environment for prisoners and staff alike. The fact that this facility is now being closed is a great end to the long road that we have been on.”

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Constitution, death row, Eighth Amendment, lawsuits/litigation, mental illness, Mississippi, physical effects, politics of punishment, prison health care, psychological effects, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

N.J. Prison Abused Inmates During Month-Long Lockdown

April 14, 2010 By 18 Comments

Solitary confinement in U.S. prisons can take many forms–including the temporary lockdown of units, buildings, or entire prisons. These 24-hour lockdowns are routinely instituted in response to perceived threats to prison safety or authority. On occasion, they can extend to days, weeks, or even months, during which the prison is under a kind of martial law even more extreme than its normal conditions.

At Bayside State Prison in southern New Jersey, this kind of lockdown was instituted after the murder of a guard in 1997. It lasted more than a month, during which hundreds of Bayside prisoners say they were beaten and otherwise abused.

Their complaints languished for a decade. But last month, a retired judge, who was appointed by the federal courts to be a fact-finder in the case, determined that the New Jersey Department of Corrections is liable for their abuse. The decision by former U.S. District Chief Judge John W. Bissell, clears the way for inmates to sue the state.

A detailed report by Mike Newell in the Philadelphia Inquirer describes what took place at the prison in the summer of 1997. 

Bayside, a medium-security prison with nearly 2,400 inmates in Cumberland County, was put on lockdown between July 30 and Sept. 3, 1997, after guard Fred Baker was stabbed in the back by an inmate with a makeshift knife.

Prisoners were confined to their cells, visitors were prohibited, and a Special Operations Group (SOG) consisting of 57 corrections officers from across New Jersey interrogated inmates and searched cells for weapons. The SOG officers dressed in riot gear, carried batons and mace, and did not wear name badges.

When the lockdown was lifted, inmates began to report stories of abuse to the Department of Corrections. More than three dozen inmates told The Inquirer in 1997 that they had been repeatedly beaten, dragged, forced to sit handcuffed in the prison gym for hours, threatened with dogs, and paraded through a gauntlet of SOG officers who beat them with nightsticks.

What happened next is an extreme version of a typical story–a series of half-hearted “investigations” and widespread coverups. As John Sullivan reported in the New York Times in 2003, in a long investigative article on the lockdown: 

After the lockdown ended in September 1997, complaints of abuse began to leak from the prison. Newspapers reported the stories, and the Department of Corrections promised a thorough investigation.

The F.B.I. began to investigate after receiving written complaints from several inmates. But the investigator’s case file, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, showed that the agent handling the case made only one telephone call: to the internal affairs division’s office at Bayside State Prison. Over the phone, the file says, the agent learned that internal affairs planned to conduct its own investigation. Because internal affairs was already on the job, and because some inmates had hired lawyers, the agent concluded no further F.B.I. investigation was needed. The agent closed the case.

The F.B.I. file also noted that the United States attorney’s office in Newark had subpoenaed records about the lockdown, but the Justice Department said it closed the case in August 1999, for lack of evidence. Both the United States attorney and the F.B.I. declined to comment.

In the end, the investigation fell to the Department of Corrections’ internal affairs unit. Internal affairs investigators conducted hundreds of interviews and gave lie detector tests to several inmates. Some inmates passed those tests when they reported abuse by guards. But in nearly every case, investigators said they could not substantiate the charges against guards. Often, the investigators’ reports said cases boiled down to inmates’ words against guards’, or inmates could not clearly identify the guards in question.

”It seems almost there was a decision not to credit what an inmate says,” said Justin Loughry, a lawyer representing some Bayside inmates. By late 1998, internal affairs investigators concluded there was no evidence of widespread abuse…In the end, no charges, criminal or administrative, related to the aftermath of the murder were brought against guards at Bayside.

But ”questions about the Bayside episode refused to die,” the Times reported. The newspaper’s own investigations, along with those of inmates’ lawyers, uncovered internal prison documents, videotapes, and testimony from whistleblowers that supported the inmates abuse claims. Investigators complained of being told to file inaccurate reports. A few guards came forward to tell about the abuses they witnessed, and one prison ombudsman said that the warden had “responded to reports of injuries by saying prisoners had probably gotten into fights or fallen against their bunks.” According to the Times article:

Portions of surveillance videotapes, identified through the state’s Public Records Law, show guards dragging a handcuffed inmate down a steel staircase like a bag of laundry, and yanking another screaming inmate along a hallway. Other tapes show inmates with cuts and bruises. When an inmate being dragged along the floor begs to walk, a supervisor orders guards to keep him on the ground.

”Don’t pick him up, drag him,” a voice says on the tape. ”I want him drug along the floor, just like that, like a pig.”…

Inmates told similar tales. Adrian Torres, imprisoned for car theft, said prisoners were forced to kneel motionless in the gym for hours. Anyone who moved or complained was dragged to the back of the room and beaten, he said.

”You had inmates urinating in their clothes,” Mr. Torres said in an interview at Northern State Prison in Newark. ”They made it clear: If you turn your head, if you lift your hand up, if you even say anything, they were going to beat you up.”

A prison nurse testified in an unrelated administrative trial that hundreds of inmates went to the infirmary after altercations with guards. The former warden of a nearby prison said that an inmate returned from a work detail at Bayside bearing marks of a beating.

One guard, who requested anonymity, recalled that inmates were forced to walk a gantlet of guards who beat them with nightsticks. ”I could hear them screaming,” the guard said. ”It was horrible.”…

One prisoner, Wilbert Jones, said he was attacked and beaten without provocation by a group of guards, then charged with refusing to follow orders, and placed in solitary confinement for 180 days. ”It is unimaginable when you are in the hole, locked up for something you didn’t do,” Jones told the Times. ”That had to be the lowest point in my life.” His account was later corroborated by another guard who witnessed the attack, but because of the incident, he was denied parole–and remains in prison today.

Four days after the New York Times article appeared, in April 2003, the New Jersey attorney general opened a new investigation. A few inmates have since won damages in civil trials.  But the March 29 decision by Judge Bissell will allow dozens, if not hundreds of inmates to sue the state for monetary damages.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bissell found that it was reasonable for the DOC to place the prison on lockdown following the killing of a guard. However, “both as designed and thereafter implemented, [the lockdown] violated the Eighth Amendment rights of inmates.” It quickly became clear that the guard’s murder was “an isolated incident,” Bissell wrote, so ”a full lockdown with SOG’s intimidating presence was not only unnecessary, but dangerous to the safety and well-being of the inmates.”

How often do we hear government officials express concern about “the safety and well-being of inmates”? To hear these words from a former federal district court judge, who has been appointed as a “special master” and empowered to make decisions about the case, offers some hope that after 13 years, these prisoners may finally find some justice. 

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Constitution, Eighth Amendment, lawsuits/litigation, New Jersey, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , , , , ,