Voices from Solitary: Disciplined Into Madness and Death

February 18, 2013 By 14 Comments

bedford hillsThe following essay comes from Sara Rodrigues, formerly imprisoned at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison for women in Westchester, New York, and now further upstate at Albion. When Sara was sent to prison at the age of 16, she found her friend D there as well. Both Sara and D had life-long struggles with mental health, and while in prison, spent long periods of time in solitary confinement (both Keeplock, which is lockdown in one’s own cell, and SHU, which is the Special Housing Unit).

Sara writes about the difficulty D faced when she was finally released and put on parole, with no transitional assistance to move from prison to the free world. She ultimately ended up back in prison and committed suicide, shortly after giving birth to a baby girl. Sara Rodrigues wrote this piece in the hope of spreading awareness of her situation and the experience of many people around her. She writes, “Too many inmates in New York State under the age of 25 are killing themselves in prisons because they are literally being thrown away like garbage by the court systems.” (Thanks to Jennifer Parish of the Urban Justice Center for forwarding this essay to Solitary Watch.) –Rachel M. Cohen

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This essay is dedicated to D and all those who have given their minds and/or lives trying to pay their debt to society and to those who will forever be haunted and scarred from our justice system. Once self-worth and hope dies within our souls, what is left behind is a shell of life that can see no future, no redemption and no chance for a normal life. It is then that our minds realize how truly unwanted we are and how on a daily basis we are reminded that society has no use for us. Day by day life becomes very dark, some lose their minds, some will never be the same, and some just give in and take their own lives.

Many people who are sentenced to prisons are very young and have serious behavioral and mental health problems and this environment only makes their sickness worse. This is D’s story and how somehow out of the tragedy of her passing has made me resolve to open people’s eyes to the greater damage that happens to everyone by throwing the very young, mentally and emotionally ill into cages to rot under the pretense that more punishment, isolation, and deprivation will make people change for the better. This story has nothing to do with not doing your time, but doing your time in a healthy corrective facility, not the factories of misery that most of our prisons are today. D’s death had such an impact on me that she inspired me to keep fighting for my sanity, to try to never give up, and to get the word out whether people care to hear the truth or not.

In December 2008, I tripped and fell down the rabbit hole. Instead of “Alice in Wonderland,” I became Sara in Prisonland and I am still to do this day trying to wake up from my nightmare. I was 16 years old entering RCOD (reception) in a maximum-security prison, Bedford Hills. My sentence was eight, years flat and 5-post release supervision, I was scared and in definite culture shock, it was all so alien and overwhelming. Later I learned D was there, to me D was my cousin, my best friend, and a sister all rolled into one. We could talk about anything, she helped me so much to get used to this crazy way to survive my new life. We also argued a lot as young teenage girls often do, now in hindsight I regret ever getting angry and wish I had been a better friend.

Some months later, she was paroled and went home but it did not take long and here she was again. Being so young when she went into prison, the outside world was just too overwhelming for her. This and coupled with the fact that there are no transitional programs for people leaving prisons in the area we live in, which is Jefferson County, this leaves all parolees pretty much on their own. Get out of prison, go report to parole, go to Credo, (drug and alcohol counseling), go to mental health, get a job, pay your rent, don’t drive till we say you can, pay parole, pay credo, be home at curfew. You give up because it is all to stressful, can’t get a decent job because you are just out of prison and no one wants to hire you, zero job programs or training programs for parolees. One can’t even go to VESID (vocational training) until 6 months after you get out of prison and by then it is usually too late.

People need these services as soon as they come home and because of all this lack of support, every parolee is set up for failure. So she just gave in to all the temptation around her and started partying and having a good time, and even though her mother begged parole to try to live in a drug and alcohol program instead of sending her back to prison, they didn’t care and did what they do best. That is to not keep people out of prison but to make sure they end up back in. Do the math, almost zero services and supports for parolees in this country why is this and who lets this happen?

By this time she came back to Bedford Hills, she was pregnant. D’s time in the prison system was not easy, she was an outsider even in prison, she had a extensive disciplinary record which was making her mental health issues worse, and she had a long history of suicidal behavior, she had been hospitalized before incarceration and during. Making matters worse, she was always in Keeplock or SHU and this did nothing to help her problems. In coming back to prison, it was so much harder to deal with than the time before and at that point, I believe she thought nothing would ever change, she was in a cycle she could not get out of and I think she was just getting soul tired.

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Filed Under: juveniles, mental illness, New York, psychological effects, solitary confinement, suicide, Voices from Solitary Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

New York Prisoner Gets Five Years in Solitary for Cell Phone Smuggled in by Guard

September 20, 2012 By 8 Comments

Philip Miller was midway through a twenty-year sentence for robbery at Sing Sing Prison in New York, with an almost spotless prison record, when he was caught with a mobile phone in his cell in April 2010. He was charged with two disciplinary violations: ”possession of contraband” and also “altering state property,” since he had hidden the cell phone and charger in “a compartment carved out of the windowsill.”

Miller was brought before an internal prison disciplinary hearing and pled guilty to the two charges. But he sought to call various inmates who could attest to his good behavior and to describe what actually had happened. The hearing officer denied him  his request, claiming that he, the prison officer, knew all about Miller and it wasn’t necessary to call the witnesses. Miller was found guilty of both charges and sentenced to 60 months—five years—in solitary, with a proviso that 24 months might be suspended if he incurred no further disciplinary charges. Despite the nonviolent nature of his offenses, Miller was shipped off to serve his time at Southport, the all-solitary supermax facility south of Elmira.

Long stretches in the so-called Special Housing Unit (“the SHU” or, more commonly, ”the box”) is an everyday punishment in New York State prisons. Currently, about  4,500 inmates are serving time in some form of 23-hour-a-day lockdown, with sentences ranging from months to decades. As we wrote in an earlier article, New York leads the nation in the use of “disciplinary segregation,” and isolation “is very much a punishment of first resort, doled out for minor rule violations as well as major offenses. In New York, the most common reason for a stint in solitary is creating a ‘disturbance’ or ‘demonstration.’…Second is ‘dirty urine’—testing positive for drugs of any kind…Other infractions include refusing to obey orders, ‘interfering with employees,’ being ‘out of place’ and possession of contraband—not only a shiv but a joint, a cellphone or too many postage stamps.”

Miller appealed his conviction and sentence within the prison system, insisting that he had been denied his right to have witnesses testify on his behalf.  He lost. He then went to state court and lost there. Finally, he took his case to the state court’s appellate division where the decision against him, handed down in August 2012, contained this rather incoherent passage:

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Filed Under: due process, lawsuits/litigation, New York, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Voices from Solitary: Katfish on Life in “The Bucket”

September 5, 2010 By 1 Comment

Katfish’s blog posts appear on Tales from the Cells, a web site featuring writing by prisoners, maintained by Nikita. Katsfish–whose given name is Mike Harris–is currently serving time in FCI Yazoo City, a federal prison near Jackson, Mississippi. Before he was transferred to ”the Zoo” last fall, he was in FCI Big Spring, in west central Texas. Although both are low- to medium-security facilities, he spent much of his time in lockdown in their Special Housing Units (SHUs), accused of various disciplinary offenses. He believes he is also being punished for writing his blog. 

The federal Bureau of Prisons officially states that it does not have solitary confinement–but in the same breath says that on any given day, some 11,000 of its 200,000 prisoners are in SHUs at its various prisons. In fact, the experience Katfish describes here–which dates back to last summer when he was still at Big Spring–reveal the practice of double-bunking in the SHU, which means 23-hour lockdown with one other person. In the first of the two posts excerpted here, Katfish describes every aspect of his cell; in the second, he deconstructs the rules for inmate disciplinary hearings–which are used, among other things, to determine whether prisoners remain in solitary confinement. Although these rules are supposed to guarantee inmates certain “rights” to protest unjust treatment, Katfish’s advice is: “Man, do not bother…You never had a chance.”

Welcome to the hole, better known as The Bucket. One enters the Bucket thru a two door trap. Big Spring is very security conscious indeed because a hostage cannot be here without two guards–sometimes as many as four- who escort the hostage thru the various wings, halls, and stairways. The actual floor plan of the Bucket is irrelevant. Besides that, the way the SIS police act towards me now that they know I’m blogging for TFTC, who can guess what kind of reason they may next contrive to KEEP me in here should I reveal floor plans. Let’s not.

So anyway, as I said, two guards to each hostage. A hostage will never be outside his cell, outside his recreation cage, or outside his interview cage (more on Cage World in a moment) without being cuffed behind his back. One guard leads the way while the other holds onto the handcuffs.

The Bucket’s clothing issue is all emergency orange in color: Pants, shirts, socks, Chinese karate shoes, even the goddamned boxer-shorts are orange. A very loud color (my nuts haven’t had a good night’s sleep yet).

The cell they keep me a hostage in is twelve feet by eight feet. The desk I’m sitting at right now is a pie wedge shaped piece of stainless steel bolted into the corner, the front edge three feet across (my measurements are made by my using my pad of paper which is ten and a half inches long). Bolted to the floor in front of this desk is a metal stool. It’s shaped like a cable spool. It’s about eighteen inches high. Each end is eleven inches across. Five bolts hold it down. Also in my cell is the ubiquitous stainless steel toilet combo sink. This has a drinking fountain thingy on it. You push the button and nothing happens. I have a theory about that, but nothing solid yuh understand.

The cell has a double bunk, an upper and a lower, which kind of eliminates that whole “in isolation” concept that being in the Bucket means. The bunks are approximately eighty inches long by (and my celly and I have measured this twice now) twenty-seven inches wide. Think about that. Twenty-seven inches wide. I am seventy-five inches tall. I’m not sure how wide I am–who is?– but I do not fit; my elbows and shoulders hang over the edges. The bunk itself is secured to metal plates in the floor at all four points. It is also secured to the wall at two points. By secured I mean welded. There are two half circle loops of metal about three inches across welded at each end of the bunk. Two. Each end. There’s also the same loops welded at each side, but only one per side. I’m told that they’re there in case an overly violent convict should need to be restrained: the two at the foot of the bunk would be one for each foot. The one’s at the sides would naturally be for the wrists. It’s unclear what the restraints would consist of; either leather straps or chains. I’m not inclined to discover for myself. The half circles welded at the head of the bed are a mystery.

The mattress is covered in bright blue vinyl; solid like a waiting room’s chair’s upholstery. The mattress itself is NOT soft; it is seventy-two inches long by twenty-six inches wide. It’s about three inches thick. It has a UNICOR prison industries label attached to it: I tried to peel it off, no dice. Bedding issue is one blanket, one towel, two sheets, zero pillows. All UNICOR products.

The window in the wall is between the desk and the bunk. It has a sheet of opaque plastic secured to it on the outside which allows light in and nothing else. The window is twenty inches across by forty-four inches high. It has three squared bars welded into it vertically. Each bar is two inches to a side. The entire window has a grill of expanded metal welded over it.

The door to the cell is a heavy duty Nazi-bunker affair, thirty-six inches by eighty-four inches. It has a slot window in it maybe sixteen inches high by five inches across. I can see the cell across from me. There are Mexicans in there. We do not speak the same language. There is also a tray slot. It is locked from the outside. Food trays are passed in so one can sit next to the toilet and eat soggy food. The tray slot is also for handcuffing. If a convict must come out of the cell, then he must back up and extend his arms/wrists thru the slot. The guard cuffs us. If you have a bunky (I’ve been in this cell before with 4 convicts at a time–two man cell–four convicts), then he also must cuff up before the door is opened.

Also on the door is a round hole. It is at face level. It has perforated steel welded to it, inside and out. In between the perforated steel is a piece of metal which blocks about 75% of the hole. The hole was designed so a hostage could speak with staff. The metal blocking the hold is an add-on idea meant to block an angry and frustrated hostage form spitting or throwing nasty liquids thru it and into staff’s face. The metal blocking the hole also is good at blocking sound rendering the hole useless, thus staff and hostage scream into the door’s edges in an effort to communicate. By the way, the expanded metal welded to the windows make it impossible to clean. The window to the outside is recessed, approximately six inches from expanded metal to glass. It is unbelievably filthy in there; at least half an inch of dust, dirt, lint (orange colored of course), plastic forks and spoons, desiccated and largely unrecognizable bits of food and fruit peels, Jolly Rancher wrappers, etc tetra Yeck.

The floor is concrete and gray. The walls, stool and bunks are painted a dull yellow, the color of a heavy smokers’ walls. The door and windows are painted a dark brown. The ventilation is very good. There’s a shelf made of expanded metal welded beneath the lower bunk. We’re to keep our few allowable affects there.

There is a long fluorescent light-box in the ceiling. It has two light bars in it. Between 10:30pm and 11:00pm the fluorescent lights are extinguished. They stay off until between 6:00am and 6:30am. Doesn’t matter because there is also a regular light bulb up there. It’s as strong as the one in your living-room. It’s stays lit 24/7. I can write and read by it. In fact I’m doing so now. It’s 4:37am.

This is my world. This is day 18 in “the Bucket”, punished without reason, charged with nothing, held under the ever ambiguous investigation clause…

Now meet Cage world: The recreation cage is one large cage divided into 3 smaller cages. When I was a hostage here from July 29th, 05 thru December 5th, 05 for rioting (see my upcoming blog “Riot of ’05”), two out of the three cages had both basketball hoops and pull up bars. The third had a dip bar/pull up bar contraption in it. The north and west walls are concrete, the rest is chain-link, roof inclusive. I went out there the other day. The pull up bars, dip bar contraption and basketball hoops have all been removed. Now it’s simply 3 empty cages. That’s Big Spring’s segregation rec. Empty cages. Three of them.

There are other cages. In ’05 it was only one. It was in a private room. It was utilized for strip searches, giving urine tests, or conducting interviews. Since 2005 three other cages have been installed in the middle of the thru-way that leads to the rec cages. Big Spring SHU does enormous business due to their SIS officer’s inappropriate use of the 90 day investigation clause. Nothing like creating their own job security. Fuckers.

The rules also state a shower is to be made available 3 times a week. I detest this rule because I shower and shave every day. My floor’s shower schedule is Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. The shower is also a caged affair at the front of every hallway. There are but 4 showers in the whole Bucket. The police must move hostages back and forth all day. Props to them.

There are plenty of police who work at FCI Big Spring whom realize that a convict’s life is already plenty miserable enough, and those Poe show kindness when they can. Yet there are definitely those other Poe who clearly cannot wait to get to work so they can power trip on us for 8 to 10 hours. I don’t mess with police. I don’t try to make their jobs harder. I don’t mess with anybody truth be known…. And if I do hear of some outrageous behavior by BOP Big Spring staff, I look into it, write it down, and I share it….You’re learning thru my eyes, my ears, my words.

Day 22

Yesterday, the shu-police moved me, and my “Forrest Gump Bob” celly to different cell–standard BOP procedure really. Every three weeks or so, they play musical cells.

My new cell is exactly like the old one, except for two major differences: I have a bigger desk with two stools, and there is no expanded metal welded to either window, thus this cell is fairly clean.

Once settled in, I discovered a stack of papers on the lower bunks shelf. In those papers were copies of the new commissary sheet, a copy of a convicts disciplinary report, for refusing to give a urine sample, and a BP-5293.052, which is an inmates rights at discipline hearing form. I’m including this for posting.

Never yet having been given a shot in the feds, I’d not seen one before.

People, as I read the seven inmates rights, I quickly became stunned with the blatant misinformation therein.

So read the form, then read my opinion of one through seven. I believe it’s kind of important that people know that the kangaroo courts in every federal prison uses this same inmates rights form.

First Right
Imagine you’re a convict, and you’ve been in the bucket for, I dunno, say 90 days, a suit shows up, hands you your disciplinary sheet, and a copy of the inmates rights through the tray slot in the door.

Now say it’s 8 a.m.; Your hearing is at 8 a.m., in 24 hours.

Great–now you have 24 hours to prepare.

The 90 day investigation clause gave the SIS police all the time in the world to prepare a defense, but you’ve got to get at it, tiger!

Second Right
A convict has the right to have a staff member represent them at the hearing.

If a convict would even deem to be represented by a B.O.P. employee, said employee must be reasonably available, meaning if he/she isn’t here at 8 a.m. tomorrow, you’re screwed.

Also, keep in mind you’ve been in the bucket for 90 days, you have not been on the compound, you no longer know if anyone remembers you, or even why you are in the bucket.

How in the world are you going to locate a staff member who may know, or even be willing to go on record, that you’re either innocent, or that there were mitigating factors, because they won’t let you out of the bucket, to go round up evidence on your behalf, in the first place?

Third Right
The right to call witnesses, present documentary evidence, blah, blah, fucking blah. Same thing. How’s a hostage in the bucket suppose to do this?

And this: “…provide institutional safety not to be jeopardized.”

Are they kidding me?

They invoke an ambiguous term like that without having to justify the reason, and you can bet you’re never getting out of the bucket- never!

Fourth Right
The right to talk or remain silent.

Only in this case, the most basic Miranda Rights/5th Amendment rights are completely excluded, because this clearly states that remaining silent may be used to draw an adverse inference, while at the same time stating your silence alone may not be used to support a finding of guilt. Catch 22; Doublespeak, baby, doublefuckingspeak. Silent or not, you will be found guilty.

Fifth Right
You can either be present, or not, for the charade, because one way or another they are absolutely sitting in judgment of you.

They have added that all the staff reps, and/or witnesses, that they never let you contact, can be present.

As if.

Sixth Right
Check this out–they’re willing to come tell you that they’ve found you guilty.

Why wouldn’t they? It’s highly likely that the POE/SIS that put you in here to begin with was probably having lunch with the hearing officer the day before, at the officer’s mess, at the chow chow hall.

And, hey–not only are they willing to tell you you’re guilty, as if 90 days the bucket wasn’t enough proof of “guilty until proven innocent”, but they’ll even give you written proof, same as the gave you a copy of your inmate rights.

Seventh Right
You have the right to appeal, and have 20 days to do so.

Man, do not bother. In the eyes of the bureaucrats, the moment one of their guards put you in the bucket, you were 100% guilty, and the whole disciplinary hearing was nothing more than lip service, red tape, and a dosie doe. You never had a chance.

And, neither do I.

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Filed Under: corrections industry, due process, federal prisons, Mississippi, psychological effects, solitary confinement, Texas, Voices from Solitary Tagged With: , ,

Lessons from Solitary

June 3, 2010 By 7 Comments
Guest Post by David Chura

Editors’ Note: David Chura has spent forty years working with–and writing about–”kids in the system”: at-risk children in foster care, group homes, homeless shelters, psych hospitals, drug rehab, special education, and alternative high schools, as well as in juvenile and adult corrections facilities. (Chura’s blog is kidsinthesystem.wordpress.com.)

As a teacher in the Westchester County Jail, including its “Special Housing Unit,” Chura observed the effects of solitary confinement on children growing up in 23-hour-a-day lockdown in adult prison. He documented this experience in his  powerful book on the subject, I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, which we featured on Solitary Watch a few months back. In this guest post, he exposes–and debunks–a little-discussed aspect of the public’s perception of solitary confinement.

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I had just finished reading “Safety and Security,” a chapter from my book I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, at a recent book event. It describes a morning I spent proctoring a state exam for a student who was locked up in solitary confinement at the county jail where I taught high school for ten years.

Each time I read that chapter the horrors of that morning come back to me: the emergency response team dragging in an inmate, struggling, crying, screaming that he couldn’t breathe, that he was dying, couldn’t anybody please help him, until the glass and metal door of his cell slammed shut on his pleas. That morning I knew that I had seen something that no civilian was meant to witness. And I knew, as well, that every man on that block, locked in his own cage of silence, had had a similar story of despair to tell.

After I finished reading the chapter that evening, my listeners sat in stunned silence, caught in the nightmare of solitary confinement. Then, tentatively a hand went up.

“I was married to a man who was in solitary for several years,” a woman in her 60s said. “When I asked him how he made it through, he told me that he practiced walking meditation, and that he got to know, really know, every concrete block in his cell. He said he learned a lot.”

I didn’t doubt her husband’s experience—or her perception of it. Yet I sensed in what she said an attitude I’d heard before from people trying to make sense of this brutal practice. It is an attitude, I suspect, that offers people comfort: solitary confinement as the monk’s cave, as the scholar’s study, as the New Age guru’s retreat; a time for meditation, yoga, reading; self-discovery.

It’s a romantic image—the lone prisoner triumphing over his keeper—that’s been around for awhile and has made its way into the general consciousness. Burt Lancaster in The Birdman of Alcatraz as Robert Stroud serving a life sentence in solitary surrounded by his books and birds. Or Denzel Washington in The Hurricane as Rubin Carter studying his way to personal liberation from his isolation.

Nothing could be further from the truth for the majority of men and women in prisons across the country buried in isolation cells, some for years.

As often as I could I visited my students—some as young as 15—who were locked up in solitary. (Luckily, state education law mandated that an incarcerated high school student must receive some kind of education even in solitary confinement.)

Contrary to that romantic image, the men—young and old—I saw on my escorted walk down the block’s hallway had triumphed over nothing.  “The cage,” as my students called it, reeked of unwashed, long neglected bodies. The walls were scuffed and gouged where shackled inmates writhed and kicked as they were dragged in. The cell door windows were smeared as prisoners jammed their faces at odd angles against the glass, desperate to see anyone, anything, hungry for visual stimulation. If the men weren’t sleeping (and many slept for 15, 16 hours a day, barely waking for meals) they were screeching, howling through the walls, trying to make contact with each other, with another human being, even if those shouts were indecipherable and incomprehensible.

That evening, listening to the woman’s comment, I couldn’t help thinking about those inmates I saw. Few of them, for whatever reasons, had any of her husband’s resources, especially the young men—children really—that I taught whose lives were fractured, some seemingly beyond repair, and whose identities were too fragile to withstand the assault of solitary.

Put in isolation, for behavior the department of corrections deemed dangerous and uncontrollable, a threat to “safety and security”—behavior considered less than human— those individuals were made to live in subhuman conditions in order to learn how to act human. But the only lesson learned is one that most locked up people have known all their lives: There is no end to how cruel we can be to each other; and how easily we are able to justify that cruelty.

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Filed Under: Eighth Amendment, featured posts, guest posts, juveniles, media, New York, popular culture, psychological effects, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , ,

The Lost Boys of Westchester County’s SHU

March 26, 2010 By 2 Comments

Mother Jones this week ran a powerful two-part excerpt from a new book called I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. The book is by David Chura, who worked for 10 years as an English teacher in the Westchester County Jail. The published excerpt focuses on the jail’s Special Housing Unit (SHU), which is the euphemism New York State uses for solitary confinement.

As the editors’ introduction puts it, “These state-of-the-art, maximum-security isolation blocks became a trend during the late-1990s prison-building boom…And to accompany the construction spree, state and federal legislators enacted new laws that gave more kids adult sentences in adult institutions.”

As we’ve written before on Solitary Watch, in addition to these converging trends, children in adult correctional facilities are disproportionately likely to be placed in solitary confinement–either because they act up, or for their own “protection.” Large numbers of these kids have psychiatric or emotional problems to begin with, and the affects of isolation on their growing bodies and minds is usually devastating. Cutting and other forms of self-harm are common among these incarcerated children, and suicides are far from rare.

Part 1 of the two-part excerpt from Chura’s book vital background by describing the opening of the then-new SHU, which was actually celebrated as a great improvement over the rest of the jail–cleaner, safer, quieter, and implicitly, more humane. Initially Chura’s students even seemed better behaved–more attentive and less rowdy.

In Part 2, the truth begins to emerge. We’ve included a sample here, but the excerpts–and no doubt the book, as well–are worth reading in full. Chura has also started a blog on abuses of juveniles in the justice system.

It was only after I had been visiting the SHU for a while that I began to see things differently. At first, I thought the changes in my students’ behavior were the result of the calmer, cleaner environment.

But more and more I realized that it was, in fact, the result of their total isolation. They listened, they studied my face, they begged me to return, and they watched me leave because they were hungry—for words, sounds, the sight of people—any stimulation that broke their solitude.

In the months that followed, the SHU began to show this underbelly of deprivation. Conditions deteriorated. The walls got scuffed and nicked where inmates struggled against the emergency response teams carrying them in. Windows grew smeared from hands and faces pressed against the glass.

Gradually, the inmates stopped making their beds. They piled clothes on the floor. They left books and papers wherever they dropped. Now when I visited after class, some of my students would be sleeping. They’d bury themselves under the covers, their heads wrapped up in towels for warmth and to shut out the light.

If I was able to wake them, calling through the tray slot, they’d grumble and splutter to be left alone. Once they knew it was me and got up, they were still polite and appreciative, but they would stare, stunned and bewildered—wondering if I was real or just part of some dream.

And they were dirty. Even the guys who were usually fastidious about grooming became sloppy and disheveled. Like Pinto, who used to arrive to class every day scrubbed, shaved, and smelling of Old Spice. His county oranges would be pressed, and his hair clipped short and brushed to a black lacquer.

But in the SHU, his eyes grew puffy and crusted from endless hours of sleep. His face was covered with a patchy, scruffy beard, and his hair was knotted and woolly. When he leaned down to talk to me his breath was sour, and the odor of his unwashed clothes and body rose out of the metal opening like a malevolent genie.

An update on conditions for at the Westchester County Jail can be found in a scathing report released last fall by the Justice Department, which among other things looked at the use of solitary confinement on juveniles. As summarized by Mother Jones: 

At the Westchester lockup, investigators found that half of the inmates recently consigned to the SHU were 16 to 18 years old, and many were doing stints of a year or more in isolation. One 16-year-old got 510 days for assaulting a guard. Another teen, an 18-year-old, was simply thrown in the SHU indefinitely. “Such sentences,” the report noted, “may inflict substantial psychological harm” on juveniles.

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Filed Under: human rights, juveniles, New York, physical effects, psychological effects, solitary confinement, suicide Tagged With: , , , ,