Uptown People’s Law Center

The End of Tamms Supermax

January 9, 2013 By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway 1 Comment

tamms-chicago-4-224x300 As the new year began, the notorious Tamms state supermax in southern Illinois closed its doors forever. The closure marked the end of a decade-long effort that combined legal and political pressure with press exposes and tireless grassroots organizing. One excellent recap of this effort and its remarkable outcome was published by In These Times, here. Two more can be found on ACLU’s Blog of Rights, here and here. The second piece, quoted below, describes the role played by the men who were buried alive in Tamms.

Put simply, men were sent to Tamms to disappear.

Tamms was sold to the public as necessary to control the “worst of the worst” prisoners in Illinois. Yet when it opened in 1998, the majority of prisoners had virtually no disciplinary history at all. Rather, Tamms was populated by men who had sued the Department, filed grievances, and otherwise complained about illegal conduct by prison officials—wardens were looking for a way to get rid of these headaches. Other men transferred to Tamms had long histories of mental illness—which had never been treated in prison. Many were sent to Tamms because someone had claimed, at some point in the past, that they were gang leaders—even though most had never been found guilty of any gang activity. When the Uptown People’s Law Center challenged the placement of our clients in Tamms, we were told that these men were not entitled to a hearing, and would not be told why they had been sent to Tamms.

Some of these men have spent the last 15 years in complete and total solitary confinement at Tamms.

Tamms officially closes its doors today, first and foremost because the men sent there did not disappear. Rather than buckle under the extreme psychological pressure of solitary confinement, they banded together, fought back, and reached out and educated and organized their families and friends…

Like other “supermax” facilities, Tamms was designed to ensure that prisoners could be housed in complete isolation—never coming in contact with another prisoner, and only rarely coming in contact with staff. There is no dining hall; there is no chapel; there is no library; there are no classrooms; there is no yard. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are brought to prisoners in their cells—passed through a slot in a steel door. Medical and mental health care is generally provided through the cell door—with no privacy, and minimal ability for medical professionals to examine or even conduct a meaningful conversation with the men they are supposed to be caring for.

In a brave act, the men at Tamms initiated a prison-wide hunger strike in 2000. They asked for such simple things as shoes to wear outside that would protect their feet; the right to clean their own showers; and for other activities to productively occupy their time. The vast majority of prisoners refused meals the first day; dozens refused meals for a week; three lasted over 30 days…

Two of the last men out in December, 2012, were also two of the first men to arrive at Tamms in March, 1998. They survived almost 15 years in total isolation. While closing Tamms is a tremendous victory, we cannot forget the terrible price paid by human beings as a result of this 15 year experiment in torture.

For more background, see “Trapped in Tamms,” the groundbreaking series published in the Belleville News-Democrat, as well as our earlier piece on Tamms in Mother Jones.

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, corrections industry, cost/budget issues, Illinois, lawsuits/litigation, psychological effects, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: closure, solitary confinement, supermax, Tamms, Tamms Year Ten, Uptown People's Law Center

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

July 16, 2012 By Julian Burns 3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, cost/budget issues, due process, featured posts, Illinois, lawsuits/litigation, politics of punishment, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: Alan Mills, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, Tamms, Uptown People's Law Center

Judge Rules Procedures at Tamms Supermax Violate Constitution

July 21, 2010 By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway 4 Comments

A federal judge yesterday ruled that current procedures for sending prisoners to the Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois–and keeping them there indefinitely–is in violation of the 14th Amendment to U.S. Constitution, which guarantees due process of law. The judge ordered that significant changes be made at the notorious state supermax.

George Pawlaczyk, whose award-winning coverage last year exposed abuses at Tamms, reports in the Belleville News-Democrat:

A federal judge has ruled that even inmates termed the “worst of the worst” by state prison system officials have a constitutional right to a hearing before they are sent to what many consider the harshest prison in Illinois — the solitary-only Tamms Correctional Center.

U.S. District Court Judge G. Patrick Murphy, sitting in federal court in East St. Louis, has ruled that all inmates transferred to Tamms, the state’s only supermax prison, must be given a swift hearing and told why they are being sent to the lockup, where most prisoners spend 23 hours a day in their cells and are let out only to walk alone in a steel cage.

And all inmates currently at the prison must be given the same type of hearing, which must allow them an opportunity to challenge their transfer. Tamms inmates also must be given 48 hours notice of the hearing after being sent to Tamms, so that they can have an opportunity to prepare to challenge their transfer.

The decision follows a ten-year legal effort by the Uptown People’s Law Center in Chicago, which brought suit on behalf of several dozen Tamms prisoners, and a trial in federal court that ended last December. Pawlaczyk quotes Uptown’s Legal Director Alan S. Mills, who called the judge’s ruling a “significant victory”:

“Everybody who has been sent there (Tamms) up until now, have had their constitutional rights violated and has a right to a hearing, a new hearing, to see whether or not they should have ever been sent there in the first place,” said Mills…

Mills said that inmates can now challenge prison system claims that they violated disciplinary rules at other prisons or any administration claim that warrants being sent to Tamms. And they can require prison officials to state a reason for transfer. They also may challenge department claims that they are members of a gang and that is why they were sent to the lockup.

“Many of these inmates have never been told why they were sent to Tamms,” Mills said. He said these inmates include one plaintiff in the lawsuit who had been at Tamms since it opened more than 12 years ago but was never told why.

Murphy also ordered that inmates who have been at Tamms the longest, and many have been there for more than 10 years, will be placed at the head of the list for the hearings. The judge’s order noted that some inmates were not told why they were sent to Tamms until years later…

Judge Murphy made clear that his ruling “is narrowly drawn, extends no further than necessary to correct the violation of the 14th Amendment due process rights of IDOC [Illinois Department of Corrections] inmates placed at Tamms, and is the least intrusive means necessary to correct the violation of the federal rights of such inmates.” He stated that “the supermax prison at Tamms is clean, excellently administered, and well staffed.” This despite the fact that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have challenged conditions at Tamms, as has a local activist group, Tamms Year Ten.

New attention was focused on the prison last year, after reporting by George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer found nightmarish conditions at Tamms, which is in many cases used as a de facto asylum for prisoners suffering from serious mental illness. [You can read the original series here.] As Pawlaczyk wrote yesterday:

The treatment of Tamms inmates, especially those who were mentally ill, was the subject of a News-Democrat investigative series in August titled “Trapped in Tamms,” which was followed by more than a dozen follow-up stories. The articles challenged the prison system’s claims that Tamms inmates were the worst of the worst, and reported that more than half of the inmate population had not committed any new crimes since entering prison.

The newspaper reported that many mentally ill inmates were sent to Tamms after throwing urine and feces at guards, assaults that are often handled administratively at other prisons. This behavior, according to mental health experts who study incarceration, can often be a sign of mental illness made worse by solitary confinement.

Mud stencil on Chicago sidewalk, by Tamms Year Ten

It remains to be seen how much the new ruling will help such inmates. The court stated that during the newly mandated hearings, prison officials can consider ”the safety and security of the facility, the public, or any person, [and] an inmate’s disciplinary and behavioral history,” in deciding whether an inmate needs to be held at Tamms. Clearly, an inmate’s “behavioral history” can be affected by untreated mental illness.

However, the prisoners in Tamms have more going for them that many of the of other 25,000-odd inmates held in U.S. supermax prisons: They have local muckraking journalists to expose their living conditions; local and international human rights groups taking up their cause; and excellent pro bono legal representation from the Uptown People’s Law Center. All of these watchdogs will, no doubt, be waiting to see what happens at Tamms when the judge’s order goes into effect.