Fight Over Closing of Illinois Supermax Ends 14 Years of Prisoners' Silence in Solitary Confinement

Wednesday, 15 August 2012 By Yana Kunichoff and Jesse Menendez, Truthout and Vocalo | Report This display of the men in Tamms was originally designed by the art group CAFF for a Peace Fest held in the Roseland neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. Since then, Tamms Year Ten has attached information about the men, including excerpts from their letters, their poetry, their photo requests, and their magazine requests. The display also marks who is "NOW FREE" from prison, who "NEEDS PENPAL" and who has died at Tamms. (Photo: Lenny Gilmore)
Tamms Correctional Center on 200 Supermax Road, near the southern tip of Southern Illinois, may be as far from the hustling and bustling city of Chicago, with its constant city throb of noise, as you can get. And it's likely that no one can feel the difference as much as its inmates.
The only supermax facility in Illinois, meaning it is the only prison built to keep the majority of its prisoners in isolation, Tamms prison was consigned for closure by the state's governor in July.
But the battle between former prisoners, the families of those hurt by conditions at Tamms, anti-torture advocates, the union determined to keep its jobs and the state legislature struggling to contain costs continues to rage.
The story of Tamms is the story of something positive that may have come out of a recession, about what may be the last throes of the supermax movement, and what a campaign against torture accomplished in less than four years.
Behind the Walls of Tamms
A man in Tamms made this drawing and others like it to communicate his despair from being in Tamms since 1998. (Image: Bear Cub)The first supermax prison in the United States was the infamous Alcatraz, opened in 1934. Since then, tough-on-crime policies have led to the opening of more than 55 correctional facilities devoted, entirely or partly, to housing "the worst of the worst" across the country. This was the logic behind the opening of Tamms in 1998.
For the first ten years of its operation, the prison was mostly silent to the public ear. When the Tamms Year Ten campaign launched ten years after the prison was first opened, it became clear that much of the silence was due to the prolonged solitary confinement that most of its inmates were kept in for years.
"We wanted to create a set of demands around the crisis of isolation," said Laurie Jo Reynolds with the Tamms Year Ten campaign. "The prison was started with the concept of short-term isolation, but ten years later, no one had heard anything from inside Tamms."
The group, made up of former prisoners, prisoners' families, artists, writers, lawyers and others, believes that long-term solitary confinement is a form of torture punishment that should be curtailed, if not banned altogether.
When they finally began hearing word from Tamms, the group discovered that most inmates are held in concrete cells 24 hours a day, are not allowed phone calls, and rarely see or speak to another human being. In addition, what little counseling was available was wholly inadequate, and reading material and family photographs were strictly rationed.
Darrell was tortured into a confession by Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge in 1983. Of his 24 years of wrongful imprisonment, the last 9 were spent in Tamms. (Photo: Community Based Art Practices Group, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Tamms Year Ten)
A former inmate, Brian Nelson, described the feeling of being in Tamms: "The doors are like a rust-red color with thousands of perforated holes. And you look outside, and you don't see nothing but a gray wall. My biggest fear is that this is all happening in my head, and I am going to wake up and I'm in that cell. And that scares the s--- out of me."
Reynolds says that half of the prisoners they communicate with are under administrative detention, meaning they could be alleged gang members or have other ties that cause them to be classified as "administrative detainees," a category long considered "broad enough as to be meaningless."
A report by the John Howard Association of Illinois found that:

Supermax inmates frequently suffer from mental illness. At Tamms, this often manifests itself in inmates cutting themselves, a practice staff tries but is unable to prevent. While Tamms has implemented some policies intended to lessen the harshness of life within its walls, it also has some practices certain to increase inmate discomfort....
The prison is intentionally devoid of color or other visual stimulation. Inmates are usually unable to talk with one another. At best, they spend 23 hours a day alone within their cells. At worst, they can be confined to their cells 24 hours a day for three months as a disciplinary measure. Like its counterparts around the nation, Tamms is frequently criticized for maltreatment of inmates. There are 23 pending federal lawsuits against Tamms, according to prison management. Earlier this year a federal judge ruled that inmates sent to Tamms could challenge their transfer to the prison. The judge concluded that conditions at the prison endanger the psychiatric well being of long-term inmates.

Reynolds says that a large majority of the prisoners have pre-existing mental health conditions, creating a cruel cycle. "When those people are in a regular prison, they can't follow all the rules, but when they are placed in isolation, their mental health gets worse."
More generally, Illinois correctional facilities regularly hold inmates who are mentally ill and end up in prison or jail for lack of treatment facilities that could help them avoid punishment. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart called Cook County Jail "the largest mental health provider in the state of Illinois."
In 2012, the United Nations discussed the possibility of launching a probe to see whether the treatment of inmates at Tamms constituted torture by international human rights standards.
But for those whose loved ones spend every day in Tamms, the pain continues.
Brenda Smith, whose son Herman has been in isolation in Tamms for more than ten years, says, "The letters that he writes me are horrifying."
The only way she copes is by "trying not to think about what he is going through."
"I am the only person he can write the letters to, and he doesn't tell me everything he is going through," says Smith.
Smith's son is one of the inmates at Tamms whose distress has led him to self-mutilate.
"It's like he's dead, in a sense. You can't touch him; you can't hug him. It's hard."
Family members and other people of conscience hold a rally outside the James R. Thompson Center to urge Governor Quinn to recognize that long-term isolation causes lasting mental damage, and that people with extreme mental illnesses are more likely to end up in segregation and eventually isolation. (Photo: Tamms Year Ten)
The Roots of a Campaign Take Hold
Reynolds first met two mothers of prisoners at Tamms when she was working on a campaign against the high cost of phone calls in jails. The prison opened in 1998, and it was 2008 when Reynolds says that one-third of the more than 250 inmates in Tamms had been in solitary confinement for ten years.
She kept in touch with them, and then, in 2000, she joined several mothers and anti-prison activists on the Tamms Committee. From there, they launched the Tamms Poetry Committee, "By sending a poem or a letter to every person at Tamms," said Reynolds, "we gave them much-needed human contact."
One of the prisoners sent a poem back, and then, more prisoners sent poems back. And then they started asking something else, says Reynolds: "This is great, but could you please tell the government what is going on here."
That was in 2007.
"It prompted us into launching a campaign," said Reynolds. "I thought, if I find this so appalling and reprehensible, if we take this issue to the public, they will agree with us. It was the prisoners who prompted us to go further."
Then began the legislative merry-go-round that the group has followed doggedly, now nearly to its end. The group started pressuring the Prison Reform Committee, an arm of the Illinois House of Representatives, to call a hearing.
And when they did, in 2008, "We held a series of events to prepare for the hearing, and then packed the room," said Reynolds.
Riding the momentum from the hearing, Tamms Year Ten decided to push for reform legislation that Reynolds says would "go back to the original legislative intent" of the facility.
A key complaint of the men in the prison was that many of them were not aware why they were in the supermax facility, or what they needed to do to get out. The result was HB 6651, introduced in the spring 2008 session to establish standards for which prisoners could be transferred to Tamms and to set the limits of their stay.
According to Stephen Eisenman, a Northwestern University art professor and activist with the campaign, the bill would, "ensure that only violent prisoners are transferred to Tamms; provide hearings to establish fairness in decisions about transfer; limit terms of solitary confinement at Tamms to one year, unless the prisoner committed another violent act; and prevent mentally ill prisoners from being sent to Tamms."
The legislation didn't make it into law, but a new director, Michael Randle, was appointed to the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC), with the top priority of reviewing the supermax. He met with Tamms Year Ten and legislators and began looking into the conditions in the prison. This was in May 2009.
Meanwhile, the Belleville News-Democrat began a series in August 2009 that unveiled the horror behind the doors of Tamms: prisoners self-mutilating, the high proportion of mentally ill prisoners and the large costs of running the facility.
Tamms Year Ten continued to send letters and poetry to prisoners and to organize screenings, marches, music concerts and art campaigns.
Randle issued a Ten Point Plan for how to reform Tamms in 2010, calling for better mental health screenings, limited phone calls and the chance for prisoners to earn time outside of their cells. At the same time, a new process of prisoner reviews at Tamms led to the transfer of nearly 40 inmates out of the facility and the introduction of a new GED program.
Then in July of 2012, US District Judge G. Patrick Murphy ruled that several dozen individuals from Tamms had had their constitutional rights violated and were denied their right to a hearing before they were sent to the isolation facility, and called the incarceration at Tamms "virtual sensory deprivation."
Eisenman, in an op-ed in The Chicago Sun-Times, argued that, while their efforts were welcomed, "neither Judge Murphy nor the John Howard Association got to the heart of the matter."

The problem with Tamms is not that guards are insensitive, food is poor, educational programming - apart from a few GED classes - is nonexistent or rules for visitation are maddeningly complex. It is that terms of isolation are unconscionably long and that there is a lack of transparency concerning the reasons prisoners are sent to Tamms. Forty of the 206 men now at Tamms have been there since the facility opened in 1998, and criteria for being sent to the prison (and held there) are vague in the extreme.... [Legislators and Illinois Department of Corrections officials] should remember that the Ten-Point Plan at Tamms remains an incomplete project and that fundamental change at the Supermax is essential for the sake of economic health, public safety and basic humanity."

On September 2, 2010, the group lost its sympathetic director when Randle resigned following a scandal in which prisoners let out on an early-release initiative he championed re-offended soon after their release.
Tamms Year Ten has continued to testify every year to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees when the IDOC budget is being argued.
"The financial argument itself is so striking, it would be easy to close the facility on that only," said Reynolds.
The Straw That Broke the Camel's Back
On June 19, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn announced that Tamms would be closing by the end of August.
Along with years of work by activists, the straw that broke the camel's back and led to the planned closure was price tag. The cost to run Tamms, which regularly holds less than 200 prisoners at a time, is $62,000 per inmate per year. According to NPR, this is three times the statewide average.
Quinn said in a statement: "We have the responsibility to manage the state's limited resources as efficiently as possible and make the difficult decisions necessary to restore fiscal stability to Illinois. The growing costs of pension and Medicaid make up 39% of state general revenue spending. While we were able to enact more than $2 billion in Medicaid reforms with bi-partisan support, we still must reform our public pension systems to alleviate this squeeze on general revenue spending."
Annually, the cost to run the facility is $26 million,  out of the IDOC's $1.2 billion budget.
Meanwhile, Illinois' budget deficit is one of the worst in the nation - $43.8 billion in the red. Child care programs, health care for low-income people, programs for the homeless and public-sector pensions have all ended up on the chopping block.
The Tamms Year Ten campaign celebrates the decision, says Reynolds. "It was a pragmatic decision, but I think Quinn is also principled and cares about the issue."
Reynolds says that the new IDOC director says only 25 individuals in Tamms are in need of maximum security. Some prisoner transfers have already begun.
For Smith, whose son remains in Tamms, the news of the closure "is something to give them hope."
"They would have a lot less problems if they were giving them any hope, but they see no way out," said Smith. "If you cage an animal up and mistreat him, he will bite you."
Downstate legislators and the prison union have come down hard against the closing of the prison. It is the main employer in Tamms, Illinois, a town with a population of 632.
Legislators, including some Democrats, have continued to put money to run Tamms into the Department of Corrections budget, which Governor Quinn has then vetoed as a line item.
Illinois Rep. Brandon Phelps (D-Harrisburg), one of the Democratic legislators leading the push to keep Tamms open, was not available for comment.
Prison guards, led by American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 31, are suing Governor Quinn for his plans to close the facility, arguing that bringing Tamms residents to other prisons will increase overcrowding and bring unsafe working conditions.
Reynolds, in response, says that guards from Tamms could be used to staff other overcrowded and understaffed prisons. "The union has gone entirely ballistic with a campaign of outright lies, half-truths and fearmongering," she said.
AFSCME Local 31 did not respond to requests for comment.
But the lawsuit, and a criminal investigation into alleged leaks by prison guards, has halted prisoner transfers until August 17.
Eric Fink, a labor lawyer, professor and former legal attorney for AFSCME prison guards in Pennsylvania, says that the tension between a union's immediate employment interests and a wider social justice agenda is not unheard of.
"The union's main function is to advocate for the interest of its members, and it isn't normally in the business of saying we support eliminating the jobs of our members."
However, says Fink, "the ideal solution might be to say, for reasons of social justice, that we agree with reigning back the prison complex, but we want that to be coupled with shifting to other jobs and the necessary training so correctional officers can be trained to do other things."
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1000 in California has come out against prison expansion in favor of increasing positions for social workers instead.
The End of Supermax?
Despite the roadblocks, Reynolds says she is "confident the closure of Tamms - a really difficult project, but also a really inspiring project - will be completed."
And with it, says Reynolds, another leg will be kicked out from under the supermax model. States including California and Kansas have closed or downgraded their maximum-security prisons.
However, the battle continues. On August 17, Quinn is expected to announce the results of his discussions with AFSCME, and as the Tamms issue continues, he is under fire for not letting reporters into two other Illinois prisons where, inmates say, conditions are poor.
For Reynolds, "the moral of the story is, it really does matter if a bunch of people band together and say, You can't do this."
Interviews by Vocalo
Music Vox host Jesse Menendez spoke with Tamms Year Ten representative Josh Jones about his organization's efforts to close the Tamms Correctional Center and the benefit Tamms Year Ten is organizing to support their cause.

Concrete Solitaire: A Poor Imitation of Death

 August 8, 2012 by Planet Waves
 

Editor’s Note: In March 2010, we began posting the work of Enceno Macy, an inmate in a U.S. prison. Enceno’s articles are sent handwritten, then typed and edited by a trusted editor. Comments typed into the response area will be sent directly to Enceno. Thanks for reading and for the warm response he’s received each time. –efc & ajp
by Enceno Macy

On June 19, 2012, Senator Dick Durbin held the first ever congressional hearing on America’s excessive use of solitary confinement. “America has led the way with human rights around the world,” Durbin said. But “what do our prisons say about our American values?”

View through the door of a cell in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, Ireland. The former prison is now a museum. Photo by Hal J. Cohen.

“Solitary confinement makes our criminal justice criminal … It dehumanizes us all.” (Statement by Anthony Graves, exoneree who spent nearly 18 years in extreme isolation for a crime he didn’t commit.)
These are the conditions in which some 80,000 inmates live on any given day in American prisons and jails.

The light is as dim as a 40 watt bulb in a basement, like you might see in a B-rated horror movie. But this light illuminates a different kind of horror.

Imagine you’re in a cube, a concrete cube six feet by ten feet max. A thick concrete slab three feet high is built into the back wall. An exercise mat lies atop the slab, three inches thick and almost as hard as the slab itself. A stainless steel combination toilet-sink is built into the side wall, and next to it is a solid steel door. There may or may not be a small, filthy window, no bigger than a VCR tape, high up in one wall. The available floor space is about the same as a standard 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. This is your entire world, 24/7.

You have two books, if you’re lucky, chosen from a very limited selection of dog-eared novels, usually with subjects of no interest to you. A couple sheets of paper, a pen the size of a golf pencil, a toothbrush and a comb complete the inventory of your property.

Three times a day, a slot in your door opens, a tray is shoved through with strictly regulated portions of alleged food the FDA may or may not have approved strewn across it. Every two days, you are restrained — put in handcuffs and leg chains — and taken to shower. The hotel-size bar soap is made with the most basic ingredients, the major one probably lye, leaving your skin instantly dry. So dry that scratching the resulting itch tears your skin.


Occasionally you will receive your mail if the guards don’t ‘lose’ it and if you are fortunate enough to have anyone care enough to write to you. Every little noise echoes. Even the silence echoes, a dry, empty silence, the kind where you can hear yourself think. As months go by, the thoughts you hear become actual voices. After years in the cube, those voices become someone else’s and you no longer have a voice of your own.

This is a cell in what they call “segregation.” It used to be called solitary confinement, but for some bureaucratic reason it was changed to “segregation,” with various adjectives added. The use of solitary, once a relatively rare means of isolating prisoners whose violence jeopardized both guards and other prisoners, is now so frequent and so commonplace in U.S. prisons that prefab concrete segregation cubes are standard units of prison construction.

It is not hard to see how difficult it would be to keep yourself from going crazy in such a cube. Now add the probability — actually the strong likelihood — that most of the people put into those cubes already have some serious psychological problems before they are put there, and even a ten year old could deduce that such treatment would compound whatever problems someone had. Yet for the last 25 years, there has been a vast expansion of dungeons full of cubes like those I describe in prisons throughout the U.S. And their original purpose of keeping dangerous prisoners from harming others has been vastly expanded to include punishments for violations of prison rules and any behavior deemed insubordinate by sadistic or control-freak guards.

To anyone who has endured the horrors of solitary, it is impossible not to view this kind of punishment as an extreme form of cruelty. I would say cruel and unusual, except that it’s no longer unusual because every prison in the country has isolation units just as bad or worse than my description.

In some prisons, you are put on a leash when you exit the cell for any reason, like for medical treatment if you’re lucky. You are allowed to exit for “yard” once a week, for an hour alone in a slightly larger concrete cube with a screen across the open roof twenty feet above. This is your only contact with the outdoors. I have done a total of some two years off and on in solitary cells such as these. Not one of the experiences was anything but depressing and painful.

Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, a private prison for men operated by GEO Group on behalf of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, located in Walnut Grove, Mississippi. Photo: Southern Poverty Law Center.

I am not suggesting that some of the people put into these units do not need to be segregated from the rest of the prison population. Many are in prison for anti-social behaviors and shouldn’t have been stuck with each other to begin with. But a very high percentage of them would technically be certified for mental institutions if not for their violent, criminal behavior. Prison, and especially solitary, simply intensifies psychological problems that might be treatable in another setting. It is distressing and sad to report from my personal observation that there are very few or no opportunities for rehabilitation in prison, whether psychological, behavioral or even educational.

Logical thinking might lead one to conclude that lock-up, which is pretty much a long-term ‘time out’ from society, is not an adequate means of deterring criminal activity, especially when you herd a bunch of wildly dysfunctional people together and expect them to change. Of course it’s not; you might as well herd wild horses into a corral and expect them to change into dressage champions. I think actually addressing and correcting convicts’ issues would be more productive, but there is too much political and economic pressure hindering the introduction of rehabilitative services. An unempathetic society chooses to punish offenders instead of helping them, even if the punishment creates worse monsters than the originals.

For example, if you put a 15-year-old kid in prison for a lengthy amount of time (as I have been), and offer him little or no avenue to learn how to be a positive contributor to society, he will inevitably learn from what he is being exposed to. He will come to know only how to cope and survive in a locked-up environment surrounded by seriously messed-up guys. So when you eventually re-introduce him to society, what expectation can you have of him? Even if he tries his best to fit in, his reactions to situations will be a product of what he has come to know.

I have written before about the prison environment. It is 99 percent negative and sub-primal. This doesn’t mean no one ever survives it and returns to society to become a functioning citizen, but the likelihood of this happening is slim to none.

The same and more so can be said of locking someone in a solitary/segregation cube and expecting him to come out any better. The overwhelming likelihood is that he will emerge a far more violent, far more uncontrolled, far angrier person than ever before. Punishment may be a necessary aspect of deterring certain behaviors, but I don’t think people who have not experienced this kind of punishment can comprehend how it can actually harden one to the prospect of such consequences.
When you get put into that kind of isolation, you have no choice but to accept it. After a time, some people actually come to embrace the solitude, and it becomes a great discomfort to live in the general population again. Now they are not only no longer deterred by the threat of solitary, but are likely to create the situations that will send them there.

Around the country, some of these seg (solitary/segregation) units hold people for years, even decades, prolonging and eventually preventing their potential recovery from such an experience.

Sketches by Enceno Macy comparing a regular cell with a segregation, or solitary confinement, cell in two different prisons. Click image for larger version.

The unrelieved boredom of these units and the lack of any live contact drives many inmates to create any opportunity for interaction with anybody at all. Common examples are phantom or self-inflicted injuries that give them a chance to have contact with medical staff, who may be incompetent and totally indifferent but at least are arguably human. An extreme example, all too common, is creating a situation requiring “cell extraction,” which is breaking a rule in seg and then refusing to submit to the consequences.

Cell extraction sounds like having a tooth pulled, but it’s nowhere near so benign. Say you refuse to return your meal tray through the slot, or as often happens you give in to the bottomless rage of despair and plug your toilet or flood the unit by leaving a tap on. Then you refuse orders to back up to the cuff-slot in the door with your hands behind your back to be hand-cuffed so the guards can enter and punish you.

What happens next is that six or eight officers in full riot gear with gas masks on charge the unit. They spray gas (pepper spray, or OC, which stands for ‘Oleoresin Capsicum’) into your cell, wait for you to succumb to the gas, and rush in. They slam you to the ground and beat you, zap you, then carry you to the showers before dumping you back into the same gas-filled cube, naked except for a bar of soap and a spray-soaked blanket. (A vivid and gruesomely accurate description of such extractions can be found in David Baldacci’s novel, Divine Justice; be aware that his account is most assuredly not an exaggeration.)

A cell extraction occurs almost every day, sometimes more than once. With 70 cells on one isolation tier, there is bound to be at least one disgruntled or insane inmate a day who can no longer stand the solitude. The officers have a field day with their gear and pepper spray. On at least one occasion they ‘accidentally’ set off an entire canister of spray, which made its way into all of the vents and into all of our cells. They wouldn’t let any of us rinse in the showers, so we endured the gassing for the rest of the night. It was so bad that a couple of guys passed out and had to be taken to medical. My neighbor’s nose would not stop bleeding; it gushed for hours until they finally came and threw him into the showers.

So far, the longest I’ve done in seg was 96 days. During that time the unit I was in set a state record for the most cell extractions in a single day, a total of 86. Such extractions, although common policy, do little to deter future negative behaviors. The only reason I never subjected myself to extraction, even during my less enlightened days, is that I am not fond of undue pain and would rather not pay the $200 (or more) fine that comes with it, along with a doubling or tripling of the time I would spend in seg. (When you consider that the usual prison job might pay you thirty dollars a month at best, you can see what an impossible debt that $200 is, since all your pay and any money your family sends will be commandeered until it’s paid off, and you don’t work or get paid anything while you’re in seg.)

Since most of these guys have little or no ability to anticipate or consider consequences in the heat of the moment, the Department of Corrections makes thousands of dollars in such fines — those 86 extractions brought in $17,200 in one day — taking advantage of inmates’ inabilities instead of helping to cure them.

Long-term seg units give inmates ‘packets’ that they are required to complete prior to release back into general population. These are basically a joke. The packets ask inmates to explore their behavior in an attempt to get them to understand how their thinking and actions led to their being in solitary. But there are no simple cookie-cutter answers to such complexities.

These inmates have spent their whole lives becoming who they are; a year or more of solitary confinement cannot alter the mentality that has been created during a lifetime — except to enhance the most negative elements of it. I mean, think about it: the very last things you’re likely to acquire while locked alone in a concrete cube are empathy or civil behavior or social conflict-solving techniques.

I am not an expert, so I can not propose satisfactory solutions to the dilemma of holding criminals accountable and at the same time avoiding any contribution to their mental and behavioral instabilities. A few things come to mind, though, primarily the need to help these guys understand the importance of becoming educated. Services using former prisoners, who are more likely to be regarded with respect and attention, could teach inmates this importance and provide opportunities to pursue all kinds of knowledge and skills, which would give them an incentive to stay out of trouble and to better themselves.

This would fill another important need: our need to feel useful and have something to do good for. Those who have been discarded by society — unloved, unwanted, uncared for — need this above all: a way to acquire or regain that sense of worth. Burying us alive in concrete cubes has exactly the opposite effect.

What society has done is invest in more and more solitary confinement cubes that intensify the problem, instead of investing in the education that could cure or prevent it. Somewhere I read that it is cheaper to send someone to Harvard than to incarcerate him for a year. That says it all, doesn’t it?

Photo and original handwritten note by a youth in solitary confinement from photographer Ara Oshagan’s project “Juvies,” which documents high-risk juvenile offenders being tried as adults in California.

Solitary for Children

If the above looks like hell for an adult, consider please what solitary confinement does to a child, who has no experience or knowledge of how to survive such isolation. Children, by definition, are dependent on others — parents, teachers, siblings, friends, neighbors, bus drivers, whatever — for their emotional and intellectual development and stability. Take all those contacts away, and the child becomes feral and loses all incentive and ability to behave appropriately.

I know. I was fifteen years old when I was arrested, and spent eight months alone in a solitary confinement cell while awaiting trial. Another child locked in solitary summed it up grimly:

What comes from nothing?
What kind of change comes from solitude?
When has anything new grown from complaining?
When the days have been stripped of their meaning and purpose
And we exist only in physicality,
life becomes a poor imitation of death.

Trapped in that cube, I forgot what sunlight and fresh air were. I was allowed one book a week, a golf pencil and two sheets of paper a day. The term ‘driving me up the wall’ is an exact description of what it felt like. I spent a lot of hours crying because I didn’t know what to do with my thoughts. I didn’t know what my emotions were, much less how to deal with them. I did the only thing a kid with my limited emotional experience can do: directed my negative emotions into relentless hate and disdain.

This molded me into a scared, hateful, angry person, which I never was by nature, drugged into compliance by jail staff. By the time of my trial, I had given up any thought or hope of being anything else. How such a human wreck could be expected to participate in his own defense is an abiding mystery. In this condition I was convicted and sent upstate, where my continued erratic behavior led to more and more time in solitary for breaking prison rules or mouthing off to guards.
I hated seg, and still do. But that never deterred me, because by the time of my trial and for years afterward, I simply didn’t care any more.

Note: Finally the issue of solitary confinement and its abuses is gaining some national attention, thanks largely to the efforts of Solitary Watch: News from a Nation in Lockdown, which has been collecting the voices of prisoners in the hole and recently took our voices to Congress for the first ever hearing on the subject. Stay tuned for further developments.

Defense Motion Describes Bradley Manning’s “Unlawful Pretrial Punishment” in Solitary Confinement

August 11, 2012 Solitary Watch

by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

 

David E. Coombs, attorney for accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning, has made public a motion “to dismiss all charges owing to the unlawful pretrial punishment to which PFC Manning was subjected while at Marine Corps Base, Quantico.” Manning spent close to nine months in solitary confinement in the Brig at Quantico, from July 2010 to April 2011, before being transferred into less restrictive conditions at Fort Leavenworth.

Manning was held in conditions that were denounced as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez. His lawyer is now arguing that they were also in “flagrant violation” of military code. Keep in mind that Manning had not–and still has not–been convicted of any crime, nor had he been accused of any disciplinary violations while in custody.
According to the motion, as summarzied on Coombs’s website, “a decision had been made early on at Quantico to keep PFC Manning in MAX Custody and in Prevention of Injury (POI) status — in effect, the functional equivalent of solitary confinement.” The motion further argues that “Multiple psychiatrists at the Quantico Brig recommended for almost nine months that PFC Manning be downgraded from POI status.  The psychiatrists informed Quantico Brig officials that PFC Manning’s POI status was not warranted because he did not present a risk to himself and that the POI status was actually causing PFC Manning psychological harm.  The psychiatrists’ recommendations were outright ignored by Quantico officials.”

The defense claims it has documents that “reveal that the senior Brig officer who ordered PFC Manning to be held in MAX and in POI was receiving his marching orders from a three-star general. They also reveal that everyone at Quantico was complicit in the unlawful pretrial punishment, from senior officers to enlisted marines.”

Many aspects of Bradley Manning’s conditions of confinement at Quantico will sound familiar to the tens of thousands of American prisoners who have spent time in solitary confinement in supermax prisons and Special Housing Units. Additional restrictions were put in place supposedly because he was at risk of harming himself, though they in fact seem only to have added to his torture. According to the summary of the motion:

PFC Manning was placed in a 6×8 cell with no window or natural light. Owing to his classification as a MAX detainee, PFC Manning was subject to the following restrictions:

• PFC Manning was placed in a cell directly in front of the guard post to facilitate his constant monitoring.
• PFC Manning was awoken at 0500 hours and required to remain awake in his cell from 0500 to 2200 hours.
• PFC Manning was not permitted to lie down on his rack during the duty day. Nor was PFC Manning permitted to lean his back against the cell wall; he had to sit upright on his rack without any back support.
• Whenever PFC Manning was moved outside his cell, the entire facility was locked down.
• Whenever PFC Manning was moved outside his cell, he was shackled with metal hand and leg restraints and accompanied by at least two guards.
• From 29 July 2010 to 10 December 2010, PFC Manning was permitted only 20 minutes of “sunshine call.”  Aside from a 3-5 minute shower, this would be the only time PFC Manning would regularly spend outside his cell.  During this sunshine call, he would be brought to a small concrete yard, about half to a third of the size of a basketball court.  PFC Manning would be permitted to walk around the yard in hand and leg shackles, while being accompanied by a Brig guard…
• From 10 December 2010 onward, PFC Manning was permitted a one hour recreation call.  At this point, the Brig authorized the removal of his hand and leg shackles and PFC Manning was no longer required to be accompanied by a Brig guard…
• PFC Manning was only authorized non-contact visits.  The non-contact visits were permitted on Saturdays and Sundays between 1200 and 1500 hours by approved visitors.  During these visits, he would have to wear his hand and leg restraints.
• PFC Manning was required to meet his visitors in a small 4 by 6 foot room that was separated with a glass partition.  His visits were monitored by the guards and they were audio recorded by the Brig…
• PFC Manning was only permitted non-contact visits with his attorneys. During these visits, he was shackled at the hands and feet.
• PFC Manning was not permitted any work duty.

Owing to PFC Manning being placed on continuous POI status, he was subject to the following further restrictions:

• PFC Manningwas subject to constant monitoring; the Brig guards were required to check on him every five minutes by asking him some variation of, “are you okay?” PFC Manning was required to respond in some affirmative manner.   Guards were required to make notations every five minutes in a logbook.
• At night, if the guards could not see him clearly, because he had a blanket over his head or he was curled up towards the wall, they would wake PFC Manning in order to ensure that he was okay.
• At night, only some of the lights would be turned off.  Additionally, there was a florescent light in the hall outside PFC Manning’s cell that would stay on at night.
• PFC Manning was required to receive each of his meals alone in his cell.  He was only permitted to eat with a spoon.
• There were usually no detainees on either side of PFC Manning.  If PFC Manning attempted to speak to those detainees that were several cells away from him, the guards would order him to stop speaking.
• PFC Manning originally was provided with a standard mattress and no pillow. PFC Manning tried to fold the mattress to make a pillow so that he could be more comfortable when sleeping.  Brig officials did not like this, so on 15 December 2010 they provided him with a suicide mattress with a built-in pillow…
• PFC Manning was not permitted regular sheets or blankets.  Instead he was provided with a tear-proof security blanket.  This blanket was extremely coarse…The blanket did not keep PFC Manning warm because it did not retain heat and, due to its stiffness, did not contour to his body.
• PFC Manningwas not allowed to have any personal items in his cell.
• PFC Manningwas only allowed to have one book or one magazine at any given time to read.  If he was not actively reading, the book or magazine would be taken away from him.  Also, the book or magazine would be taken away from him at the end of the day before he went to sleep.
• For the last month of his confinement at Quantico, PFC Manning was given a pen and five pieces of paper along with his book.  However, if he was not actively reading his book and taking notes, these items would be taken away from him.
• PFC Manning was prevented from exercising in his cell.  If he attempted to do push-ups, sit-ups, or any other form of exercise he would be forced to stop.
• When PFC Manning went to sleep, he was required to strip down to his underwear and surrender his clothing to the guards.
• PFC Manning was only permitted hygiene items as needed. PFC Manning would have to request toilet paper every time he wanted to go to the bathroom; at times, he had to wait for guards to provide him with toilet paper.
• There was no soap in his cell.  PFC Manning requested soap to wash his hands after using the bathroom; guards would sometimes get the soap, and sometimes not.
• PFC Manning was not permitted to wear shoes in his cell.
• PFC Manning was initially only permitted correspondence time for one hour a day; after 27 October 2010, this was changed to two hours per day.

According to the complaint, at one point, after he suffered an apparent anxiety attack and then protested his conditions, a Brig official “placed PFC Manning in Suicide Risk status, over the recommendation of a Brig psychiatrist.” For two days he was confined to his cell, permitted to wear only his underwear during the day, and forced to sleep naked at night; his eyeglasses were also taken away. After he complained about his conditions again, Manning was “required to wear a heavy and restrictive suicide smock which irritated his skin and, on one occasion, almost choked him.”
As Matt Williams writes at the Guardian:

The defence motion is brought under Article 13 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It states that “no person, while being held for trial, may be subjected to punishment or penalty other than arrest or confinement upon the charges pending against him, nor shall the arrest or confinement imposed upon him be any more rigorous than the circumstances required to insure his presence.”Under Article 13, if a judge decides that a member of the armed forces has been illegally punished before trial, he can grant the prisoner credit on the amount of time they have already served in custody, or can even dismiss all charges outright.

For more detailed readings of the motion, see Kevin Gosztola’s blog at Firedoglake and Kim Zetter’s post on Wired.

New Report Examines the Hardships of Life After Solitary Confinement

August 10, 2012 Solitary Watch

by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

 

An important new report, released yesterday by the American Friends Service Committee in Arizona, is the first to focus on the effects solitary confinement has on its survivors afterthey leave prison. Lifetime in Lockdown: How Isolation Conditions Impact Prisoner Reentry, finds that spending time in solitary leaves people “deeply traumatized and essentially socially disabled.” These “crippling symptoms” combine with “the extensive legal and structural barriers to successful reentry” to create “recipe for failure.” It is hardly surprising, then, that the report is able to “directly link conditions in Arizona’s supermax prisons with the state’s high recidivism rate.”

Lifetimes in Lockdown raises issues that have been largely absent from research and discussions on prisoner reentry and recidivism. As the report points out:

Much of the discourse…has focused on what are referred to as ‘collateral consequences’: the structural barriers erected by institutions that bar people with criminal convictions from voting, housing, employment, welfare assistance, and other factors critical to ensuring success upon release. Rarely is there discussion of the direct impact that prison conditions have on a person’s cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral functioning and therefore, on that person’s ability to function as a member of society post-incarceration.

The most serious problems, of course, result from the ”deleterious mental health impacts of incarceration in super maximum-security—or “supermax”—environments,” which remain with people long after they leave solitary for the general population, or leave prison for the free world. In addition, the report finds, “policies limiting visitation and prohibiting maximum-security prisoners from participation in education, treatment, and employment have a negative impact on these prisoners’ reentry prospects.”

Yet the Arizona Department of Corrections, like most prison systems, does little to “prepare prisoners who have been held in supermax during their incarceration for reentry to the community,” and on the outside, “social service agencies are largely unaware of, and unprepared to address, the special needs of this population.” Many survivors of solitary “‘slip through the cracks,’ while others self-isolate and deliberately avoid social service agencies.”


The report is based largely on research done by Dr. Brackette F. Williams, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, under a Soros Justice Fellowship. Under the name “Project Homecoming,” Brackette worked with the AFSC in Arizona to study the impact of solitary confinement on prisoner reetry. As the report notes:

Psychologist Dr. Terry Kupers makes the comparison between prisoners who have just been released from solitary confinement in a supermax facility and persons who were recently on suicide watch. The most likely and dangerous time for violence, acting out, or another crisis to occur is immediately after one is released. Dr. Kupers says, “Whether a prisoner leaves the isolation unit and gets into trouble on the yard or ‘maxes out…’ and gets into trouble in the community, we are seeing a new population of prisoners who, on account of lengthy stints in isolation units, are not well prepared to return to a social milieu.” This is an institutional and systemic problem that is created by the conditions of incarceration…

The participants reported that they would often avoid the areas where the few available social service agencies, transitional homes, and homeless shelters are located, because these are areas where they made poor choices previously. Likewise, available shelters offer very little in the way of privacy, are always crowded, and difficult to get into. For prisoners who have spent years in isolation, such an environment would be the last place they would want to turn. While deciding to avoid problem locations would usually be considered wise, the reality is complex–in these cases, it renders the individuals even more isolated and lacking any support networks or services. Here, the self-inflicted social isolation that was created by the extreme isolation in prison is most noticeably debilitating.

In describing his life on the outside, one participant who avoided old neighborhoods and contacts said that “life is way harder out here for me than it is in there.” He is not alone in this nostalgia for prison life and for the isolation of the supermax cell. A female participant, also homeless and barely getting by at the time of the interview, said almost ashamedly, “The worst thing that I can honestly say about trying to get back into society is I miss my cage more and more everyday. I just can’t function out here.” When asked, “Do you want to the small cage back or the big cage?” she replied, “The smaller the better. I can control everything in it.” They make repeated efforts to avoid people, for example moving to the edge of the city or living alone in a tunnel. It is strikingly reminiscent of the social withdrawal that Craig Haney describes as endemic to persons held in isolation for long periods, except now they are outside the supermax cell, in the great wide open of supposed freedom, which terrifies them.

Thoughts of suicide permeated many of the participants’ interviews, especially when the conversation turned toward plans for the future. At least 10 of the male participants (50 percent) from Pima County had considered suicide between their release from prison and their first interview. Each participant who reported suicidal thoughts mentioned them in more than one of their interviews. Strikingly, some of these men had been out of prison less than one week when the first interview took place. They reported the inability to see a viable way to remain out of prison, yet at the same time could not imagine doing more prison time. By their final interview, three of these men stated that they considered suicide on a daily basis, but had yet to act on these considerations. A few also considered committing some crime that would land them back in prison and allow for more time to devise a better strategy for handling life on the outside.

Anyone leaving prison is faced with an unwelcoming social landscape. The simultaneous necessity and absence of housing and work are experienced immediately. The freedom of release is truncated by limited housing options, partially as a result of neighborhood bans on people with felony convictions, and a job market that has very little inclination or incentive to hire former prisoners. Add to this reality significantly higher rates of mental illness; tendencies toward social withdrawal; lack of support networks or family to rely on due to the added social distance of a supermax prison; and no transition services after spending years in the most extreme isolation, and the experience of a former supermax prisoner begins to take shape. More notably it begins to demonstrate the compounded effects of supermax confinement and the additional limitations once released. In the same way, one prisoner’s perceived ease of life in prison compared to his experiences of life on the outside, as well as another’s longing for a space she can control even if it is a cage, demonstrates precisely the extra layer of difficulties created by prolonged isolation.

A press release from AFSC calls the report’s findings ”a wake-up call to corrections officials, state leaders, and social service agencies, who are often completely unaware of the prison experiences of their clients or how to assist them in this transition. AFSC hopes that this research will add to the growing body of evidence that the practice of long-term solitary confinement in supermax units creates more problems than it is purported to solve and should be abolished.”

AFSC also notes that “the release of this report coincides with the launch of Arizona is Maxed Out, a joint campaign with the ACLU of Arizona against the planned expansion of maximum-security prisons in Arizona. The latest state budget allocated $50 million to build 500 more maximum-security beds in the next two years.”

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

August 7, 2012 Solitary Watch

by Sal Rodriguez

 

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

According to Mutope Duguma (legal name James Crawford) at Pelican Bay, it’s his political views “that got me placed in solitary confinement and labeled a BGF member, which I am not, but in order to place you in solitary confinement IGI/ISU/OCS have to label you a BGF if you’re a New Afrikan.”
He has been in solitary for over a decade. “My cell has a concrete slab bed, the cell is white with a concrete brick slab for TV holding. Toilet and sink connected all in one and the steel front panel door and a white painted wall in front. No trees. No animals. No sun. No life. Just prisoners isolated from the world,” he writes.

Life for men in the SHU is bleak, reports Duguma., “I get up at 5:30 AM, go to the yard when my rotation comes around for 90 minutes, then I am back in my cell for the rest of the day.”
Inmates labeled BGF are routinely validated on the basis of their political views. In a June 2012 ruling, the California Court of Appeals found that Duguma’s political writings were wrongly used to prevent outgoing mail to the San Francisco Bay View newspaper.  Duguma referred to himself as a “New Afrikan Nationalist Revolutionary Man.”

A Correctional officer intercepted the letter and sent a “Stopped Mail Notification”, indicating that the letter “promotes gang activity,” and that his writings were a reference to “ideology created by the Black Guerilla Family.”

Stanford Professor James Campbell, after reading the letter, told the court that Duguma is “a serious political thinker using terms such as ‘New Afrikan’ and ‘New Afrikan Nationalist Revolutionary Man’ that were ubiquitous in Black urban life in the 1960s and 1970s…”

The court ultimately ruled that “without any evidence showing the letter to promote violence or otherwise threaten security, the confiscation violates the First Amendment” and ordered that the letter finally be sent to the Bay View.

According to accounts by men in California’s SHUs, drawings are also used to justify the continued isolation of inmates. One common image that is used to validate inmates is any drawing of a dragon. For the BGF, one of their symbols is a dragon squeezing a prison guard tower.
According to J., an inmate at Corcoran State Prison:

A K-9 unit was allowed into our cells and spilled some coffee on a Japanese cultural piece I’m doing for an auction to aid the Japanese Tsunami Relief Fund which depicts the Sun Goddess Amazerasu releasing a phoenix into the sky at sunrise over the Sea of Japan wearing a kimoni with imperial dragons on it and a crown featuring the Japense Imperial Crest (Dragon and Phoenix). When I filed to have IGI/ISU compensate me for the piece, after reviewing the work, it was returned to me and I was told that if I attempted to mail it out it would be confiscated because “it has dragons on the kimono and you’re B.G.F.”

I asked–”Are you saying the Japanese Imperial family is B.G.F?” The response was “If you try to mail it out we’ll take it.”

In addition, J. writes, “D. and I wrote several pieces for newsletters. These were confiscated by an I.G.I. officer and were used as “BGF gang material” as a basis to deny D.’s inactive status.”
D., also at the Corcoran SHU, writes:

Think about this. I could write as many letters as I want. And call someone as many “n’s” as I want. Call women all manner of foul things. I can even compare the President to Adolf Hitler. And it would be cool. Protected speech. But they have actually criminalized certain people, language.

I could mention the first or last name of certain Afrikans, and I would automatically be accused of gang activity. Even if the person was dead.

If they came in the cell and found an actual book marker that came from a vendor with books. And the book marker had a drawing of a dragon on it. They would say that it’s gang activity. Some of this has sunk to such a low level that it would be as comical as it sounds were it not so destructive.

D.’s reference to the potential for gang validation for saying something about a dead person is actually based on how he himself was validated. Gang validation documents sent to Solitary Watch indicate that among the pieces of evidence of gang activity in his case (which ranged from a confidential informant to his name appearing on a piece of paper in another inmates cell), was a eulogy he had written for a deceased African-American inmate who had been a BGF member.
While it cannot be definitively said that none of these men have ever been involved with the BGF, it appears from these and other instances of seemingly weak evidence of gang activity that prison officials may be overreaching in their efforts to curb legitimately disruptive gang activity.

One Year After Historic Hunger Strike, Isolated California Prisoners Report Little Change

August 6, 2012 Solitary Confinement

by Sal Rodriguez

 

At this time one year ago, a three week hunger strike across California prisons had been concluded, and the California Assembly had begun planning a hearing on the use of solitary confinement in California’s prisons. The conditions of the California Security Housing Units, where over 3,000 inmates are held in isolation, many for decades, had come to the public’s attention. In the time since August 2011, there would be another round of three week hunger strikes, a smaller series of hunger strikes at the Corcoran Administrative Segregation Unit, a new “Step Down Program” announced in California, a federal lawsuit filed by Pelican Bay SHU inmates, and a US Senate hearing on solitary confinement.

Even so, the situation in the SHUs and ASUs remains much as it did one year ago. A few concessions by prison officials, such as issuing sweatpants and allowing family photos, did nothing to change the problem of long-term isolation and non-existent due process.

It should be reiterated that in California, the majority of SHU inmates are not necessarily there for conduct, but for gang membership.

In a letter to California activists, Pelican Bay hunger strike leader Alfred Sandoval reports feeling  like “just banging my head against the wall because nothing ever changes around here. Right now the Department of Corruption and the current administration have been attempting to pacify prisoners with items…ie. sweats, watch caps, and various food items from canteen–in hopes of distracting us …”

He continues, “the sad fact is that some have been complacent and accepted the physical and psychological abuses as normal because it has been implemented in small increments over decades, year after year so it has become the norm.”


Isolated inmates throughout California continue to report desolate conditions and more-of-the-same.
According to one inmate in the Corcoran State Prison SHU, “The reality is there is a significant number of us for whom death holds no real fear, in fact, in some ways—as an alternative to another few decades of this—it holds some appeal. If it becomes necessary to take up peaceful protest again—and it’s unfortunately looking that way—you may be writing a lot more Christian Gomez articles…Most here only want to, after so very long, hold their children, kiss their wives, speak to their families, and have access to some meaningful program that will give them some hope of parole, higher education, and marketable job skills. But all of this is indicative of a sick society, of values and mores that have never been seriously and confronted and corrected in the history of U.S. social, political, and economic development.”

Christian Gomez was an inmate in Corcoran State Prison’s ASU who died while participating in a January-Feburary hunger strike protesting the conditions of the ASU.

One of the leaders of the Corcoran ASU strike, Juan Jaimes, was transfered during the strike to Kern Valley State Prison’s ASU unit as a means of limiting the strike. Jaimes recently reported to the San Francisco Bay View that he has received poor medical care for a broken back.

Another Corcoran inmate who has been in the SHU for over 20 years also reports doubts about the Step Down Program, and thinks that there will be no changes. He also offers his opinion on the validity of the SHU in the first place, echoing the sentiments of many SHU inmates that any use of isolation should be based on conduct rather than gang affiliation.

“I don’t think anyone should be housed in isolation for more than a few weeks, if at all, and without meaningful program. SHU should consist of a system that includes earning meaningful privileges, and a dignified manner in being released. The SHU should be used for exactly the purpose that it is supposed to be used for: to house those prisoners who conduct threatens the safety and security of the prison,” he writes.

An inmate at North Kern State Prison’s Administrative Segregation Unit reports that himself and several inmates have waited over a year to be transferred to one of the SHU’s. “The waiting list can take up to three years, I’ve been here 15 months due to the overcrowding by the I.G.I. (Institutional Gang Investigators) validating everybody as prison gang members,” he writes, “a lot of us New Afrikans, Latin Amerikans, poor whites and indiegenous people have been labeled for reading our culture and history…I’ve witnessed men lose their minds behind these walls, cut their wrists to kill themselves in order to escape this mental torture, spread feces on themselves and the walls, yell out and scream, some are on psychotropic medication that causes them to turn into human zombies where they don’t even know who they are anymore.”

Solitary Watch will continue to report on the situation in California as information becomes available.

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

August 4, 2012 Solitary Watch

by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway 

 

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

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

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

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


Cohen first parses “What’s in the Memo”:

You can decide for yourself what you think of the tone of the memo. Some of you likely will find it a cruel and patronizing attempt by federal bureaucrats and lawyers to try to cover their asses in anticipation of litigation to come. For example:
“Every institution is staffed with psychologists who provide counseling and other supportive mental health services. Anytime you want to speak with a psychologist, let staff know and they will contact Psychology Services to make the necessary arrangements.”

Others may find its touchy-feely language particularly odd given the memo’s audience. This memo was sent to hundreds of thousands of federal prisoners, including some of the most deadly and violent America currently has in custody. For example:
“If you are unable to think of solutions other than suicide, it is not because solutions do not exist; it is because you are currently unable to see them. Do not lose hope. Solutions can be found, feelings change, unanticipated positive events occur. Look for meaning and purpose in educational and treatment programs, faith, work, family and friends.”

And then there is this passage, which makes Tom Hanks’ “The Green Mile” guard Paul Edgecomb seem like Cool Hand Luke’s jailer. Remember, Director Samuels here is speaking to men who live in such detention and isolation — often as punishment for past conduct in prison — that they have gone clinically mad from the conditions of their confinement:

“You may be reading this message while in a Special Housing Unit or Special Management Unit cell, thinking your life is moving in the wrong direction. But wherever you are, whatever your circumstances, my commitment to you is the same. I want you to succeed.”

Cohen then comments on “What’s Not in the Memo”:

[No one can read the memo] and reasonably conclude that the Bureau of Prisons is planning to help solve the problem by hiring more doctors and psychiatrists. The June civil rights complaint, in the case now styled Bacote v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, alleges that there are only two mental health professionals responsible for the care of 450 prisoners at Supermax. With such a ratio, it’s ridiculous to think that even those inmates who want to accept Director Samuels’ kind invitation are going to be successful in doing so.

Nor can anyone read the July 20 memo and reasonably conclude that the Bureau of Prisons intends to modify its rules, which prohibit the use of psychotropic drugs in its “Control Units,” the most secure detention portions of its prisons. That’s the essence of the complaints in both pending cases: The Constitution requires adequate medical treatment, including mental health treatment, but often the inmates who need medicine the most are the ones who cannot by policy and practice get it.

Nor, finally, can anyone read Director Samuels’ memo as indicative of a shift in prison policy that will encourage the reporting of staff abuse of mentally ill prisoners.The Bacote complaint alleges that, at ADX Florence, the prison “watchdog” official responsible for investigating allegations of official misconduct is married to the prison official who is responsible for “all correctional functions” at the facility. How could an inmate take Samuels up on his invitation and expect much of a growl from the watchdog?

It’s essential to read the rest of the piece, in which Cohen describes some of the prisoners at ADX Florence who presumably received this memo. They include one man who “has cut off his scrotum, and a testicle, and has amputated some of his fingers,” another who “allegedly crawls around ADX Florence on one leg because prison officials have refused to replace his prosthetic,” and another who “tried to commit suicide in 2008, [and] was promptly returned to the cell in which he had made the attempt, a cell which was still covered in his own blood.” One prisoner who sought help, as the BOP director suggests, “was given a “tele-psychiatry” session whereby he spoke via video conference with an off-site doctor. [He] alleges that, during the session, he was handcuffed from behind with shackles on his legs and surrounded by corrections officers.”

Cohen concludes that the memo is really directed not toward any prisoners who might actually take Samuels up on his offer, but toward the lawsuits the BOP now faces. The response to those suits, Cohen asserts, can be found at the end of the memo:

“I want your life to go forward in a positive direction — a direction personally fulfilling to you, but also a direction which ensures the safety of the staff and inmates who interact with you each day.”

That’s the argument — that, even if the allegations are true, the deprivation of medicine and care, the emptiness of reporting safeguards, and even the occasional abuse are necessary to ensure the safety of the prison, its staff, and its inmates. The sub-argument is that, even if reasonable people disagree about how to treat the mentally ill in our nation’s prisons, the final call ought to be made by prison officials as “experts” in the field. Read’s Samuels’ statement to that effect, made in June during a Senate subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill.

In fact, this is the same argument that is made time and again, in prisons and jails across the country, to justify solitary confinement and all manner of abuses. Matters of “safety and security”–which are defined by prison staff, and no one else–trump all other concerns, including the possible torture of people in prison.

Central Prisoners Vote to End Hunger Strike

August 4, 2012 Prison Books.info

 

We just received word that earlier this week prisoners at Central in Raleigh voted to end their hunger strike, started on July 16th in protest of conditions on Unit 1. We have not heard from prisoners at Bertie or Scotland. Small groups of prisoners at Foothills CI and Tabor CI have also said they have joined the protest.

The strike was organized to take aim at the fundamental conditions of sensory deprivation, psychological and physical torture, and abuse that characterize solitary confinement, and for that matter, prisons in general. It was also catalyzed by the need for law libraries for prisoners to be able to be better organize and defend themselves in the legal realm.

Some of the short term demands of prisoners, such as tools with which to clean cells, clearing the windows to the outside, and other demands have already been granted, but more significant demands have been put to the unit manager and have yet to be addressed. For the strikers involved, it seems like this strike was a way to garner much needed attention towards their conditions, as well as demonstrate to other prisoners that it is indeed possible to organize across lines of race or gang status, and to do so with meaningful support and solidarity from the outside.

At least one of the strikers, Jamey Wilkins, who has also been active in a successful lawsuit against guards, is facing reprisals for his involvement in organizing activity. Despite not having write-ups or infractions, he is being recommended for Supermax. Outside supporters are strongly encouraged to continue to call in or demonstrate on his and others’ behalf; prison officials are trying to send a warning to others who would organize or rebel, and they must be opposed resolutely.

In related news, several of the “Strong 8″ prisoners, eight men who refused to continue to work in the face of unaddressed labor grievances in Central’s kitchens, have been taken off I-Con status and allowed back to general population, despite their involvement in the hunger strike. Others have remained on solitary due to (the admin. claims) infractions.

This hunger strike has garnered a good deal of attention, and the support and solidarity of a number diverse groups. At least four solidarity demonstrations have occurred, as well as a growing swell of support from alternative and social media sources and call-in days from all over the country. So it seems appropriate to end this update with some words of thanks from the strikers with regards to outside support and protest:

“I had assumed that the strike was over until Friday when I heard it on NPR! I’m going to practice solidarity with my fellow activists abroad and push out 2 or 3 days…I really appreciate you guys on your activism and bringing things together. Stay solid!” -Foothills CI, Morganton, NC

“I’ve been housed on Unit 1 since may 15th 2009 for assault on police back in 2007. So I know all the bullshit that goes on here at central or unit 1. I heard y’all  by my cell window good around 1pm or 130 pm on Sunday, but i couldn’t understand the words that was said because everybody on unit one was kicking their cell doors.” – Central Prison, Raleigh, NC

“Keep up the good work all the up and tell everybody we do really, really appreciate all the help of stepping up for prisoners period.” – Central Prison, Raleigh, NC

“I told a couple guys about the hunger strike and we began a little something of our own. It’s only like four of us, but four is plenty!” - Tabor CI, Tabor City, NC

“Thank your for the demo! I heard it from outside. The solidarity is felt.” – Central Prison, Raleigh, NC

“We heard y’all! I was ready to go all out!” – Central Prison, Raleigh, NC

Hopefully this strike can be seen and felt as a beginning. Not to editorialize, but we would urge fellow supporters on the outside not to see this sort of flare-up as a simple quest for certain demands, like toilet brushes or cleaner windows or even law libraries. This kind of moment, even on the small scale in which it has occurred here, can only be fully understood as a struggle for dignity and freedom in the face of the largest and arguably the most brutal system of policing and human warehousing in the history of the world. The forms of these moments will grow and change: it may be a hunger strike today and a riot tomorrow, or a quiet study group the next day. But the content of these struggles, at least for some, remains a burning desire for liberty set against an institutional matrix of petty tyrannies and genocidal abuses that characterize all prisons everywhere.

North Carolina Prisoners Launch Hunger Strike

August 1, 2012 Solitary Watch

by Sal Rodriguez

Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina

On July 16th, inmates at Central Prison, Bertie Correctional Institution and Scotland Correctional Institution launched a hunger strike in protest of various prison conditions, including solitary confinement.  North Carolina Department of Corrections currently holds over 7,000 inmates out of approximately 36,000 in “Close Custody.” Among these are inmates are those held in Maximum Control, Protective Custody, Disciplinary Segregation and Intensive Control. Maximum security units are described this way by the DOC:

Inmates confined in a maximum security unit typically are in their cell 23 hours a day. During the other hour they may be allowed to shower and exercise in the cellblock or an exterior cage. All inmate movement is strictly controlled with the use of physical restraints and correctional officer escort.

Prison officials at Central Prison indicated on July 28th that only seven hunger strikers remained, but that the number fluctuated with inmates joining and stopping. The strikers are all Close Custody inmates and are held in their cell for 23 hours a day in isolation. As many as 100 inmates were reported to have participated since the launch of the strike.
Demands of the strikers include:

• “The end of cell restriction. Sometimes prisoners are locked in their cell for weeks or more than a month, unable to come out for showers and recreation.”
• “An immediate end to the physical and mental abuse inflicted by officers.”
• “Education programs for prisoners on lock-up”
• “The levels of I-Con, M-Con, and H-Con need to be done away with altogether. When one is placed on Intensive Control Status (I-Con), one is placed in the hole for six months and told to stay out of trouble. But even when we stay out of trouble, we are called back to the FCC and DCC only to be told to do another six months in the hold, infraction free.”
• “The immediate release of prisoners from solitary who have been held unjustly or for years without infractions; this includes the Strong 8, sent to solitary for the purpose of political intimidation.”

Central Prison in Raleigh was the site of a strike by inmates in December 2011. The inmates were protesting conditions in their kitchen employment. The strike leaders, referred to as the “Strong 8″ were placed in solitary confinement for launching the work stoppage. According to one of the strike leaders placed in the Intensive Control unit, “I-Con is an intensive form of segregation, typically 23 hours a day in a small solitary cell, with few if any resources available, constantly censored mail, and little recreational activity. Sentences on I-Con often last 6 months or longer.”

Central Prison currently holds over 600 inmates in Close Custody. In March, an inmate with a history of self-harm was found dead in his solitary confinement cell. In North Carolina, self-harm can be punished by up to 30 days in isolation.

According to local media, it is the intention of the DOC to address the concerns of the inmates after the strike ends.

Suicide in Solitary: The Death of Alex Machado

July 24, 2012 Solitary Watch

by Sal Rodriguez

Alexis “Alex” Machado was a prisoner at Pelican Bay State Prison’s isolation units for nearly two years when he took his own life on October 24, 2011.

According to the autopsy report, Machado was last seen alive at approximately 12:15 AM “as he was examined and then cleared by medical staff for a complaint of heart palpitations.” Thirty minutes later, at 12:45 AM, an officer found Machado and reported that “….Machado [was] hanging inside his cell…” He was seen “sitting on the floor with a sheet tied to his neck and the sheet tied to the top bunk.”

Concluded the autopsy: “The decedent died as a result of asphyxiation due to strangulation by hanging.” Toxicology reports were negative.

As institutional records and letters from Machado in the year leading up to his death show, he had been suffering severe psychological problems in response to his prolonged isolation. Once a jailhouse lawyer whose writings were both clearly and intelligently composed, his mental state would decline at Pelican Bay.

Machado had been incarcerated since 1999 on a robbery charge and a related shooting. He was sentenced to an 80-to-life prison term. Described as an intelligent and thoughtful man with a warm smile by his sister, Cynthia, he generally experienced no problems in his initial 11 years of incarceration. For most of his time, he was held at Kern Valley State Prison.

Things began to change in late 2007, when a race riot took place. “The prison said he was the one who started the riot,” according to Cynthia, “when he really had nothing to do with it.”

His involvement in the riot would result in his being placed in Administrative Segregation Unit (ASU) in December 2007. Though he was never officially found guilty for the riot, prison gang investigators would begin to build a case for his validation as a gang member. In December 2008, he was placed in the ASU again for “manufacturing a weapon”; in January 2009, a confidential informant was officially cited by prison officials as evidence of his gang activity.

He was finally validated as a gang associate, in large part due to the confidential informant, on February 4th, 2010.  In his appeal of the validation, he argued that the source items used in his validation were insufficient, saying that “these allegations are not true and I initiated nothing.”

Drawing by Machado of his niece

He further charged in his appeal that his validation as a gang member was in retaliation of his acquittal in the racial riot case.

He was sent to Pelican Bay to serve an indeterminate SHU sentence on February 17th, 2010 from the Kern Valley ASU.

Being screened into Pelican Bay, he reported no psychological problems.

Soon after arriving, however, he reported in letters that he was consistently harassed by the guards. In a letter dated March 10th, 2010, he wrote that “when I first got here an officer told me that he was being pressured to make a bogus psychologist referral on me…I guess they want to make it look like I am going crazy.” He reported that guards took him to debrief in an attempt to make him look like an informant. Further, he was told that a green light (hit order) had been placed on him; a claim that he didn’t believe.

An ASU classification document indicates that he received some mental health services in May 2010, and previously in October 2009.

A mental health chronos indicates his first significant problem at Pelican Bay surfaced on January 24, 2011 with a mental health referral from a correctional officer for paranoia.” Also beginning in January, he was noted to have decreased the number of showers he took, from a regular of three a week to only once or twice a week.

He received a 115 (rules violation report) on March 1, 2011 for  ”willfully resisting” officers after “fishing line” for communication with other inmates was found and he refused to “cuff up.” He told the health care worker who saw him after his extraction with pepper spray that “I want you to put down that they are denying my legal mail.”

On May 31st, a mental health referral reported that he “stated he is being watched, listened to, cell has bugs and cameras. He also stated he hears knocking on all his cell walls.”

Things would decline significantly in June. On June 5th, a mental health record reports that he was depressed, anxious, poor hygiene/grooming, hallucinations, paranoia and delusion. He reported that is presenting complaints were listed as “hearing voices, can’t sleep anxiety a ttacks, someone/something controlling thoughts, hasn’t cleaned cell in three days.”

Days later he would receive another referral for anxiety and reporting increased heart rate and breathing. On June 12th, he was placed in a crisis room for threatening to kill himself.
The following is from a Counseling Chrono dated June 21, 2011:

On Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 1440 hours I was summoned to the cell of Inmate Machado…by Registered Nurse…Upon looking in the cell window, I observed a noose hanging from the air duct. I observed the No-Tear Mattress lying on the cell floor torn apart. I ordered Machado to submit to handcuffs, to which he complied. After handcuffing Machado I placed him in holding cell #136 so Dr. N could speak with him. I returned to cell 188 and observed feces smeared on the right wall. It appears Machado had torn off the outer layer of the mattress, fashioned a noose from it, and tied the noose to the vent…

Just days after the incident, he was issued a notice that he would be placed in Pelican Bay’s Administrative Segregation Unit:

You were endorsed by the CSR on 02/04/10 to serve an indeterminate SHU term, due to your validation as an Associate of the …prison gang…On 06/22/11, your Mental Health Level of Care (LOC) was elevated to Correctional Clinical Case Management (CCCMS), PBSP-SHU Exclusionary; therefore, your placement in PBSP-SHU is no longer appropriate. Due to the above, on 06/22/11, a decision was made to place you in the PBSP Administrative Segregation Unit. Single celled due to prison gang validation.

By June 30th, he was deemed to have “active psychotic symptoms” but had a low risk of suicide.
On July 6th, he threw his breakfast through his food port and refused breakfast the next day. On the date of the incident a referral indicated ”inappropriate behaviors”, “hallucinating” and “poor impulse control.” The referral notes that he believed “electromagnetic pulses are interfering with his thoughts.”

A mental health document says later that “[he] is believed to be in a desperate situation with an equal amount of anxiety. During ICC in Ad Seg, he refused the debriefing process; hence his situation appears to be deteriorating possibly leading to [his] current state of mind.”

In June and July, he was variously diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder and Brief Psychotic Disorder. According to his sister, though he was officially granted a vegetarian diet for religious reasons, he would primarily subsist on an unhealthy cheese-only diet due to his being allergic to peanuts, the other primary component of a prison vegetarian food tray. This is believed by his sister to have been one of the factors that contributed to the already physically and mentally stressful environment.

Alex Machado’s Suicide Note

Machado’s sister noticed her once coherent and seemingly adjusted brother decline in his time at Pelican Bay. “I noticed he started writing strange things, about seeing things,” she says. Around this time, she and her mother called Pelican Bay after receiving a despondent letter from Alex. “I’m afraid for my sons life,” Machado’s mother told one of his mental health counselors.
Though CDCR has previously gone on the record to say that he was not a participant in the hunger strikes, the Machado family believes that he in fact did participate in the strikes. He reportedly mentioned the strike many times in letters sent to his family.

In late July or early August, he sent a letter to his sister claiming that he saw “someone I know and I saw another in pieces and demons…I don’t know the significance of it…I hope it was a hallucination.” He wrote that was taken to the infirmary for leg pains, where he further wrote:

I was handcuffed in a cell and was being watched by two officers I never seen before…I was handcuffed for what seemed like an eternity. I felt like I was in that room handcuffed for days but it was only an hour…the shooting in my case flashed in my mind and they suggested I died that day in the shooting and that I was now in ‘purgatory’ or in ‘Dantes Inferno.’ I felt trapped. I thought I was condemned to be handcuffed in that cell forever. They made me believe I was killed in real life. I thought I was caught in another realm. I saw insects in the cell and demons. It was way out I don’t know what happened…

Also written while at Pelican Bay, Machado reflected on his decade long incarceration, writing ”I wish my life was different and that we could all be out there together…I don’t know what to do. I’m stuck and I have been away from home for a long time now.”

In the final months of his life, he would continue to spend over 22 hours a day in a small cell. His letters came less and less frequently. During his time at Pelican Bay, he told his family not to make the over 700-mile trip to visit him. He didn’t want them to see him in chains.

Though his letters in the two months leading to his death were increasingly distorted, he did have some glimmer of hope. He had secured a lawyer who was in the process of challenging his original criminal conviction.

His sister describes his plight this way,

“It takes one inmate informant to report you falsely. Then you are in solitary confinement. When you want to fight to get out it is impossible because of all the torture that goes on in there physically and mentally.”

After years of isolation, paranoia, and gradual deterioration, he took his life.

“He was a loving brother, son, and uncle…raised by a single mother and got lost in the system,” says Cynthia. “He wanted to be treated fair.”

The Machado family welcomes any assistance in getting Alex Machado’s story out. If you’d like to contact the Machado family email the author of this article at: Sal_SolitaryW@yahoo.com.