Category Archives: Prison Letters

New Poem by Conway: “J Cat”

I sent my prison pen pal “Conway” a copy of an article I blogged about this summer, concerning psychosis-inducing conditions at America’s supermax prisons. This poem was his response. In prison slang, “J Cat” (derived from “Category J” in the California Penal Code) refers to an inmate who is deemed too mentally ill to be housed with the general population.

My understanding is that this is a persona poem; from the tenor of his letters, Conway is not suicidal, but determinedly working on his personal growth and maintaining good relationships with his children and grandchildren on the outside.

California readers, you can help bring their day of reunion closer by voting Yes on 36, the Three-Strikes Reform Act.

J Cat

Even if you find your mind waking in a padded room,
    Don’t panic!
realize comfort, that it’s not this concrete tomb.
Your friends (in your head) it is said
might share a little love (even if they’re dead)
When the shit goes down, then the goon squad shows up
because of the camera in the ceiling (on the fritz)
paranoia trumpets ill feeling as the comedown side of high
starts shaking behind your eye, shaking all reasons to try
    Maintain…
Even if nothing seems zen…

Padded rooms, “they say” are there to comfort the wall
from our fall, crash of bones, attempting to take a leap or
creep out of this dimension, false skin.
Concrete tombs transform toilets to despair, but
they never claimed to be soft, or a silent sensitivity
like a razor blade’s slash.

Even if the edge slid gently across the track
like a Hotwheel zipping around orange loop-d-loops.
The exit burns while the entrance yearns for another track,
another quick trip around the wrist.

Even if you find your mind twisted in a padded tomb
and find yourself listening to those hide-n-seek friends, whom
no-one else can see or hear, not even the broken mirror.
It won’t matter, until you’re in a courtroom, hobbled
like a steer, with a lawyer whispering in your ear.
That’s when, that’s the time those sneaky voices scream.
Where did this radio come from? Why?
I try to find the plug, a battery box, the off switch.
One more blade, I pray. One more slice, than things
will get better, things will get good. Then I’ll be gladder.
None of this will matter…

Winners of the 2012 PEN Prison Writing Program Awards

The PEN American Center, a literary organization with a human rights focus, sponsors writing programs in U.S. prisons and gives annual awards for the best submissions of poetry and prose by incarcerated writers. This year’s winners were posted on their website in July. Here are some highlights of my reading so far.

Christopher Myers’s second-prize poem “Tell Me the Story Again About the Frogs and the Seeds” is a poignant and hopeful message from a father to his young son about the future springtime when he will be released.

In Ezekiel Caliguiri’s gorgeously written first-prize memoir “The Last Visit from the Girl in the Willow Tree”, the girl he loved as a teenager remains in his heart as a radiant image, like Dante’s Beatrice–a bittersweet reminder of the life he could have had, if he hadn’t yielded to fatalism and the desire to appear tough.

Atif Rafay’s first-prize scholarly essay “Bleak Housing & Black Americans” indicts American prison policy as a disguised return to segregation and disenfranchisement of African-Americans, and asks why our prison system is more brutal and ugly than either crime-prevention or fair punishment require. Because racism is irrational and covert, rational appeals for reform have a limited impact. In addition, he argues, “The argument from racial disparity ultimately scants the crucial point: present policies are wrong because they are destructively harsh…An argument that invites human beings to regard themselves as part of a ‘race’ and to think of compassion for the Other rather than to think of justice for all will ineluctably break any promise it might seem to hold out.”

Leonard Scovens’s honorable mention memoir “How I Became My Father” takes us inside the struggles of a fatherless young black man seeking male role models. “You grow up without a dad and you dream his ghost into a god. When Luke [Skywalker]’s phantom god was smashed and broken across Vader’s confession, he lost his grip. If Vader was his father, what did it mean for his fate? The sins of the father, after all, are visited upon the son.”

Excerpt From Charles Shaw’s “Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics and Spirituality”


This week, the excellent online literary journal The Nervous Breakdown features a chapter from Charles Shaw’s prison memoir, Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics and Spirituality, recently released by Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press. I will be ordering copies for myself and my prison pen pals. The book examines what the surveillance state and the prison-industrial complex are doing to the soul of America. Here’s a sample:

All cultures have their own particular concept of “limbo,” purgatory, or some other form of antechamber to paradise. The word “limbo” itself comes from the Latin limbus, meaning an “edge or boundary.” Used as proper nouns, Limbus describes the edge of Hell, and Limbo is a place for the souls of unbaptized infants and patriarchs who died before the coming of Christ, to wait for Christ to be born and pardon them. Once pardoned, they are in effect “saved” and become de facto Christians, and are finally granted access to eternal paradise. But the Messiah doesn’t seem to come around very often, so they sit around like millions of undocumented immigrants, waiting for the next mass amnesty.

Purgatory, by comparison, is like the express line at the US-Mexican Border, the one for people with spotless backgrounds, or diplomatic cover. It’s the waiting room for the already-saved, a kind of hazmat decontamination unit that scrubs off the last few sins and moral entanglements of the true believers, before they can cross the border into freedom and eternal, unencumbered bliss. What all of these places have in common is the theme of detention. Prison is all of these things constrained within the temporal, corporeal plane. The lives of inmates exist in stasis until that time when they are released back into the world. There is absolutely nothing you can do about the outside world, or about the life you may have been living, while you are incarcerated. Everything that you are doing in life stops in its tracks. Vita interrupta. Your rent and bills stop being paid, your mail stops being picked up, your phone is never answered, your email is never downloaded, your refrigerator is never cleaned out, your dog is never walked or fed. Forget about your dreams and ambitions, your plans and goals, because those get put on hold too. If you are lucky to reemerge, you are forever altered by the reality of a conviction record.

Nine times out of ten, no one but your family and closest friends, if you have them, know where you are or what happened to you. Those few people are your lifelines to the outside world, and generally are the only people to do anything for you. You find out very quickly whom you can trust and who will really be there for you. Many inmates find themselves with no one.

Prisons are situated on the fringes of civilization, isolated from most population centers and the general public, hidden away from sight in a gulag network of thousands of municipal, county, state, and federal facilities stretching across the land. Americans not only want to feel that their communities are safe, they really don’t want to have to trouble themselves with thinking about the consequences of locking up millions of people, or the abuses, in all forms, that might be taking place under a system of Prohibition funded by fear, apathy, and taxes. In America, it is simply a matter of out of sight, out of mind.

Because of that, and because of the isolation of the prison experience, the full understanding of what it is like to be forcibly dislocated from society becomes, for many inmates, the key struggle and in the end the key transformative experience of their lives. Jazz musicians talk about “sustained intensity.” Prison life is a frantic Coltrane riff that produces no sound and sucks the life right out of you. It’s a negative-sum game for which there is no recuperative period. No . . . Sleep . . . ’til . . . Parole!

The lack of popular noise produced over our national prison system, and the underlying reasons for the apparent apathy of the public, will keep Americans from ever having a Bastille moment, which was the storming of a Paris prison that sparked the French Revolution. The American public’s pervasive lack of political involvement seems to keep them from storming anything except a Wal-Mart during Christmas shopping season. Plus, since American prisons are so far away from everything else, the proverbial angry mob would have to endure a six-hour bus trip ahead of time before they could commence stormin’.

But prisoners of the drug war aren’t seen by the Mainstream as political prisoners, as victims of tyranny like those held in the Bastille by Louis XVI, even though that’s precisely what they are.

There are reasons for this, and most are attributable to race and class. At its core, the war on drugs is nothing more than the criminalization of lifestyle. In many regards, it is also a war on religious freedom, and on consciousness itself.

The punishment for defying the system and exerting these inherent freedoms (the ones endowed by our Creator and all) is first disability, then disenfranchisement, then imprisonment, and finally, internal exile. Limbo time everybody, how low can you go? When in limbo, one invariably has an entirely new understanding of time.

I would spend 13 days in isolation at the Stateville Northern Reception and Classification center in Joliet, Illinois, before being sent on to my prison facility to serve out the remainder of my sentence. Thirteen endless days in a brand-new, state-of-the-art, hyper-sterile, hyper-industrialized detention facility. It was “only” 13 days, I can tell myself now, four years later. But while it was happening, it was a form of torture that leaves an indelible scar on a person’s soul. That is why they call Stateville “Hotel Hell.”

It is a cold and sterilized form of detention, a little taste of a supermax prison for everyone. Once they process you in, and stuff you into that 6 x 10 cement hole, you don’t come out again. You are on 24-hour-a-day lockdown with your cellmate, if you have one, and nothing else. Nothing to read, nothing to see, nothing to do but wait, wait, wait. And once the waiting begins, things start to go all sorts of ways inside your mind.

Thirteen days was interminable while on lockdown, yet right now I think over the last 13 days of my life and can’t remember half of it. Most people wouldn’t think twice about doing anything for two weeks, until it’s put into the proper context. The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted 13 days. Ask anyone who lived through it to tell you what a hellish eternity it was, teetering, if only briefly, on the edge of nuclear annihilation. Ask anyone on day seven of a two-week master cleanse fast how they feel, or two new lovers separated for two weeks, or the parents of a lost child, or someone waiting two weeks for test results that will tell them whether they live or die.

Likewise, two weeks spent in the cold and dark—half-starved, without anything to occupy your mind, contemplating your past, your life, your crimes literal and spiritual, missing people you love, pondering your future as a convict, stressing about which penitentiary you will be sent to and what you will have to face once you get there, and soon and so forth—is its own particularly menacing brand of torment.

 

Supermax Prison Sued for Inhumane Treatment of the Mentally Ill

This week The Atlantic’s website published a powerful three-part investigative report by Andrew Cohen on the inhumane treatment of mentally ill prisoners at “Supermax” in Florence, Colorado, the flagship maximum-security federal prison.

Part One, “American Gulag”, describes flagrant violations of Bureau of Prisons rules requiring medical treatment for prisoners with diagnosed disabilities. Prisoners are caught in a nightmarish cycle of contradictions. Federal policy prohibits prisoners with serious mental illness from being transferred to Supermax, where the inmates are not allowed to be on psychotropic medications. However, many such prisoners are sent there anyway, and then denied the drugs they need to keep from injuring themselves and others. Their acting-out prompts more disciplinary crackdowns that drive them further into madness. According to a lawsuit filed this week by five inmates, alleging violations of the Constitution’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause, guards often chain up these prisoners in their own waste products and taunt them by giving them empty food bags at mealtime.

In Part Two, “Supermax: The Faces of a Prison’s Mentally Ill”, the magazine profiles the plaintiffs. These are not the sympathetic characters championed by groups like The Innocence Project; they are violent, delusional, convicted of murder and other serious crimes. However, the article reminds us that they are also human beings with shocking trauma histories and, in many cases, mental retardation and brain injuries. Often their conditions have dramatically worsened because prison staff has mistreated them or failed to protect them from other prisoners’ violence. Here’s just one story:

Michael Bacote: He is the first named plaintiff in the case. Age 37, functionally illiterate, and deemed “mildly mentally retarded” a decade ago by a prison psychologist, Bacote was sent to ADX in 2005 after pleading guilty to murder in a case involving the death of a fellow inmate at the federal prison in Texas. (Evidently, he did not kill the victim but rather stood guard while others did.) Bacote has been diagnosed as suffering from “major depressive disorder with psychotic features” as well as from “paranoid ideations,” and he also may suffer the after-effects of severe closed-head injury.

Bacote refuses to take medicine that has been ground up from pill form by prison officials. And they, in turn, refuse to allow Bacote to take his medicine in pill form. Bacote has repeatedly tried to transfer out of Supermax. Over and over again, his requests have been denied. Despite the prior diagnoses from prison doctors, for example, paragraph 138 of the complaint alleges that ADX officials in April 2009 told Bacote that “a review of your file does not indicate you are mentally ill or mentally retarded.”

Part Three, “The Constitution and Mentally Ill Prisoners”, surveys the issues in the current lawsuit. The takeaway question: if we require a certain level of mental competency to hold a person accountable for a crime, “why does such a competency determination not impact the severity of an inmate’s incarceration?” The answer will tell us a lot about what American values really are.

Reading this series, I couldn’t help but wonder…what would happen if Christians threw their considerable political clout behind prison reform? The religious right has poured enormous amounts of money and organizational skills into passing legislation on contentious social issues. Like the unborn, mentally ill prisoners could certainly be considered “the least of these”, whom Jesus told us to protect. Sure, their feet don’t look as good on a lapel pin, but Matthew 25 is pretty clear:

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

So what can YOU do?
Donate to the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, one of the pro bono groups behind this lawsuit. Contact your member of Congress. Write to a prison pen pal, and share their stories so the world can see that these people are “more than their worst act” (as Sister Helen Prejean said in “Dead Man Walking”). 

Prisons Withhold Medical Care to Coerce Inmates Into Snitching


The FACTS Education Fund, also known as Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes, just sent me this newsletter about coercive withholding of medical care from prisoners in Segregated Housing Units (SHU). The SHU is a form of restricted or solitary confinement imposed on prisoners who are accused of gang connections, which often happens based on secret evidence or arbitrary prison politics. Once there, prisoners are put under enormous pressure to “debrief”, or inform on other suspected gang members to prison officials. This report from American RadioWorks, “Locked Down: Gangs in the Supermax“, gives more background on this process.

In the FACTS newsletter, Alfred Sandoval, a prisoner in California’s Pelican Bay SHU, describes why he joined last year’s hunger strike to improve prison conditions. Sandoval reports that guards withheld family visits and essential medical care from terminally ill prisoners to pressure them to debrief. An excerpt:

A few years ago, a close friend – his name was Jimmy – developed cancer. The medical staff, MTAs and RNs, explained that if he’d debrief, become an informant, he would receive better medical care. Now Jimmy and I had known each other since we were teenagers running the streets of East Los Angeles getting high and living the lifestyle that ended up with both of us in prison for life.

As Jimmy’s cancer grew worse, he began chemotherapy. Jimmy mentioned to me how the IGI would “show up” at the clinic and comment that he could have contact visits with his wife before he died if he’d debrief. He refused but that’s how he found out the cancer was terminal! Jimmy loved his wife more than anything and he wouldn’t tell her everything about the head games and bullshit like waking up from surgery still under anesthesia being questioned by IGI, but I had warned him of that because it happened to me and at least three other prisoners.

After one of the surgeries, Jimmy was returned to his cell after a brief stay at the Pelican Bay prison infirmary. Those cells are completely bare except for a bed and all you can do is lay there and wait. On the second night back in his cell, he awoke to a bad pain. He said it was a little after 2 a.m. and the staples had opened along his abdomen and he was bleeding. He was holding his intestines in, calling for the C/O. The C/O came and saw the blood and said he’d call the RN on duty.

The C/O came back approximately 30 minutes later with a roll of toilet paper. Jimmy was sitting on the blood-covered cement floor holding a towel soaked in blood against his stomach. The cop tossed Jimmy the toilet paper and said the medical staff would not come until the next shift and there was nothing he could do. Jimmy held his stomach closed in pain until almost 6 a.m. when the medical finally came and they rushed him to the hospital. He asked that I keep it to myself because that was his style.

I was pissed! He had requested two hardship transfers to Corcoran because of its medical facility and he’d be able to see his wife and family more before he died. Both were denied and he was told to debrief and then he’d be transferred but he steadfastly refused. The cancer spread and the gang unit increased the head games, telling the medical staff to confiscate his shaded prescription glasses. But luckily, a Dr. Williams stepped in and told the medical staff to leave Jimmy alone as he was at end stage cancer. Jimmy chose to stop the chemotherapy and die. We’d talk through a steel door and discuss everything and nothing and plan out his funeral. He died in December of 2010 and I am proud and honored to have been his friend.

Shortly after Jimmy’s death, I was told that approximately eight of the older prisoners had been approved for transfer to the SHU medical facility at New Folsom, but the gang unit had those transfers stopped citing that those prisoners, all in their 60s and 70s, had not successfully completed the debriefing, thereby issuing a death sentence to all of these prisoners and denying adequate medical care.

Make a donation to FACTS to help end these human rights abuses. You can write Mr. Sandoval a letter of support at: Alfred Sandoval, D-61000, Pelican Bay State Prison, P.O. Box 7500, Crescent City, CA 95532.

Boston Globe Critiques Three-Strikes Sentencing Plan


Lois Ahrens at The Real Cost of Prisons, a Massachusetts prisoner advocacy site, forwarded me this editorial from Northeaster University criminologist James Alan Fox about potential overbreadth in the three-strikes sentencing bill currently under consideration in the Statehouse. An excerpt follows.

…By current statute, third-time felons charged and convicted as habitual offenders must serve one-half of their sentence before becoming eligible for parole consideration. Crafted in response to two particularly high profile murder cases involving repeat offenders, both the Senate and the House bills call for increasing the threshold from one-half to two-thirds of the maximum sentence imposed.

But the more significant change comes with the second portion (Subsection b) of these bills, which makes those habitual offenders who had committed one of a long list of nearly 60 crimes ineligible for parole consideration (as well as “good time” reduction). These prisoners would need to serve the maximum with no gifts from a parole board (or a dying royalty).

A close examination of the list of crimes raises two concerns. The first involves the overly broad range of offenses among those that disallow parole, and the other relates to the subset that is punishable by life without parole.

While the array of serious felonies appropriately includes such atrocities as homicide and rape, lesser offenses such as stalking in violation of a restraining order and assault with intent to commit robbery would also make the third-timer ineligible for early release on parole.

Particularly curious, if not problematic, is the fate of those convicted on a smaller subset of crimes that are punishable by as much as a life sentence. At the severity extreme, there is, of course, murder. A first degree murder conviction already carries a life sentence without parole eligibility, whether the offender is a first-timer or a repeat criminal. A habitual offender convicted of second degree murder would also, by virtue of the pending legislation, receive life without parole.

Not so reasonable, however, is that many other habitual offenders convicted of crimes far short of murder could also be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. If charged as a habitual offender, defendants convicted of such crimes as armed robbery and burglary could be sent away to prison forever.

While I do not mean to minimize the severity of such transgressions, they do not rise to the gravity level of homicide. Life without parole should be reserved for the very worst of the worst, and robbers and burglars — even habitual ones — do not fall in the category of those who should never ever experience freedom again. The most serious crimes short of homicide require long sentences, but not life-long ones.
…

 

A Three-Strikes Prisoner Speaks Out


Last month I wrote about how Massachusetts is considering a “three-strikes” sentencing bill. I asked my prison pen pal “Conway”, whose poetry I’ve often shared on this blog, to share his thoughts about the unjust impact of such legislation. A nonviolent offender, Conway is serving 25-to-life in a supermax facility in California for receiving stolen goods. The “EDGE” program that he mentions was a youth mentoring program that he taught in before he was transferred to his current facility. Conway is a talented writer and artist who used his skills to help at-risk youth find safer outlets for their negative emotions.

Here is an excerpt from the letter he sent me last week:

****
“…So the Mass. State House is contemplating a three-strikes bill? Didn’t or haven’t they seen that it broke New York’s budget and California, which supposedly had one of the largest economies, has now begun sending prisoners to five other states because of overcrowding.

California has been forced by the Supreme Court to reduce their prison population. And they have created a [prison] guard union that forces the lawmakers to bow down to their agenda. Sounds like someone is not thinking about the people except as commodities/prisoners.

That’s one way to build a voters’ market.

Only the franchised can vote. Next comes the prison labor bill. Put those crooks/slaves to work for pennies an hour. Sound familiar? ‘Cause they did that here. Same time they put the three strikes into effect. Check Prison Industries and the Joint Venture Program, Penal Code 2717.4. 

It’s all legalized slavery.

It’s sad really how easy the voting public is manipulated.

For example: They show television programs with perfect or dysfunctional lives. (But not truly dysfunctional.) Then they advertise all this shiny crap every 10 minutes and you say ‘Wow! I want some of that.’ But wait there’s more.

You need money, you need to stay away from where money is, ’cause the cops know you ain’t got none. Don’t betray your morals, our morals.

If you work 10 hours a day, I’ll pay you minimum wage for 8 hours. And you can make payments on this car someone already wore out.

Oh? You have a record? No soup for you!

The frustrating way that a carrot is dangled in front of an old plow horse, basically…

…Wackenhut or some other private prison conglomeration…convince the public that crime is on the rise with false pie charts, and media exploitation of some heinous crime that is unexplainable. Because no one knows what’s going through some of these sociopaths heads. Some are just broken machines; broken by the prison system itself. These broken machines pacing back and forth and back and forth, until one day these fools just open the cage, hand them 200 dollars and drop them off at a bus station.

No one reached out in here and the thing is, if you did see a headshrink they just fill out a subscription [sic] for pills that make you sleep or nonresponsive.

Do I know a cure? No. I don’t even know what I would do to change the current way things are run. But I do know that another tough on crime bill, is not a deterrent to crime or a way to manage human lives.

How about voting for a second change program. When a person paroles, they enter a working environment that treats them like people. Like their lives can be whole again if they want to show the effort.

They could learn a trade and earn an honest dollar. Feel proud of their accomplishments without being locked in a toilet every night.

Obviously some would fail to assimilate. But, most prisoners would rather take a beating than subject themselves to this drudgery.

Most of these prisoners are not good with frustration. So, they lash out (because, maybe that’s a learned response). But, give em something to be proud of. And enforce that attitude and you’d see miracles.

I wish that I could of had a follow-up program for my EDGE kids. All of those kids had serious potential. They just needed someone to show an interest in their abilities. Someone to listen to their frustration, that went through the same unique things…It’s such a shame that the prison officials decided to stop the program, because of the new warden.

We had a judge come in and see a couple of our groups and he wanted to make it a mandatory program for the juvenile offenders in his jurisdiction. He even bought a huge library of child psychology books and different self-help books to help us explore our program.

Why wouldn’t something like that work for prisoners as well?”

****

 

Call for Anthology Submissions: Survivors in Solidarity with Prison Abolition


This call for anthology submissions is reprinted from the Survivors in Solidarity website. Hat tip to Lois Ahrens at The Real Cost of Prisons, a Massachusetts-based prisoners’ rights weblog, for alerting me to this project.

Working Title: Challenging Convictions: Survivors of Sexual Assault/Domestic Violence Writing on Solidarity with Prison Abolition.

Completed submissions due: April 15, 2012.

Like much prison abolition work, the call for this anthology comes from frustration and hope: frustration with organizers against sexual assault and domestic violence who treat the police as a universally available and as a good solution; frustration with prison abolitionists who only use “domestic violence” and “rape” as provocative examples; and, frustration with academic discussions that use only distanced third-person case studies and statistics to talk about sexual violence and the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). But, this project also shares the hope and worth of working toward building communities without prisons and without sexual violence. Most importantly, it is anchored in the belief that resisting prisons, domestic violence, and sexual assault are inseparable.

Organizers of this anthology want to hear from survivors in conversation with prison abolition struggles. We are interested in receiving submissions from survivors who are/have been imprisoned, and survivors who have not. Both those survivors who have sought police intervention, as well as those who haven’t, are encouraged to submit. We are looking for personal essays and creative non-fiction from fellow survivors who are interested in discussing their unique needs in anti-violence work and prison abolitionism.

Discussions of sexual assault, domestic violence, police violence, prejudice within courts, and imprisonment cannot be separated from experiences of privilege and marginalization. Overwhelmingly people who are perceived to be white, straight, able-bodied, normatively masculine, settlers who are legal residents/citizens, and/or financially stable are not only less likely to experience violence but also less likely to encounter the criminal injustice system than those who are not accorded the privileges associated with these positions. At the same time, sexual assault and domestic violence support centers and shelters are often designed with certain privileges assumed. We are especially interested in contributions that explore how experiences of race, ability, gender, citizenship, sexuality, or class inform your understandings of, or interactions with cops, prisons, and sexual assault/domestic violence support.

For complete submission guidelines and suggested topics, read more on their website.

Massachusetts Considers Punitive “Three-Strikes” Law


Even as pressure builds in California to overturn their “three-strikes” criminal sentencing law, the Massachusetts legislature is trying to slip a similar bill under the public’s radar. Three-strikes laws impose harsh mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders, regardless of the seriousness of the third crime. Thus, for instance, a person with two prior felonies can be sentenced to 25-to-life for a nonviolent offense such as drug possession or petty theft. My pen pal “Conway” is one victim of this system.

This unreasonable policy has contributed to such severe overcrowding in California prisons that the US Supreme Court recently ruled that conditions there violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Why would we want to bring this problem to Massachusetts?

A letter that ran Tuesday in our local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, eloquently makes the case against this proposed law. It was authored by Leslie Walker, the executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, and Lois Ahrens, the director of The Real Cost of Prisons Project of Northampton.

Unless recent legislation that fast-tracked both the Massachusetts House and Senate is slowed down and reconsidered, Massachusetts prisons will rapidly move into the ranks of the most overcrowded and expensive in the nation.

The two “Three Strikes and You’re Out” bills, which passed in the final moments of the November legislative session, will make a bad situation worse.

Look at two examples:

MCI-Concord, meant to hold 614 prisoners, is jammed with 1,345 men for a 219 percent occupancy rate.

MCI-Framingham was meant to hold 388 women and now houses 445 – a 115 percent occupancy rate.

Worst of all is MCI-Framingham’s Awaiting Trial Unit, where 215 women who have been convicted of no crime are crammed into a space designed for 64 – more than 330 percent the intended occupancy.

The number of prisoners in Department of Correction custody is at an all-time high. Overcrowding averages 143 percent over capacity. The corrections department has reported that parole releases have dropped by 56 percent in 2011, mostly due to parole practices and policies promoted by the Patrick administration. Even without the new law, Massachusetts faces increased corrections costs of approximately $100 million dollars a year.

An analysis performed on sentencing data provided by the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission illustrates how costly implementation of a “Three Strikes” law would be to taxpayers: an annual burden of between $75 million to $125 million could be added because between 1,500 to 2,500 prisoners could be sentenced to life with parole.

This means that the commonwealth will have to build new prison space at a cost of $100,000 per cell since our prisons are far beyond capacity. We are already paying $1 billion a year simply to incarcerate men and women, with each costing taxpayers almost as much as a year’s tuition at one of the Valley’s private colleges – approximately $50,000.

We will also keep paying the annual costs to house the same prisoner over and over because the current system is too strained to take steps that might keep prisoners from committing another crime – only 2.4 percent of the corrections department budget is spent on programming.

Education – the more one has, the more effective it is – has been proven to be one of the most successful ways of keeping people from returning to prison, but like other programs proven to rehabilitate, it is hampered without funds.

The chance for a Massachusetts prisoner to leave crime through such programs is nearly zero.

The current “Three Strikes” bills are not cost effective because they are too broadly drawn. For example, the Senate version of the bill sweeps in nonviolent convictions and mandates the third strike maximum punishment even if the previous cases were not serious enough to require a sentence of more than a day in jail. The bills would not allow judges to consider how long ago the offenses occurred or any mitigating circumstances. This would continue to overfill our prisons.

No government official wants to be labeled as “soft on crime.” But officials in other states have advocated for smart prison reform that have saved millions for taxpayers and increased public safety.

Malcolm Young, of Northwestern Law School’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, writing in The Crime Report notes, “Several states are moving ahead with carefully researched plans and strategies grounded in “best practices,” bent on reducing prison incarceration and corrections costs. Among them are Ohio, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi.”

These and other states, like New York, Michigan and New Jersey, have also reduced their prison populations with shorter sentences for nonviolent crimes, elimination of mandatory minimums for low-level drug offenses and creative alternatives to prison. The result is hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced corrections spending and lower recidivism rates.

If the current “Three Strikes” bills pass, we’ll be wasting millions of dollars while doing nothing to cut crime in Massachusetts – and continue to crowd prisons. Forget education. Forget rehabilitation.

Without such tools, those we sentence to prison will get out with even fewer resources than they have now and that means compromising the public’s safety. We urge legislators to take several steps back and consider the consequences of the hurriedly made and costly decisions which will be with us for decades.

To get involved, visit www.smartoncrimema.org. Write or call your state representatives (see House and Senate websites to find your legislator’s contact information).


Torture in America’s Supermax Prisons


Writing last year in Boston Review, a well-regarded magazine of literature and politics, reporter Lance Tapley shines a spotlight on the routine physical and mental degradation that inmates endure in America’s supermax prisons. The article was adapted from his contribution to Marjorie Cohn’s anthology The United States and Torture, published this past January by NYU Press. Tapley notes that the types of abuses we rightly decried at Guantanamo are actually common in the regular prison system, but these receive far less press attention, even though the victims are American citizens. (My pen pal Conway resides in a supermax facility in California.)

An excerpt from the article follows. Tapley is discussing Mike James, an inmate at a Maine supermax:

James, who is in his twenties, has been beaten all his life, first by family members: “I was punched, kicked, slapped, bitten, thrown against the wall.” He began seeing mental-health workers at four and taking psychiatric medication at seven. He said he was bipolar and had many other disorders. When a doctor took him off his meds at age eighteen, he got into “selling drugs, robbing people, fighting, burglaries.” He received a twelve-year sentence for robbery. Of the four years James had been in prison when I met him, he had spent all but five months in solitary confinement. The isolation is “mental torture, even for people who are able to control themselves,” he said. It included periods alone in a cell “with no blankets, no clothes, butt-naked, mace covering me.” Everything James told me was confirmed by other inmates and prison employees.

James’s story illustrates an irony in the negative reaction of many Americans to the mistreatment of “war on terrorism” prisoners at Guantánamo. To little public outcry, tens of thousands of American citizens are being held in equivalent or worse conditions in this country’s super-harsh, super-maximum security, solitary-confinement prisons, or in comparable units of traditional prisons. The Obama administration— somewhat unsteadily—plans to shut down the Guantánamo detention center and ship its inmates to one or more supermaxes in the United States, as though this would mark a substantive change. In the supermaxes inmates suffer weeks, months, years, or even decades of mind-destroying isolation, usually without meaningful recourse to challenge the conditions of their captivity. Prisoners may be regularly beaten in cell extractions, and they receive meager health services. The isolation frequently leads to insane behavior including self-injury and suicide attempts.

In 2004, state-run supermaxes in 44 states held about 25,000 people, according to Daniel Mears, a Florida State University criminologist who has done the most careful count. Mears told me his number was conservative. In addition the federal system has a big supermax in Colorado, ADX Florence, and a total of about 11,000 inmates in solitary in all its lockups, according to the Bureau of Prisons. Some researchers peg the state and federal supermax total as high as a hundred thousand; their studies sometimes include more broadly defined “control units”—for example, those in which men spend all day in a cell with another prisoner. (Nationally, 91 percent of prison and jail inmates are men, so overwhelmingly men fill the supermaxes. Women also are kept in supermax conditions, but apparently no one has estimated how many.) Then there are the county and city jails, the most sizable of which have large solitary-confinement sections. Although the roughness in what prisoners call “the hole” varies from prison to prison and jail to jail, isolation is the overwhelming, defining punishment in this vast network of what critics have begun to call mass torture.

James experienced frequent cell extractions—on one occasion, five of them in a single day. In this procedure, five hollering guards wearing helmets and body armor charge into the cell. The point man smashes a big shield into the prisoner. The others spray mace into his face, push him onto the bed, and twist his arms behind his back to handcuff him, connecting the cuffs by a chain to leg irons. As they continue to mace him, the guards carry him screaming to an observation room, where they bind him to a special chair. He remains there for hours.

A scene such as this might have taken place at supposedly aberrant Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers tormented captured Iraqis. But as described by prisoners and guards and vividly revealed in a leaked video (the Maine prison records these events to ensure that inmates are not mistreated), an extraction is the supermax’s normal, zero-tolerance reaction to prisoner disobedience, which may be as minor as protesting bad food by covering the cell door’s tiny window with a piece of paper. Such extractions occur all the time, not just in Maine but throughout the country. The principle applied is total control of a prisoner’s actions. Even if the inmate has no history of violence, when he leaves the cell he’s in handcuffs and ankle shackles, with a guard on either side.

But he doesn’t often leave the cell. In Maine’s supermax, which is typical, an inmate spends 23 hours a day alone in a 6.5-by-14-foot space. When the weather is good, he’ll spend an hour a day, five days a week, usually alone, in a small dog run outdoors. Radios and TVs are forbidden. Cell lights are on night and day. When the cold food is shoved through the door slot, prisoners fear it is contaminated by the feces, urine, and blood splattered on the cell door and corridor surfaces by the many mentally ill or enraged inmates. The prisoner is not allowed a toothbrush but is provided a plastic nub to use on a fingertip. Mental-health care usually amounts to a five-minute, through-the-steel-door conversation with a social worker once or twice a week. The prisoner gets a shower a few times a week, a brief telephone call every week or two, and occasional “no-contact” access to a visitor. Variations in these conditions exist: for example, in some states TVs or radios are allowed.

When supermaxes were built across the country in the 1980s and 1990s, they were theoretically for “the worst of the worst,” the most violent prisoners. But an inmate may be put in one for possession of contraband such as marijuana, if accused by another inmate of being a gang member, for hesitating to follow a guard’s order, and even for protection from other inmates. Several prisoners are in the Maine supermax because they got themselves tattooed. By many accounts mental illness is the most common denominator; mentally ill inmates have a hard time following prison rules. A Wisconsin study found that three-quarters of the prisoners in one solitary-confinement unit were mentally ill. In Maine, over half of supermax inmates are classified as having a serious mental illness.

Prison officials have extraordinary discretion in extending the stay of supermax inmates. Their decisions hit the mentally ill the hardest. Administrators can add time as a disciplinary measure, and often they will charge prisoners with criminal offenses that can add years to their sentences.

In 2007 James was tried on ten assault charges for biting and kicking guards and throwing feces at them. Most were felony charges, and if convicted he could have served decades more in prison. Inmates almost never beat such charges, but James’s court-appointed lawyer, Joseph Steinberger, a scrappy ex-New Yorker, succeeded with a defense rare in cases of Maine prisoners accused of crimes: he convinced a jury in Rockland, the nearby county seat, to find James “not criminally responsible” by reason of insanity. Steinberger thought the verdict was a landmark because it called into question the state’s standard practice of keeping mentally ill individuals in isolation and then punishing them with yet more isolation when their conditions worsen. After the verdict, as the law required, the judge committed James to a state mental hospital.

But prison officials and the state attorney general’s office saw the verdict as another kind of landmark: never before in Maine had a convict been committed to the mental hospital after being tried for assault on guards. In the view of the corrections establishment, James would be escaping his deserved punishment, and this would send the wrong signal to prisoners. Officials refused to send him to the hospital, arguing he first had to serve the remaining nine years of his sentence.

Steinberger wrote to Maine’s governor—John Baldacci, a Democrat—begging him to intervene and send James to the hospital:

He continually slits open his arms and legs with chips of paint and concrete, smears himself and his cell with feces, strangles himself to unconsciousness with his clothing. . . . He also bites, hits, kicks, spits at, and throws urine and feces on his guards.

This behavior was never in dispute, but the governor declined to intervene.

After a year of court battles, Steinberger finally succeeded in getting James into the hospital, though the judge conceded to the Department of Corrections that his time there would not count against his sentence. So James faces nine years in prison after however long it takes to bring him to a sane mental state.
…

Why is the richest, most powerful nation in the world still using punishment methods that Europe abandoned 150 years ago as too brutal? Our prison system is an international scandal.

I wish I could end this article with an “action item” to mitigate the helplessness you may feel after reading this. Can’t we click on something, donate something, sign a petition? I don’t have a quick fix, but my advice is: Get informed. Feel your common humanity with those who seem alien and frightening. Look behind the “tough on crime” rhetoric in your next election. Write to a prisoner in SHU. Your letters and books could save someone’s sanity.