Nice video!
Brothers William and Michael Morgan of Norwood stole $7,000 in copper in May -- a felony. Their victim, Danny Pabst, decided not to send them to prison. Last week he hired them. Produced by Carrie Cochran.
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Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Victim hires copper thieves
From Cincinnati.com: http://news.cincinnati.com/videonetwork/1299426335001/Victim-hires-copper-thieves
Nice video!
Nice video!
Solitary Confinement on Rikers Island: An Interview with the Prisoners Rights Project
From: Solitary Watch http://solitarywatch.com/2011/11/28/solitary-confinement-on-rikers-island-an-interview-with-the-prisoners-rights-project/
November 28, 2011, by
It is three years since adolescent prisoner Christopher Robinson was killed by other prisoners with uniformed DOC staff complicity as part of a sadistic society referred to as “The Program.” Three DOC staff members were criminally indicted for their participation in the violent group. Two Correction Officers pled guilty last month and another Correction Officer and seven inmates are still awaiting trial.
November 28, 2011, by
Last week we wrote about the dramatic increase in the use of solitary confinement currently underway on Rikers Island. By the end of this year, Rikers will have close to 1,000 “punitive segregation” units for a population of 12,700 inmates–giving the island prison one of the highest rates of solitary confinement in the country (and thus, the industrialized world). The majority of the prisoners on Rikers are awaiting trial, while the rest are serving short prison terms of up to one year. Approximately one-third of them suffer from mental illness, and more than 800 are juveniles.
The New York City Department of Corrections (DOC) and Corrections Officers Benevolent Association (COBA) say that the increase in solitary confinement is a necessary response to increased violence at Rikers. A number of groups that advocate for prisoners disagree. Among these is the Legal Aid Society’s Prisoners Rights Project (PRP), which, “protects and enforces the legal rights of New York City and New York State prisoners through litigation, advice, and assistance to individual prisoners,” according to its mission statement. PRP is the host and co-sponsor of a meeting to take place on December 1 to discuss issues of concern in New York City jails, including the rising use of solitary. In response to a set of questions emailed by Solitary Watch, the PRP’s Sarah Kerr, John Boston, and Jonathan Chasan provided the following analysis.
=====
SW: The DOC is clearly presenting what they call a “chronic shortage” of punitive segregation beds as a primary reason for the recent rise in violent incidents at Rikers. They are also presenting the increase in isolation beds as the best–perhaps the only–way to deal with this problem. What would you say in response to this?
PWP: We do not believe that there is a genuine shortage of segregation beds. In fact, the jail population is several thousand prisoners lower than it was in the late 1990s, when there were fewer segregation beds than there are today. To the contrary we are finding that there are problems with Department of Correction policies and practices which are artificially inflating the need for segregation beds without dealing with problems in jail management.
For example, the disciplinary process is often a sham in which due process requirements are not observed. The Legal Aid Society has received numerous complaints from prisoners who report being falsely marked as refusing their disciplinary hearings, and who were then sentenced to punitive segregation without having a hearing. Punitive segregation sentences are artificially inflated by bringing multiple charges for the same actions if they affected more than one person.
We believe a substantial number of people are wrongly held in punitive segregation. Some of these prisoners were assaulted by correction staff, sometimes as a result of minor rules violations or purely verbal misconduct, and then charged with assault on staff—a very common complaint, and one we find credible based on lengthy experience litigating cases of misuse of force by DOC staff.
Moreover, the DOC policy of returning prisoners to punitive segregation if they were previously released from jail before completing their segregation time, is imposed without regard to the length of time that has passed between periods of incarceration, and without any assessment of current need for segregated confinement on any basis.
Contrary to the COBA presentation of this issue, punitive segregation is not solely utilized for those who have committed violent infractions. DOC should do a utilization analysis of its segregation population to identify prisoners in segregation who do not merit such isolating and punitive confinement. Although this has been recommended, DOC has declined to do this analysis in the past, and we do not know if the present administration has remedied that omission.
We do agree that there is currently an increase of violence in the City jails. Our contacts with the jail population show an increase in injurious violence by staff against prisoners, which is confirmed by data on the DOC web site indicating an increase in uses of force with injury:
The Legal Aid Society continues to receive complaints from prisoners of assaults and threats under circumstances suggesting continued staff complicity or acquiescence. We have brought several cases for inmates beaten by gang members at the solicitation of, or with the facilitation of DOC staff. We have litigated a number of class action injunctive cases, and damage cases on behalf of City inmates severely injured in staff beatings and these cases have settled for sums totaling millions of dollars.
SW: What are your thoughts on the relationship between the high number of inmates with mental illness at Rikers and the high rate of solitary confinement?
PWP: We are extremely concerned that a significant number of detainees and prisoners with serious mental illness are confined in harmful solitary confinement in the NYC jails. The mental health treatment program in the City jails is not effective. Individuals with inadequately treated mental illness who cannot conform their behavior to jail rules due to untreated symptoms or who are punished for symptomatic behavior, end up in solitary confinement where their condition worsens and they may accumulate additional disciplinary infractions and sentences to isolated punitive segregation.
SW: We understand that a number of the new punitive segregation cells are for adolescents. What do you think about this? Are there alternative ways to deal with violence among the teenagers at Rikers?
PWP: Christopher Robinson, the murdered inmate discussed above, was only 18 at the time of his death. “The Program,” in which DOC staff was complicit and which beat him to death, was in the juvenile facility on Rikers. Clearly DOC has a lot to do to train its staff and learn to manage the adolescent population in a humane manner. However, the idea that the solution is to utilize punitive segregation cells as a first resort is ill founded.
The adolescent population requires adequate supervision by staff who are trained to deal with the adolescent population and are trained in recognizing mental health issues in adolescents. Adding and utilizing punitive segregation cells for adolescents is a terrible threat to young people’s mental health and a grossly inadequate response to young prisoners with mental health issues. The correct response would include increased mental health services and to provide adequate close supervision of the adolescent population to control the level of violence in it.
SW: Why are you among the organizations convening the December 1 meeting now, and what do you hope it might accomplish?
PWP: The Legal Aid Society is hosting the development of a new coalition of organizations and individuals – advocacy, mental health, prison family members, ex-offenders – to work together on issues of concern in the City jails. This came out of our work with the Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement coalition (MHASC). The work of MHASC resulted in the passage of the SHU Exclusion Law limiting the use of solitary confinement of prisoners with mental illness in the New York state prisons. We hope to duplicate reforms won in the state prisons and to provide the community with a voice in the current discussion about the prevalence of individuals with mental illness in the City jails and other issues of concern. We believe that other issues will include over-use of solitary confinement (regardless of mental health), lack of needed mental health treatment and housing options in general, and problems with brutality and other forms of mistreatment.
The meeting is planned as a brainstorming session designed to find common concerns and ideas for implementing reform (litigation, legislation, public education, training, lobbying, testimony). The goal will be to work together moving forward with a broad coalition of stakeholders participating in working together to improve the City jails.
You asked above whether increasing punitive segregation cells is the correct way to deal with the increase in violence at the City jails. We do not believe that an increase in punitive segregation cells is an appropriate response to the myriad problems in the City jails. The culture of brutality by DOC staff has not been sufficiently redressed through oversight and training. There is a failure to provide the population of detainees with mental health needs with sufficient treatment that would accommodate their disability and permit them to participate in the jail program without running afoul of disciplinary rules. Training, oversight and improved mental health care should be the first response to reducing the level of violence in the jails.
Monday, November 28, 2011
JEFF GERRITT: After closing psychiatric hospitals, Michigan incarcerates mentally ill
From the Detroit Free Press: http://www.freep.com/article/20111127/OPINION02/111270434/After-closing-psychiatric-hospitals-Michigan-incarcerates-mentally-ill-?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7COpinion&mid=53
By Jeff Gerritt - Nov. 27, 2011
By Jeff Gerritt - Nov. 27, 2011
Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon spoke for most sheriffs when he said, during a community meeting earlier this year, that his jail had become his county's largest mental health care institution.
Over the last two decades, changes in state policy and big cuts in funding for community mental health care have pushed hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people into county jails and state prisons.
Between 1987 and 2003, Michigan closed three-quarters of its 16 state psychiatric hospitals, including Northville in suburban Detroit. The state now provides the sixth-lowest number of psychiatric beds per capita in the nation, reports the Treatment Advocacy Center.
"We closed too many (hospitals), too quickly," Mark Reinstein, president of the Mental Health Association in Michigan, told me this month. "It wasn't done in a planned, rational way."
Community mental health agencies -- which were supposed to take up the slack but never received the resources to do so -- face continuing budget cuts. The state has resumed warehousing its mentally ill -- this time behind bars.
A University of Michigan study last year found that more than 20% of the state's prisoners had severe mental disabilities -- and far more were mentally ill. The same study found that 65% of prisoners with several mental disabilities had received no treatment in the previous 12 months.
The problem is even worse in county jails, where psychiatric treatment is virtually nonexistent. In 1999, a Department of Community Health study -- conducted by Wayne State University -- of jails in Wayne, Kent and Clinton Counties found that more than half their populations were mentally ill and one-third were seriously afflicted, suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar and other psychotic disorders. If anything, the crisis has worsened since then.
Sometimes, the results are tragic. In 2006, I reported that Timothy Joe Souders, a mentally ill 21-year-old serving one to four years for stealing two paintball guns and threatening a police officer, had died of heat and thirst after spending four days strapped down in a hot isolation cell, naked and soaked in his own urine.
Since 2008, the state has slashed $50million from community mental health agencies, with Wayne County absorbing more than half of the cuts.
The annual budget for the nonprofit Detroit Central City Community Mental Health one of Detroit's largest community mental health agencies, plunged from $11.2 million in 2008 to $8million. President and CEO Irva Faber-Bermudez said the cuts have forced her agency to close an urgent care clinic and end an effective transitional housing program. Gov. Rick Snyder and the Legislature should reconsider these cuts if they really want to improve mental health care and remove mentally ill people from prisons and jails.
Treating one client in a community program costs about $10,000 a year, compared with $35,000 a year to house one prisoner. Detroit Central City's jail diversion and prisoner re-entry programs report recidivism rates of less than 10% -- at least four times lower than the overall state average.
Serving 4,600 people a year, Detroit Central City, headquartered at 10 Peterboro, reaches only half of those needing community mental health services. Statewide, more than 200,000 people a year use community mental health services, but experts say at least twice that many need them.
The return of hope
Homeless, Michael Squirewell, 56, came to Detroit Central City three years ago with nothing more than the clothes on his back. In the early 1980s, the former gang member had nearly $175,000 in cash.
Growing up in the Brewster Projects, Squirewell dropped out of school in the third grade. One of his friends on the northwest side was now famous writer Michael Eric Dyson, who cited Squirewell as a peer who "sought to protect me from some of the worst elements in our neighborhood."
Later, as a founding member of Young Boys Incorporated, Squirewell sold drugs and recruited other gang members -- some as young as 8 -- on Detroit's west side. He was stabbed and shot while witnessing nearly a dozen shootouts and murders.
By the mid-1980s, Squirewell had become his own best customer. Mentally ill and addicted to crack, he ducked into Dumpsters, hiding from the cops and getting high. "I didn't care about anything or anyone, even me," he said. "For a while, you get the cars, the girlfriends and the money. But a lot of pain and suffering go with it. It's not worth it."
By the time he got to Detroit Central City, Squirewell was broke and almost out of hope. The agency sent him to a transitional housing program for two months and helped him apply for Social Security benefits. It diagnosed his mental illness, put him on medication and taught him how to pay bills and cook meals. It gave him a new sense of hope and self-worth.
Today, in his two-bedroom apartment on East Jefferson, he looks out at Belle Isle and the Detroit River, instead of boarded homes and dope houses. He plans to marry Jackie Taylor, 47, of Detroit, next year. The two met at a state jobs program 13 years ago. "She walked this mile with me," he said.
Enrolled in a literacy program, Squirewell continues to work on his GED and mentors people going through the same struggles he did. "Detroit Central City saved my life," he told me. "I'm moving forward, and I'm not looking back."
Diagnosed in prison
Some clients don't reach Detroit Central City until after years of incarceration, said Norris Howard, manager of community re-entry.
Jerry Zillner of Detroit didn't know he was mentally ill until after he started serving a 13- to 50-year sentence for second-degree murder, a crime he committed in early 1986, when he was 19, after a neighborhood man assaulted his mother and sister on Detroit's east side. He was diagnosed in prison with paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Zillner, 44, was paroled on April 5, after serving more than 26 years in prison.
Before prison, Zillner worked as a disc jockey, mainly at after-hour parties. He dropped out of Southeastern High School in the 10th grade.
"I always knew something was wrong, but I didn't find out I had a chemical imbalance until I went to prison," he told me. "When I got upset, I was like Dr. Bruce Banner (the mild-mannered comic-book physicist who involuntarily turns into the raging Hulk). I had racing, manic thoughts. I could go from 1 to 1,000 in moments."
After sentencing Zillner, Judge George Crockett III ordered a psychiatric evaluation. Zillner spent seven months in a prison forensic unit.
In prison, Zillner earned a GED but was sometimes out of control. Following a beef in 1994, he stabbed an inmate multiple times with a homemade shank. (The inmate survived.)
Zillner started taking psychotropic medications to even his thoughts and moods. He joined the Nation of Islam. His newfound faith gave him strength but also forced him to look at himself. He knew he was lucky to get a second chance.
"I can never use (mental illness) as a crutch or excuse," Zillner told me. "It doesn't lessen my responsibility as a man. I deserved that punishment. I'm just thankful I'm still alive."
On parole, Zillner came to Detroit Central City to get a monthly injection of Prolixin, an antipsychotic drug. He also found other ways to help himself. Now he spends two to three hours a day at Detroit Central City, attending group meetings and counseling sessions and talking to peer specialists -- mentally ill people who serve as mentors.
Detroit Central City helped him settle at Cass Community Social Services. At home, Zillner exercises, reads and meditates. At 6-feet-4 and 185 pounds, he's slim and cut. He has lined up a job as a sanitation worker or, as he puts it, "garbage man," and continues to work with the Nation of Islam.
Without Detroit Central City, Zillner said he would probably be back in prison. "This place helped me become stable," he said. "I have a support system. I'm doing well, and I'm about to do better."
Cries for help
Pattie Charleston, a certified peer support specialist at Detroit Central City, has spent most of the last six years helping other mentally ill people avoid the criminal justice system and get the community treatment they need.
"Every day when I come in, I see me," said Charleston, 50, who spent a total of 24 years locked up for various offenses, including check fraud, larceny, prostitution and drugs.
A manic-depressive, Charleston became a Central City client in 2003, after decades of mental illness, severe depression, incarceration and substance abuse. She started drinking at 11. By 19, she was using crack. She tried to commit suicide by slitting her wrists, overdosing on pain killers, and hanging herself.
"It was really a cry for help," she said. "I couldn't understand why my life was such a roller coaster. Even when I was off drugs, this cloud would come out of nowhere."
After Detroit Central City diagnosed her mental illness, she had to confront the stigma. "You're labeled as crazy," she said. "I felt that if I had a mental illness, my life was going to be limited."
Charleston worked with a treatment team and learned how to manage stress and mental illness. Her therapist helped her cope with the pain and trauma of childhood molestation.
Impressed with her progress, the agency hired Charleston two years later. She later became a certified peer support specialist, working as a mentor and role model.
This year, her work with jail diversion became even more personal. She visits her 19-year-old son, William Rhymes, in the Wayne County Jail, where he awaits trial for armed robbery. Charleston believes her son is -- like her -- bipolar, but he hasn't been diagnosed or treated. He attempted suicide in 2008, according to court records.
Last month, I went with Charleston to visit her son in jail. No chairs were available for visitors, who had to practically shout through small glass partitions.
Rhymes told me he asked to speak to a psychologist a week earlier but had heard nothing. "I feel overwhelmed," he said. Charleston works with a social worker, trying to make sure the court evaluates her son's mental illness.
As she left the jail, Charleston placed her hand on the glass, where her son placed his, and held it there. "He's slipping through the cracks," she said as we walked away. "I don't want them to count him out."
Citizens for Prison Reform
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"
-Martin Luther King
Website: www.micpr.org
Sunday, November 27, 2011
State review finds mentally ill inmates neglected in prison
From Newsobserver.com: http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/11/14/1642506/prison-neglects-the-ill.html
RALEIGH -- An internal review of conditions inside North Carolina's Central Prison found that inmates with serious mental illnesses were neglected by staff and locked away in fetid cells.
- Associated Press
RALEIGH -- An internal review of conditions inside North Carolina's Central Prison found that inmates with serious mental illnesses were neglected by staff and locked away in fetid cells.
That neglect, which included the failure to properly track anti-psychotic medications, may have contributed to the death of at least one inmate, a 2011 report says.
The review, obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request, found:
Inmates inside the Raleigh prison were left isolated for weeks of "therapeutic seclusion," sometimes without clothing or a mattress, in cells described as roach-infested and with human waste puddled on the floor.
Others were strapped to their bunks in an improper manner that allowed them to bang their heads against the concrete wall.
Chronic understaffing led to situations where the sick went untreated and suicidal inmates sometimes went unmonitored.
Jennie Lancaster, chief operating officer for the N.C. Department of Correction, said the agency is working to improve conditions, provide remedial staff training and fill long-vacant positions.
No prison staff were fired or disciplined following the internal review.
'Fixes' under way
"This is a difficult population, and it presents safety challenges, it presents behavior challenges," Lancaster said. "When you've got an offender who you clean his cell and then two hours later he's taken feces and he's smeared it all over the cell again, and you've got someone down in another cell and they're acting out ... if you're limited in your staff, it's not the ideal thing, but you have to prioritize what you're doing."
The review of conditions inside Central's mental unit was performed last spring by two prison system nurses.
Lancaster said living conditions for inmates will improve when the state this month opens a new $155 million health care complex at Central.
She said the agency long pushed to secure funding for the new building because of deficiencies with the current mental unit, a 144-bed facility dating to the 1970s.
The new prison hospital will have 216 inpatient mental health beds. There is also increased funding to hire more staff.
"These inmates are highly unpredictable and unstable," the report says, adding that they require the highest level of care and treatment because their mental illnesses and extreme behaviors can lead to "life-threatening situations."
But the report says the state failed to provide such care to the inmates.
Drugs poorly tracked
Years of budget cuts, hiring freezes and high turnover led to staffing shortages in critical jobs, especially nurses and doctors. Staff failed to maintain up-to-date records, track medications or respond to calls for medical help.
The report says that nurses acknowledged not knowing which inmates were which and that patients were given too much prescribed medication or none at all.
On April 7, 2011, an inmate was listed as receiving nine doses of powerful psychiatric drugs that included lithium and Thorazine, even though he'd already been transferred to another prison the day before.
The report also said there "have been a number of deaths due to medical conditions," including an inmate who died in October 2010 as the result of "complications of lithium toxicity."
That information appears to match the case of Levon Wilson, a Winston-Salem man with bipolar disorder arrested on misdemeanor charges on Aug. 31, 2010, and sent to Central Prison for safe-keeping while awaiting trial.
Dangers of lithium
Lithium is often prescribed to treat manic symptoms common with bipolar disorder. However, taking too much lithium can be deadly. Those taking the drug must be carefully monitored with routine blood tests because of a long list of known side effects, including impaired kidney function and obstructed bowels.
An autopsy report shows Wilson was transferred from the prison to WakeMed Hospital in Raleigh on Sept. 30, 2010, with "moderately high levels" of lithium in his bloodstream. He died 10 days later.
The cause of death is listed as "complications of lithium therapy," which led to kidney and bowel problems. Still, the state doctor performing the autopsy declared Wilson's death as "natural."
DOC officials refused to release a separate internal review of Wilson's death, citing federal medical privacy laws.
Inmates often isolated
The 2011 report also says understaffing led to patients going unsupervised, despite orders they be carefully watched because they had tried to harm themselves.
Inmates cut themselves and swallowed nails, batteries and shards from plastic eating utensils. The review found numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in written records of observational rounds.
The report also found that inmates in "therapeutic seclusion" were often locked in cells for extended periods without being let out for meals, recreation time or to shower. An officer stated that patients in "therapeutic seclusion" didn't get a shower because they're suicidal, but the review found most weren't suicidal but rather had "unpredictable behaviors."
An inmate placed in isolation on Feb. 1, 2011, was ordered by a doctor to be allowed one hour per day alone in the unit's day room. A review of his records found no evidence he was let out of his cell before April 19, a stretch of 78 days.
Prison system policy says no inmate can be kept in seclusion for more than a week without special approval from an internal review committee consisting of a doctor, a nurse and a prison administrator.
Isolated inmates ate meals in their cells and sometimes hoarded food, leading to infestations of roaches and ants.
Being alone is damaging
Solitary confinement can be psychologically damaging even for healthy people, said Dr. Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist who studied the issue while on the faculty of Harvard Medical School.
Grassian said the conditions described in the North Carolina report could cause permanent psychological harm for inmates suffering from chronic disorders such as schizophrenia.
"When you take a person like that and put them in solitary confinement, obviously what happens is they become more and more paranoid," Grassian said. "Because these are progressive disorders, once they have deteriorated you really don't have much of an opportunity to get them back."
Grassian said there is nothing therapeutic about long-term seclusion, which he said increases the risk of abnormal behavior and suicide.
At Central, mentally ill inmates who attempted to harm themselves sometimes had their clothes, blanket and mattress removed, leaving them in an empty cell with only a "safety blanket or smock."
"If given a safety blanket, the inmate would have to choose to cover either his body or rusty bunk and lie naked," the report says. "Staff stated that at times, the inmates prefer to lie on the floor."
Report cites filthy cells
The review also noted the strong smell of urine throughout the facility, with sick inmates left to live in their own filth.
The report cites a March 16 incident where an inmate was reported as needing a bath and his cell cleaned.
"They only had two officers for three floors and during the weekend they only had one officer," the report says. "The evening nurse stated she would 'try' to have it taken care of that evening."
Nearly a week later, on March 22, the same patient appeared stiff and lethargic.
"Upon inspection of the patient's cell, the floor was noted to be sticky; the room had a strong odor of urine and puddles of yellowish, light brown fluid on the floor," the report said.
Nurses were also observed failing to wash their hands or change latex gloves between patients when providing injections, potentially helping to spread blood-borne diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C.
Vicki Smith, executive director of the advocacy group Disability Rights North Carolina, doubted moving the mental unit to a new building would fix the systemic problems.
She called for "big changes that really improve the care and treatment they are providing to these vulnerable and very ill prisoners."
Mental health issue
The report is not the first time North Carolina's prison system has faced questions about harsh treatment. It's been revealed in recent years that prison staff have used nylon straps similar to a dog leash to tether inmates; pepper-sprayed a nude, incapacitated inmate having a panic attack in his cell; and been convicted of felony charges for using billy clubs to severely beat a shackled inmate.
As for the Central Prison problems, Lancaster said, it wouldn't be fair to point the finger at any single official. Several positions for doctors and key administrators were vacant, she said.
Officials said they have addressed 57 of 84 issues identified in a corrective action plan.
State Sen. Thom Goolsby, co-chairman of the Senate appropriations committee for Justice and Public Safety, said he first learned of the critical report after the AP sought its release.
The Wilmington Republican wants to know why no one at the prison was held responsible.
"I want some answers, because this can't be allowed to happen again," Goolsby said. "We punish people for their crimes, but when you have someone with a mental illness you have to treat the disease. Not helping people, not seeing that they get their medication and are treated like human beings, is just wrong in every sense of the word."
This sounds all too familiar to us in Michigan...
The review, obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request, found:
Inmates inside the Raleigh prison were left isolated for weeks of "therapeutic seclusion," sometimes without clothing or a mattress, in cells described as roach-infested and with human waste puddled on the floor.
Others were strapped to their bunks in an improper manner that allowed them to bang their heads against the concrete wall.
Chronic understaffing led to situations where the sick went untreated and suicidal inmates sometimes went unmonitored.
Jennie Lancaster, chief operating officer for the N.C. Department of Correction, said the agency is working to improve conditions, provide remedial staff training and fill long-vacant positions.
No prison staff were fired or disciplined following the internal review.
'Fixes' under way
"This is a difficult population, and it presents safety challenges, it presents behavior challenges," Lancaster said. "When you've got an offender who you clean his cell and then two hours later he's taken feces and he's smeared it all over the cell again, and you've got someone down in another cell and they're acting out ... if you're limited in your staff, it's not the ideal thing, but you have to prioritize what you're doing."
The review of conditions inside Central's mental unit was performed last spring by two prison system nurses.
Lancaster said living conditions for inmates will improve when the state this month opens a new $155 million health care complex at Central.
She said the agency long pushed to secure funding for the new building because of deficiencies with the current mental unit, a 144-bed facility dating to the 1970s.
The new prison hospital will have 216 inpatient mental health beds. There is also increased funding to hire more staff.
"These inmates are highly unpredictable and unstable," the report says, adding that they require the highest level of care and treatment because their mental illnesses and extreme behaviors can lead to "life-threatening situations."
But the report says the state failed to provide such care to the inmates.
Drugs poorly tracked
Years of budget cuts, hiring freezes and high turnover led to staffing shortages in critical jobs, especially nurses and doctors. Staff failed to maintain up-to-date records, track medications or respond to calls for medical help.
The report says that nurses acknowledged not knowing which inmates were which and that patients were given too much prescribed medication or none at all.
On April 7, 2011, an inmate was listed as receiving nine doses of powerful psychiatric drugs that included lithium and Thorazine, even though he'd already been transferred to another prison the day before.
The report also said there "have been a number of deaths due to medical conditions," including an inmate who died in October 2010 as the result of "complications of lithium toxicity."
That information appears to match the case of Levon Wilson, a Winston-Salem man with bipolar disorder arrested on misdemeanor charges on Aug. 31, 2010, and sent to Central Prison for safe-keeping while awaiting trial.
Dangers of lithium
Lithium is often prescribed to treat manic symptoms common with bipolar disorder. However, taking too much lithium can be deadly. Those taking the drug must be carefully monitored with routine blood tests because of a long list of known side effects, including impaired kidney function and obstructed bowels.
An autopsy report shows Wilson was transferred from the prison to WakeMed Hospital in Raleigh on Sept. 30, 2010, with "moderately high levels" of lithium in his bloodstream. He died 10 days later.
The cause of death is listed as "complications of lithium therapy," which led to kidney and bowel problems. Still, the state doctor performing the autopsy declared Wilson's death as "natural."
DOC officials refused to release a separate internal review of Wilson's death, citing federal medical privacy laws.
Inmates often isolated
The 2011 report also says understaffing led to patients going unsupervised, despite orders they be carefully watched because they had tried to harm themselves.
Inmates cut themselves and swallowed nails, batteries and shards from plastic eating utensils. The review found numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in written records of observational rounds.
The report also found that inmates in "therapeutic seclusion" were often locked in cells for extended periods without being let out for meals, recreation time or to shower. An officer stated that patients in "therapeutic seclusion" didn't get a shower because they're suicidal, but the review found most weren't suicidal but rather had "unpredictable behaviors."
An inmate placed in isolation on Feb. 1, 2011, was ordered by a doctor to be allowed one hour per day alone in the unit's day room. A review of his records found no evidence he was let out of his cell before April 19, a stretch of 78 days.
Prison system policy says no inmate can be kept in seclusion for more than a week without special approval from an internal review committee consisting of a doctor, a nurse and a prison administrator.
Isolated inmates ate meals in their cells and sometimes hoarded food, leading to infestations of roaches and ants.
Being alone is damaging
Solitary confinement can be psychologically damaging even for healthy people, said Dr. Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist who studied the issue while on the faculty of Harvard Medical School.
Grassian said the conditions described in the North Carolina report could cause permanent psychological harm for inmates suffering from chronic disorders such as schizophrenia.
"When you take a person like that and put them in solitary confinement, obviously what happens is they become more and more paranoid," Grassian said. "Because these are progressive disorders, once they have deteriorated you really don't have much of an opportunity to get them back."
Grassian said there is nothing therapeutic about long-term seclusion, which he said increases the risk of abnormal behavior and suicide.
At Central, mentally ill inmates who attempted to harm themselves sometimes had their clothes, blanket and mattress removed, leaving them in an empty cell with only a "safety blanket or smock."
"If given a safety blanket, the inmate would have to choose to cover either his body or rusty bunk and lie naked," the report says. "Staff stated that at times, the inmates prefer to lie on the floor."
Report cites filthy cells
The review also noted the strong smell of urine throughout the facility, with sick inmates left to live in their own filth.
The report cites a March 16 incident where an inmate was reported as needing a bath and his cell cleaned.
"They only had two officers for three floors and during the weekend they only had one officer," the report says. "The evening nurse stated she would 'try' to have it taken care of that evening."
Nearly a week later, on March 22, the same patient appeared stiff and lethargic.
"Upon inspection of the patient's cell, the floor was noted to be sticky; the room had a strong odor of urine and puddles of yellowish, light brown fluid on the floor," the report said.
Nurses were also observed failing to wash their hands or change latex gloves between patients when providing injections, potentially helping to spread blood-borne diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C.
Vicki Smith, executive director of the advocacy group Disability Rights North Carolina, doubted moving the mental unit to a new building would fix the systemic problems.
She called for "big changes that really improve the care and treatment they are providing to these vulnerable and very ill prisoners."
Mental health issue
The report is not the first time North Carolina's prison system has faced questions about harsh treatment. It's been revealed in recent years that prison staff have used nylon straps similar to a dog leash to tether inmates; pepper-sprayed a nude, incapacitated inmate having a panic attack in his cell; and been convicted of felony charges for using billy clubs to severely beat a shackled inmate.
As for the Central Prison problems, Lancaster said, it wouldn't be fair to point the finger at any single official. Several positions for doctors and key administrators were vacant, she said.
Officials said they have addressed 57 of 84 issues identified in a corrective action plan.
State Sen. Thom Goolsby, co-chairman of the Senate appropriations committee for Justice and Public Safety, said he first learned of the critical report after the AP sought its release.
The Wilmington Republican wants to know why no one at the prison was held responsible.
"I want some answers, because this can't be allowed to happen again," Goolsby said. "We punish people for their crimes, but when you have someone with a mental illness you have to treat the disease. Not helping people, not seeing that they get their medication and are treated like human beings, is just wrong in every sense of the word."
This sounds all too familiar to us in Michigan...
Citizens for Prison Reform
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"
-Martin Luther King
Website: www.micpr.org
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Cañon City, Colorado, is the Solitary Confinement Capital of the Western World (Part 1)
This series is long, but well worth reading!
Fortresses of Solitude (Part 1) by James Ridgeway and Jean Casella
Silverstein made his meticulously detailed ink drawing–which shows a winged Rovner holding a sword, surrounded by slain bodies–in his 7 x 12-foot cell at the notorious United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, or ADX, in rural Florence, Colorado. A talented self-taught artist, he has had plenty of time to hone his craft. For the last 27 years, Tommy Silverstein has been literally buried alive—held in an extreme form of solitary confinement in the depths of the federal prison system, under a “no human contact” order. The man who was at one time known as “America’s Most Dangerous Prisoner” is now described, on a web site maintained by his supporters, as “America’s Most Isolated Man.”
He is also Laura Rovner’s client. Rovner, teaching fellow Brittany Glidden, and a group of student attorneys from DU’s Civil Rights Clinic have filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Denver, arguing that Silverstein’s 84 square feet of utter and permanent isolation violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, as well as its guarantee of due process. The suit is just one of several brought by the clinic on behalf of various inmates at ADX and at the nearby state supermax prison. Along with a small handful of other cases in Colorado and around the country, the work of DU’s Civil Rights Clinic represents the leading edge of a legal challenge to solitary confinement. As such, it has the potential to affect the lives of the 100,000 or more prisoners who are held in some form of solitary on any given day in prisons across the United States.
In person, the Angel of Justice is a petite, brown-haired woman who chain-swigs Diet Pepsis and pauses to glance at her computer, which incessantly pings for her attention. Rovner has spent most of her career teaching in civil rights clinics at Georgetown, Syracuse, and North Dakota Law Schools, defending the rights of the deaf and other people with disabilities who had been victimized by discrimination, as well as the rights of prisoners. As she talks about her work at DU, she buzzes with energy, yet chooses her words carefully, measuring them against her clients’ best interests.
After pointing out Silverstein’s drawing, Rovner displays some samples from a pile of hand-knit afghans, scarves, and mittens, also made by Silverstein (and notable for the absence of red, blue, and black, which are banned at ADX as “gang colors”). She shows us a recent photograph, in which Silverstein sports long gray hair and an even longer white beard, his eyes squinting out above weathered cheeks and a friendly smile. Dressed in loose white clothing, he looks like an angelic hipster, maybe an aging yoga teacher, or at worst an over-the-hill biker—certainly not a man more dangerous than the host of convicted terrorists, spies, mobsters, and drug kingpins housed with him at ADX.
Silverstein never killed anyone before he got to prison, and he contends that he did so then only when he felt his own life was threatened. He also says that, nearly three decades later, he is a changed man (he does, in fact, meditate and do yoga in his cell). This transformation is something his attorneys seem to accept, and they make a point of it in their suit. But ultimately, Rovner believes, if the Constitution is to mean anything, then it must apply not just to people and causes that engender sympathy, but to men like Tommy Silverstein, who have been written off as “the worst of the worst.” It must prevail not only in the light of day, but in the fluorescent-lit dungeons of ADX.
If Rovner is determined to defend the Constitutional rights of prisoners held in what is euphemistically called “administrative segregation,” then she has come to the right place. The state of Colorado has become ground zero for the use of solitary confinement—and increasingly, for efforts to challenge it on legal, humanitarian, and even economic grounds. Douglas Wilson, the Colorado State Public Defender, describes solitary confinement as a “hot little issue” in his state, due in part to a highly public battle over the opening of a second costly state supermax, and to a new effort in the state legislature to limit the use of solitary.
At the center of the storm is Cañon City, Colorado, which stands as the solitary confinement capital of the industrialized world. Two hours southwest of Denver, the Cañon City area is home to 14 state and federal prisons and about 8,000 prisoners–close to 1,500 of them in long-term solitary confinement. Colorado’s two state supermax facilities, on the outskirts of town, have over 1,066 solitary confinement cells in all, and ADX Florence, with some 400 more, is just ten miles down the road.
Cañon City does its best to promote itself as an Old West tourist town, a base for whitewater rafting and narrow-gauge train rides in nearby Royal Gorge. Its strip is filled with chain motels, alongside kitschy establishments like the Waffle Wagon, Big Daddy’s Diner, and the Smoker Friendly Tobacco Hut. But while it isn’t quite the rundown hellhole depicted in the recent French web documentary called Prison Valley, Cañon City is unmistakably a company town. Prison guards’ uniforms are a common sight in its streets and shops, and the motels advertise special rates for government employees. Downtown Cañon City holds the Museum of Colorado Prisons, which lies in the shadow of yet another actual prison. On its front lawn stands a gas chamber—not a replica, but the actual gas chamber used for eight state executions. Inside the museum, the exhibits include “behavior control devices” such as balls and chains, cattle prods, gas guns, and a kind of whipping horse that was known as the “Old Gray Mare.” The printed museum guide informs visitors that “the items on exhibit can no longer be used because the court system deemed their use cruel and unusual punishment.”
The courts have, for the most part, failed to reach the same conclusion about long-term solitary confinement, although some of Cañon City’s prisoners might well prefer a few minutes on the Old Gray Mare to years or decades of 23- to 24-hour lockdown with barely a glimpse of a human face. Numerous studies have confirmed the psychological and physiological damage caused by this type of isolation, and international conventions identify it as a form of “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment. The practice is rare in Europe, but in the United States, over the past 30 years, the use of solitary confinement has increased even more dramatically than our staggering incarceration rate. (Between 1995 and 2000 alone, the growth rate for prisoners housed in isolation was 40 percent, as compared to 28 percent for the prison population in general.) According to the best available data, about 25,000 prisoners are in solitary in supermax facilities, while some as many as 80,000 more are in segregation units or cells in other prisons and jails. With more than 6 percent of its prisoners in isolation, Colorado ranks well above the national average of about 2 percent—but then, so do states that span the political spectrum, from Arizona and Nevada to Maine and New York.
At ADX, the only supermax in the federal prison system, human isolation has been raised to an art. The location alone is desolate enough: On a road outside the tiny town of Florence, on a cleared patch of red-brown high desert turf, lies a razor-wire-fenced compound dotted with signs that read “No trespassing, 24-hour surveillance.” This is the Florence Federal Correctional Complex, which includes medium and maximum-security facilities as well as the world-famous ADX. With their cheery red and yellow bricks and tiled roofs, the buildings nearest to the road resemble a southwestern strip mall; set further back and low to the ground, ADX would be at home on a suburban industrial estate, minus its massive concrete guard towers.
The interior of ADX, however, is something few Americans will ever see, even through the eyes of journalists. Alan Prendergast, a reporter for Denver’s alternative weekly Westword, has written about ADX since its opening in 1994; in its early years, he entered the federal supermax several times and was even granted permission to interview prisoners. After 9/11, however, all press access was cut off. From documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Prendergast learned that after January 2002, every single request from the press to visit ADX was denied, with the majority of denials citing unspecified “security concerns.” “I may have been the last reporter inside ADX,” Prendergast said in an interview.
Several University of Denver students have, however, succeeded in entering this fortress of solitude, due to their standing as student lawyers. Erica Day and Nick Catanzarite, DU students who are currently working on Tommy Silverstein’s case, described their experiences visiting ADX, along with Rovner and Glidden, in October 2010. The first thing they saw when they entered was a huge black-and-white photo of Alcatraz Prison floating in San Francisco Bay, implicitly conveying pride in ADX’s reputation as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” Then there was a series of photos of the men responsible for the facility: President Barak Obama, then Attorney General Eric Holder, followed by the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the North Central Regional BOP director, and ADX Warden Blake R. Davis. After clearing security, they passed a cabinet selling T-shirts that read “Pen State,” with proceeds going to the prison guards’ union, and then a set of staff awards for excellence. Finally, there was a long underground hallway, punctuated by a series of signs with slogans like “Loyalty,” “Honesty,” and “Integrity.”
After crowding into a small concrete visitors’ booth in sight of several video cameras, Rovner, Glidden and the students watched through thick plexiglass as their client was brought in. Silverstein’s legs were shackled together, and his hands were cuffed and connected to a belly chain fitted through a “black box” attached to his waist. After hearing about the man some prison officials refer to as “Terrible Tommy,” Catanzarite says he was taken aback by his appearance: “He looked like an old man.” Day was “caught off guard by Tommy’s manners. ”He was concerned about the long trip we’d had to take to get there,” she says, and “every time someone entered or left the room,” she said, “he stood up.”
They spent close to six hours in the concrete enclosure interviewing their client—an experience the student attorneys describe as exhausting, partly because of the subject matter, and partly because they themselves felt unhinged by their environment, consumed in a kind of time warp. Both clearly have been affected by the visit. Day’s voice becomes emotional when she describes leaving ADX: “It’s hard when you walk outside into the light, and know he is going back to his cell.”
Laura Rovner is one of the only outsiders who have ever seen what awaits Tommy Silverstein when he returns to his cell. For years, he was housed in a place called Range 13—the most restrictive section within the most restrictive unit of the most restrictive prison in America. Its only residents were Silverstein and Ramzi Yousef, convicted as a principal participant in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. When Silverstein arrived at ADX—after years in Marion, Atlanta, and then Leavenworth, where he occupied a remote underground cell known as the “Silverstein Suite”—prison officials built an additional wall in the hallway to make absolutely sure that the two could not communicate, even by shouting. They also moved Silverstein back and forth, every three months, between two different cells.
When Rovner examined the cells, she saw the usual immovable, poured concrete bed, desk, and stool; the combination toilet/sink and interior shower, which renders it unnecessary for prisoners to ever be removed from their cells. The cells are lit and surveilled by video cameras 24-hours-a-day. They receive close-circuit broadcasts onto black-and-white televisions that had to be retrofitted specifically for the Bureau of Prisons–reputedly because the BOP didn’t like the PR implications of providing supermax prisoners with color TV. Each cell has a small, high, wire-covered window, which the prisoner can only look through by climbing on the desk, and which provides a view only of the concrete walls of the exercise enclosure into which the inmate is released (by remote control) for up to one hour a day. The enclosure’s high concrete walls offer a glimpse of sky, but no view of the nearby mountains, and its dimensions are such that the occupant can walk approximately ten steps in any direction, or thirty feet in a circle.
Remotely controlled bars separate each cell from a vestibule, and a solid steel door separates the vestibule from the hallway. Food comes into the vestibule through a slot in the door. Any contact Silverstein had with prison staff, including the psychologist who spoke to him for a few minutes every 30 days, generally took place through the steel door. There was no need—and little possibility—of him ever seeing a human face. According to Silverstein’s lawsuit, while he was held in Range 13, “invasive strip searches and infrequent haircuts were the only physical contact Mr. Silverstein experienced with other human beings.” Rovner says that experts on the use and effects of supermax prisons, including psychologist Craig Haney and correctional expert Steve J. Martin, told her that Range 13 has the most isolating prison conditions they had seen.
The complaint, filed on Silverstein’s behalf by the Civil Rights Clinic in 2007, states that the “extreme sensory deprivation and social isolation” to which Tommy Silverstein has been subjected over the last 27 years have deprived him of “human contact and human dignity” and “led to physical and psychological harm.” The harm cited in the complaint includes “eyesight damage, hypertension, anxiety attacks, sleep disturbances, pain…shortness of breath, and aggravated symptoms of diabetes and Hepatitis C…depression, hallucinations, disorientation, memory loss, cognitive impairment and other various psychological problems.” The complaint argues that the BOP is well aware of the risk of harm they are causing, and that all of this constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the 8th Amendment.
The complaint also alleges that Tommy Silverstein is being subjected to this cruelty without due process of law, which is guaranteed to him by the 5th Amendment. Rovner and her students argue that there is no meaningful legal process to determine who gets put into ADX (as opposed to a conventional maximum security prison) or what they have to do to get out. The prison putatively maintains a “step-down” program, by which prisoners can gradually earn their way, through good behavior, into somewhat less restrictive conditions. But the lawsuit depicts the step-down program as little more than a sham process, and one to which their client has had no real access.
Silverstein has not had a disciplinary write-up in 23 years, but this fact has had no impact on his confinement. “The BOP shrinks chalk it up as me being so isolated I haven’t anyone to fight with,” Silverstein wrote to Alan Prendergast, “but they’re totally oblivious to all the petty BS that I could go off on if I chose to. I can toss a turd and cup of piss with the best of ‘em if I desired,” he continued, referring to fact that some supermax prisoners resort to throwing their own excrement. “What are they going to do, lock me up?”
Nick Catanzarite says that he “felt conflicted” when he began working on the Silverstein case, because of what he knew about his client’s violent past. But he is now convinced that regardless of that past, “what he has been subjected to is not OK. Even if it had a rehabilitative purpose, it wouldn’t be justified.” Erica Day finds the conditions at ADX so extreme that they shock both the senses and the conscience. “There’s a reason these prisons aren’t in the middle of Denver,” she said. “You really hope this goes on because people don’t know, and not because they don’t care. But there will always be people whose minds can’t be changed.”
If their goal is to change minds, as well as change their clients’ conditions, Rovner and her students have chosen an unlikely poster child in Tommy Silverstein. Even some steadfast opponents of long-term solitary confinement told us that they questioned the idea of litigating on behalf of Silverstein rather than someone with a less violent and more sympathetic story. After all, Silverstein’s crimes—which include killing a guard while being marched to the shower in shackles—do seem to qualify him as one of the “worst of the worst.” Meanwhile, tens of thousands of American prisoners are in solitary for disciplinary infractions that range from fighting in the mess hall to having a too many postage stamps, while thousands more live in isolation simply because they are deemed too young, too vulnerable, or too mentally ill for the general population.
But Rovner believes that the extreme nature of Silverstein’s isolation, and its duration, demand a legal response. And it’s possible that the outcome of his case could affect the thousands of other inmates being held in long-term solitary confinement in supermax facilities and administrative segregation units across the country, from Virginia’s Red Onion prison to California’s Pelican Bay. When a federal judge ruled, in March 2010, that Silverstein’s lawsuit could move forward, Rovner pointed out that it was “one of only two or three in the entire country where a court has held that solitary confinement alone is enough to state a claim for cruel and unusual punishment, even absent mental illness or other physical harm. We anticipate and hope that this decision will have a positive impact on the ability of litigators across the country to challenge the disturbing trend of holding individuals in solitary confinement indefinitely.”
The case of this former member of the Aryan Brotherhood could, ironically, have implications for the plight of two former Black Panthers in Louisiana—or vice versa. Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, members of the group known as the Angola 3, have been in solitary confinement in state prisons for almost continuously for 37 years. A team of pro bono lawyers has mounted a challenge on grounds similar to those in the Silverstein case, and will likely go to trial in federal district court in Baton Rouge sometime this year.
Extreme and indefinite solitary confinement has also become the punishment of first resort for those accused or convicted of crimes related to the so-called war on terror. ADX now holds the likes of Zacarias Moussaoui, Richard Reid, and John Walker Lindh, and is spoken of as a possible final destination for residents of Guantanamo. Marion and Terre Haute federal prisons already contain ultra-isolation “Communications Management Units” (CMUs) that were set up secretly under the Bush administration, supposedly to hold high-risk inmates, including terrorists, whose crimes warranted heightened monitoring of their external and internal communications. According to a lawsuit filed this past spring by the Center for Constitutional Rights, many prisoners in fact end up in the CMUs “for their constitutionally protected religious beliefs, unpopular political views, or in retaliation for challenging poor treatment or other rights violations in the federal prison system.”
The DU Civil Rights Clinic’s clients also include three prisoners convicted of terrorism charges, in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Following their convictions in 1995, Mohammed Saleh, El-Sayyid Nosair, and Ibrahim Elgabrowny were housed in the general population at various federal prisons, where they ate in the mess hall, worked jobs, hung out on the yard, and received visits from their families. But according to the complaint filed on their behalf, within “hours” of the 9/11 attacks, they were rounded up and placed in solitary confinement, and later transferred to ADX–all without any form of due process, which the Constitution demands whenever anyone is deprived by the state of liberty or property. Just because these men are prisoners, explains Kellie Eastin, one of the students working on the case, “doesn’t mean they can’t have more of their liberty taken away.” The courts, however, have been indefinite and contradictory when it comes to defining the “liberty interest” of prisoners. In December, a federal judge dismissed the case, concluding that the men’s confinement at ADX served a “legitimate penological interest” and, remarkably, that the conditions at ADX could not be considered “extreme.” The Civil Rights Clinic is appealing the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Because of her work at ADX, Rovner was recently asked to provide evidence to the European Court of Human Rights in the case of four British nationals who are fighting extradition to the United States to face terrorism charges. The suspects have argued that if extradited, they could face a lifetime of solitary confinement, most likely at ADX—and that this type of confinement would violate the European Convention on Human Rights’s ban on “torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
These suits implicitly challenge Americans to think about the issue of torture not in distant prisons like Gitmo, Bagram, or Abu Ghraib, but in our own backyards. “When we think about people being waterboarded overseas by our government,” Rovner told the Denver Post, “the idea of sitting in a cell with three meals a day doesn’t seem that bad. But that doesn’t account for the scars you can’t see or the devastating human erosion.” Tommy Silverstein himself has described life in solitary confinement as “a slow constant peeling of the skin, stripping of the flesh, the nerve-wracking sound of water dripping from a leaky faucet in the still of the night while you’re trying to sleep. Drip, drip, drip, the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, constantly drip away with no end or relief in sight.”
Many more months—and perhaps even years—will drip away before Silverstein’s case is resolved. But the litigation process itself is not without some impact. Already, Tommy Silverstein, Ibrahim Elgabrowny, and El-Sayyid Nosair have been moved from their original cells at ADX to different (though only marginally less restrictive) conditions. The changes took place since the Civil Rights Clinic filed its lawsuits, though the federal Bureau of Prisons denies the suits had anything to do with the moves.
In the end, all that is certain is that the students and their clients will affect one another on a personal level—in some cases, quite profoundly. The students who visited their clients at ADX and the nearby Colorado State Penitentiary describe ascending from those hidden worlds and drinking in the air, the sun, the mountains—the sensation of freedom—and feeling changed by their experience. For Tommy Silverstein, conversely, his time in the ADX visiting booth felt like a “vacation” from his life of utter solitude.
Laura Rovner acknowledges that her clinic’s litigation is providing its clients with one thing they desperately need: a spark of genuine human interaction. While she hopes to accomplish much more, she also believes that this alone is significant.
Fortresses of Solitude (Part 1) by James Ridgeway and Jean Casella
Cañon City, Colorado, is the Solitary Confinement Capital of the Western World. Now, a Small Group Lawyers, Legislators, and Activists Is Challenging This All-American Form of Torture.
Part 1: The Alcatraz of the Rockies
On the wall opposite Laura Rovner’s desk at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law is a large framed drawing depicting her as the Angel of Justice. The artist is Thomas Silverstein, a onetime armed robber who is serving multiple life sentences for the murders of two fellow prison inmates and a guard.Silverstein made his meticulously detailed ink drawing–which shows a winged Rovner holding a sword, surrounded by slain bodies–in his 7 x 12-foot cell at the notorious United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, or ADX, in rural Florence, Colorado. A talented self-taught artist, he has had plenty of time to hone his craft. For the last 27 years, Tommy Silverstein has been literally buried alive—held in an extreme form of solitary confinement in the depths of the federal prison system, under a “no human contact” order. The man who was at one time known as “America’s Most Dangerous Prisoner” is now described, on a web site maintained by his supporters, as “America’s Most Isolated Man.”
He is also Laura Rovner’s client. Rovner, teaching fellow Brittany Glidden, and a group of student attorneys from DU’s Civil Rights Clinic have filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Denver, arguing that Silverstein’s 84 square feet of utter and permanent isolation violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, as well as its guarantee of due process. The suit is just one of several brought by the clinic on behalf of various inmates at ADX and at the nearby state supermax prison. Along with a small handful of other cases in Colorado and around the country, the work of DU’s Civil Rights Clinic represents the leading edge of a legal challenge to solitary confinement. As such, it has the potential to affect the lives of the 100,000 or more prisoners who are held in some form of solitary on any given day in prisons across the United States.
In person, the Angel of Justice is a petite, brown-haired woman who chain-swigs Diet Pepsis and pauses to glance at her computer, which incessantly pings for her attention. Rovner has spent most of her career teaching in civil rights clinics at Georgetown, Syracuse, and North Dakota Law Schools, defending the rights of the deaf and other people with disabilities who had been victimized by discrimination, as well as the rights of prisoners. As she talks about her work at DU, she buzzes with energy, yet chooses her words carefully, measuring them against her clients’ best interests.
After pointing out Silverstein’s drawing, Rovner displays some samples from a pile of hand-knit afghans, scarves, and mittens, also made by Silverstein (and notable for the absence of red, blue, and black, which are banned at ADX as “gang colors”). She shows us a recent photograph, in which Silverstein sports long gray hair and an even longer white beard, his eyes squinting out above weathered cheeks and a friendly smile. Dressed in loose white clothing, he looks like an angelic hipster, maybe an aging yoga teacher, or at worst an over-the-hill biker—certainly not a man more dangerous than the host of convicted terrorists, spies, mobsters, and drug kingpins housed with him at ADX.
Silverstein never killed anyone before he got to prison, and he contends that he did so then only when he felt his own life was threatened. He also says that, nearly three decades later, he is a changed man (he does, in fact, meditate and do yoga in his cell). This transformation is something his attorneys seem to accept, and they make a point of it in their suit. But ultimately, Rovner believes, if the Constitution is to mean anything, then it must apply not just to people and causes that engender sympathy, but to men like Tommy Silverstein, who have been written off as “the worst of the worst.” It must prevail not only in the light of day, but in the fluorescent-lit dungeons of ADX.
If Rovner is determined to defend the Constitutional rights of prisoners held in what is euphemistically called “administrative segregation,” then she has come to the right place. The state of Colorado has become ground zero for the use of solitary confinement—and increasingly, for efforts to challenge it on legal, humanitarian, and even economic grounds. Douglas Wilson, the Colorado State Public Defender, describes solitary confinement as a “hot little issue” in his state, due in part to a highly public battle over the opening of a second costly state supermax, and to a new effort in the state legislature to limit the use of solitary.
At the center of the storm is Cañon City, Colorado, which stands as the solitary confinement capital of the industrialized world. Two hours southwest of Denver, the Cañon City area is home to 14 state and federal prisons and about 8,000 prisoners–close to 1,500 of them in long-term solitary confinement. Colorado’s two state supermax facilities, on the outskirts of town, have over 1,066 solitary confinement cells in all, and ADX Florence, with some 400 more, is just ten miles down the road.
Cañon City does its best to promote itself as an Old West tourist town, a base for whitewater rafting and narrow-gauge train rides in nearby Royal Gorge. Its strip is filled with chain motels, alongside kitschy establishments like the Waffle Wagon, Big Daddy’s Diner, and the Smoker Friendly Tobacco Hut. But while it isn’t quite the rundown hellhole depicted in the recent French web documentary called Prison Valley, Cañon City is unmistakably a company town. Prison guards’ uniforms are a common sight in its streets and shops, and the motels advertise special rates for government employees. Downtown Cañon City holds the Museum of Colorado Prisons, which lies in the shadow of yet another actual prison. On its front lawn stands a gas chamber—not a replica, but the actual gas chamber used for eight state executions. Inside the museum, the exhibits include “behavior control devices” such as balls and chains, cattle prods, gas guns, and a kind of whipping horse that was known as the “Old Gray Mare.” The printed museum guide informs visitors that “the items on exhibit can no longer be used because the court system deemed their use cruel and unusual punishment.”
The courts have, for the most part, failed to reach the same conclusion about long-term solitary confinement, although some of Cañon City’s prisoners might well prefer a few minutes on the Old Gray Mare to years or decades of 23- to 24-hour lockdown with barely a glimpse of a human face. Numerous studies have confirmed the psychological and physiological damage caused by this type of isolation, and international conventions identify it as a form of “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment. The practice is rare in Europe, but in the United States, over the past 30 years, the use of solitary confinement has increased even more dramatically than our staggering incarceration rate. (Between 1995 and 2000 alone, the growth rate for prisoners housed in isolation was 40 percent, as compared to 28 percent for the prison population in general.) According to the best available data, about 25,000 prisoners are in solitary in supermax facilities, while some as many as 80,000 more are in segregation units or cells in other prisons and jails. With more than 6 percent of its prisoners in isolation, Colorado ranks well above the national average of about 2 percent—but then, so do states that span the political spectrum, from Arizona and Nevada to Maine and New York.
At ADX, the only supermax in the federal prison system, human isolation has been raised to an art. The location alone is desolate enough: On a road outside the tiny town of Florence, on a cleared patch of red-brown high desert turf, lies a razor-wire-fenced compound dotted with signs that read “No trespassing, 24-hour surveillance.” This is the Florence Federal Correctional Complex, which includes medium and maximum-security facilities as well as the world-famous ADX. With their cheery red and yellow bricks and tiled roofs, the buildings nearest to the road resemble a southwestern strip mall; set further back and low to the ground, ADX would be at home on a suburban industrial estate, minus its massive concrete guard towers.
The interior of ADX, however, is something few Americans will ever see, even through the eyes of journalists. Alan Prendergast, a reporter for Denver’s alternative weekly Westword, has written about ADX since its opening in 1994; in its early years, he entered the federal supermax several times and was even granted permission to interview prisoners. After 9/11, however, all press access was cut off. From documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Prendergast learned that after January 2002, every single request from the press to visit ADX was denied, with the majority of denials citing unspecified “security concerns.” “I may have been the last reporter inside ADX,” Prendergast said in an interview.
Several University of Denver students have, however, succeeded in entering this fortress of solitude, due to their standing as student lawyers. Erica Day and Nick Catanzarite, DU students who are currently working on Tommy Silverstein’s case, described their experiences visiting ADX, along with Rovner and Glidden, in October 2010. The first thing they saw when they entered was a huge black-and-white photo of Alcatraz Prison floating in San Francisco Bay, implicitly conveying pride in ADX’s reputation as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” Then there was a series of photos of the men responsible for the facility: President Barak Obama, then Attorney General Eric Holder, followed by the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the North Central Regional BOP director, and ADX Warden Blake R. Davis. After clearing security, they passed a cabinet selling T-shirts that read “Pen State,” with proceeds going to the prison guards’ union, and then a set of staff awards for excellence. Finally, there was a long underground hallway, punctuated by a series of signs with slogans like “Loyalty,” “Honesty,” and “Integrity.”
After crowding into a small concrete visitors’ booth in sight of several video cameras, Rovner, Glidden and the students watched through thick plexiglass as their client was brought in. Silverstein’s legs were shackled together, and his hands were cuffed and connected to a belly chain fitted through a “black box” attached to his waist. After hearing about the man some prison officials refer to as “Terrible Tommy,” Catanzarite says he was taken aback by his appearance: “He looked like an old man.” Day was “caught off guard by Tommy’s manners. ”He was concerned about the long trip we’d had to take to get there,” she says, and “every time someone entered or left the room,” she said, “he stood up.”
They spent close to six hours in the concrete enclosure interviewing their client—an experience the student attorneys describe as exhausting, partly because of the subject matter, and partly because they themselves felt unhinged by their environment, consumed in a kind of time warp. Both clearly have been affected by the visit. Day’s voice becomes emotional when she describes leaving ADX: “It’s hard when you walk outside into the light, and know he is going back to his cell.”
Laura Rovner is one of the only outsiders who have ever seen what awaits Tommy Silverstein when he returns to his cell. For years, he was housed in a place called Range 13—the most restrictive section within the most restrictive unit of the most restrictive prison in America. Its only residents were Silverstein and Ramzi Yousef, convicted as a principal participant in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. When Silverstein arrived at ADX—after years in Marion, Atlanta, and then Leavenworth, where he occupied a remote underground cell known as the “Silverstein Suite”—prison officials built an additional wall in the hallway to make absolutely sure that the two could not communicate, even by shouting. They also moved Silverstein back and forth, every three months, between two different cells.
When Rovner examined the cells, she saw the usual immovable, poured concrete bed, desk, and stool; the combination toilet/sink and interior shower, which renders it unnecessary for prisoners to ever be removed from their cells. The cells are lit and surveilled by video cameras 24-hours-a-day. They receive close-circuit broadcasts onto black-and-white televisions that had to be retrofitted specifically for the Bureau of Prisons–reputedly because the BOP didn’t like the PR implications of providing supermax prisoners with color TV. Each cell has a small, high, wire-covered window, which the prisoner can only look through by climbing on the desk, and which provides a view only of the concrete walls of the exercise enclosure into which the inmate is released (by remote control) for up to one hour a day. The enclosure’s high concrete walls offer a glimpse of sky, but no view of the nearby mountains, and its dimensions are such that the occupant can walk approximately ten steps in any direction, or thirty feet in a circle.
Remotely controlled bars separate each cell from a vestibule, and a solid steel door separates the vestibule from the hallway. Food comes into the vestibule through a slot in the door. Any contact Silverstein had with prison staff, including the psychologist who spoke to him for a few minutes every 30 days, generally took place through the steel door. There was no need—and little possibility—of him ever seeing a human face. According to Silverstein’s lawsuit, while he was held in Range 13, “invasive strip searches and infrequent haircuts were the only physical contact Mr. Silverstein experienced with other human beings.” Rovner says that experts on the use and effects of supermax prisons, including psychologist Craig Haney and correctional expert Steve J. Martin, told her that Range 13 has the most isolating prison conditions they had seen.
The complaint, filed on Silverstein’s behalf by the Civil Rights Clinic in 2007, states that the “extreme sensory deprivation and social isolation” to which Tommy Silverstein has been subjected over the last 27 years have deprived him of “human contact and human dignity” and “led to physical and psychological harm.” The harm cited in the complaint includes “eyesight damage, hypertension, anxiety attacks, sleep disturbances, pain…shortness of breath, and aggravated symptoms of diabetes and Hepatitis C…depression, hallucinations, disorientation, memory loss, cognitive impairment and other various psychological problems.” The complaint argues that the BOP is well aware of the risk of harm they are causing, and that all of this constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the 8th Amendment.
The complaint also alleges that Tommy Silverstein is being subjected to this cruelty without due process of law, which is guaranteed to him by the 5th Amendment. Rovner and her students argue that there is no meaningful legal process to determine who gets put into ADX (as opposed to a conventional maximum security prison) or what they have to do to get out. The prison putatively maintains a “step-down” program, by which prisoners can gradually earn their way, through good behavior, into somewhat less restrictive conditions. But the lawsuit depicts the step-down program as little more than a sham process, and one to which their client has had no real access.
Silverstein has not had a disciplinary write-up in 23 years, but this fact has had no impact on his confinement. “The BOP shrinks chalk it up as me being so isolated I haven’t anyone to fight with,” Silverstein wrote to Alan Prendergast, “but they’re totally oblivious to all the petty BS that I could go off on if I chose to. I can toss a turd and cup of piss with the best of ‘em if I desired,” he continued, referring to fact that some supermax prisoners resort to throwing their own excrement. “What are they going to do, lock me up?”
Nick Catanzarite says that he “felt conflicted” when he began working on the Silverstein case, because of what he knew about his client’s violent past. But he is now convinced that regardless of that past, “what he has been subjected to is not OK. Even if it had a rehabilitative purpose, it wouldn’t be justified.” Erica Day finds the conditions at ADX so extreme that they shock both the senses and the conscience. “There’s a reason these prisons aren’t in the middle of Denver,” she said. “You really hope this goes on because people don’t know, and not because they don’t care. But there will always be people whose minds can’t be changed.”
If their goal is to change minds, as well as change their clients’ conditions, Rovner and her students have chosen an unlikely poster child in Tommy Silverstein. Even some steadfast opponents of long-term solitary confinement told us that they questioned the idea of litigating on behalf of Silverstein rather than someone with a less violent and more sympathetic story. After all, Silverstein’s crimes—which include killing a guard while being marched to the shower in shackles—do seem to qualify him as one of the “worst of the worst.” Meanwhile, tens of thousands of American prisoners are in solitary for disciplinary infractions that range from fighting in the mess hall to having a too many postage stamps, while thousands more live in isolation simply because they are deemed too young, too vulnerable, or too mentally ill for the general population.
But Rovner believes that the extreme nature of Silverstein’s isolation, and its duration, demand a legal response. And it’s possible that the outcome of his case could affect the thousands of other inmates being held in long-term solitary confinement in supermax facilities and administrative segregation units across the country, from Virginia’s Red Onion prison to California’s Pelican Bay. When a federal judge ruled, in March 2010, that Silverstein’s lawsuit could move forward, Rovner pointed out that it was “one of only two or three in the entire country where a court has held that solitary confinement alone is enough to state a claim for cruel and unusual punishment, even absent mental illness or other physical harm. We anticipate and hope that this decision will have a positive impact on the ability of litigators across the country to challenge the disturbing trend of holding individuals in solitary confinement indefinitely.”
The case of this former member of the Aryan Brotherhood could, ironically, have implications for the plight of two former Black Panthers in Louisiana—or vice versa. Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, members of the group known as the Angola 3, have been in solitary confinement in state prisons for almost continuously for 37 years. A team of pro bono lawyers has mounted a challenge on grounds similar to those in the Silverstein case, and will likely go to trial in federal district court in Baton Rouge sometime this year.
Extreme and indefinite solitary confinement has also become the punishment of first resort for those accused or convicted of crimes related to the so-called war on terror. ADX now holds the likes of Zacarias Moussaoui, Richard Reid, and John Walker Lindh, and is spoken of as a possible final destination for residents of Guantanamo. Marion and Terre Haute federal prisons already contain ultra-isolation “Communications Management Units” (CMUs) that were set up secretly under the Bush administration, supposedly to hold high-risk inmates, including terrorists, whose crimes warranted heightened monitoring of their external and internal communications. According to a lawsuit filed this past spring by the Center for Constitutional Rights, many prisoners in fact end up in the CMUs “for their constitutionally protected religious beliefs, unpopular political views, or in retaliation for challenging poor treatment or other rights violations in the federal prison system.”
The DU Civil Rights Clinic’s clients also include three prisoners convicted of terrorism charges, in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Following their convictions in 1995, Mohammed Saleh, El-Sayyid Nosair, and Ibrahim Elgabrowny were housed in the general population at various federal prisons, where they ate in the mess hall, worked jobs, hung out on the yard, and received visits from their families. But according to the complaint filed on their behalf, within “hours” of the 9/11 attacks, they were rounded up and placed in solitary confinement, and later transferred to ADX–all without any form of due process, which the Constitution demands whenever anyone is deprived by the state of liberty or property. Just because these men are prisoners, explains Kellie Eastin, one of the students working on the case, “doesn’t mean they can’t have more of their liberty taken away.” The courts, however, have been indefinite and contradictory when it comes to defining the “liberty interest” of prisoners. In December, a federal judge dismissed the case, concluding that the men’s confinement at ADX served a “legitimate penological interest” and, remarkably, that the conditions at ADX could not be considered “extreme.” The Civil Rights Clinic is appealing the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Because of her work at ADX, Rovner was recently asked to provide evidence to the European Court of Human Rights in the case of four British nationals who are fighting extradition to the United States to face terrorism charges. The suspects have argued that if extradited, they could face a lifetime of solitary confinement, most likely at ADX—and that this type of confinement would violate the European Convention on Human Rights’s ban on “torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
These suits implicitly challenge Americans to think about the issue of torture not in distant prisons like Gitmo, Bagram, or Abu Ghraib, but in our own backyards. “When we think about people being waterboarded overseas by our government,” Rovner told the Denver Post, “the idea of sitting in a cell with three meals a day doesn’t seem that bad. But that doesn’t account for the scars you can’t see or the devastating human erosion.” Tommy Silverstein himself has described life in solitary confinement as “a slow constant peeling of the skin, stripping of the flesh, the nerve-wracking sound of water dripping from a leaky faucet in the still of the night while you’re trying to sleep. Drip, drip, drip, the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, constantly drip away with no end or relief in sight.”
Many more months—and perhaps even years—will drip away before Silverstein’s case is resolved. But the litigation process itself is not without some impact. Already, Tommy Silverstein, Ibrahim Elgabrowny, and El-Sayyid Nosair have been moved from their original cells at ADX to different (though only marginally less restrictive) conditions. The changes took place since the Civil Rights Clinic filed its lawsuits, though the federal Bureau of Prisons denies the suits had anything to do with the moves.
In the end, all that is certain is that the students and their clients will affect one another on a personal level—in some cases, quite profoundly. The students who visited their clients at ADX and the nearby Colorado State Penitentiary describe ascending from those hidden worlds and drinking in the air, the sun, the mountains—the sensation of freedom—and feeling changed by their experience. For Tommy Silverstein, conversely, his time in the ADX visiting booth felt like a “vacation” from his life of utter solitude.
Laura Rovner acknowledges that her clinic’s litigation is providing its clients with one thing they desperately need: a spark of genuine human interaction. While she hopes to accomplish much more, she also believes that this alone is significant.
**This information is being shared by Citizens for Prison Reform for purely informational purposes.
Citizens for Prison Reform
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"
-Martin Luther King
Website: www.micpr.org
Cañon City, Colorado, is the Solitary Confinement Capital of the Western World
From: Solitary Watch
http://solitarywatch.com/about/fortresses-of-solitude-part-2/
Fortresses of Solitude (Part 2)by James Ridgeway and Jean Casella
The men who inhabit CSP are more typical of supermax residents than those at ADX, and few of them would qualify as “the worst of the worst.” Prisoners from throughout Colorado’s correctional facilities land in administrative segregation, or “ad seg,” at CSP for fighting with other inmates or guards or for making threats or “compromising” or “intimidating” staff; for being identified as gang members; for having contraband (which can include not only weapons but cigarettes or “drug paraphernalia”); for attempting to escape, refusing a work assignment, “advocating facility disruption,” or generally posing a “serious management problem”—all on the say-so of prison officials. Prisoners are entitled to a hearing, but according to a 2005 study, 90 percent of these hearing result in the segregation requested by prison staff. Terms in solitary last an average of 18 months, but many stretch to years.
Whatever their violations of record, many prisoners find their way to CSP by exhibiting the symptoms of untreated mental illness. Since the 1980s, as budgets for social services have been slashed to the bone even as prison costs exploded, prisons have increasingly become the new asylums, and supermax isolation has become a substitute for appropriate mental health or substance abuse treatment for tens of thousands of prisoners. When the bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons issued its report in 2006, one of its primary recommendations was to “protect mentally ill prisoners” with disciplinary issues from being placed in solitary confinement, rather than in the “secure therapeutic units” where they belonged.
To date, only a few states have made progress in this area–and they did so only when their hands were forced by lawsuits. According to a report from Human Rights Watch, which based its estimates on available data from the states, one-third to one-half of prisoners held in segregation suffered from mental illness. In Colorado, by the state’s own calculations, the figure in 2005 was 37 percent, up from 15 percent a decade earlier. The increase, according to the state’s report, had followed “a dramatic decline in mental health professionals and rehabilitation programs that were a casualty of budget cuts.”
Troy Anderson has spent 23 of his 40 years on earth behind bars—and the majority of those years in solitary confinement. His list of diagnoses includes ADHD, bipolar disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, anti-social personality disorder, cognitive disorders, a seizure disorder, and polysubstance dependence, and he has attempted suicide many times, starting at the age of 10. Now serving a 75-year sentence, Anderson has been seen periodically by prison psychiatrists, all of whom seem to concur that he is seriously mentally ill and needs therapy and medication. On at least one occasion, he briefly received treatment in a facility designed for prisoners with mental illness, and improved considerably. But he was taken from that facility and sent back to CSP, where his mental health treatment has been a fiasco of intermittent and inappropriate medications and scant therapy, sometimes conducted through a slot in his solid steel cell door.
According to the lawsuit filed on his behalf by the University of Denver’s Civil Rights Clinic, it is Troy Anderson’s mental illness that landed him in solitary in the first place; and it is is mental illness that now will not allow him to earn his way out of isolation and into the general population. His lawyers predict that unless something changes, he will die in prison, and probably in solitary confinement at CSP.
A team of student lawyers is working for Anderson under the supervision of teaching fellow Brittany Glidden—who came to DU fresh from the landmark case on prisoner health care in California–and co-counsel Amy Robertson of the law firm Fox & Robertson. Their suit is taking a new approach in challenging Anderson’s decade-long isolation. In addition to making Constitutional claims similar to those in other solitary confinement cases, Anderson’s lawyers are claiming violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. They argue that by failing to treat his mental illness, and then effectively punishing him for having it, the Colorado Department of Corrections is discriminating against him based on his disability. The state is seeking to dismiss their complaint, and there is “not much precedent to predict how courts will decide,” says Glidden. But she feels confident that they will be able to move forward on at least some of their claims.
Matthew Court, one of the students working on the Troy Anderson case, says, “I like the idea of systemic changes, but it’s really about Troy. We are doing everything we can to get him the treatment he needs, so that he has a fair shot, and can see what he is capable of.” Courtney Longtin agrees. “This is not abstract,’’ she says. “There’s some hope for Troy; if his case goes the way we hope his life could really change…He could get out of CSP and into the general population, and maybe even into the world.” Lee Knox is not sure that the case will have an impact on prison policy in general, but hopes that it will have a “small, positive impact on people at CSP.” In any event, he continues, the case “gives Troy a serious voice. Prisoners don’t have that voice.”
Colorado prisoners do, however, have an unusual number of people dedicated to speaking out on their behalf, in the form of a community of Denver-based criminal justice reform advocates. The ACLU of Colorado, along with local attorney Gail Johnson, is currently suing to improve conditions on the state’s death row, arguing that denying condemned prisoners exercise and sunlight violates their 8th amendment rights. The Pendulum Foundation advocates for children in Colorado’s adult prisons, as does the Colorado Juvenile Defender Coalition, which recently documented the use of solitary confinement on teenagers in the Denver County Jail. And the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition contains more than a hundred groups, including many religious congregations, that seek to “reduce the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado” through legislation and policymaking.
Barb Stephenson is among the activists who are moved by personal experience as well as conscience. Stephenson works with the prison reform and prisoner support group Colorado CURE. She talks frankly about her son Dudley, now 35, who has spent 13 years in prison for felony murder after taking part in a robbery where the victim was killed by an accomplice. Dudley also suffers from lifelong mental illness, and quickly landed in solitary confinement. Stephenson says she realized that “I was the only person who was going to advocate for my son,” and was “relentless” about getting him moved out of ad seg and into a setting where he could get treatment. Her matter-of-fact tone does not hide the toll this work has clearly taken on her.
Stephenson finally succeeded this past summer, when her son became a resident of a new unit for “OMIs”–offenders with mental illness—in the Canon City prison complex. Stephenson says the change is “wonderful”: Dudley is now in a unit with only 16 other inmates, and is receiving the right medication. There is a therapist on the unit, and “they get therapy outside of cages,” Stephenson says, referring to the practice of placing segregated prisoners in adjoining pens for “group” therapy. But the new unit is small, she says, and the only other prison facility dedicated to OMIs, in nearby Pueblo, has just 255 beds. This means that Colorado’s ad seg cells likely hold more prisoners with mental illness than its treatment units.
A new and highly controversial report from the Colorado Department of Corrections claims that ad seg may not be such a bad place for them. The study followed a group of prisoners—including some with diagnosed mental illnesses and some without–for a year after they were placed in solitary at CSP. It found not only a lack of psychological harm, but astonishingly, some modest “improvement in psychological well-being across all study groups.” This runs counter to virtually all previous research on the psychological effects of solitary confinement, and the study’s methodology and conclusions were immediately slammed by a number of prominent experts in forensic psychiatry.
Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and former member of the Harvard Medical School faculty, outlined a series of “fatal flaws” in the study, based largely on the fact that the data on prisoners’ mental state was “self-reported.” Grassian points to what he calls the “Alysha Effect”—the impact of using an attractive young graduate student to question inmates, who might be reluctant to tell her about their psychiatric deterioration. “Much of the 163 page final report consists of long and endless statistical dissections of the self-report data,” Grassian wrote in an email. “Yet these minute dissections reveal nothing, because the data they dissect does not in any meaningful manner reflect the psychiatric pathology they are supposed to be studying. They endlessly dissect garbage. And statistics are not alchemy; they cannot transform garbage into anything else but different arrangements of garbage.”
Dr. Terry Kupers, a clinical psychologist and researcher who teaches at Berkeley’s Wright Institute, says the study is “terrible and needs to be debunked. It offers bad methodology and sloppy thinking aimed specifically at disproving that supermax confinement causes psychological damage.” In an email, Kupers continued: “What needs to be underlined is that this study does prove that lots of prisoners with serious mental illness selectively wend their way into supermax and are very symptomatic during their tenure in supermax. This is not the spin the researchers want to put on their findings, but it’s definitely apparent in their results.”
“When the principal investigator is an employee of the agency whose practices are being studied, it certainly raises questions about neutrality and objectivity,” says David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, which recently made solitary confinement in U.S. prisons a priority issue. “These results fly in the face of the bulk of the literature, which shows that solitary confinement is extremely damaging to many people. So I don’t think this one study with its highly idiosyncratic results will have much influence.”
Opponents of solitary confinement do worry, however, that the state will use its new study as ammunition in what has become a public battle over a further expansion of the practice in Colorado. The subject actually made headlines last spring during a contentious budget debate in the cash-strapped state. At issue was the opening of a second state supermax, known as CSP II. Begun in 2003, when the first CSP was barely ten years old, construction of the 208 million CSP II was delayed by a lawsuit, and then by Colorado governor Bill Ritter, who put its opening on hold because of budget shortfalls.
But Ritter changed his mind, despite resistance from a coalition of state civil liberties, human rights, and criminal justice reform groups. When state lawmakers finally passed their $18 billion budget in April 2010, they made substantial cuts to public education, colleges and universities, and tax breaks for small businesses and senior citizens, as well as to inmate vocational training, re-entry programs, and mental health care. But in the midst of all these cuts, the Colorado legislature managed to find $9.37 million to open one wing of the new supermax, containing 316 additional ad seg cells. The new prison is a state-of-the-art isolation facility where prisoners’ family visits and even mental health treatment can be “Skyped,” since every one of the 316 cells has its own computer screen. (Our requests to visit both CSP and CSP II were denied by the Colorado Department of Corrections because at the time the facilities were “in transition.”)
Douglas Wilson, the Colorado Public Defender, provides criminal defense to the state’s indigent; at the entrance to the busy office he heads in downtown Denver is a seal bearing the motto: “That Justice Escape None.” Wilson has plenty of former clients in CSP, and some current ones, as well, since he defends inmates accused of committing crimes inside the state’s prisons. He cites from memory a store of facts and figures on the use of solitary confinement in Colorado, sometimes with dry asides that signal his disdain for certain aspects of criminal justice policy in his state. When he wants to answer a question in the affirmative without actually answering it, he raises his eyebrows and says, meaningfully, “Some would say so.”
Wilson’s criticism is more direct when it comes to the opening of CSP II (now officially renamed “Centennial South”), and says he and other opponents were “blindsided” when the supermax was put back in the budget. Wilson points out that there were already 1200 ad seg beds throughout the Colorado prison system, including 750 at CSP alone—more than three times the national average, as a percentage of the total prison population. But the DOC mounted what he calls a “propaganda” effort, claiming there were thousands of prisoners waiting to get into administrative segregation; in reality, Wilson says, the number was 119. What’s more, he argues, “450 guys are in ad seg because of mental illness,” and if they were moved to treatment units, as they should be, “you wouldn’t need CSP II.”
The growth in solitary confinement outpaces, but also draws upon, the explosion in Colorado’s incarceration rate over the last 30 years, which in turn tracks a national trend. In Colorado the trend began in earnest in 1985, Wilson says, when the state legislature voted to simply double all sentences. In the 1990s the state added mandatory minimums. Since 1980, the population of Colorado has increased by about 60 percent, while its prison population has increased by more than 600 percent.
Critics of mass incarceration attribute such changes largely to political posturing and policymaking, rather than increases in the crime rate, and have expressed hope that the cost-pressures caused by the recession might help reverse this trend. Wilson himself advocated targeted sentencing reductions as a member of a Sentencing Task Force of the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice—which is charged by the state legislature with, among other things, promoting “cost-effective expenditure of limited criminal justice funds.” Wilson says he argued for sentencing reforms that would have saved the state $60 million, and that excluded sex offenders and those convicted of serious violent crimes. Nevertheless, he reports, the response was overwhelmingly negative. “You would have thought I’d just kicked my grandmother down the stairs,” he said.
The growth in solitary confinement, likewise, has little to do with any empirical data showing that it improves inmates’ behavior or reduces either prison violence or recidivism. To the contrary, Wilson points out; ex-offenders who have spent time in ad seg are more likely to end up back in prison: over 60 percent of them do so within three years of release, as opposed to 50 percent of the state’s overall prison population. Wilson finds this unsurprising, since more than 40 percent of Colorado’s ad seg prisoners are released directly back onto the street, after years or months in solitary confinement. Wilson says he would particularly like to see changes to the process of how inmates get into and out of ad seg, and what happens to them once they leave.
But even such small inroads will depend upon action by the courts or what he calls “brave legislators”—because any reduction in the use of solitary confinement will undoubtedly be seen as “soft on crime,” and therefore as political poison. The ACLU’s David Fathi agrees that practices like solitary confinement tend to survive even when they “make no rational sense from a prison management point of view,” because “unfortunately they make political sense for the next election.” But Fathi also believes that a number of events are coming together to produce a “breakthrough in public awareness” on the issue of solitary confinement.
In one of the most hopeful signs, a pair of “brave legislators” has stepped forward in Colorado. On February 21, a bill was introduced in the state legislature by Sen. Morgan Carroll of Aurora and Rep. Claire Levy of Boulder, both Democrats. Their bill is aimed at what many people see as the soft underbelly of solitary confinement—the areas where the practice is most vulnerable to criticism. The legislation would significantly curb the isolation of prisoners with mentally illness or developmental disabilities, and would demand that prisoners be reintegrated into the general prison population before their release. In addition, it emphasizes what the ACLU called “the staggering cost of using solitary confinement, rather than mental or behavioral health alternatives, as the default placement without regard to medical needs, institutional security or prisoner and public safety.” The additional cost of solitary confinement in Colorado is as high as $21,485 per year, per inmate, and by emphasizing the practice’s economic costs as well as its human costs, the legislation exploits a growing willingness among fiscal conservatives to question the nation’s 30-year addiction to mass incarceration.
A similar bill introduced in the Maine state legislature last year ended with legislators agreeing only to “study” the issue further. But if nothing else, the Colorado bill might help the state’s criminal justice reformers halt a still further expansion of solitary confinement. Wilson points out that just one wing of CSP II has been opened so far. The total capacity of the prison is 948, so 632 additional beds remain empty in two additional wings. In the past, the pool of prisoners deemed in need of solitary confinement has expanded to fill the capacity. Wilson wonders if, despite a rising tide of opposition, the “Field of Dreams” rule may apply once again at CSP II: If you build it, they will come.
The students and faculty at the DU Civil Rights Clinic are watching the new legislation closely, but they have learned that when it comes of challenging solitary confinement, successes must be measured in increments. Solitary in Colorado is a huge, well-established institution, which is unlikely to be undone by a group of crusading law students, or even a brave legislator or two. But that doesn’t mean that the fight isn’t worthwhile. Student attorney Keenan Jones says the reason he is at the Civil Rights Clinic, working to defend the rights of these buried men, is because he “fell in love with the Constitution,” and he believes that today, the Constitution “is being tested in prisons, perhaps more than anywhere else.” John Feeney-Coyle agrees: How we in treat our prisoners, he says, is the ultimate measure of “how tied we are to our system and its principles.”
http://solitarywatch.com/about/fortresses-of-solitude-part-2/
Fortresses of Solitude (Part 2)by James Ridgeway and Jean Casella
Cañon City, Colorado, is the Solitary Confinement Capital of the Western World. Now, a Small Group Lawyers, Legislators, and Activists Is Challenging This All-American Form of Torture.
Part 2: Showdown at the Colorado State Penitentiary
Time passes slowly for the 750 prisoners at the Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP) on the outskirts of Cañon City. For years they were, like most supermax prisoners, virtually invisible to the public—but that has recently begun to change. CSP gained notoriety last year as the subject of a documentary on solitary confinement by National Geographic Explorer. And now, a bill introduced in the state legislature, which seeks to curb the use of solitary, has made the state of Colorado—and CSP in particular–a focal point for a rising national movement against isolated confinement.The men who inhabit CSP are more typical of supermax residents than those at ADX, and few of them would qualify as “the worst of the worst.” Prisoners from throughout Colorado’s correctional facilities land in administrative segregation, or “ad seg,” at CSP for fighting with other inmates or guards or for making threats or “compromising” or “intimidating” staff; for being identified as gang members; for having contraband (which can include not only weapons but cigarettes or “drug paraphernalia”); for attempting to escape, refusing a work assignment, “advocating facility disruption,” or generally posing a “serious management problem”—all on the say-so of prison officials. Prisoners are entitled to a hearing, but according to a 2005 study, 90 percent of these hearing result in the segregation requested by prison staff. Terms in solitary last an average of 18 months, but many stretch to years.
Whatever their violations of record, many prisoners find their way to CSP by exhibiting the symptoms of untreated mental illness. Since the 1980s, as budgets for social services have been slashed to the bone even as prison costs exploded, prisons have increasingly become the new asylums, and supermax isolation has become a substitute for appropriate mental health or substance abuse treatment for tens of thousands of prisoners. When the bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons issued its report in 2006, one of its primary recommendations was to “protect mentally ill prisoners” with disciplinary issues from being placed in solitary confinement, rather than in the “secure therapeutic units” where they belonged.
To date, only a few states have made progress in this area–and they did so only when their hands were forced by lawsuits. According to a report from Human Rights Watch, which based its estimates on available data from the states, one-third to one-half of prisoners held in segregation suffered from mental illness. In Colorado, by the state’s own calculations, the figure in 2005 was 37 percent, up from 15 percent a decade earlier. The increase, according to the state’s report, had followed “a dramatic decline in mental health professionals and rehabilitation programs that were a casualty of budget cuts.”
Troy Anderson has spent 23 of his 40 years on earth behind bars—and the majority of those years in solitary confinement. His list of diagnoses includes ADHD, bipolar disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, anti-social personality disorder, cognitive disorders, a seizure disorder, and polysubstance dependence, and he has attempted suicide many times, starting at the age of 10. Now serving a 75-year sentence, Anderson has been seen periodically by prison psychiatrists, all of whom seem to concur that he is seriously mentally ill and needs therapy and medication. On at least one occasion, he briefly received treatment in a facility designed for prisoners with mental illness, and improved considerably. But he was taken from that facility and sent back to CSP, where his mental health treatment has been a fiasco of intermittent and inappropriate medications and scant therapy, sometimes conducted through a slot in his solid steel cell door.
According to the lawsuit filed on his behalf by the University of Denver’s Civil Rights Clinic, it is Troy Anderson’s mental illness that landed him in solitary in the first place; and it is is mental illness that now will not allow him to earn his way out of isolation and into the general population. His lawyers predict that unless something changes, he will die in prison, and probably in solitary confinement at CSP.
A team of student lawyers is working for Anderson under the supervision of teaching fellow Brittany Glidden—who came to DU fresh from the landmark case on prisoner health care in California–and co-counsel Amy Robertson of the law firm Fox & Robertson. Their suit is taking a new approach in challenging Anderson’s decade-long isolation. In addition to making Constitutional claims similar to those in other solitary confinement cases, Anderson’s lawyers are claiming violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. They argue that by failing to treat his mental illness, and then effectively punishing him for having it, the Colorado Department of Corrections is discriminating against him based on his disability. The state is seeking to dismiss their complaint, and there is “not much precedent to predict how courts will decide,” says Glidden. But she feels confident that they will be able to move forward on at least some of their claims.
Matthew Court, one of the students working on the Troy Anderson case, says, “I like the idea of systemic changes, but it’s really about Troy. We are doing everything we can to get him the treatment he needs, so that he has a fair shot, and can see what he is capable of.” Courtney Longtin agrees. “This is not abstract,’’ she says. “There’s some hope for Troy; if his case goes the way we hope his life could really change…He could get out of CSP and into the general population, and maybe even into the world.” Lee Knox is not sure that the case will have an impact on prison policy in general, but hopes that it will have a “small, positive impact on people at CSP.” In any event, he continues, the case “gives Troy a serious voice. Prisoners don’t have that voice.”
Colorado prisoners do, however, have an unusual number of people dedicated to speaking out on their behalf, in the form of a community of Denver-based criminal justice reform advocates. The ACLU of Colorado, along with local attorney Gail Johnson, is currently suing to improve conditions on the state’s death row, arguing that denying condemned prisoners exercise and sunlight violates their 8th amendment rights. The Pendulum Foundation advocates for children in Colorado’s adult prisons, as does the Colorado Juvenile Defender Coalition, which recently documented the use of solitary confinement on teenagers in the Denver County Jail. And the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition contains more than a hundred groups, including many religious congregations, that seek to “reduce the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado” through legislation and policymaking.
Barb Stephenson is among the activists who are moved by personal experience as well as conscience. Stephenson works with the prison reform and prisoner support group Colorado CURE. She talks frankly about her son Dudley, now 35, who has spent 13 years in prison for felony murder after taking part in a robbery where the victim was killed by an accomplice. Dudley also suffers from lifelong mental illness, and quickly landed in solitary confinement. Stephenson says she realized that “I was the only person who was going to advocate for my son,” and was “relentless” about getting him moved out of ad seg and into a setting where he could get treatment. Her matter-of-fact tone does not hide the toll this work has clearly taken on her.
Stephenson finally succeeded this past summer, when her son became a resident of a new unit for “OMIs”–offenders with mental illness—in the Canon City prison complex. Stephenson says the change is “wonderful”: Dudley is now in a unit with only 16 other inmates, and is receiving the right medication. There is a therapist on the unit, and “they get therapy outside of cages,” Stephenson says, referring to the practice of placing segregated prisoners in adjoining pens for “group” therapy. But the new unit is small, she says, and the only other prison facility dedicated to OMIs, in nearby Pueblo, has just 255 beds. This means that Colorado’s ad seg cells likely hold more prisoners with mental illness than its treatment units.
A new and highly controversial report from the Colorado Department of Corrections claims that ad seg may not be such a bad place for them. The study followed a group of prisoners—including some with diagnosed mental illnesses and some without–for a year after they were placed in solitary at CSP. It found not only a lack of psychological harm, but astonishingly, some modest “improvement in psychological well-being across all study groups.” This runs counter to virtually all previous research on the psychological effects of solitary confinement, and the study’s methodology and conclusions were immediately slammed by a number of prominent experts in forensic psychiatry.
Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and former member of the Harvard Medical School faculty, outlined a series of “fatal flaws” in the study, based largely on the fact that the data on prisoners’ mental state was “self-reported.” Grassian points to what he calls the “Alysha Effect”—the impact of using an attractive young graduate student to question inmates, who might be reluctant to tell her about their psychiatric deterioration. “Much of the 163 page final report consists of long and endless statistical dissections of the self-report data,” Grassian wrote in an email. “Yet these minute dissections reveal nothing, because the data they dissect does not in any meaningful manner reflect the psychiatric pathology they are supposed to be studying. They endlessly dissect garbage. And statistics are not alchemy; they cannot transform garbage into anything else but different arrangements of garbage.”
Dr. Terry Kupers, a clinical psychologist and researcher who teaches at Berkeley’s Wright Institute, says the study is “terrible and needs to be debunked. It offers bad methodology and sloppy thinking aimed specifically at disproving that supermax confinement causes psychological damage.” In an email, Kupers continued: “What needs to be underlined is that this study does prove that lots of prisoners with serious mental illness selectively wend their way into supermax and are very symptomatic during their tenure in supermax. This is not the spin the researchers want to put on their findings, but it’s definitely apparent in their results.”
“When the principal investigator is an employee of the agency whose practices are being studied, it certainly raises questions about neutrality and objectivity,” says David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, which recently made solitary confinement in U.S. prisons a priority issue. “These results fly in the face of the bulk of the literature, which shows that solitary confinement is extremely damaging to many people. So I don’t think this one study with its highly idiosyncratic results will have much influence.”
Opponents of solitary confinement do worry, however, that the state will use its new study as ammunition in what has become a public battle over a further expansion of the practice in Colorado. The subject actually made headlines last spring during a contentious budget debate in the cash-strapped state. At issue was the opening of a second state supermax, known as CSP II. Begun in 2003, when the first CSP was barely ten years old, construction of the 208 million CSP II was delayed by a lawsuit, and then by Colorado governor Bill Ritter, who put its opening on hold because of budget shortfalls.
But Ritter changed his mind, despite resistance from a coalition of state civil liberties, human rights, and criminal justice reform groups. When state lawmakers finally passed their $18 billion budget in April 2010, they made substantial cuts to public education, colleges and universities, and tax breaks for small businesses and senior citizens, as well as to inmate vocational training, re-entry programs, and mental health care. But in the midst of all these cuts, the Colorado legislature managed to find $9.37 million to open one wing of the new supermax, containing 316 additional ad seg cells. The new prison is a state-of-the-art isolation facility where prisoners’ family visits and even mental health treatment can be “Skyped,” since every one of the 316 cells has its own computer screen. (Our requests to visit both CSP and CSP II were denied by the Colorado Department of Corrections because at the time the facilities were “in transition.”)
Douglas Wilson, the Colorado Public Defender, provides criminal defense to the state’s indigent; at the entrance to the busy office he heads in downtown Denver is a seal bearing the motto: “That Justice Escape None.” Wilson has plenty of former clients in CSP, and some current ones, as well, since he defends inmates accused of committing crimes inside the state’s prisons. He cites from memory a store of facts and figures on the use of solitary confinement in Colorado, sometimes with dry asides that signal his disdain for certain aspects of criminal justice policy in his state. When he wants to answer a question in the affirmative without actually answering it, he raises his eyebrows and says, meaningfully, “Some would say so.”
Wilson’s criticism is more direct when it comes to the opening of CSP II (now officially renamed “Centennial South”), and says he and other opponents were “blindsided” when the supermax was put back in the budget. Wilson points out that there were already 1200 ad seg beds throughout the Colorado prison system, including 750 at CSP alone—more than three times the national average, as a percentage of the total prison population. But the DOC mounted what he calls a “propaganda” effort, claiming there were thousands of prisoners waiting to get into administrative segregation; in reality, Wilson says, the number was 119. What’s more, he argues, “450 guys are in ad seg because of mental illness,” and if they were moved to treatment units, as they should be, “you wouldn’t need CSP II.”
The growth in solitary confinement outpaces, but also draws upon, the explosion in Colorado’s incarceration rate over the last 30 years, which in turn tracks a national trend. In Colorado the trend began in earnest in 1985, Wilson says, when the state legislature voted to simply double all sentences. In the 1990s the state added mandatory minimums. Since 1980, the population of Colorado has increased by about 60 percent, while its prison population has increased by more than 600 percent.
Critics of mass incarceration attribute such changes largely to political posturing and policymaking, rather than increases in the crime rate, and have expressed hope that the cost-pressures caused by the recession might help reverse this trend. Wilson himself advocated targeted sentencing reductions as a member of a Sentencing Task Force of the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice—which is charged by the state legislature with, among other things, promoting “cost-effective expenditure of limited criminal justice funds.” Wilson says he argued for sentencing reforms that would have saved the state $60 million, and that excluded sex offenders and those convicted of serious violent crimes. Nevertheless, he reports, the response was overwhelmingly negative. “You would have thought I’d just kicked my grandmother down the stairs,” he said.
The growth in solitary confinement, likewise, has little to do with any empirical data showing that it improves inmates’ behavior or reduces either prison violence or recidivism. To the contrary, Wilson points out; ex-offenders who have spent time in ad seg are more likely to end up back in prison: over 60 percent of them do so within three years of release, as opposed to 50 percent of the state’s overall prison population. Wilson finds this unsurprising, since more than 40 percent of Colorado’s ad seg prisoners are released directly back onto the street, after years or months in solitary confinement. Wilson says he would particularly like to see changes to the process of how inmates get into and out of ad seg, and what happens to them once they leave.
But even such small inroads will depend upon action by the courts or what he calls “brave legislators”—because any reduction in the use of solitary confinement will undoubtedly be seen as “soft on crime,” and therefore as political poison. The ACLU’s David Fathi agrees that practices like solitary confinement tend to survive even when they “make no rational sense from a prison management point of view,” because “unfortunately they make political sense for the next election.” But Fathi also believes that a number of events are coming together to produce a “breakthrough in public awareness” on the issue of solitary confinement.
In one of the most hopeful signs, a pair of “brave legislators” has stepped forward in Colorado. On February 21, a bill was introduced in the state legislature by Sen. Morgan Carroll of Aurora and Rep. Claire Levy of Boulder, both Democrats. Their bill is aimed at what many people see as the soft underbelly of solitary confinement—the areas where the practice is most vulnerable to criticism. The legislation would significantly curb the isolation of prisoners with mentally illness or developmental disabilities, and would demand that prisoners be reintegrated into the general prison population before their release. In addition, it emphasizes what the ACLU called “the staggering cost of using solitary confinement, rather than mental or behavioral health alternatives, as the default placement without regard to medical needs, institutional security or prisoner and public safety.” The additional cost of solitary confinement in Colorado is as high as $21,485 per year, per inmate, and by emphasizing the practice’s economic costs as well as its human costs, the legislation exploits a growing willingness among fiscal conservatives to question the nation’s 30-year addiction to mass incarceration.
A similar bill introduced in the Maine state legislature last year ended with legislators agreeing only to “study” the issue further. But if nothing else, the Colorado bill might help the state’s criminal justice reformers halt a still further expansion of solitary confinement. Wilson points out that just one wing of CSP II has been opened so far. The total capacity of the prison is 948, so 632 additional beds remain empty in two additional wings. In the past, the pool of prisoners deemed in need of solitary confinement has expanded to fill the capacity. Wilson wonders if, despite a rising tide of opposition, the “Field of Dreams” rule may apply once again at CSP II: If you build it, they will come.
The students and faculty at the DU Civil Rights Clinic are watching the new legislation closely, but they have learned that when it comes of challenging solitary confinement, successes must be measured in increments. Solitary in Colorado is a huge, well-established institution, which is unlikely to be undone by a group of crusading law students, or even a brave legislator or two. But that doesn’t mean that the fight isn’t worthwhile. Student attorney Keenan Jones says the reason he is at the Civil Rights Clinic, working to defend the rights of these buried men, is because he “fell in love with the Constitution,” and he believes that today, the Constitution “is being tested in prisons, perhaps more than anywhere else.” John Feeney-Coyle agrees: How we in treat our prisoners, he says, is the ultimate measure of “how tied we are to our system and its principles.”
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Citizens for Prison Reform Monthly Meeting 12-10-2011
CITIZENS FOR PRISON REFORM IS HOSTING:
A meeting for prisoner families, loved ones and individuals interested in working to reform Michigan
Date: Saturday December 10, 2011
Location: West Lansing Church
5505 W. St. Joseph Hwy
Time: Registration/Sign‐in at 10:15 a.m.
Park and enter at the back side of Church)
Meeting from 10:30 a.m. ‐12:30 p.m.
Presentation: Inside Out Prison Exchange Program
Presenters: Dr. Lora Lempert, Professor UM Dearborn, Instructor in Inside Out Prison
Exchange Program, Ryan Correctional, Detroit, MI
Mr. Bryan Granger, Theory Group Member,
Masters Student in Counseling,Wayne State University
Exchange Program, Ryan Correctional, Detroit, MI
Mr. Bryan Granger, Theory Group Member,
Masters Student in Counseling,
Topic: The Inside Out Prison Exchange Program is an evolving set of courses that creates opportunities for dialogue between those on the outside and those on the inside of the nation’s correctional facilities. Inside Out seeks to deepen the conversation and transform ways of thinking about crime and justice. UM Dearborn Detroit Dearborn
12:30‐Lunch following for those who wish to join at the R-Club
6509 Centurion Dr. Off of Creyts Rd- where St. Joe and Creyts meet, parking in back)
RSVP for the upcoming meeting by: Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Questions: Contact 269-339-0606 or citizensforprisonreform@yahoo.com
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