Week 1

This week I learned the basic system for receiving letters from AZ inmates, logging the correspondence between them and us in the database, and how to respond to letters. As AFSC cannot provide legal advice to inmates I had to send along the names of organizations who might be able to help the inmates with things like suing for Hepatitis C treatment that was being denied. Another inmate had been denied a request for protective segregation from other inmates who had threatened to kill him and his mother had been denied--he also said that he had been tricked into signing a waiver of appeal-- all we could do was to ask for the name of someone he thought might be helpful to call to see if we could find out if he had any other options (we also told him to try and find out those options for himself as well).

I decided to sign my letters with only my first initial as a means of protecting myself...it's a trip to be able to look up the crimes the inmates have been incarcerated for and to acknowledge the fact that I am judgmental of people for what they did. It's been good for me to do the readings on solitary confinement because it's helped me to articulate for myself why, no matter what someone did, it is not right for that person to undergo a form of torture for an average of 5 years or more without any significant human interaction or kind of rehabilitation, education or work because, if that person does get out of prison they are living in my state, with my family and friends, after receiving treatment that most likely has left them more messed up than when they went into jail/prison.

Notes on readings for this week:

“Buried Alive: Solitary Confinement in Arizona’s Prisons and Jails” by Caroline Isaacs and Matthew Lowen of the American Friends Service Committee–Arizona

-“Arizona has chosen to employ long-term isolation not only for sentenced adult felons but also for juveniles under 18 years of age and for persons detained in jail prior to being found guilty of the criminal charges pending against them” (1).

-“Solitary confinement in supermax units is characterized by holding prisoners alone at least 23 hours per day for months or years. The cells are generally the size of a small bathroom and are outfitted only with a toilet, a sink, and a slab of metal protruding from the wall as a bed. Many cells have no windows and no way to tell if it is daytime or nighttime. Prisoners describe either an eerie silence or a deafening wall of constant noise 24 hours each day. Prisoners eat alone and most human ‘interaction’ occurs through a small slot in a steel door. Shakedowns, or cell searches, by guards and strip searches are common. These prisoners have extremely limited access to prison programs. They are forbidden from holding jobs or attending rehabilitative or educational programs. In 2000, the United Nations Committee Against Torture called the ‘excessively harsh regime’ of supermax prisons a violation of the U.N. Convention Against Torture” (2).

-The people who are sent to long-term isolation units are “death-sentence prisoners, prisoners who have been threatened or attacked by other prisoners, and, most often, prisoners found in need of behavioral modification because of alleged gang membership or behavioral problems. Assignment to such units is a purely administrative decision, controlled by corrections officials, raising concerns regarding protections of a prisoner’s right to due process” (2).

-“New York State found that 53 percent of all mentally ill inmates in supermax confinement had attempted suicide” (3).

-“the use of long-term isolation is … a thoroughly ineffective behavioral-management tool that actually exacerbates and produces mental illness, frequently resulting in increased behavorial problems. . . . research and investigations are showing that supermax confinement creates more problems than it solves” (5).

-Recommendations

Immediate measures:

1. All facilities employing any level of long-term isolation should be subject to permanent review and monitoring by an independent body that is empowered to hold the facility accountable for problems and enact necessary reforms.

2. One aspect of this monitoring should be a requirement to collect and release to the public statistical data that indicates the impacts and effectiveness of this type of confinement, including:

a. Incident reports of assaults, disturbances, suicides, and suicide attempts by unit;

b. Percentage of prisoners with mental illnesses, onset of symptoms correlated to housing in solitary confinement, and treatment requested and received;

c. Recidivism rates by unit, mental health status, and length of time in solitary confinement;

d. Cost data.

Intermediate measures

3. All facilities should be sufficiently funded to allow for adequate mental health treatment, including maintaining proper staffing levels, providing ongoing staff training, and delivering the community standard of care for all mentally ill prisoners, including timely and consistent delivery of proper medications.

Long-term measures

1. Under no circumstances should prisoners with a history or symptoms of mental illness be held in long-term solitary confinement conditions.

2 . Juveniles and pre-trial detainees should never be held in long-term solitary confinement conditions.

Eliminate the use of long-term solitary confinement in all Arizona facilities.

"Torture in Our Own Backyards: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons"

By Jessica Pupovac, AlterNet
Posted on March 24, 2008, Printed on September 26, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/80440/

“today an estimated 20,000 prisoners in 44 states live in these modern-day dungeons, judged to be "unmanageable" by prison officials and moved from other penitentiaries to the nearest supermax.”

"The (United Nations) committee (Against Torture) is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to," they stated, "the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

“Alan Mills of the Uptown People's Law Center in Chicago, Ill., thinks that the ambiguity surrounding how and why inmates are sent to supermax facilities constitutes a violation of due process. ‘Sending someone to a supermax is punishment,’ Mills told AlterNet, ‘and before someone gets punished, they have a right to a fair hearing.’ ‘Just like if you were to get a traffic ticket, you have a right to say 'I didn't do it' and bring witnesses, and the police would have to come and testify against you,’ he said. ‘The same should go for prisoners who are being subjected to this horrendous long-term confinement.’ Mills claims he has ‘tracked a pattern of prisoners being sent to Tamms because of them filing grievances or lawsuits and being jailhouse lawyers.’”

“IDOC (Illinois Department of Corrections) also claims it costs approximately $60,000 per inmate per year to keep the (supermax) facility running, a figure over three times higher than the per-inmate annual cost at other IDOC facilities.”

"'You get these guys and they don't know how to acclimate, so they start cutting themselves up,' [former Illinois supermax inmate Reginald Berry] recalled, adding that some would go so far as 'taking a pen and sticking it all the way up into their penis,' or even worse, attempting suicide."

“One expert on the effects of solitary confinement, Dr. Terry Kupers, who consults prison agencies on mental health services, says it is not uncommon for ‘psychiatric symptoms [to] emerge in previously healthy prisoners … in this context of near-total isolation and idleness.’ Psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Stuart Grassian concurs. In 2005 he told the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons that he had evaluated ‘scores of inmates’ who ‘psychiatrically deteriorated during the course of their confinement in solitary.’ ‘Many of these inmates,’ he said. ‘have become psychotic, and many have engaged in self-injurious and self-mutilatory behavior.’/ Annibal Santiago, who has been incarcerated at Tamms since 1998, describes how it feels from the inside: ‘The mentally ill prisoners drive the normal prisoners crazy by screaming, crying, yelling into the pod at all hours of the day and night for days nonstop, by banging on toilets, doors, walls, and/or by shaking or kicking the doors so hard that it sounds like rumbling thunder, flooding the wing with toilet water, and by throwing feces at other prisoners or inserting feces into the air vents so that the whole wing receives a dose of the smell for months.’”

“(former Illinois supermax inmate Reginald) Berry says one thing that kept him going was keeping his family at the forefront of his mind. It bothered him that Tamms prisoners were allowed to keep only 15 pictures in their cells. ‘Every time my wife sent me pictures, she'd send me sets of 24, and I'd say, 'OK, I got to decide right here which ones I want,' because if you get caught with more than that, they can give you a ticket and send you back down to seg [disciplinary segregation, a unit in which inmates have only one shower and one yard visit per week].’ Inmates remain in ‘seg’ for a minimum of 90 days and are not allowed visits for the duration. Once, says Berry, in what would be a devastating error, he tried to mail a picture to his son rather than throw it away. Because in the photo his son's hat was tilted to one side, the officers gave Berry a disciplinary ticket, allegedly for participating in gang-related activity. ‘My heart dropped to my knees,’ he says. ‘I told them, 'ya'll let this picture in here!’’ The violation earned him a ticket to ‘seg’ for six months -- months that were tacked onto his sentence, which had been reduced for ‘good time.’ The decision meant that Berry's sentence would effectively be extended, forcing him to miss his youngest son's college graduation. ‘I was thinking, 'You missed the eighth-grade graduation, you missed the high school graduation, you've got to make this college graduation,’ Berry recalls. . . . A 2007 Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP) report lists family ties as integral to rehabilitation and successful re-entry into the general community.”

“A 2006 national survey of 601 prison wardens, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and administered by the Urban League, showed 62.5 percent of wardens agreeing or strongly agreeing that ‘staff training’ would be an ‘effective alternative to supermax prisons.’ It was the No. 1 choice selected in the survey.”

"StopMax: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons Heats Up"

By Jessica Pupovac, AlterNet
Posted on August 11, 2008, Printed on September 26, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/94257/

“Wilkerson is a former member of the Black Panther Party and one of the Angola Three. He spent more than 30 years in prison (and 29 in solitary confinement) for the killing of a prison guard, along with two other former Black Panthers -- Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace -- before being exonerated by the state of Louisiana in February 2001. Woodfox and Wallace still languish in prison. They are the longest-held prisoners in solitary isolation to date in the United States.”

“Bonnie Kerness, Prison Watch coordinator for the AFSC, said that over the past two decades, the organization has received an "astounding" number of letters from people in solitary confinement describing the abuse that occurs in their desolate cells. She told AlterNet that ‘they describe in excruciating detail,’ among other things, ‘the uses of devices of torture -- forced medication, restraint beds, restraint chairs …’”

“The United States has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, at 2.2 million people as of 2006, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. At any given time, an estimated 10 percent of those prisoners are being held in isolation, according to a new analysis of prison data compiled by Dr. Terry Kupers, a mental health adviser to prison facilities and a leading expert on the effects of solitary confinement. That translates into roughly 220,000 local, state and federal prisoners held in solitary confinement at any given moment.”

“Over-represented among supermax inmates are ‘jailhouse lawyers’ -- those who file lawsuits, advocate on behalf of themselves and other prisoners, or otherwise irritate prison guards. Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois openly admits this on its Web site, stating that the Tamms control unit houses ‘some of the most litigious inmates in the department's custody.’”

“according to the Correctional Association of New York, more than 40 percent of completed suicides occur in segregation. In part this is due to the fact that, within the prison population, the most over-represented group in isolation is prisoners who are mentally ill. At some institutions, such as Indiana's Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, officials have admitted that the mentally ill comprise ‘over half’ of their supermax population.”

Burns, Saxon. “Isolated and Ill: A Tucson group fights to end solitary confinement in Arizona's prisons.” Tucson Weekly Currents Feature May 24, 2007

In “a 60 Minutes segment on the death of Timothy Souders, a mentally ill prisoner in Michigan who was chained down for up to 17 hours at a time in his cell. A videotape captured the moment when Souders eventually keeled over dead from dehydration after one such episode.”

“in the past two decades, [supermax facilities] have been instituted in 44 states, according to numerous studies by Professor Daniel P. Mears, an associate professor at Florida State University. Mears' study Evaluating the Effectiveness of Supermax Prisons cited statistics that claim some 20,000 inmates, or 2 percent of the total prison population in the United States, were housed in such facilities 1998.”

“There are an estimated 300,000 mentally ill Americans in prison, who, the 60 Minutes report points out, are often sent there because they have nowhere else to go, as the country's behavioral-health system has crumbled.”