History > 2014 > USA > Jail, prison (I)

Ebony Fisher, 25,

on the road to her mother’s house outside Vicksburg, Miss.

The conjugal visits she has with her husband,

who is serving a 60-year term, are slated to end soon.

William Widmer for The New York Times

As Conjugal Visits Fade, a Lifeline to Inmates’ Spouses Is Lost

NYT

JAN. 12, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/13/us/with-conjugal-visits-fading-a-lifeline-to-inmates-spouses-is-lost.html

What I Saw on Rikers Island

Cecily McMillan

on Brutality and Humiliation on Rikers Island

JULY 23, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By CECILY McMILLAN

I RECENTLY served 58 days of a three-month sentence on Rikers Island. I was convicted in May of assaulting a New York City police officer as the police cleared Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protesters in 2012. (I am appealing my conviction.) I got a firsthand experience that I did not seek of what it is like to live behind bars.

Rikers is a city jail; it holds some 11,000 inmates who are awaiting trial or sentencing, or who have been convicted and sentenced to a year or less of time.

During my incarceration, two correction officers were arrested on charges of smuggling contraband, including drugs, to inmates. The week after I was released, two more correction officers and a captain were arrested on charges of having beaten a handcuffed prisoner into unconsciousness in 2012. Last week, The New York Times reported on the “culture of brutality” on Rikers. The city is now investigating more than 100 reported violent assaults on inmates.

None of this would surprise the inmates of the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s barrack on the island, who routinely experience or witness brutality of all kinds.

On one day in May, I was waiting outside the jail pharmacy for my daily A.D.H.D. prescription. A male officer began harassing me, and when I made the mistake of looking at his badge to get his number, he slammed his body into mine and shouted a sexual slur at me.

I wrote up a complaint and then showed it to my lawyer, but he advised me not to file it, because of the risk of retaliation. Despite formal rules governing the interactions between correction officers and inmates that are detailed in the inmate handbook issued to everyone at intake, in reality we had no rights and no recourse in these kinds of conflicts.

Violence is easy to grasp and to condemn. What’s harder to understand for people who haven’t done time is the day-in, day-out degradation and neglect.

Inmates are routinely denied basic medical treatment. I saw a woman soiled with vomit and sobbing for hours. We other inmates were afraid and concerned. We didn’t know what was happening, or what we could do. Finally, at the insistence of a few inmates, she was taken to the hospital. She never came back. Her name was Judith. She had befriended me before she died.

I fear for my jailhouse “madrina” (godmother), who remains on Rikers. For more than a month, she has been asking to get a biopsy of a lump in her throat, which she worries is a recurrence of the cancer she was treated for years ago.

And then there is the ritual humiliation of the inmates — not physical death, but death of the soul. Our dorm was searched at least twice a month, and more often if the guards wanted to set an example. Two or three captains, and about 10 officers, male and female, would file into the dorm in full riot gear, wearing plexiglass masks and carrying big wooden bats.

Another set of female officers filed into the bathroom and stood in a line facing the stalls, which lack doors. We were ordered to lie down on our beds, face down, hands behind our backs. A third set of female officers filed in.

They called us row by row into the bathroom, where we were ordered to strip naked, do a deep knee-bend facing forward and another one facing backward, open our mouths, shake out our hair and lift up our breasts.

After we put our green jumpsuits back on, we were marched into the day room where we were ordered to stand facing the wall, sometimes for hours, while the dormitory was searched, the bedding flipped over, our personal possessions ransacked. Then a work detail of inmates went into the dormitory and swept all our “unapproved” belongings — fruit, pens, extra blankets — into trash bags. The aftermath reminded me of what it was like to come home after a hurricane in southeast Texas, where I grew up.

In the face of inhumanity, many of the women I shared quarters with were amazingly resilient and caring. They looked after one another, and they looked after me.

In March, Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed Joseph Ponte as the city’s new correction commissioner. By reputation, Mr. Ponte, formerly the head of the Department of Corrections in Maine, is a reformer. He recently told Times reporters that Rikers Island needed change to “really bring it into the 21st century.” But he denied that Rikers had “a culture of violence.” I disagree.

Fixing the prison system won’t be quick or easy. But in the short term, things could be done to improve conditions on Rikers. Before I left, I asked the other inmates what changes they would make. They had many ideas. Here are two.

Upon intake, every inmate should receive a physical and psychological examination, as well as medication and treatment as needed. (I waited three weeks before receiving that daily prescription medication, which I had been taking before I was incarcerated.) While in jail, each prisoner should be guaranteed access to a doctor within 24 hours, as well as emergency medical help — such action, I believe, could have saved Judith’s life.

And inmates need to be able to file grievances about mistreatment without fear of retaliation. The rules governing ordinary interactions between inmates and correction officers, as well as the process for filing grievances, seem all too often to describe an alternate reality where interactions are calm, orderly and reasonably respectful.

But what I saw and experienced on Rikers was far more chaotic and arbitrary. Yes, the women and men on Rikers have been accused or convicted of crimes — but that does not mean that they should be deprived of their basic rights to safety and care.
 

Cecily McMillan is a graduate student at the New School
and an Occupy Wall Street activist.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 24, 2014,
on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline:
What I Saw on Rikers Island.

    What I Saw on Rikers Island, NYT, 23.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/opinion/
    cecily-mcmillan-on-brutality-and-humiliation-on-rikers-island.html

New York City to Pay $2.75 Million

to Settle Suit in Death

of Rikers Island Inmate

 

JULY 21, 2014

The New York Times

By BENJAMIN WEISER

New York City has agreed to pay $2.75 million to settle a lawsuit stemming from the December 2012 death of a prisoner at Rikers Island after he suffered what the city medical examiner’s office concluded was “blunt force trauma” to the head.

The inmate, Ronald Spear, 52, had kidney problems and walked with a cane, according to the lawsuit. The medical examiner’s office ruled that the manner of death was homicide.

The settlement is one of the largest paid by the city in recent years to resolve a lawsuit alleging violence against an inmate. Two years ago, the city agreed to pay $2 million to settle a case stemming from the 2008 fatal assault on Christopher Robinson, an 18-year-old inmate who was said to have been beaten by other prisoners who were enlisted by correction officers to help control his unit.

The settlement also comes at a time of heightened focus on violence in city jails, including a recent New York Times report that documented 129 cases of inmates who were seriously injured over the course of 11 months in 2013 after violent encounters with correction officers. A copy of the settlement agreement was obtained by The Times.

Mr. Spear was being held at the North Infirmary Command, where he was “struggling to get medical care for a serious and chronic kidney disease,” the lawsuit said. “Part of what makes the underlying facts so disturbing was Mr. Spear’s obvious vulnerability at the time of the assault and killing,” it added.

Jonathan S. Chasan, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society, which helped represent the family, said the case was “yet another example of the persistent problem of excessive force in the New York City jails, a problem that has not been adequately addressed or remediated.”

Citing sworn statements by other inmate witnesses, the lawsuit alleged that Mr. Spear had been kicked in the face and chest by one correction officer while being pinned down by two other officers.

Jonathan S. Abady, a lawyer whose firm, Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, also represented the family, said, “No amount of money adequately compensates for the loss of a life.” But, he added, the settlement “seems to reflect a recognition on the part of the city that something terribly wrong happened here, whether or not that’s explicitly admitted.”

Eldin L. Villafañe, deputy commissioner of public information for the city’s Department of Correction, said that one officer had been fired, and others were facing disciplinary charges. Citing legal restrictions, he said he could not offer further details about the disciplinary investigations.

The city does not admit fault in the settlement document, which is expected to be filed on Monday before Judge P. Kevin Castel of Federal District Court in Manhattan.

Muriel Goode-Trufant, a senior city lawyer, said in a statement: “This was a tragic incident. It is hoped that this resolution brings some small measure of closure for the family.”

Mr. Spear was arrested in September 2012 and while in jail, he required regular dialysis treatment for kidney disease, the lawsuit said, adding that he often complained to correction officers about his medications and dialysis.

In early December 2012, he filed his own lawsuit, without the help of a lawyer, claiming that while in jail he had been denied medication, which had caused him “severe physical pain.”

In the lawsuit, he also said that he had contacted the Legal Aid Society, and as a result, “I have correction officers retaliating against me.” He died about two weeks later.

“It appears that correction officers had grown impatient with Mr. Spear’s persistent requests for medical treatment, and that they punished him by beating him to death,” his lawyers wrote last year in a letter to the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, asking that it open an investigation into Mr. Spear’s death.

The lawyers complained in their letter that the Bronx district attorney’s office, which had been investigating the case, was moving too slowly.

On Friday, a spokeswoman for the Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, said, “The Bronx D.A.’s office did a full investigation of the case, and determined it couldn’t prove criminal responsibility on the officers’ behalf beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Mr. Abady, the family’s lawyer, said on Friday that he had learned that Mr. Bharara’s office was now conducting a civil rights investigation into Mr. Spear’s death. A spokesman for Mr. Bharara declined to comment.

Two inmates who provided sworn statements to the family’s lawyers said Mr. Spear had raised frequent complaints about his care. The witnesses — Jesse James and Shawn Fraser — said that on the morning of Dec. 19, 2012, Mr. Spear asked to see a captain after getting into a disagreement with an officer about his treatment.

The officer grabbed Mr. Spear’s arm and hit him three or four times, knocking him down, the inmates said. They added that as he lay on the floor, two other officers held him, while the first officer kicked him repeatedly in the face and chest.

A third inmate who also provided a statement, Julius Newton, said that he looked into the hallway and saw an officer “kicking Ronald, who was lying on the ground” and not moving.

Mr. Spear’s sister, Nellie Kelly, said in a phone interview that the settlement was unlikely to change “the way that the officers behave, the way the city allows them to behave.”

It would have “no major impact on anything,” she added.

A version of this article appears in print on July 21, 2014,
on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline:
City to Pay $2.75 Million to Settle Suit in Death of Rikers Inmate.

    New York City to Pay $2.75 Million to Settle Suit in Death of Rikers Island Inmate,
    NYT, 21.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/nyregion/
    new-york-city-to-pay-2-75-million-to-settle-suit-in-death-of-rikers-island-inmate.html

End Mass Incarceration Now

MAY 24, 2014
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The New York Times
SundayReview | Editorial

For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America’s now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens. If there is any remaining disagreement about the destructiveness of this experiment, it mirrors the so-called debate over climate change.

In both cases, overwhelming evidence shows a crisis that threatens society as a whole. In both cases, those who study the problem have called for immediate correction.

Several recent reports provide some of the most comprehensive and compelling proof yet that the United States “has gone past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits,” and that mass incarceration itself is “a source of injustice.”

That is the central conclusion of a two-year, 444-page study prepared by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Justice Department and others. The report highlights many well-known statistics: Since the early 1970s, the nation’s prison population has quadrupled to 2.2 million, making it the world’s biggest. That is five to 10 times the incarceration rate in other democracies.

On closer inspection the numbers only get worse. More than half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes, and one of every nine, or about 159,000 people, are serving life sentences — nearly a third of them without the possibility of parole.

While politicians were responding initially to higher crime rates in the late 1960s, this “historically unprecedented” growth is primarily the result of harsher sentencing that continued long after crime began to fall. These include lengthy mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenses that became popular in the 1980s, and “three strikes” laws that have put people away for life for stealing a pair of socks.

And even though the political climate has shifted in recent years, many politicians continue to fear appearing to be “soft on crime,” even when there is no evidence that imprisoning more people has reduced crime by more than a small amount.

Meanwhile, much of the world watches in disbelief. A report by Human Rights Watch notes that while prison should generally be a last resort, in the United States “it has been treated as the medicine that cures all ills,” and that “in its embrace of incarceration, the country seems to have forgotten just how severe a punishment it is.”

The severity is evident in the devastation wrought on America’s poorest and least educated, destroying neighborhoods and families. From 1980 to 2000, the number of children with fathers in prison rose from 350,000 to 2.1 million. Since race and poverty overlap so significantly, the weight of our criminal justice experiment continues to fall overwhelmingly on communities of color, and particularly on young black men.

After prison, people are sent back to the impoverished places they came from, but are blocked from re-entering society. Often they cannot vote, get jobs, or receive public benefits like subsidized housing — all of which would improve their odds of staying out of trouble. This web of collateral consequences has created what the National Academy of Sciences report calls “a highly distinct political and legal universe for a large segment of the U.S. population.”

All of this has come at an astounding economic cost, as tallied by a report from the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project — $80 billion a year in direct corrections expenses alone, and more than a quarter-trillion dollars when factoring in police, judicial and legal services.

Many of the solutions to this crisis are clear, even if the political path to them often is not: Reduce sentence lengths substantially. Provide more opportunities for rehabilitation inside prison. Remove the barriers that keep people from rejoining society after they are released from prison. Use alternatives to imprisonment for nonviolent offenders, drug addicts and the mentally ill. Release elderly or ill prisoners, who are the least likely to re-offend. And since more than 95 percent of inmates are eventually released, rate prisons on their success in keeping former inmates from returning — which as many as two-thirds currently do. Some states have already taken smart and effective steps in these directions, but there is a long way to go.

The insanity of the situation is plain to people across the political spectrum, from Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who agree on the urgent need for change. The research is in, and it is uncontestable. The American experiment in mass incarceration has been a moral, legal, social, and economic disaster. It cannot end soon enough.


A version of this editorial appears in print on May 25, 2014

on page SR10 of the New York edition with the headline:

End Mass Incarceration Now.

    End Mass Incarceration Now, NYT, 24.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/opinion/sunday/
    end-mass-incarceration-now.html

Grandstanding on Prisons in Texas

APRIL 4, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Rick Perry, the Republican governor of Texas, is gearing up for the 2016 presidential elections by bellowing about imaginary overreach from Washington and refusing to comply with the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003.

The law was approved by Congress with unanimous bipartisan support and signed into law by George W. Bush, Mr. Perry’s predecessor in the governor’s mansion. It requires institutions that receive federal money to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual violence behind bars and use rigorous tactics to prevent it.

After the bill became law, the Justice Department developed basic rules that, among other things, hold governors responsible for monitoring progress, providing periodic audits and making sure that corrections systems comply with the law.

Mr. Perry’s complaints about the rules are without merit, but the governor wants to show that he’s opposed to federal oversight of any sort. Unfortunately, his cynical stance could prompt state corrections officials to ignore policies that protect inmates from sexual predation. The consequences could be terrible since the Texas system is replete with the sexual violence that prompted Congress to pass this law.

Mr. Perry announced his intention to flout the law in a March 28 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. He implied that Texas had its own rape-prevention measures and did not need federal oversight. Federal data consistently tell a different story. A 2013 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that Texas had more prison facilities with high rates of inmate-on-inmate sexual violence than any other state.

There are several rules that seem to particularly irk Mr. Perry. One requires states to periodically audit rape prevention programs. Another requires them to certify that their prisons are in compliance. Mr. Perry complains that he couldn’t possibly certify compliance because he can’t audit all of the facilities covered by the law at once. However, the rules make clear that only one-third of the covered facilities need to be audited each year.

Moreover, the Justice Department has explained that the compliance process is flexible — the governor does not have to rely solely on audit data but can take into account internal reports or any other information that could be used to gauge whether the system meets the requirements of the law.

Mr. Perry also takes issue with a provision that sets minimum staffing levels for juvenile facilities so that young people are adequately protected from predators, including those who might be part of the institution’s staff. The levels set in the rules are consistent with those used in a dozen states and are deemed necessary to keep young people safe. The states are not be required to reach those levels until 2017.

Another rule that troubles Mr. Perry bars nonmedical staff members of the opposite sex from viewing inmates while they are showering, using the toilet or changing their clothing — except in emergencies or incidentally during routine cell checks. He argues absurdly that it would violate gender discrimination laws because it would somehow impede women from doing their jobs properly and advancing professionally. And finally, he suggests that the rules were foisted on the states without consultation — even though the Justice Department consulted widely for nearly three years and solicited extensive comment from all relevant constituencies, including corrections officials.

States that do not fully comply with the rules could lose 5 percent of the money they would normally receive from the Justice Department for prison purposes — unless they agree to spend the 5 percent on the rape prevention program. That is only a limited sanction, but the Justice Department should enforce it vigorously.

A version of this editorial appears in print on April 5, 2014,

on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline:

Grandstanding on Prisons in Texas.

    Grandstanding on Prisons in Texas, NYT, 4.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/05/opinion/grandstanding-on-prisons-in-texas.html

Complaint by Fired Correction Officer

Adds Details About a Death at Rikers Island

MARCH 25, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

For the new correction officer, the trouble began about an hour and a half into his shift at Rikers Island.

Inside a solitary confinement unit for mentally ill inmates, a banging on the door to one of the cells caught the attention of the young officer, Raymond Castro. Through a small window, he could see that the inmate inside was in distress. The 25-year-old prisoner told Mr. Castro he had swallowed a “soap ball,” a packet of highly toxic detergent that he should not have had.

He needed Mr. Castro to summon help.

Hours earlier, the inmate at the New York City jail complex had received the soap ball from another inexperienced correction officer, who apparently was unaware of the mortal risk posed by the cleaning agent. There had been an overflow of raw sewage from the inmates’ toilets, and the soap balls were to be diluted in water and distributed to inmates to clean up the mess. By the time Mr. Castro encountered the inmate, around 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 18, 2012, a caustic chemical mix was searing the flesh off his tongue and throat and coursing through his digestive tract.

The inmate, Jason Echevarria, was already sick. He had had behavioral problems since he was a child and was found to have bipolar disorder. He had been charged with burglary and robbery in the Bronx, and at Rikers had attempted suicide more than once. Because of his disruptiveness, according to court papers, he was taken out of the regular jail population and placed in solitary confinement at the George R. Vierno Center, a Rikers unit that inmate advocates say was notorious for abuse and neglect before the Correction Department closed it in December.

On Monday, the man who was supervising Mr. Castro was arrested and charged with violating Mr. Echevarria’s civil rights, the first such prosecution involving Rikers in at least a decade.

But court documents and interviews portray Mr. Echevarria’s final hours as a cascade of mistakes by inexperienced officers, compounded by the alleged indifference of the commander, in a mental health unit long plagued by systemic problems. Some of the officers responsible for the most difficult and volatile inmates at Rikers were, like Mr. Castro, barely out of the academy, little trained in working with people with severe mental illness.

Beyond the officers’ lack of experience, basic safeguards were not in place. Mr. Castro, for example, initially could not find the phone number to summon medics. When he did, the commander, Capt. Terrence Pendergrass, would not allow him to use the phone, according to a wrongful termination complaint filed by Mr. Castro.

“The immediate cause of the incident was sheer human callousness,” said Joshua Kelner, a lawyer for Jason’s father, Ramon Echevarria, who is suing the city.

“They let someone slowly die in his cell.”

A union leader and an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Mr. Pendergrass was not indifferent to Mr. Echevarria. The inmate had been acting out the day before his death, and Mr. Pendergrass took him to see a jail psychiatrist, the union leader and the official said. “Does that sound like someone who is evading work?” Patrick Ferraiuolo, president of the Correction Captains Association, said of Mr. Pendergrass’s conduct.

A year after Mr. Echevarria’s death, Mr. Castro was fired for misconduct relating to the episode. He later filed a wrongful termination complaint, arguing that he had tried to summon aid for the inmate and was thwarted by Mr. Pendergrass, who either failed to grasp the gravity of the emergency or did not care.

Mr. Castro did not respond to phone messages asking for comment on Tuesday. His lawyer, Liam L. Castro, who is of no relation, said his client would not be able to comment on the matter while legal proceedings were continuing.

In his wrongful termination complaint, Mr. Castro asserts that in the seven hours after he first encountered Mr. Echevarria, he alerted Captain Pendergrass at least three times to the inmate’s worsening condition. The first time he did, the captain is said to have responded, “Don’t call me if you have a live breathing body,” a statement echoed in the criminal complaint filed by the United States attorney’s office on Monday.

After Mr. Castro noticed vomit coating the window of Mr. Echevarria’s cell, he returned with a report to Captain Pendergrass, who responded that the inmate should “hold it,” according to court papers.

Around 5:35 p.m., an hour after Mr. Echevarria first complained of feeling sick, a pharmacy technician and an accompanying correction officer came into the mental health unit. Both later told federal investigators that they heard Mr. Echevarria ask for medical help. The medical technician also said that Mr. Echevarria’s face appeared discolored.

Mr. Castro again went to Captain Pendergrass, this time with the officer who was accompanying the pharmacy technician. At that point, the captain walked to Mr. Echevarria’s cell and looked in for several seconds, according to the federal complaint. When he returned, he told both Mr. Castro and the other officer that he did not believe Mr. Echevarria had ingested a soap ball, according to the complaint.

Mr. Pendergrass appeared on Monday in federal court and was released on bond, and the union that represented him when he was a captain said Mr. Pendergrass was not told Mr. Echevarria was sick. Mr. Echevarria was in one of the 25 cells in housing area 11A. Mr. Castro was working the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift that day. He had only begun work on Rikers eight months earlier and was still a probationary officer. But he had drawn one of the more difficult posts at the sprawling complex of 10 jails. Each of the inmates in the unit had been found to have a mental illness and had a history of behavioral problems. Such inmates can be disruptive and violent and often respond aggressively to guards’ attempts to discipline them.

Mr. Echevarria had had mental illness since he was a child. He was adopted along with his two brothers and grew up in the Bronx. While his brothers excelled — one works as an administrator at Montefiore Medical Center and the other is a court officer at the Bronx Criminal Court — Mr. Echevarria always struggled, Mr. Kelner said. His father, who worked for 25 years for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, refused to speak to a reporter. Two years after his son’s death, he remains too distraught to discuss the case, Mr. Kelner said.

Jason Echevarria’s route to Rikers began on Sept. 27, 2011. He was arrested in connection with a robbery and a burglary. In one incident, he was alleged to have grabbed a woman in a chokehold and torn off several necklaces she was wearing.

At Rikers, he ended up in a mental health unit, but it is unclear whether Mr. Castro, Mr. Pendergrass or other staff members who encountered him in the hours before he died were aware of his troubled history. Advocates for inmates said they were not sure it would have mattered. At Rikers, they said, punishment often trumps treatment or rehabilitation.

The mental health unit where Mr. Echevarria was housed was a place where officers “could react with violence and indifference without any concern that they would be disciplined for that,” said Jennifer Parish of the Urban Justice Center Mental Health Project, who visited the unit.

At the end of his shift around 11 p.m., Mr. Castro left his post and went home, knowing that Mr. Echevarria had received no medical help, according to court papers. Captain Pendergrass did the same.

Mr. Echevarria was found dead in his cell the next morning, at 8:35. There was vomit in the toilet and blood around his mouth, according to the federal complaint. In the cell was at least one soap ball, emptied of its toxic detergent.

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on March 26, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Reconstructing an Inmate’s Terrible Last Hours.

    Complaint by Fired Correction Officer Adds Details
    About a Death at Rikers Island, NYT, 25.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/nyregion/
    complaint-by-fired-correction-officer-adds-details-about-a-death-at-rikers-island.html

After 20 Hours in Solitary,

Colorado’s Prisons Chief Wins Praise

MARCH 15, 2014
The New York Times
By ERICA GOODE

CAÑON CITY, Colo. — The cells where inmates are kept in solitary confinement at the state penitentiary here are 7-by-13-foot boxes arranged in semicircular tiers. When the warden, Travis Trani, heard that Rick Raemisch, Colorado’s new chief of corrections, intended to spend a night in one of them, he had two reactions.

“I thought he was crazy,” Mr. Trani recalled. “But I also admired him for wanting to have the experience.”

Mr. Raemisch has been in his job for just over seven months, having stepped in after his predecessor was shot to death a year ago Tuesday by a former inmate who had spent years in solitary. During that time, Mr. Raemisch has gained a reputation as an outspoken reformer and has made clear that he wants to make significant changes in the way the state operates its prisons.

Mr. Trani was given only about nine hours’ notice, and he rushed to make arrangements. An upper-tier cell was selected so that if inmates recognized Mr. Raemisch, they could not pelt him with objects from above. A code phrase, “I need medical,” was agreed on for him to use if he felt unsafe. He was advised to lay his towel across the cell door to block “fishing” — prisoners’ sending notes or other items into his cell using a weighted piece of string.

Shortly after 7 p.m. on Jan. 23, two corrections officers escorted Mr. Raemisch along the tier, removed his handcuffs and leg shackles, and slammed the door shut.

The directors of state prison systems tend to keep a low profile. But Mr. Raemisch’s brief prison stay — he spent 20 hours in the cell and wrote about the experience in an opinion piece in The New York Times last month — drew local and national headlines.

On Capitol Hill, where Mr. Raemisch told a Senate subcommittee last month that solitary confinement was “overused, misused and abused,” he was besieged by well-wishers, including representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union, who joked that directors in other states might now want to take “the Colorado challenge.” Others, though, called his action a politically motivated stunt. “This guy is jive,” said Peter Boyles, a conservative talk radio host in Denver.

Mr. Raemisch, 60, is not the first corrections director to criticize the widespread reliance of American prisons on solitary confinement, the practice of locking prisoners alone in cells for 22 or more hours a day over a period of months, years or even decades. In the last two years, an increasing number of states, prodded by lawsuits, lower budgets and public opinion, have been rethinking the policy.

Tom Clements, Colorado’s previous executive director of corrections, was convinced that many inmates in segregation cells — Colorado made extensive use of solitary confinement — did not need to be there. He was particularly worried about the state’s habit of releasing some prisoners from long-term isolation directly onto the streets, with no transition. Mr. Clements’s killer, Evan S. Ebel, who died in a shootout later with the police, was one such prisoner.

To Mr. Raemisch, who was secretary of corrections in Wisconsin until newly elected Gov. Scott Walker moved him out of the post in 2011, the potential negative effects seemed obvious.

“You don’t have to spend much time in a prison talking to someone in a segregation cell to realize that something is inherently wrong with that,” he said, sitting one recent afternoon in his office in Colorado Springs, where photographs show him as a young narcotics detective standing next to giant marijuana plants and with a mountain lion he bagged on a hunting trip in Idaho. “Everything you know about treating human beings, that’s not the way to do it.”

By the time he died, Mr. Clements had cut the number of inmates in solitary confinement in half, to 726 from about 1,500. Mr. Raemisch has decreased that number to 577, and has moved all but a few inmates with serious mental illnesses into other settings.

But when Mr. Raemisch arrived in July, the Corrections Department, which runs 20 prisons for about 20,000 inmates, was itself in lockdown, the executive staff was in disarray and many of the programs initiated by Mr. Clements had been halted.

Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, who said he was impressed by Mr. Raemisch’s law enforcement background and by his determination to proceed slowly and with a constant eye to safety, asked him to pick up where Mr. Clements had left off.

“I was looking for someone who would not just carry it on but get it done,” Mr. Hickenlooper said. “In your life, you only get so many people that are the right person at exactly the right time.”

Compact and barrel-chested, at home in sports jackets and striped T-shirts, Mr. Raemisch looks more like the cop he once was — he spent years as a deputy sheriff, a prosecutor and an elected sheriff before entering corrections — than the head of the state’s largest agency. Soft-spoken and cautious, a self-described “meat and potatoes man” who distrusts adventurous cuisine, he is prone to self-deprecation: At parties, he said, people head the other way when they hear what he does for a living. “Nobody wants to talk,” he said.

Before coming to Colorado, he had spent his entire life in Wisconsin, where his family has century-old roots; a plaque at Madison’s municipal airport commemorates his father, a longtime county board supervisor.

Mr. Raemisch’s staff members have gotten used to his directness, and to his sudden silences. “When he’s quiet, that’s when he’s at his best, because his wheels are turning,” said Kellie Wasko, his deputy.

Like Mr. Clements, Mr. Raemisch emphasizes that 97 percent of inmates will eventually be released.

“First and foremost, you have to understand that they’re going back, and it’s our job to get them prepared and determined to be law-abiding citizens when they go back,” he said. “I don’t want any new victims. That’s what drives me.”

But he has also pushed into territory where few others in his position have ventured. A memo sent to corrections staff this month described an ambitious agenda for the coming months, including allowing death row prisoners out of their cells for four hours a day and sending inmates to solitary confinement for specific lengths of time instead of indefinite periods. “They should know when they’re coming out,” Mr. Raemisch said.

He hopes to go further, making changes in the training of corrections officers, the preparation inmates receive before they are released and the way that corrections officers interact with inmates.

In Wisconsin, Mr. Raemisch’s views sometimes put him at odds with critics who accused him of being soft on crime. An early-release program he started there was called “catch and release” and “hug a thug” by some legislators.

But by that point in his career, the absolutes he saw as a young law enforcement officer had faded into more complex realities, he said. He had observed the criminal justice system from many angles, chasing down cocaine dealers on the streets of Madison, interviewing rape victims and seeing inmates in the county jail “sleeping on the floor, doing nothing all day long, in a system they couldn’t get out of.”

“If it works, we better be doing it,” he said. “We’re already doing things that don’t work.”

He was at his home in Wisconsin last March, preparing to go to work at Madison College, where he had taken a job as a dean after leaving state government, when he heard that Mr. Clements had been killed.

“It made me angry,” he said. “His purpose was really to help inmates, and to be killed by an inmate — it was just insulting to me.”

His predecessor’s violent death continues to shadow him. Having received death threats days after arriving in Colorado, he travels with a security detail and carries a gun on planes. His family has had to adjust to coexisting with bodyguards, a development his younger daughter is not entirely happy about.

“It’s pretty hard to form relationships when there’s guys with guns following you,” he said.

Advocates for crime victims worry that Mr. Raemisch is moving too fast and that public safety could be jeopardized. Prisoner advocacy groups complain that he is moving too slowly: Some inmates with mental illnesses, they say, are still kept in cells 22 hours a day without adequate treatment.

Mr. Raemisch said he was trying to find a balance between the two poles, stressing his concern for safety and reminding his critics that large bureaucracies move slowly.

“It’s a work in progress,” he said.

In Wisconsin, the thought of spending a night in a segregation cell never crossed his mind, Mr. Raemisch said, but in Colorado, it grew on him. He called Ms. Wasko on a Tuesday night to float the idea and was met with dead silence. “Hello, are you there?” he asked.

Ms. Wasko later said her first thought was “Why?” and her second, “I won’t bury another executive director.”

“Tom was inside his house” when he was killed, she said, referring to Mr. Clements. “Anything can happen under the roof of a prison.”

Mr. Raemisch said he was surprised that his day in solitary confinement had received so much notice.

“It was 20 hours,” he said. “If it would have been maybe even two days or a week, I would think, ‘Yeah, that would probably get someone’s attention.’ I might walk out stark raving mad, but it would get somebody’s attention.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 16, 2014,

on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline:

After 20 Hours in Solitary, Colorado’s Prisons Chief

Wins Praise.

    After 20 Hours in Solitary, Colorado’s Prisons Chief Wins Praise,
    NYT, 15.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/us/
    after-20-hours-in-solitary-colorados-prisons-chief-wins-praise.html

A Sentencing Commission for California

MARCH 9, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Twenty years ago, California voters overwhelmingly passed the “three strikes” law that has come to symbolize America’s deeply irrational and misguided obsession with harsh and inflexible sentencing. It set a life sentence for anyone with a third felony conviction, no matter how minor or nonviolent — even for stealing a pair of socks.

The law contributed to a dramatic increase in California’s prison population, which grew so far beyond capacity that in 2011 the Supreme Court ruled that horrendous prison conditions violated the Constitution. In 2012, Californians voted to soften the law, allowing prisoners whose third strike was a nonserious and nonviolent crime to seek early release. Since December 2012, about 1,500 inmates have been released under the amended law. Their recidivism rates so far are a fraction of the state average.

There are, however, even more inmates sentenced under a lesser-known part of the 1994 law, which automatically doubles the sentence for a second felony. As of June 2013, there were more than 34,000 “two-strikers” in state prison — a quarter of the whole inmate population. Many are serving absurdly long sentences because the law does not consider the seriousness of their second strike.

Last month, the Federal District Court overseeing the overcrowding litigation issued a scathing order accusing state officials of taking “no significant steps toward reducing the prison population and relieving overcrowding despite repeated orders” by the court. It reluctantly gave the state two final years to get its prison population down to 110,000 inmates (137.5 percent of prison capacity), provided it adopts several immediate reforms. One, offer second-strikers who have completed at least half of their sentence a chance at parole. Two, consider creating a sentencing commission that would recommend systemic, evidence-based and tested reforms.

California should move quickly to set up a commission. Over the past few decades, the federal government and about one-third of the states, from Alabama to Washington, have established commissions to address overcrowding and other issues. By using data-based assessments of who is more or less likely to re-offend, they help correctional systems both protect public safety and save money. A 2010 report by the California state auditor estimated that the longer sentences imposed under the three-strikes law will cost the state an additional $19.2 billion.

As important as reducing prison populations is making sure that people don’t go right back in. That will require postprison programs focusing on jobs, housing, and treatment for drug addiction and mental illness. California has budgeted for this as part of a statewide reform initiative, but the money needs to be spent wisely. (A report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office criticized Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to move prisoners to county jails and private prisons. It said the state should focus on longer-term solutions, like reducing sentences for some crimes and diverting more offenders away from prison.)

Governor Brown, who has thwarted meaningful reform in the past, has begun to show some openness to change — for example, in signing off on parole releases at a far higher rate than any governor in decades. But governors come and go. Permanently fixing California’s penal system will require the rational approach that a sentencing commission can bring.

A version of this editorial appears in print on March 10, 2014,

on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline:

A Sentencing Commission for California.

    A Sentencing Commission for California, NYT, 9.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/opinion/
    a-sentencing-commission-for-california.html

Little-Known Health Act Fact:

Prison Inmates Are Signing Up

MARCH 9, 2014
The New York Times
By ERICA GOODE

In a little-noticed outcome of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, jails and prisons around the country are beginning to sign up inmates for health insurance under the law, taking advantage of the expansion of Medicaid that allows states to extend coverage to single and childless adults — a major part of the prison population.

State and counties are enrolling inmates for two main reasons. Although Medicaid does not cover standard health care for inmates, it can pay for their hospital stays beyond 24 hours — meaning states can transfer millions of dollars of obligations to the federal government.

But the most important benefit of the program, corrections officials say, is that inmates who are enrolled in Medicaid while in jail or prison can have coverage after they get out. People coming out of jail or prison have disproportionately high rates of chronic diseases, especially mental illness and addictive disorders. Few, however, have insurance, and many would qualify for Medicaid under the income test for the program — 138 percent of the poverty line — in the 25 states that have elected to expand their programs.

Health care experts estimate that up to 35 percent of those newly eligible for Medicaid under Mr. Obama’s health care law are people with histories of criminal justice system involvement, including jail and prison inmates and those on parole or probation.

“For those newly covered, it will open up treatment doors for them” and potentially save money in the long run by reducing recidivism, said Dr. Fred Osher, director of health systems and services policy for the Council of State Governments Justice Center.

He added that a 2009 study in Washington State found that low-income adults who received treatment for addiction had significantly fewer arrests than those who were untreated.

In Chicago, inmates at the Cook County Jail are being enrolled in Medicaid under the health care law as part of the intake process after they are arrested; the county has submitted more than 4,000 applications for inmates since Jan. 1.

In Colorado, state prisoners are being signed up when they need extended hospitalization; 93 applications for inmates and 149 for parolees have been submitted so far.

In the Portland area, more than 1,200 inmates have been enrolled through the state exchange, Cover Oregon, while Delaware and Illinois expect to start soon.

Devon Campbell-Williams, an inmate serving time for assault in the Multnomah County Inverness Jail in Portland, Ore., applied for Medicaid in January with the help of an eligibility worker hired by the county to enroll inmates. When he gets out of jail in May, he said, he will have health insurance for the first time, coverage that will allow him to get treatment for his ankle, which he broke in 2007 and has been bothered by ever since.

“It’s going to mean a lot,” Mr. Campbell-Williams said, adding that in the past, “I just went to the hospital, that was really about it.”

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act say that expanding Medicaid has further burdened an already overburdened program, and that allowing enrollment of inmates only worsens the problem. They also contend that while shifting inmate health care costs to the federal government may help states’ budgets, it will deepen the federal deficit. And they assert that allowing newly released inmates to receive Medicaid could present new public relations problems for the Affordable Care Act.

“There can be little doubt that it would be controversial if it was widely understood that a substantial proportion of the Medicaid expansion that taxpayers are funding would be directed toward convicted criminals,” said Avik Roy, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy group.

Language in the health care law also allows private insurance plans purchased through state exchanges to cover health care for people who are in jail awaiting trial, even in states that have not expanded Medicaid. But few prisoners have incomes high enough to afford the plans, even with federal subsidies, and most state and county correction systems are not yet set up to benefit from that coverage.

In the past, states and counties have paid for almost all the health care services provided to jail and prison inmates, who are guaranteed such care under the Eighth Amendment. According to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, 44 states spent $6.5 billion on prison health care in 2008. In Ohio, health care for prisoners cost $225 million in 2010 and accounted for 20 percent of the state’s corrections budget. Extended hospital stays — treatment for cancer or heart attacks or lengthy psychiatric hospitalizations, for example — are particularly expensive.

Stuart Hudson, managing director of health care for Ohio’s Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said his department, which plans to start enrolling inmates in Medicaid when they have been in the hospital for 24 hours, expects to save $18 million a year through the practice, “although it’s hard to know for sure, because there’s other eligibility factors we have to keep in mind.”

Nancy Griffith, Multnomah County’s director of corrections health, said the county expected to save an estimated $1 million annually in hospital expenses by enrolling eligible inmates and passing the costs to the federal government.

More money could be saved over the long term, she added, if connecting newly released inmates to services helps to keep them out of jail and reduces visits to emergency rooms, the most expensive form of care.

“The ability for us to be able to call up a treatment provider and say, ‘We have this person we want to refer to you and guess what, you can actually get payment now,’ changes the lives of these people,” Ms. Griffith said.

Rick Raemisch, executive director of Colorado’s Department of Corrections, said that billing Medicaid for hospital care would save “several million dollars” each year. But as important, he said, was the chance to coordinate care for prisoners after their release.

About 70 percent of prison inmates in the state have problems with addiction, he said, and 34 percent suffer from mental illness.

Without health coverage, inmates leave prison with 30 days’ worth of medication and are then mostly left to their own devices.

“If they go off their medication, oftentimes it can once again lead to more criminal activity,” Mr. Raemisch said. “So by keeping them medicated and keeping them mentally healthy, it really helps us in our re-entry efforts.”

It costs far more to keep an inmate in prison than to provide treatment outside. Yet most health care experts agree that health coverage alone is not enough to keep chronic offenders on track.

As essential as health insurance is for people trying to put together their lives after being incarcerated, the challenge of getting them into treatment, when they often did not have housing or jobs, was “a whole other kettle of fish,” said Bradley Brockmann, executive director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights in Providence, R.I. He is an author articles in a collection on the topic in the March issue of The Journal of Health Affairs.

“The potential for this is so huge,” he said, “and it will take a lot more than just getting returning prisoners their Medicaid cards.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 10, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Little-Known Health Act Fact: Prison Inmates Are Signing Up.

    Little-Known Health Act Fact: Prison Inmates Are Signing Up,
    NYT, 9.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/us/
    little-known-health-act-fact-prison-inmates-are-signing-up.html

New York Rethinks Solitary Confinement

FEB. 20, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The New York State prison system has for years been among the nation’s worst when it comes to the overuse of solitary confinement. At any given time about 3,800 inmates across the state are held in windowless isolation for 23 hours a day, the vast majority for disciplinary infractions. The average length of a stay in solitary is five months, and from 2007 to 2011, nearly 2,800 people were in solitary for a year or more.

On Wednesday, corrections officials took a major step toward reform by agreeing to new guidelines for the maximum length prisoners may be placed in solitary. The state will also curb the use of solitary for the most vulnerable groups of inmates: those younger than 18 will receive at least five hours of exercise and other programming outside their cell five days a week, making New York the largest prison system yet to end the most extreme form of isolation for juveniles. Solitary confinement will be presumptively prohibited for pregnant women, and inmates with developmental disabilities will be held there for no more than 30 days.

These changes come after a similar reform in the New York City jail system. In January, jail officials announced that they had stopped sending mentally ill inmates to solitary, where they spent an average of nearly eight weeks. Those inmates are now being diverted to psychiatric treatment in jail.

Wednesday’s agreement was the result of lawsuits by three prisoners, one of whom spent more than two years in solitary confinement for filing false legal documents. Those suits are now on hold, and will be settled within two years if two outside experts — one chosen by the Department of Corrections and one by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the plaintiffs — find that the reform efforts have succeeded. The experts will also issue recommendations on the role of solitary confinement in the prison disciplinary system.

But it shouldn’t take two years to confirm what has long been evident about the widespread and frequently unjust use of solitary confinement. While it may be necessary in very rare instances, it is almost never effective at changing an inmate’s behavior for the better.

A study published Feb. 12 in The American Journal of Public Health found that New York City jail inmates placed in solitary confinement were nearly seven times as likely to harm themselves as those in the general jail population. The effect was most pronounced among juveniles and the severely mentally ill.

It amazes me that professionals who have devoted their entire lives to managing and improving corrections facilities are only now even...

This will come as no surprise to most other advanced nations, where solitary confinement is used sparingly, if at all. A 2011 United Nations report called for the banning of the practice in all but extraordinary circumstances, and even then only for a maximum of 15 days.

Prison guards are opposed to the changes, fearing a breakdown in prison order and risk to their own safety. But states like Maine and Mississippi have substantially reduced the use of solitary as punishment without an increase in prison violence.

The rampant use of solitary is also financially unsustainable, often costing many times more than regular incarceration. Anthony Annucci, the acting commissioner of New York’s Corrections Department, was right to call the changes to solitary confinement policy both “more humane” and still protective of “safety and security.” Since 95 percent of prisoners eventually return to society, it is crucial that their treatment while in prison give them the best chance possible to succeed on the outside.

A version of this editorial appears in print

on February 21, 2014, on page A24 of the New York edition

with the headline: New York Rethinks Solitary Confinement.

    New York Rethinks Solitary Confinement, NYT, 20.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/opinion/
    new-york-rethinks-solitary-confinement.html

My Night in Solitary

FEB. 20, 2014
The New York Times
By RICK RAEMISCH

COLORADO SPRINGS — AT 6:45 p.m. on Jan. 23, I was delivered to a Colorado state penitentiary, where I was issued an inmate uniform and a mesh bag with my toiletries and bedding. My arms were handcuffed behind my back, my legs were shackled and I was deposited in Administrative Segregation — solitary confinement.

I hadn’t committed a crime. Instead, as the new head of the state’s corrections department, I wanted to learn more about what we call Ad Seg.

Most states now agree that solitary confinement is overused, and many — like New York, which just agreed to a powerful set of reforms this week — are beginning to act. When I was appointed, Gov. John Hickenlooper charged me with three goals: limiting or eliminating the use of solitary confinement for mentally ill inmates; addressing the needs of those who have been in solitary for long periods; and reducing the number of offenders released directly from solitary back into their communities. If I was going to accomplish these, I needed a better sense of what solitary confinement was like, and what it did to the prisoners who were housed there, sometimes for years.

My cell, No. 22, was on the second floor, at the end of what seemed like a very long walk. At the cell, the officers removed my shackles. The door closed and the feed tray door opened. I was told to put my hands through it so the cuffs could be removed. And then I was alone — classified as an R.F.P., or “Removed From Population.”

In regular Ad Seg, inmates can have books or TVs. But in R.F.P. Ad Seg, no personal property is allowed. The room is about 7 by 13 feet. What little there is inside — bed, toilet, sink — is steel and screwed to the floor.

First thing you notice is that it’s anything but quiet. You’re immersed in a drone of garbled noise — other inmates’ blaring TVs, distant conversations, shouted arguments. I couldn’t make sense of any of it, and was left feeling twitchy and paranoid. I kept waiting for the lights to turn off, to signal the end of the day. But the lights did not shut off. I began to count the small holes carved in the walls. Tiny grooves made by inmates who’d chipped away at the cell as the cell chipped away at them.

For a sound mind, those are daunting circumstances. But every prison in America has become a dumping ground for the mentally ill, and often the “worst of the worst” — some of society’s most unsound minds — are dumped in Ad Seg.

If an inmate acts up, we slam a steel door on him. Ad Seg allows a prison to run more efficiently for a period of time, but by placing a difficult offender in isolation you have not solved the problem — only delayed or more likely exacerbated it, not only for the prison, but ultimately for the public. Our job in corrections is to protect the community, not to release people who are worse than they were when they came in.

Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist and expert on confinement, described in a paper published last year the many psychological effects of solitary. Inmates reported nightmares, heart palpitations and “fear of impending nervous breakdowns.” He pointed to research from the 1980s that found that a third of those studied had experienced “paranoia, aggressive fantasies, and impulse control problems ... In almost all instances the prisoners had not previously experienced any of these psychiatric reactions.”

Too often, these prisoners are “maxed out,” meaning they are released from solitary directly into society. In Colorado, in 2012, 140 people were released into the public from Ad Seg; last year, 70; so far in 2014, two.

The main light in my cellblock eventually turned off, and I fell into a fitful sleep, awakening every time a toilet flushed or an officer yanked on the doors to determine they were secure. Then there were the counts. According to the Ad Seg rules, within every 24-hour period there are five scheduled counts and at least two random ones. They are announced over the intercom and prisoners must stand with their feet visible to the officer as he looks through the door’s small window. As executive director, I praise the dedication, but as someone trying to sleep and rest my mind — forget it. I learned later that a number of inmates make earplugs out of toilet paper.

Thank you for sharing this harrowing account. Just one night spent in Solitary starts the process of reducing a human being and those who...

When 6:15 a.m. and breakfast finally came, I brushed my teeth, washed my face, did two sets of push-ups, and made my bed. I looked out my small window, saw that it was still dark outside, and thought, now what?

I would spend a total of 20 hours in that cell. Which, compared with the typical stay, is practically a blink. On average, inmates who are sent to solitary in Colorado spend an average of 23 months there. Some spend 20 years.

Eventually, I broke a promise to myself and asked an officer what time it was. 11:10 a.m. I felt as if I’d been there for days. I sat with my mind. How long would it take before Ad Seg chipped that away? I don’t know, but I’m confident that it would be a battle I would lose.

Inmates in Ad Seg have, of course, committed serious crimes. But I don’t believe that justifies the use of solitary confinement. My predecessor, Tom Clements, who was as courageous a reformer as they come, felt the same way. Mr. Clements had already gone a long way to reining in the overuse of solitary confinement in Colorado. In little more than two years, he and his staff cut it by more than half: from 1,505 inmates (among the highest rates in the country) to 726. As of January, the number was down to 593. (We have also gotten the number of severely mentally ill inmates in Ad Seg down to the single digits.)

But Mr. Clements had barely begun his work when he was assassinated last March. In a tragic irony, he was murdered in his home by a gang member who had been recently released directly from Ad Seg. This former inmate murdered a pizza delivery person, allegedly for the purpose of wearing his uniform to lure Mr. Clements to open his front door. A few days later, the man was killed in a shootout with the Texas police after he had shot an officer during a traffic stop. Whatever solitary confinement did to that former inmate and murderer, it was not for the better.

When I finally left my cell at 3 p.m., I felt even more urgency for reform. If we can’t eliminate solitary confinement, at least we can strive to greatly reduce its use. Knowing that 97 percent of inmates are ultimately returned to their communities, doing anything less would be both counterproductive and inhumane.

Rick Raemisch is executive director

of the Colorado Department of Corrections.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 21, 2014,

on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline:

My Night in Solitary.

    My Night in Solitary, NYT, 20.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/opinion/my-night-in-solitary.html

New York State in Deal

to Limit Solitary Confinement

FEB. 19, 2014
The New York Times
By BENJAMIN WEISER

New York State has agreed to sweeping reforms intended to curtail the widespread use of solitary confinement, including prohibiting its use in disciplining prisoners under 18.

In doing so, New York becomes the largest prison system in the United States to prohibit the use of disciplinary confinement for minors, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represented the three prisoners who se lawsuit led to the agreement cited in court papers filed on Wednesday.

State correction officials will also be prohibited from imposing solitary confinement as a disciplinary measure for inmates who are pregnant, and the punishment will be limited to 30 days for those who are developmentally disabled, the court filing says.
Related Coverage

document Document: Agreement Regarding Solitary ConfinementFEB. 19, 2014

The agreement imposes “sentencing guidelines” for all prisoners, specifying the length of punishment allowed for different infractions and, for the first time in all cases, a maximum length that such sentences may run, the civil liberties group said. No such guidelines exist, except in cases involving certain violent and drug-related offenses.

“New York State has done the right thing by committing to comprehensive reform of the way it uses extreme isolation, a harmful and inhumane practice that has for years been used as a punishment of first resort” in prisons, said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the organization.

Several states, including Colorado, Mississippi and Washington, had begun to look into how to reduce the use of solitary confinement; a Senate judiciary subcommittee is holding a hearing next week on the issue.

Taylor Pendergrass, the lead lawyer in the case for the civil liberties group, said a small number of states had also banned or limited the use of solitary confinement for inmates under 18, in adult or juvenile detention facilities.

But given New York’s size and visibility, the agreement places the state “at the vanguard” of progressive thinking about how to move away from “a very punitive system that almost every state has adopted in one form or another over the last couple of decades,” Mr. Pendergrass said.

The agreement also calls for the N.Y.C.L.U. and the state to each designate an expert to assess current disciplinary practices across the state prisons and recommend further changes.

If the reform process is successful, the lawsuit will be settled in two years, the civil rights group said.

The filing, by lawyers for the plaintiffs and the state, asks the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan, to delay the litigation while the process takes place. Judge Scheindlin gave that approval on Wednesday.

The agreement calls for the creation of a new post of assistant commissioner and a separate research position to allow the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to “oversee and monitor the disciplinary system” statewide, through data collection and tracking performance, with the goal of “promoting consistency and fairness” in the imposition of such discipline.

Under the agreement, 16- and 17-year-old prisoners who are subjected to even the most restrictive form of disciplinary confinement must be given at least five hours of outdoor exercise and programming outside of their cells five days a week. The state must also set aside space at designated facilities to accommodate the minors who would normally be placed in solitary confinement.

The agreement followed months of negotiations between the office of the governor, the attorney general and the Corrections Department. The plaintiffs were represented by the civil rights organization; the law firm Morrison & Foerster, which donated its services; and a prisoners’ rights expert, Alexander A. Reinert, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Anthony J. Annucci, acting commissioner of the Corrections Department, said the agreement would result in “historic and appropriate changes in the use and conditions of special housing units.”

He added that the changes would “make the disciplinary practices in New York’s prisons more humane, and ultimately, our state’s criminal justice system more fair and progressive, while maintaining safety and security.”

But the union representing state corrections officers, the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, was more critical of the agreement.

“Today’s disciplinary confinement policies have evolved over decades of experience, and it is simply wrong to unilaterally take the tools away from law enforcement officers who face dangerous situations on a daily basis,” a statement released by the union said. “Any policy changes must prioritize the safety and security of everyone who works or lives in these institutions.”

There are about 3,800 state prisoners currently being held in “extreme isolation” cells, known as special housing units or S.H.U.s, according to the civil liberties group. The organization’s 2012 report, “Boxed In,” found that from 2007 through 2011, corrections officials issued such sentences about 68,000 times for disciplinary reasons. The most common infraction was failure to obey an order, which resulted in 35,000 such punishments, the data showed.

The average “extreme isolation” sentence was about five months, the report said, with nearly 2,800 sentences of a year or more.

Such prisoners are held in their cells for 23 hours a day, receive their meals through a slot in the cell door and are granted one hour of outdoor recreation in a “walled-in solitary pen,” the civil liberties group says.

Roughly half of such inmates are confined alone, while the other half are held with another prisoner in a space about the size of a parking spot, the report says.

“Double-celled prisoners experience the same isolation and idleness, withdrawal and anxiety, anger and depression as do prisoners living alone in the S.H.U.,” the report said. But such inmates also must “endure the constant, unabating presence of another man in their personal physical and mental space,” it added.

While disciplinary confinement makes up the vast majority of those placed in solitary, a small percentage of prisoners are placed there for administrative reasons or for protective custody.

The lawsuit that led to the agreement had originally been filed by a prisoner, Leroy Peoples. The N.Y.C.L.U. later took on the case for Mr. Peoples, who had spent two periods in isolation, totaling more than two years, according to the suit.

Mr. Peoples had been convicted of two first-degree rapes and had been sentenced to 13 to 16 years in prison. His infractions included possessing dietary supplement pills and the filing of false liens against prosecutors in the Queens district attorney’s office.

The civil liberties group later assumed representation of two more plaintiffs, Tonja Fenton and Dewayne Richardson, who had also each sued without a lawyer, and was intending to seek class-action status on behalf of all state inmates, Mr. Pendergrass said.

A version of this article appears in print on February 20, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

New York State in Deal to Limit Inmate Isolation.

    New York State in Deal to Limit Solitary Confinement,
    NYT, 19.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/20/nyregion/
    new-york-state-agrees-to-big-changes-in-how-prisons-discipline-inmates.html

Inside a Mental Hospital Called Jail

FEB. 8, 2014
The New York Times
Nicholas Kristof

CHICAGO — THE largest mental health center in America is a huge compound here in Chicago, with thousands of people suffering from manias, psychoses and other disorders, all surrounded by high fences and barbed wire.

Just one thing: It’s a jail. The only way to get treatment is to be arrested.

Psychiatric disorders are the only kind of sickness that we as a society regularly respond to not with sympathy but with handcuffs and incarceration. And as more humane and cost-effective ways of treating mental illness have been cut back, we increasingly resort to the law-enforcement toolbox: jails and prisons.

More than half of prisoners in the United States have a mental health problem, according to a 2006 Justice Department study. Among female inmates, almost three-quarters have a mental disorder.

In the jail here, some prisoners sit on their beds all day long, lost in their delusions, oblivious to their surroundings, hearing voices, sometimes talking back to them. The first person to say that this system is barbaric is their jailer.

“It’s criminalizing mental illness,” the Cook County sheriff, Thomas Dart, told me as he showed me the jail, on a day when 60 percent of the jail’s intake reported that they had been diagnosed with mental illness. Dart says the system is abhorrent and senseless, as well as an astronomically expensive way to treat mental illness — but that he has no choice but to accept schizophrenic, bipolar, depressive and psychotic prisoners delivered by local police forces.

People are not officially incarcerated because of psychiatric ailments, but that’s the unintended effect. Sheriff Dart says that although some mentally ill people commit serious crimes, the great majority are brought in for offenses that flow from mental illness.

One 47-year-old man I spoke to, George, (I’m not permitted to use last names for legal reasons) is bipolar, hears voices and abuses drugs and alcohol. He said he had been arrested five times since October for petty offenses. The current offense is criminal trespass for refusing to leave a Laundromat.

The sheriff says such examples are common and asks: “How will we be viewed, 20, 30, 50 years from now? We’ll be looked on as the ones who locked up all the mentally ill people.

“It really is one of those things so rich with irony: The same society that abhorred the idea that we lock people up in mental hospitals, now we lock people up in jails.”

A few data snapshots:

• Nationwide in America, more than three times as many mentally ill people are housed in prisons and jails as in hospitals, according to a 2010 study by the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Treatment Advocacy Center.

• Mentally ill inmates are often preyed upon while incarcerated, or disciplined because of trouble following rules. They are much more likely than other prisoners, for example, to be injured in a fight in jail, the Justice Department says.

• Some 40 percent of people with serious mental illnesses have been arrested at some point in their lives.

In the 1800s, Dorothea Dix led a campaign against the imprisonment of the mentally ill, leading to far-reaching reforms and the establishment of mental hospitals. Now we as a society have, in effect, returned to the 1800s.

Among those jailed here is Russell, 46, who is being held for burglarizing a garage. He has been diagnosed with severe depression and said that he self-medicates with alcohol and drugs. Most of his adult life has been spent behind bars for one offense after another, and he said he became aware of his mental health problems when he was being clubbed by a thug with a baseball bat and realized that he was enjoying it.

“I just want to be normal,” he said as we spoke in a large dormitory room for inmates with psychiatric problems. “I want to have a job. I’ve never had a job. I want to be able to say hi to a co-worker.” He stopped, and there were tears in his eyes.

In 1955, there was one bed in a psychiatric ward for every 300 Americans; now there is one for every 3,000 Americans, the 2010 study said. So while more effective pharmacological treatments are theoretically available, they are often very difficult to access for people who are only borderline functional.

“Some people come here to get medication,” says Ardell Hall, a superintendent of a women’s unit at the jail. “They commit a crime to get in.”

India, a 42-year-old woman, suffers from manic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. She said she tried at various times to get psychiatric care but found it almost impossible, so she self-medicates when on the outside with heroin — and has spent almost all of her adult life in jails and prisons on a succession of nonviolent offenses relating to drugs and shoplifting.

 

TAXPAYERS spend as much as $300 or $400 a day supporting patients with psychiatric disorders while they are in jail, partly because the mentally ill require medication and extra supervision and care.

“Fiscally, this is the stupidest thing I’ve seen government do,” Dart says. It would be far cheaper, he adds, to manage the mentally ill with a case worker on the outside than to spend such sums incarcerating them.

Cook County has implemented an exemplary system for mental health support for inmates. While in jail, they often stabilize. Then they are released, go off their medications and the cycle repeats.

One woman in the jail, Kristen, said she had been diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders. On the outside, her prescription medication cost $100 a month, so she skipped it.

“When I’m not on my medicine on a regular basis, I don’t make decisions well,” she said, explaining her long arrest record for theft and narcotics offenses. I asked her if access to medicine would keep her out of jail, and she said: “I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, to be totally honest. But it would help.”

As Sheriff Dart puts it: “We’ve systematically shut down all the mental health facilities, so the mentally ill have nowhere else to go. We’ve become the de facto mental health hospital.”

Do we really want to go back two centuries? Doesn’t that seem not only inhumane but also deluded — on our part?

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 9, 2014,

on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Inside a Mental Hospital Called Jail.

    Inside a Mental Hospital Called Jail, NYT, 8.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/
    inside-a-mental-hospital-called-jail.html

As Conjugal Visits Fade,

a Lifeline to Inmates’ Spouses Is Lost

 

JAN. 12, 2014
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON

PARCHMAN, Miss. — To spend time alone with the man she married four months ago, Ebony Fisher, 25, drives nearly three hours through the flat cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta until she pulls into a gravel lot next to the state’s rural penitentiary.

She joins her husband, who in 2008 began serving a 60-year sentence for rape, aggravated assault and arson, in a small room with a metal bunk and a bathroom. For an hour, they get to act like a married couple.

“That little 60 minutes isn’t a lot of time, but I appreciate it because we can just talk and hold each other and be with each other,” said Ms. Fisher, who is studying to be a surgical assistant.

But conjugal visits, a concept that started here at the Mississippi State Penitentiary as a prisoner-control practice in the days of Jim Crow, will soon be over. Christopher B. Epps, the prison commissioner, plans to end the program Feb. 1, citing budgetary reasons and “the number of babies being born possibly as a result.” In Mississippi, where more than 22,000 prisoners are incarcerated — the second-highest rate in the nation — 155 inmates participated last year.
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The penitentiary opened in 1903 as a series of work camps. Conjugal visits began because it was thought that they could compel black inmates to work harder in the fields. William Widmer for The New York Times

Since they began here in the early 1900s, when the penitentiary was just called Parchman Farm, conjugal visits have been an unlikely barometer of racial mores and changing times both in Mississippi and in states like California and New York, where married same-sex couples can participate.

In the 1970s, new prisons often included special housing for what had come to be called extended family visits. But by 1993, only 17 states allowed conjugal visits. Mississippi is one of just five that have active programs.

In California and New York, they are called family visits and are designed to help keep families together in an environment that approximates home. Some research shows that they can help prisoners better integrate back into the mainstream after their release.

Visits in those states, and in Washington and New Mexico, can last 24 hours to three days. They are spent in small apartments or trailers, often with children and grandparents, largely left alone by prison guards. Visitors bring their own food and sometimes have a barbecue.

In New York, about 8,000 family visits were arranged last year, a figure that corrections officials say has declined. Of those, 48 percent were with spouses. The rest were with family members such as children or parents.

Studies cited by Yale law students in a 2012 review of family visitation programs showed that the programs could work as powerful incentives for good behavior, help reduce sexual activity among prisoners and help strengthen families.

Though what qualifies prisoners for the visits varies from state to state, all must have records of good behavior and be legally married. In most, prisoners in maximum security or on death row are denied the visits. Federal prisons do not allow them.

Mississippi ended its more extensive family visitations last year but left in place the hourlong visits, which since their inception a century ago have been designed more as a way to control inmates than nurture relationships.

“Conjugal visits have been a privilege,” said Tara Booth, a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Corrections Department. “So in that sense, it has, as other internal opportunities, helped to maintain order.”

The notion of allowing prisoners to have sex was born here shortly after Parchman Farm opened in 1903 as a series of work camps on 1,600 acres of rich Delta farmland. Inmates, most of whom were black, were used as free farm labor in an arrangement not that far removed from slavery.

Set in the middle of the birthplace of the blues, Parchman Farm has been the subject of many songs written by classic bluesmen like Bukka White and others who did time here.
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The warden at the time believed sex could be used to compel black men to work harder in the fields, according to a history on the practice produced in the 1970s by Tyler Fletcher, who founded the department of criminal justice at the University of Southern Mississippi in 1973. So black prisoners were allowed time on Sunday with spouses or, more often, prostitutes.

By the 1940s, makeshift lean-tos and shacks built by inmates for the visits gave way to formal facilities, and white inmates were more likely participants than black ones.

Announced in December, the decision to stop the hourlong conjugal visits came as a surprise to the handful of prison spouses who rely on them. Several have taken to Facebook and other online forums and written to lawmakers to try to save what they say is an essential part of their relationships. A Mississippi prisoners’ advocacy group and a Memphis-based civil rights organization have planned a rally for Friday in Jackson, the state capital, to protest the policy change.

But State Representative Richard Bennett, Republican of Long Beach, wants the practice stopped, and he said no amount of protest would change his mind.

He said he learned about conjugal visits a few years ago when an elementary school principal told him a student of hers had shown up with a photograph of a new sibling. The student’s mother was incarcerated. The baby had been conceived during a conjugal visit.

In 2012, Mr. Bennett introduced a bill to end the visits. It did not get much attention, so he will try again when the Legislature meets this month. He said he was aware of Mr. Epps’s plans, but wanted a permanent ban. Officials have not offered any figures on the number of babies born or the program’s cost.

“I don’t think it’s fair to the children conceived and to the taxpayers,” he said. “You are in prison for a reason. You are in there to pay your debt, and conjugal visits should not be part of the deal.”

But Tina Perry, 49, a production manager at a small newspaper in eastern Mississippi, said the spouses of prisoners should not be forced to suffer any more than they already do. And the state, she said, should not take away something that is inexpensive and infrequent but essential.

She has been visiting her husband in prison every couple of months for eight years. He is serving time for molesting his former wife’s daughter, and has 19 more years to go. Ms. Perry said he was innocent. She called the surroundings, a small room with a thin mattress, “nasty” but said it was an hour she treasured nonetheless.

“It’s your husband,” she said. “You take what you can get.”

Ms. Fisher, whose husband is facing 60 years, said she was heartbroken because no more conjugal visits meant no children.

“Let me have that option,” she said. “I feel like they are taking away my choice.”

But officials who want the practice to be stopped say the state should not be helping to produce children who will be raised by single parents and possibly need state support.

There are concerns, too, about cost and H.I.V. transmission.

Women interviewed about the visits said they would be willing to pay to defray costs. And they made it clear that the visits were not about the sex. They are about privacy in a world where every letter is opened, every call monitored. Regular visits are crowded with other prisoners and their families.

“You never just get husband and wife time,” said Amy Parsons, an office worker in Arkansas who drives eight hours to see her husband, who was convicted of aggravated assault. His release date is 2022.

“It’s not romantic, but it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I just want people to realize it’s about the alone time with your husband. I understand they are in there for a reason. Obviously they did something wrong. But they are human, too. So are we.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 13, 2014,

on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline:

As Conjugal Visits Fade, a Lifeline to Inmates’ Spouses Is Lost.

    As Conjugal Visits Fade, a Lifeline to Inmates’ Spouses Is Lost,
    NYT, 12.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/13/us/
    with-conjugal-visits-fading-a-lifeline-to-inmates-spouses-is-lost.html