by Mateo Hoke
WHEN WILL IT STOP?
In 2003, there were big budget cuts in the state, actual layoffs of employees. It was a significant impact for our agency, and it set us back, as far as programming, ’cause we had a lot of educational programs back then, in the 1990s, early 2000s, especially at the female facility. There were different philosophies, different governor, different executive director of the Department of Corrections at the time. So it kinda shifted more to the warehousing-of-offenders mentality—just lock ’em up and keep ’em out of society.
A lot of the staff was upset—I mean, the teachers, obviously, and even the line staff. Especially at the female facility, the staff bought into the programming and opportunities for the offenders, so it was difficult for a lot of the staff and made it more difficult to manage the offenders too. They have fewer opportunities and less to do, fewer positive things to engage in. I’ve heard this and I’ve always believed this: programs make good security for offenders ’cause programs keep them engaged and give them something to work toward, something positive. If you take that away, then what do we have?
The overall offender population in the 2000s was still going up. I remember thinking, when will it stop? I’m trying to think of all the facilities that were opened, ’cause there were a lot of new facilities. Limon was opened in the early ’90s, CSP was opened in the early ’90s, Denver Women’s Correctional Facility was opened in 1998, Sterling Correctional Facility was opened. And then Trinidad Correctional Facility. So you wonder, How much can you grow, and when will it stop?
Next I went to Limon, which is a close-custody facility, level 4, the highest level under CSP, hard custody. So it was fairly violent, lots of fights, lots of assaults back then, gang activity.
The seg unit at Limon was disciplinary, punitive segregation. But I remember we were still growing ad seg then, and we didn’t have enough beds in ad seg. So a lot of guys were wait-listed for ad seg. They were classified ad seg, but there were no beds for ’em. They’d be at punitive seg, wait for a bed to come open, and then move. So you’d have an assault and need to remove that person from the population to keep everybody safe, and you’d be struggling to find a bed for him.
EVERYBODY KINDA KNEW THERE WAS AN ISSUE
After Limon, I moved around a lot for a few years. Then in 2012, I went back to CSP and Centennial as a warden. Tom Clements had been named executive director in 2011 and seg reform was one of the initiatives he brought. And they’d actually consulted with the National Institute of Corrections to come in and review what we were doing in Colorado. So by the time I got to CSP, that review had already been completed and NIC had given the state the recommendations.36
I think everybody kinda knew there was an issue, because ad seg had stalled. There weren’t enough spots for people who needed programs, and there were waitlists. But inmates were required to complete a program to get out, so we had unrealistic expectations and the whole thing was bottlenecked. One thing Mr. Clements asked to be done was to have the deputy directors go in and review everybody who had been in ad seg a year or longer. They started pulling wardens to go in and conduct those reviews. We would bring line staff with us to the reviews as well, and a lot of them would tell us, “We don’t know why he’s here. You know, he never causes issues.” That was really an eye-opener, ’cause I hadn’t been in that environment for a while, and the line staff were telling us that there was no reason to keep them here.
There’s one case that sticks out in my mind. There was a guy that was placed in ad seg because he shook some female volunteers’ hands too long and made them feel uncomfortable. That’s how he ended up in ad seg originally. When I talked to him, he’d been there two years because he’d acted out and wasn’t progressing through the steps. He was pretty upset about it. It was almost like he’d given up. He was very bitter. He point-blank told me he didn’t want to progress through the stages. He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to go back to general population because he was afraid something minor would happen again and he’d just get sent back to ad seg.
When that review started, probably around 1,500 people were in ad seg, I would say. Our total prison system at the time had an inmate population of 20,000, right around there, maybe a little less. With 1,500 in ad seg, we had probably close to 8 percent in seg units, and that was relatively high.
We got a lot of good input from the offenders during the ad-seg reviews. We had such unrealistic expectations of asking an offender to not cuss someone out ever in those conditions, or demanding they complete a program when we didn’t have enough teachers to deliver the programs so that the offenders could get out. And then we would hear some of the reasons they were placed in ad seg. And it was kind of a surprise. Talking to the offenders really lined up with what NIC had recommended.
I think in some cases, the stay in ad seg was definitely too long. They were in there much too long. They were in there for the wrong reasons. And it was apparent we were releasing people from ad seg to the streets, which was a problem.
When I was in Denver, a lot of offenders were released from the reception and diagnostic center, and there was a bus station across the street. I’ll never forget one time when one of my deputy directors and I were out driving in front of the reception center. We’d seen guys released to the bus stop, and we stopped to talk to ’em. There was one guy who was released from ad seg and you could tell there was a lot of anxiety. You could tell he hadn’t seen sunlight in a long time. We were thinking, How safe is that, really? To take somebody from twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown, and now he’s on the street corner in Denver, catching a bus with civilians?
I think the staff understood why reforms were needed. They understood it was partly a public safety issue. You know, it’s going to create a safer community, since we’re not keeping ’em locked up twenty-three hours a day and then pushing ’em out on the streets. We’re giving ’em opportunities to make positive change. So you always try to tie it back to safety, and it makes sense at the end of the day. For some of the staff, it made sense too because I’d say, “Do you really want somebody locked up twenty-three hours a day for years on end to go and live next to your children or your grandfather or your mom and dad?” And obviously, the answer should be no.
That initial move, based on the NIC recommendations, dropped the ad-seg population down from around 1,500 to around 700 offenders.
In March 2013, Tom Clements, then executive director of the CDOC, was murdered at his home, and the prime suspect was Evan Ebel, who had recently been released from administrative segregation at Sterling Correctional Facility. During the eight years that Ebel was incarcerated, he spent most of his time in solitary confinement. Shortly after taking office, Clements had launched a study of solitary confinement and decided to close Colorado State Penitentiary II, the state’s brand-new prison built entirely for isolation. At the time of his murder, Clements reported making significant progress in reducing the number of people released directly from solitary confinement to the streets. Clements’s successor, Rick Raemisch, continued his work of expanding solitary confinement reforms. In the fall of 2017, Raemisch announced that the CDOC had abolished long-term solitary confinement.
DO AWAY WITH AD SEG ENTIRELY
Mr. Clements was murdered after we started the NIC recommendations, and then the reforms kind of stagnated. At that time, we were looking at ways to provide outdoor recreation at CSP. Our director of prisons, who had been planning on retiring around April, continued with his plans ’cause he had other job offers. So we lost Mr. Clements and we lost our director of prisons. There was a big lull when we didn’t have leadership in our agency. By no means did we slip back, but we were waiting for some leadership, some new direction.
I don’t know that slipping back to the old ways of doing ad seg was a concern. It really didn’t cross my mind to worry that Mr. Clements’s murder would prompt a public backlash and halt the reforms. I think my bigger concern
was how to continue to move forward because under Mr. Clements, we’d also started a residential treatment program at Centennial. That was just getting started, and we knew we needed some additional resources there.
I don’t remember the exact date Mr. Raemisch came onboard, but the interval between Mr. Clements’s murder and Mr. Raemisch’s appointment seemed like an eternity—to me it did. I’m sure it was several months.
When he came in, it wasn’t full steam ahead. He kind of assessed where we were and then where he wanted to take us, his vision. I’ll never forget the first time I heard it. We were at an international conference here in Colorado Springs. He basically said he wanted to do away with ad seg entirely. I think the first time I heard him say that I thought, Well, that’s an interesting concept. How are we going to do that and keep the facility safe? You have to have some method of keeping things safe ’cause there are dangerous people in prisons. But now I understand that his vision is to not lock offenders up twenty-three hours a day, to give them more out-of-cell opportunities, to set time frames on how long they can be in an extended restricted-housing environment. And ultimately, his goal is to get the offenders out of their cells up to four hours a day.
We now have strict criteria for somebody to be placed in disciplinary restrictive housing, which is twenty-three hours a day and capped at fifteen days. We reduced it from a population of 750-some inmates in ad seg to a population of around 160 to 170 in extended restrictive housing—that’s at least four hours out of cell per day and a maximum of twelve months. We focus on creative management control of units, such as a progression from restrictive housing to letting eight offenders come out at a time for up to four hours a day.
In theory, it’s a step down to general population because they’re out among each other, participating in recreation, watching television, some programming. And then from there, they progress to a transitional unit. In the transitional unit, sixteen at a time come out six hours a day. They go to classes together. So that’s how it evolved.
In restrictive housing, disruptive behavior and use of force have decreased. You don’t see the number of events in extended restrictive housing that we did in ad seg. You don’t see the forced cell entries or the uses of force or the feces throwing. There are still dangerous offenders, but you don’t see that constant disruption in that population. You can walk in the units and you don’t hear the screaming and yelling.
That change is probably due to a lot of factors. It’s a shorter stay, so they’re not at the end of the road with no way out, so to speak. There is a way out. There is a progression. So I think it’s changed the offenders’ mind-set. Like I said before, some of them would dig themselves a hole, and then they wouldn’t see a way out. It’s like, “game on” at that point. They’d just be as disruptive as they possibly could. We don’t see that anymore ’cause they know they’re gonna come out.
It was evident that some of the guys were afraid to be in the general population, and that’s why they were in ad seg; that’s why they wanted to stay there, that’s why they would act out. Under Mr. Clements, and continuing under Mr. Raemisch, we created protective custody for that population, so they didn’t have to act out to get protection. The conditions in the PC unit mirror those for the general population now. They have programs in the PC unit. They’re out of their cells; they go to recreation. It’s just compartmentalized.
It’s evolved. Now they’re coming out around two hours a day. They have restraint tables, and they’ll bring out up to four offenders at a time to play games at the table. At a restraint table, four offenders can be seated there together, and they are restrained to the table in a way that still allows them to play cards or dominoes, to still interact with one another.37 And then they get some additional recreation time. So it’s evolved even just from the twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown.
I don’t ever see us going back to where we were with ad seg. I really don’t see it slipping back. We will be continuing with that effort, continuing to refine the residential treatment programs for the mentally ill, trying to be kinda outside the box and creative in general population facilities and how we manage the offenders and give them opportunities to make change. Trying not to make the environment so austere—that’s one of Mr. Raemisch’s things too. Does the environment make them more violent, make them act out more? Being in this job, I get to go out and visit the facilities. A lot of wardens have had wildlife murals painted in the dining halls and have retiled the dining halls so they look like a cafeteria, not like a prison dining hall. They’ve tiled the showers with nice tile, put murals in the hallways, inspirational sayings in day halls. I don’t think our wardens want to make the environment austere ’cause this is punishment. In our organization, talking to our staff now, I don’t think anybody thinks our job is to punish these guys.
IN A PERFECT WORLD, WE’D START
BEFORE THEY COME TO PRISON
I think society really does need to look at what it expects corrections to do at the end of the day. And then, whatever society expects us to do, we need the support and not just have unrealistic expectations and forget about it. I would hope that society expects us to make these offenders better ’cause in Colorado about 97 percent of them are coming back to the community.
I think in a perfect world, we would start before they come to prison, and have more programs in the community, especially for at-risk children. I would love to see more missions on the front end to keep them from coming in. I’ve seen some offenders change behaviors that were very difficult to manage. You don’t hear a lot of success stories about offenders leaving and not coming back. I mean, we don’t get a lot of that feedback from the public, but we know there are guys who leave and are successful, and we do hear some of those stories. So that reinforces what I wanted to do when I came into this career. I’ve seen that throughout my career and more so the higher up I’ve gone.
I’d like to see the media be more balanced in what they report, instead of always focusing on the negative. Because there is a lot that’s positive, and it can be disheartening to staff, just to see themselves in the media always portrayed in a negative light, having that battle just to say they do positive things.
It is quite an accomplishment by our staff to go from 1,500 in ad seg about four or five years ago to now having eliminated solitary confinement as we knew it. People said it couldn’t be done. I personally thought it couldn’t be done. But these reforms have proven that we can safely manage this population and effect change in behavior. For someone in corrections who doesn’t believe it, who does not think they can do it in their jail or prison, I would say: come here and see it for yourself. Until you see it, until you talk to the offenders and staff, you can’t understand how you can eliminate solitary. You have to put your eyes on it. And it’s all for the better, for public safety, for staff and for offenders.
I don’t know if ad seg will ever go back to the way it was. There’s nothing to hang our hat on; we could never say, “Yeah, we changed offender behavior for the better by locking them up twenty-three hours a day.” The studies say the opposite—we did more harm than good. The majority of our offenders are going to be back on the street. Our job is to balance prison safety and public safety. Our job is to protect the public and try to effect change when people come back into society. Our job is rehabilitation. It has to be.
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33. Pueblo is a city of around one hundred thousand located in southern Colorado.
34. Fremont Correctional Facility is a medium- and close-custody prison that’s part of a large correctional complex and was opened in 1962. Other facilities that are part of the same complex in Fremont County include the Colorado State Penitentiary and the Centennial Correctional Facility, a level 5 maximum-security facility.
35. The current Colorado State Penitentiary facility was opened in 1993 and can house approximately 750 individuals, all in administrative segregation.
36. The National Institute of Corrections is a federally funded agency within the Department of Justice that provides policy guidance and other technical assistance to prisons and jails.
37. Restraint tables are a common feature of many jails and prisons. The tables and chairs are bolted to the floor, and the person seated at the table is generally wearing a waist chain that can be attached by handcuffs to the underside of the table, preventing the person from leaving the table but leaving one or both hands free.
TONJA FENTON
age: 44
born in: Starkville, Mississippi
interviewed in: New York, New York
Tonja Fenton is a songwriter and mother of two boys, who spent almost all of her life in New York City. Impeccably dressed, Tonja speaks in measured tones in a deep baritone voice, often with a sly smile at the corner of her mouth. Tonja primarily worked in the restaurant industry to support herself and her family, and for much of her life had little personal contact with the criminal justice system. She was living a stable if financially difficult life with her then-wife and sons when, in 2011, she was sentenced to three years in New York prisons for allegedly failing to return deposit money to renters who were going to sublet part of her Queens home.
In 2012, lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union (including editor Taylor Pendergrass) received a letter from Tonja describing what it was like to live in one of New York’s “Special Housing Units,” or SHUs, where Tonja was sent to live for a year as punishment for a nonviolent rule violation. Tonja had already independently filed a lawsuit challenging her placement in solitary confinement. She later became a lead plaintiff, and the only woman, in a class-action lawsuit alleging that New York’s solitary confinement practices were unconstitutionally cruel and unusual. In April 2016, a five-year settlement was approved that would overhaul solitary confinement practices across the New York State prison system by focusing on reducing the use of solitary and improving the conditions in SHUs. By May 2017, in just one year’s time, the population of people held in solitary confinement in New York prisons had dropped by almost 25 percent.
