Six by Ten
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My day usually starts at about 5 or 5:30, when I wake up. I’ll wash up, make up my bed, and then pray. I’m not much of a coffee drinker, but I’ll occasionally have a cup of coffee, and if I have some writing that I need to do, I’ll start on it. If not, I’ll usually watch the news until breakfast. We usually go to breakfast at about 7:30. I always put in a CD, usually Miles Davis or Stan Getz and João Gilberto/Antonio Carlos Jobim, and listen to it while waiting to go to breakfast.
We’re allowed to walk to the dining hall, and I’m able to look at the mountains as I walk. I’ll usually make it back to the building that I’m housed in by eight. After that we just wait to either go out to the yard or the dayroom. It alternates. When I can go out to the yard, I run. I’m up to running a mile now. I’ll usually put in a Michael Franks CD, a jazz artist that I’ve enjoyed for years. After my run I’ll walk around the yard, both to come down off of the running and to speak to a lot of the guys in the yard. I walk for at least an hour.
I’m allowed out to the dayroom every day. In the dayroom area there’s a television, several tables and connecting stools, and benches for those who like to watch television. There are also telephones there for use by prisoners to make personal calls. I try to stay as busy as I possibly can. In the general population, at least the food is much better. There is a much wider variety of food served, and that really does make a difference. And, for those who are able to go to the prison commissary, it’s well stocked. You’re able to draw from your prison account once a month.
Anytime that I receive a ducat, or pass, which is usually a minimum of three times a week, I attend classes. I’m enrolled in several self-help classes and a lifers group and a mentorship program. The programs range from victims awareness to anger and denial management to relapse prevention. The classes have given me an opportunity to find out a lot about myself, although I’m always concerned about anything that has to do with state-sponsored cognitive restructuring. It makes me think they’re trying to turn people into slaves.
Here at Solano I still have my moments in which I’ll just drift off on the yard and walk by myself. I dig people a whole lot, and I have never considered myself to be an introverted person, but I have my moments when I just want to be left alone. I have my moments when I just won’t speak.
I’m continuing to experience this now that I’m in the general population, and I must try to figure out how I can deal with it. If there’s something that haunts me, it’s those moments when I knew that I was just about to go over the edge psychologically. I cannot describe what it feels like. The only word that comes to mind is dread. But it was in those moments that I would find myself looking up from this black hole and seeing a light up at the very top of the hole. It appears when you’re most depressed. That hole represents this moment, this one moment in which the dread became so overwhelming that you wish you were dead.
I cannot think of a more depressing feeling than feeling yourself lose your balance. Thinking that you’re not going to make it. Even those of us who made it lost something. After years of this, decades even, I just don’t think you’re ever the same. I’m no longer sure that you can ever go back to whatever normal you may have been. Or considered yourself to be.
I can still remember what that feels like. And I believe that it’s what people who commit suicide experience right before they take their lives. I’ve tried to convince myself that because I’m no longer in solitary, I can and should put it behind me. But I can’t. And I should not. Not until the healing is complete.
* * *
53. The Hough (pronounced “Huff”) riots occurred in Cleveland from July 18 to 23, 1966. National guardsmen as well as Cleveland police were stationed on street corners throughout the largely African American neighborhood.
54. Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) is a prison and street gang that originated at San Quentin as an offshoot of the Black Panthers.
55. In the late 1980s, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) tried to control gang activity in the prisons. If a prisoner was found to be a member of a gang he was “validated” and given an indeterminate SHU sentence. Later, they ruled that if you were inactive in a prison gang for six years, you could leave SHU. The other way to get out was to “debrief”—provide information on the prison gang you were supposedly part of and the names of all the members. If a prisoner was not part of a gang or didn’t know the members of one, he might provide random names of prisoners. Debriefing also included providing information on crimes one heard about in prison or any other information that would aid the CDCR or police.
56. Deuel Vocational Institution (DVI) is a state prison located near Tracy, California.
57. The CDCR is the largest state-run prisons system in the United States. The department oversees California’s thirty-three adult correctional institutions, thirteen adult community correctional facilities, and six juvenile facilities, which house more than 165,000 adults and nearly 2,000 juveniles.
58. The California Institute for Men is a mixed-security prison that opened in 1941. The facility is often simply called “Chino” because of its location in Chino, California, east of Los Angeles.
59. “Disciplinary free” means to have no reported incidents, such as altercations or contraband.
60. Tehachapi is another name for California Correctional Institution, a supermax state prison located in Cummings Valley, outside Tehachapi, California.
61. California State Prison, Corcoran is an all-male facility located in central California.
62. In 1996, the Los Angeles Times claimed Corcoran to be the “most troubled of the 32 [California] state prisons” (“Tales of Brutality behind Bars,” August 21, 1996). Inmates were regularly shot and killed. Guards were known to stage fights among inmates, while betting on the outcomes. Prisoners were often shot during these fights or for refusing to fight.
63. Pelican Bay State Prison is California’s only supermax facility. It is located in Crescent City, just south of the Oregon border. According to the CDCR website, half of Pelican Bay’s prisoners are housed in a general population setting, and half are housed in Security Housing Units. Its operating budget is more than $180 million per year.
64. These complaints eventually led to the class-action lawsuit, Madrid v. Gomez, in 1995, which was brought on behalf of some 3,500 prisoners at Pelican Bay.
65. In 2013, some thirty thousand prisoners in California prisons went on hunger strike to protest the state’s use of indefinite solitary confinement.
APPENDIXES
Appendix I. Ten Things You Can Do
Become a friend to someone in solitary. People in solitary may not have anyone on the outside to write or call, and correspondence with someone on the outside can be a significant source of comfort. To find a pen pal, connect with Solitary Watch’s “Lifelines” program. More info is available at http://solitarywatch.com/about-lifelines.
Invite people who have spent time in solitary to speak in your community. If you are part of a book club, coffee shop discussion group, library meetup, or any other community forum, invite someone who has been in solitary confinement to come speak and share their experiences and thoughts with other community members.
Make demands of local elected officials and candidates. In most states, the county jail is run by the locally elected sheriff. Attend town halls or write your sheriff a letter demanding that solitary be banned in your local jail. During election time, show up to events to ask candidates for sheriff to state whether they would abolish solitary confinement if elected. Vote accordingly.
Give your money or time to local prisoners’ rights and reentry organizations. These groups are on the front lines of protecting peoples’ rights while in solitary and assisting them when they return to the community.
Organize to pass statewide reforms. State
legislatures across the country have passed laws restricting solitary confinement in local jails and state prisons. Contact your local prisoner rights’ organization or ACLU to help support existing campaigns to enact new state laws addressing solitary confinement. Join efforts to improve access to quality mental health care funding, both in the broader community and in prisons and jails.
Ask your governor where they stand on solitary. The heads of most state prison systems are appointed by the state’s governor, so what the governor believes about solitary confinement and who they appoint to that position is critical. Call in to radio shows or attend town halls to ask your governor about solitary confinement. Make sure your governor is committed to appointing a corrections director tasked with implementing reforms to solitary confinement.
Volunteer in a prison. Most prisons have opportunities for volunteers to teach classes inside prisons. There you will have the opportunity to work with and talk to people returning to the general prison population after having spent time in solitary. More broadly and just as importantly, every effort that penetrates prison walls and creates more contact between the outside world and those who are incarcerated increases accountability and transparency.
Support efforts to hire formerly incarcerated people. Regardless of your vocation, making an active effort to hire people who were formerly incarcerated not only helps to repair some of the damage done to people in prison, it also helps create a bridge between those who have spent time in prison and those who have not.
Support investigative journalism. Journalists who have the time and resources to shine light inside prisons will continue to be invaluable in the movement to end solitary confinement. Donate to projects like Solitary Watch and subscribe or donate to other media outlets that cover prisons, jails, and criminal justice issues.
Share this book. Send a copy of this book to a friend. Snap a photo of an excerpt or quote from this book that most impacted you and share it on social media. Spread the voices of people whose lives have been forever altered by solitary confinement.Appendix II. Timeline of Solitary
Confinement in the United States
Various sources were consulted to create this timeline. In particular, we want to credit the Marshall Project, “Shifting Away from Solitary,” and Solitary Watch, “Milestones in Solitary Reform,” from which we drew heavily.66
1790: As part of a series of reforms advocated by a Quaker group known as the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, the dirty and overcrowded group cells at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia are converted to house most people in complete isolation.67
1816: Auburn State Prison is built in Auburn, New York. The prison requires complete silence, but people engage in group labor, in contrast to the Pennsylvania system of complete isolation.68
1821: Warden William Brittin converts Auburn State Prison’s group cells to solitary cells, inspired by the Pennsylvania system. Brittin institutes a three-tiered system of classification, in which people in the third tier, considered the most serious offenders, are held in complete solitary confinement without group labor.69
1825: The governor of New York ends Auburn State Prison’s classification system and use of solitary confinement following numerous suicides, cases of mental illness, and escape attempts by people kept in solitary confinement. Though all inmates now work in groups, they are still restricted to complete silence.70
1829: The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons builds Eastern State Penitentiary. Inmates are housed in single-occupancy cells and kept completely isolated from one another. When outside their cells, they are forced to wear hoods to minimize interaction with guards or knowledge of the building.71
1842: Charles Dickens famously visits Eastern Penitentiary and writes, “The system here, is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement.” He concluded, “I believe it . . . to be cruel and wrong. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”72
1880: Samuel James, a former Confederate major, buys Angola plantation in Louisiana. The name Angola comes from the region in Africa where the enslaved people who were forced to labor on the plantation were originally from. James uses the former slave quarters to house prisoners, whom he forces to work the plantation fields and leases as labor to private companies.73 Angola later becomes the largest maximum-security prison in the United States.74
1890: The US Supreme Court, in examining the constitutionality of a person’s prison sentence, which included solitary confinement at Eastern State Penitentiary, notes that “a considerable number of prisoners . . . fell into a semi-fatuous condition . . . and others became violently insane.”75
1901: The state of Louisiana takes over control of Angola prison after public outcry over the brutality inflicted on people by private companies under James’s leasing system. Brutality and abuse continue, however, under the new ownership.76
1913: Eastern State Penitentiary officially abandons the Pennsylvania system, following years of gradual reforms to the original policy of complete isolation.77
1933: The US Army transfers Alcatraz, formerly used as a military prison, to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Alcatraz becomes a maximum-
security prison that includes the D Block, a solitary confinement hallway in which some inmates spend years.78
1963: Alcatraz closes due to high operating costs.79
A US federal penitentiary is built in Marion, Illinois, to replace Alcatraz. USP Marion will eventually become what is often considered the first “supermax” prison in the United States.80
1968: USP Marion institutes the Control and Rehabilitation Effort (CARE) program, through which people were frequently subjected to solitary confinement.81
1971: Eastern State Penitentiary closes due to high costs of necessary repairs to the prison.82
1983: Two correctional officers are murdered at USP Marion in independent incidents on the same day by members of the Aryan Brotherhood. USP Marion subsequently goes into “permanent lockdown,” in which people are kept in solitary confinement for twenty-two to twenty-three hours each day. The Marion model spreads and becomes known as a supermax prison.83
1989: Pelican Bay, the first facility specifically designed to be a supermax prison, is built in Crescent City, California. Roughly one-third of the prison’s two thousand to three thousand people are housed in solitary confinement in high-security Special Housing Units (SHUs).84
1994: A new federal supermax facility, ADX Florence, is built in Florence, Colorado. Prisoners are housed in solitary confinement cells for at least twenty to twenty-three hours each day with limited access to any recreational activities.85
1995: A federal judge orders an overhaul of practices and medical care at Pelican Bay supermax in California and holds that people with mental illness must be removed from solitary confinement.86
2002: The United States constructs Guantánamo Bay detention camp, also known as “Gitmo,” in Cuba to imprison suspected members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Approximately 70 percent of the inmates at Guantánamo Bay are in solitary confinement, including some already cleared for release.87
2006: The Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons completes its inquiry and issues its report, Confronting Confinement. The report ranks limiting prison isolation as one of its three chief recommendations, urging that prisons and jails “make segregation a last resort,” “end conditions of isolation,” and “protect mentally ill patients.”88
USP Marion is downgraded to a medium-security facility, ending twenty-three years of lockdown.89
2007: Following a lawsuit, New York State significantly curtails the use of solitary confinement in state prisons for people with serious mental illness and requires the first-ever, limited mental health monitoring of all prisoners in solitary confinement.90
As a result of Presley v. Ep
ps, the Mississippi Department of Corrections shuts down Parchman Farm’s notorious solitary confinement Unit 32. A “step-down” system is introduced, returning inmates to Parchman’s general population; seriously mentally ill prisoners are moved to treatment units. The number of prisoners in solitary confinement drops from 1,300 to 300.91
2008: New York passes the first solitary confinement reform bill of its kind, the SHU Exclusion Law. The law, which took effect in 2011, requires the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to review and report its solitary confinement policies, remove mentally ill prisoners from isolation, ensure that those prisoners’ standard of care is higher than that of other inmates, and build a new therapeutic, nondisciplinary prison unit.92
2010: After a broad-scale advocacy campaign, the state legislature in Maine requires a review and report on the use of solitary confinement. The resulting report uncovers the overuse of isolation and makes recommendations for reform. Maine then cuts the population of prisoners in solitary confinement in half. Now, placing a prisoner in solitary for longer than seventy-two hours requires the personal approval of the commissioner of corrections. The use of disciplinary segregation largely has been replaced with informal punishments, and social programming has been expanded.93
2011: The UN special rapporteur on torture calls for a global ban on solitary confinement in almost all cases, with a definite ban on the use of solitary for periods longer than fifteen days and for individuals under eighteen years of age and those with mental disabilities.94
2012: The American Psychiatric Association (APA) issues a statement that prisoners with serious mental illness should rarely be kept in solitary confinement and, when they are in such conditions, must receive extra clinical support.95