Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  At our second meeting, Harriet showed me excerpts from a diary that a patient in the TCU had shared with her, scraps of paper that were covered in a looping, childlike script. “I can’t escape the feeling that someone is coming for me in this other place in my mind,” a passage from the diary read. The prisoner who wrote it was a convicted drug dealer with a range of physical and mental disabilities, Harriet said. At one point, he had been hospitalized for trying to swallow pieces of his wheelchair. He was also a victim of extreme childhood abuse who had lost his wife and two daughters in a car accident, she learned. This won him no sympathy from one of the guards, who called him a “loser” and, one day, tipped him out of his wheelchair.

  “This is a real person, with a real life,” said Harriet.

  Total institutions enabled abusive staff to exercise unchecked power, Harriet had learned. Yet her own experience illuminated another dynamic that could unfold in these institutions: sometimes, bonds could develop between incarcerated people and sympathetic staff. This possibility had not escaped Erving Goffman, who noted at one point in Asylums that what transpired in total institutions was “people work,” a form of labor that required interacting on a daily basis with “human materials.” Even in institutions designed to maximize the social distance between patients and staff, such work could be morally and emotionally discomfiting. “However distant the staff tries to stay from these materials, such materials can become objects of fellow feeling and even affection,” Goffman observed. “There is always the danger that an inmate will appear human; if what are felt to be hardships must be inflicted on the inmate, then sympathetic staff will suffer.”

  Not long after Harriet shared her trauma narrative with me, I met one of her former patients, Harold Hempstead, at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Lake City, Florida. He had been transferred after his sister, Windy, convinced officials at Dade that his life would be in danger if he remained there. We spoke for an hour in a featureless gray room while a sergeant stood watch, during which Hempstead recounted how, after Darren Rainey’s murder, several mental health counselors urged him to stop “obsessing” over the crime. One told him he was being “delusional”; another cautioned him to keep any accusations “vague.” Hempstead acknowledged the pressure that the mental health counselors in the TCU were under. “Their hands were tied,” he said. But too many had internalized the view that the men in the unit deserved rough treatment, because they were criminals or because they were socially marginal. If more counselors had been willing to stand up for the prisoners, he said, “the majority of that stuff wouldn’t have happened.”

  Before I left, Hempstead told me that he had a confession to make. A few weeks before Rainey died, he had informed a guard that there appeared to be dry excrement on a Koran that Rainey owned. The guard seized the Koran and, over Rainey’s protests, threw it away. Rainey later confronted Hempstead, calling him an “effing cracker.” Hempstead said that he deeply regretted talking to the guard, because losing the Koran triggered the breakdown that made Rainey a target of prison staff.

  The only therapist who had helped him work through the guilt he felt about Rainey’s death was Harriet, whom he affectionately called Ms. K. “She would actually listen,” he said. “She attempted to enroll me in some classes dealing with trauma.” He paused. “I really didn’t like to see her go.”

  * * *

  In January 2016, the Miami-Dade medical examiner delivered a copy of Rainey’s autopsy report to state prosecutors. The report was not made public, but its contents were leaked to the media. It concluded that the guards at Dade had “no intent” to harm Rainey and that his death was “accidental.” No criminal investigation was recommended, notwithstanding the fact that Rainey’s death was not an isolated incident. At least eight other people in the TCU endured abuse in a scalding shower. Among them was Daniel Geiger, who was subsequently transferred to the Lake Correctional Institution, near Clermont, Florida. When I spoke with his mother, Debra, who lives in North Carolina, she told me that she had not seen her son in several years, because prison officials had denied him visitation rights, claiming that he was dangerously unstable. She said that she had last talked to Daniel in 2012, on the phone, shortly after he was transferred out of Dade. It was a brief conversation, during which he spoke with a slur and could not pronounce simple words. He told her that his weight had dropped from 178 pounds to 105. Although she was alarmed by this news, she did not suspect that he had been abused, only that “something was being hidden” from her.

  I told Debra Geiger that, according to several sources, her son had been forced multiple times into the same shower where Rainey had died. He was also among the prisoners who had been denied meals. “I’m heartbroken,” she said, her voice cracking. When we spoke again a few days later, she told me that she had called the Lake Correctional Institution and learned that her son was being given two psychiatric medications to which he was allergic. Later, she sent the facility a note from her son’s former psychiatrist, Dr. James Larson, confirming the allergies. She received a two-line response, saying that the information would be forwarded to the medical staff, but she was not told if the treatment had been discontinued. “It’s hard for me to digest all of this,” she said, comparing the treatment of mentally ill incarcerated people to the torture of detainees at Guantánamo.

  In late February 2016, Geiger was finally permitted to visit her son. She described him as being “at death’s door,” a gaunt figure with sunken eyes who mistook her for his wife and growled at the guards when they called his name. His arms were skeletal—“no wider than my wrists,” she said—and there were deep red marks on his neck. When she asked him what had happened at Dade, he peered up at the ceiling, pressed his face against the glass partition separating them, and said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” She said that before he was sent to prison, when her son was taking the right combination of medications, he was relatively stable—a point that she impressed on the warden before leaving. “I told him that I kept him more or less normal for thirty-three years, and you all have destroyed him in seven,” she said.

  * * *

  In September 2014, Disability Rights Florida, an advocacy organization, filed a lawsuit charging the Florida Department of Corrections with subjecting mentally ill people at Dade to “abuse and discrimination on a systematic and regular basis.” According to the terms of a settlement reached one year later, the Department of Corrections agreed to make several changes, including the installation of a new camera system at Dade, better training of guards, and the hiring of an assistant warden of mental health.

  Not long after the settlement was announced, I drove to Dade to meet the new assistant warden, Glenn Morris. The prison sits on the outskirts of the Everglades, on a two-lane road flanked by squash and tomato fields and by signs advertising alligator farms and airboat rides. After exchanging greetings, I followed Morris into a control room, through a metal detector, past a heavy steel door that opened onto a quarter-mile cement path that led to a cream-colored building with a sign above the entrance: TRANSITIONAL CARE UNIT. The path wasn’t shaded and, although it was early, the heat was stifling. Much to my relief, the air-conditioning inside the TCU was functioning (Harriet told me that when she worked there, it was often broken). The walls were a dull gray, but the interior looked clean: an orderly in faded scrubs was sweeping the concrete floor. We walked down a nurses’ hall and stopped at the entrance portal to the west wing, a cavernous chamber furnished with metal tables and lined with single-person cells, each of which had a small rectangular window. There were no prisoners inside; they were out in the rec yard, Morris told me. He pointed to several TV sets that had been installed recently and to the mural on the far wall, a cheerful ocean scene that had been painted by a prisoner.

  “When I first got here, the mentality was, ‘This is confinement,’” Morris told me. “I had to change that.” The Department of Corrections had adopted an “open cell” policy at Dade, he said, so that lower-r
isk prisoners could move around more freely.

  Morris introduced me to the unit’s major, a large man with a broad smile, and to several corrections officers. All of them were recent hires. The new faces were part of the overhaul, he said. When we crossed over to the east side of the TCU, which housed people who were deemed more stable, a meeting was ending, and Morris introduced me to a more experienced staff member, Dr. Cristina Perez. “She does a very good job,” he said. Before visiting Dade, I had actually called Dr. Perez to ask her about some of the problems Morris had been hired to rectify. She refused to answer any questions. Dressed casually in sneakers and sweatpants, Dr. Perez was more cordial in person. She extended her hand after Morris’s introduction. “Nice to meet you … oh,” she stammered, evidently recalling that we had spoken before. She smiled uneasily and walked away.

  Afterward, in an administrative office, I asked Morris if the desire to appease security might compromise how well mental health counselors did their jobs. “Dr. Perez, I’m sure, tells her staff to report things to her,” he said. “And I’m very confident if she found out something, she would report it to us.” I mentioned that I had heard otherwise. Morris rolled his eyes, telling me he assumed that my understanding came from a “disgruntled” ex-employee nurturing a grudge—meaning George Mallinckrodt. I told him that other former employees had voiced similar misgivings. “Obviously, that was way before my time,” he said.

  Morris came across as sincere and well intentioned, but his assurance that prisoners were getting their “basic needs” met was disputed by other sources. Prisoners still came to the inpatient unit of the TCU and languished after being placed in what effectively amounted to solitary confinement, I was told. Many patients received no real treatment at all. In one case that was described to me, a man afflicted with paranoia had been degenerating steadily for more than a year. Though he was not disruptive, he’d spent prolonged periods in lockdown because he had stopped taking his medication. Nobody had encouraged him to try a different medication or engaged him in activities that might have lessened his feelings of distrust. As a result, one source said, the patient was “undergoing a quiet decompensation where he just gets sicker and sicker.”

  The mental health staff at Dade continued to defer to security, acquiescing when their clients were given disciplinary reports for conduct clearly related to their illnesses rather than intervening to suggest treatment. A man with diagnosed impulse-control problems had his privileges taken away after an anger outburst, for example. Following a cursory discussion, mental health officials checked a box indicating that his issues had played no role.

  According to Bob Greifinger, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies mental health conditions in prisons, such routine neglect is no less pernicious than instances of flagrant abuse, not least because it is rarely perceived as such. “Most of the coercion that happens goes relatively unrecognized,” Greifinger told me. “There are very few people who can step back and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. They are trying to interfere with my taking care of my patients.’” One observer who had sat in on a staff meeting at Dade said that the counselors and psychiatrists seated around the table seemed more oblivious to the mental health needs of the prisoners than the corrections officers in the room.

  * * *

  In the fall of 2015, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department launched an investigation to determine whether the death of Darren Rainey was part of a broader pattern of abuse. It was not the first time the Florida prison system had been subjected to federal scrutiny. In 2006, James V. “Jimmy” Crosby, who had been appointed DOC secretary by the then governor, Jeb Bush, was sentenced to eight years in prison for accepting kickbacks from private vendors. Under Crosby, corruption was not just tolerated but rewarded, Ron McAndrew, a former warden, told me, with a blind eye turned to “goon squads” who regularly beat up prisoners for sport. (Crosby himself was the warden of a prison where, in 1999, a prisoner named Frank Valdes was brutally beaten to death.) The culture changed under James McDonough, a West Point graduate and former Vietnam platoon leader who succeeded Crosby and dismissed dozens of wardens and senior officials he suspected of corruption. But McDonough’s tenure lasted little more than a year. Meanwhile, tougher sentencing laws filled Florida’s prisons beyond capacity, even as budget problems led to reductions in staffing, forcing guards at many prisons to work longer shifts that raised stress levels and, in turn, the likelihood of abuse.

  Julie Jones, the DOC secretary hired in the wake of Darren Rainey’s murder, vowed to change the culture of Florida’s prisons again. A few months after taking office, Jones issued a “statement on retaliation” in which she vowed that no employee “who comes forward with an issue of concern would face retaliation.” On the wall of the main administrative building at Dade, I spotted a framed copy of this statement. A few months earlier, however, Jones had circulated a memo requiring all DOC inspectors to sign confidentiality agreements about the investigations they conducted. There was no sign of this memo on the wall at Dade.

  * * *

  After relocating to Missouri, Harriet Krzykowski briefly contemplated working at another prison. She ended up finding a job at an agency for at-risk youth, counseling children who had been exposed to traumatic abuse and violence. Not infrequently, the experiences of the children reminded her of her own traumatic upbringing. They also reminded her of the stories she’d heard from patients at Dade, many of whom had been subjected to harrowing violence from an early age. Violence begat violence, she came to believe, producing criminals who victimized others because, in many cases, they had been victimized themselves. She was not alone in being struck by this. In 2012, researchers in Boston began conducting in-depth interviews with 122 incarcerated people in the Massachusetts prison system. Half of the subjects reported that their parents had beaten them. Many had been sexually assaulted and witnessed shootings in the chaotic, unsafe neighborhoods in which they grew up. “Violent offenders, more often than not, are victims long before they commit their first crime,” observed the sociologist Bruce Western, who helped lead the study. The pervasiveness of past victimization underscored why all prisoners deserved not just punishment but “mercy and compassion,” Western argued, something few encountered behind bars. Three-fourths of the subjects in the study reported seeing an assault by prisoners or staff.

  Harriet found her new job rewarding, but she remained haunted by her experience. One morning, I met her at a nature reserve on the banks of the Missouri River that she liked to visit on weekends. We strolled along a winding, leaf-strewn trail for half an hour before stopping at a pagoda by the river, a toffee-colored ribbon along which a couple of rowboats drifted. Harriet sat on a bench that overlooked the gently churning water. She propped her feet up on a ledge. Before working at Dade, she told me, she’d had a clear view of morality. “I always felt there was a right and there was a wrong and that was all there is to it,” she said. “People who are in the position to do the right thing are always going to do the right thing because that’s just who they are; that’s why they’re drawn to that side.” Now her view was muddled and blurred, washed in the gray light of her experience. Was she a victim of the system, or an instrument of it? Whose side had she been on? Sometimes, she reminded herself that she’d had no good choices; she was “a nobody” at Dade, “the lowest person on the rung” in a place where the slightest sign of insubordination was dangerous. Other times, she would think this was just a rationalization and feel a quiver of guilt or shame, as on the evenings when she drew a bath for her kids and checked the temperature of the water, causing her to think of Rainey.

  Perhaps because it afforded more privacy, Harriet seemed to prefer meeting outdoors, in parks and conservation areas where no one could eavesdrop on our conversations or see her crying, which happened more than once. But one afternoon, she suggested we meet indoors, at a place called the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph. The museum occupies a drab brick building that loo
ks like a hospital. After passing through a small gift shop on the ground floor, we climbed a flight of stairs that led to a series of rooms filled with arcane medical devices—a fever cabinet, a lobotomy table—that offered an unsettling commentary on how people with mental disabilities were treated in the past. At one point, Harriet stood before a life-size replica of a cell where patients were once held at the Hospital of Salpêtrière in Paris. Michel Foucault wrote about the hospital in his 1961 book, Madness and Civilization, during the era he called “the great confinement,” which began in the mid-seventeenth century. Harriet peered into the cell, a dingy chamber littered with straw. She stopped to read the label tacked on the wall:

  At the hospital of Salpêtrière, the insane were kept in narrow filthy cells … When frostbite resulted, as it often did, no medical help was available. Food was a ration of bread once a day, sometimes supplemented by thin gruel. The greatest indignity was the chains.

  Afterward, in the gazebo outside, Harriet reflected on how little had changed. “We don’t learn very fast,” she said.

  As I subsequently found out, the Glore Psychiatric Museum is situated in the medical wing of a former state psychiatric hospital. Curious to see the main compound, I went back a few days later. Following a narrow walkway shaded by pines, I arrived at a more secluded area, farther away from the main road, where the hospital’s residential quarters once stood. The path ended at a security barrier, a chain-link fence topped with razor wire that encircled what the shuttered hospital once known as the State Lunatic Asylum No. 2 has become: a prison.

  2

  The Other Prisoners