Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy noted that California’s prisons were built to accommodate 80,000 inmates; however the inmate population had swelled at one point to over 156,000. For ten years, California’s inmates have successfully argued in court that the conditions in existence in the state’s prisons were barbaric. The state knew this and ignored the ramification of policies that locked more and more people away for non-violent crimes. Many of these people suffered from mental health disorders, alcohol and drug addictions.
The USA Today’s Wednesday rational editorial correctly stated the case:“Tuesday’s 5-4 decision was humane and correct. American prisons aren’t supposed to be some 16th century version of hell where outrageous overcrowding and short-staffing mean that mentally ill inmates are confided in telephone booth size cages or left catatonic in pools of their own urine. Prisoners shouldn’t be coddled, but they shouldn’t be treated like abused animals either. California’s officials should be humiliated that it took the nation’s highest court to remind them of the meaning of ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’”
Then this:“The state’s legislators allowed the prison system to fester for years as they wrangled inconclusively about how and whether to fix it …”
As Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project (www.sentencingproject.org ) noted following the decision, the court has now provided “state policymakers with the opportunity to correct misguided sentencing policies and, in the process, produce more effective public safety outcomes.”While the decision only specifically applies to California’s “correction” system, commentators have noted the standard set out applies to all states – Virginia had better be listening.
People may not like inmates. They may think – like my reader from Alaska – that we “get what we deserve”. But, a state cannot, in the name of punishing a man for breaking the law, break the law itself. Virginia DOC on a daily basis violates the law in the conditions they maintain in their prisons. But, as I told a number of inmates who gathered around my bunk when the decision was handed down. Bob Dylan was correct. “For the times, they are a changing.”I have been very reticent to discuss in great detail my experiences in DOC’s Powhatan Receiving Unit, a filthy dangerous, poorly operated unit where men new to DOC sit for months as they are “processed” and ultimately moved to an actual prison. Men are housed in cells built for one with leaky toilets and sinks, heavily infested with roaches, ants and spiders. Air circulation is virtually non-existent. In the summer, the stifling heat and humidity climbs the temperature to over one hundred degrees. In winter, a water pipe at the rear of the cell provides the only heat. It is so hot that you can burn yourself making contact with it.
There are eighty cells to a tier with three tiers. Four hundred and eighty men locked in small cells twenty-two hours per day. The smell of blood, feces, urine, sweat and semen permeates the air. Men scream and cry. They fight, they bleed, they breakdown. They abuse and are abused. This is the system of justice, of corrections that is allowed to exist in Virginia. It is barbaric. It is criminal. It is immoral. Justice Kennedy, in his opinion, specifically detailed the dismal conditions in California’s prisons. At one point he noted that two hundred inmates were housed in a gym with forty inmates sharing a toilet. As I looked at the photo of the inmates lying in their bunks I had to smile. An entire gym, I thought. I live in the same bunks with 191 other inmates sharing roughly the square footage of half a gym. Though, only twenty of us share a toilet.
The American Corrections Association sets standards for the proper number of inmates per building and what is considered adequate square footage of personal floor space. These aren’t some “feel good stats” put together by an association. They are based on standards enumerated in Federal law. Virginia’s prisons violate those standards, violate Federal law. As I write this blog early on a typical morning, there are two officers in this building, both female. One is in the booth, the other watching TV on the “B” side. Two nights ago a fight broke out in “1” building. One inmate, tired of harassment from a younger, stronger inmate, took matters into his own hands. He placed three padlocks in a sock and snuck up on his tormentor and struck him repeatedly in the head fracturing his jaw and leaving him a bloody mess. Moments passed before an officer even arrived.
Before anyone reading this take the attitude “they are just a bunch of animals with their behavior”, ask yourself honestly how you would behave in this environment. For four and a half months I sat in receiving hell praying that “God would lead me safely through”. I walked over pools of blood left in stairwells after gangs brutally beat an enemy. I saw and heard mentally ill young men cry out at night for help and have officers tell them to “shut the f--- up”. I lived in an eight foot by six foot cell with a psychotic murderer who kept three homemade knives for protections and told me one night how he still saw his father lying in front of their home in a pool of blood, dead, the result of a gang stabbing. He was eight at the time. Some – perhaps like Alaska – would argue I deserved that and more for violating the law, for embezzling. I disagree. No person deserves to be confined like that. Humanity demands more from us.
Virginia’s prisons, by DOC’s own admissions, are at 137% capacity. These facilities are not capable of sustaining this population. Any politician who tells you otherwise is a liar. The times they are a changin: Virginia can institute real prison reform, real sentence reform, real rehabilitation or they can continue on the path of California. Reality came home this week, 5 to 4. “The Lord sets the prisoners free…” (Psalm 146:7) Perhaps Virginia will heed the call.
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