In the Red

This blog was written in October, 2014            

So the Governor announces last week that the budget is a mess (quote: “We can’t continue to rely on the Federal Government …” Beautiful!) and DOC – the state’s most bloated, inefficient, and largest department – will bear the brunt of the cuts. Less than three days later, the DOC’s Director, Harold Clarke, announces that the budget for inmate medical care is $43 million in the red. Big surprise? It shouldn’t be. See, one of the effects of tougher, longer sentences is that you’re locking up a whole lot of people for a whole lot of years; people who had poor health care before conviction; people who were on the fringe of the American dream. And Virginia’s prosecutors and Judges, with arrogance and smug self-righteousness, pile dozens of years on these schmoos – most of whom lack proper education, proper health care, proper housing and employment opportunities – and puff their chests and say “we’re making our communities safer.” Yeah right.

            $43 million in the red. DOC knows that almost half those behind bars have legitimately diagnosed mental disorders. DOC’s answer? Load these men and women with high doses of psychotropic drugs with side effects such as liver damage and suicidal thoughts. Let them check in with an overworked psychiatrist via “video” conference for five minutes each three or four months.

            “Hello. How are you? Any problems? See you in May.”

            Incarcerated persons have drug addiction issues, which leads to higher rates of Hep C inside the fences versus society at large. Drug addicts willing to smoke or shoot up anything for the high have bad dental hygiene, blood disorders, psychiatric abnormalities. Diabetes is rampant inside prison and yet the diet fed behind bars is high in starches and carbs (hey, it’s cheap!).

            $43 million in the red. By the time an offender reaches 65, he will cost the taxpayers over $75,000 per year to house and maintain him. Statistics show that inmates over 50 have the lowest recidivism rates. Yet, Virginia lets no one go early. The state has both geriatric and medical release available yet Governors from both parties refuse to use it (McDonnell, in his last year in office, granted 3 medical paroles). DOC maintains one facility – Deerfield for the aged and chronically infirmed. 1,000 men housed there with a substantial number biding their time until they die. Think I’m kidding? Look at the number who die each year at Deerfield; look at the number suffering Alzheimer’s and dementia and cardiac disease.

            $43 million in the red. That doesn’t include the number of inmates who need heart transplants, kidney and liver transplants. DOC operates and maintains Marion, a psychiatric prison for the criminally insane. The cost for each person there exceeds $100,000 per year. And I wonder, as I see 75-year-old men using walkers to get around here, how incapacitated must you be to get sent to Deerfield? I see men babbling incoherently. I know max security at Red Onion has over 700 of the state’s worst, including many with psychopathic tendencies, and they don’t qualify for Marion. And I wonder who’s in charge? Where’s the logic, the structure, the organization to any of this because, candidly, DOC may stand for “damnable old cluster-fuck.”

            $43 million in the red. Then Governor McDonnell at his inauguration touted a new approach to corrections. Re-entry – returning men and women back to their communities after they “paid their debt to society” – became a linchpin of his administration with much fanfare and ado he brought in Harold Clarke, the then director of Massachusetts’s DOC. New buzzwords popped up inside prisons: “healing environment,” and “re-entry matrix,” and “thinking for a change.” But, like the old line goes, “if you put lipstick on a pig it’s still a pig.”

            “Healing environment” – yeah right. Prison is prison. Most of the folks in charge don’t give a rat’s ass for the notion of healing. Prisons are still dirty, backward, unhealthy (and at a lot of locations, unsafe) places. And Clarke? He came in touting his Christian upbringing, his “mission” to change prisoner’s lives. Clarke has proven to be a snake-oil salesman. His only mission, it appears, is to self-promote. I wonder Mr. Clarke what Jesus would say about your tenure as DOC chief? I wonder how Jesus would run DOC? Instead of Jesus, perhaps Mr. Clarke should ponder these words from Bob Dylan –

            “All the money you make will never buy back your soul.”

            $43 million in the red. Re-entry is a colossal failure and DOC knows it. The initial recidivism numbers show that offenders going through the program actually reoffend at a higher rate. Why? Because success outside is built on (1) employability and (2) family connections. Education – higher education – reduces recidivism not the inane crap they do with “word of the day” and “thinking reports.”

            $43 million in the red. That number will get worse. Every bill comes due and Virginia’s DOC bill – years of corruption and ineptitude – is in the mail. What it will take is a good ass kicking. The mission for DOC has to be to incarcerate the worst; use community corrections and restorative justice principles for most nonviolent offenses; and, invest in education, job training, and health care.

            $43 million in the red. Hey Virginia, it’s time to ask Harold to pay the bill.

Conviction

Hillary Swank stars in a new movie based on the true story of a woman who returns to school, gets her high school and college diplomas, then goes to law school and passes the bar; all to take on her brother’s case and have his conviction for first degree murder overturned.



She was interviewed this past week with lawyer Barry Scheck, director of “The Innocence Project” (http://www.innocenceproject.org/). In a poignant scene from the movie, Swank’s character visits her brother in prison shortly after he attempts suicide. “I’ll go to school, become a lawyer get you out of here. I promise. But you have to promise me you won’t give up, you won’t kill yourself.”


The brother was, in fact, innocent. DNA testing proved it. In the same interview, twelve recently exonerated men from Texas, men who had served sentences from 10 to 26 years before DNA testing proved their innocence, appeared on screen. To a man they spoke of the isolation they endured, the inhumane treatment, the loneliness, the despair – almost each man had tried suicide – loss of family and friends. Yet, each man said the same thing. “I survived because I had faith. I knew God was with me.”


Until you are incarcerated, until you hear the cell door close, you cannot fully understand, fully empathize with these men. Prison changes you. You lose so much, suffer so deeply. If you are lucky, in your loss and despair you find faith and meaning. Still, there is a sadness that always remains.


I used to believe that justice was indeed just. I used to believe that you were “innocent until proven guilty”, that courts were fair, prosecutors honorable, defense attorneys dedicated, prisons places for rehabilitation. I know now my beliefs were all myths. I have dedicated myself to speaking out about what I see each and every day.


The vast majority of inmates are guilty, but they do not deserve the treatment they receive. The criminal justice system and prisons in particular, has become a giant machine with its gears being continually greased by the men and women convicted, their families, and their victims. Prisons warehouse inmates then release them feeling more bitter, more alienated, more lost.


How do you explain to a man that he deserves six years in prison for a driving violation? How do you tell a woman she must serve 10 years for embezzling $2 million, while a woman in Maryland only gets 18 months?


The system perpetuates itself. Virginia DOC maintains 22 facilities, employs 11,500 and holds between 32,000 and 38,000 (both figures provided by DOC themselves). DOC’s 2010-11 operating budget exceeds $1.1 billion. That does not include DCE’s (Department of Correction Education, a separate agency) budget, or that of Probation and Parole. Virginia has one of the ten largest inmate populations in the country, though its population is not in the top ten.


On October 18th a new director of DOC will take over. The outgoing director, Gene Johnson, on the eve of his retirement began speaking candidly about the failures of Virginia’s current sentencing and incarceration practices. His sobering statements should give all conscientious Virginians pause.


The newly appointed Director – Harold Clarke – was previously head of the Massachusetts’s Department of Corrections; he oversaw an inmate population of 9,000. Massachusetts, with a state population of 6.5 million, has only one fourth the prison population of Virginia, a state with a population of approximately 7.6 million. Why the vast disparity?


One of the men I count as a friend is “Black”. When Black was eighteen, he killed a man in a drug deal gone bad. He turns 40 in two months. He’s still under the “old system” (parole; his crime occurred before 1995). For the last ten years he has been “parole eligible”. Ten straight years he has been denied parole. Two days ago he had his annual “parole hearing”. That term doesn’t fit what occurs. Black sits before a video conference hookup. A young female investigator stares at her laptop and asks three questions: Name; DOC number; mandatory parole date. Hearing concluded.


For ten years Black has received the same parole denial form letter. Its reads in part: “parole has been denied due to the severity of the crime”.


During his imprisonment he has earned his college degree. He is active in the Rastafarian Church, a vegetarian and a pacifist. He reads voraciously and writes eloquently. He and I discuss politics, philosophy, religion, music, food. I have no doubt, however, that he will receive the same form denial letter in a month. That is the nature of the amoral system of “corrections” that lives and breathes in Virginia.


In March 2014, Black will be released on mandatory parole. As much as the system has tried to break him, this man survives. What he did was wrong. What Virginia did, and continues to do to him is worse.


DOC reported that last quarter 14 inmates were granted parole. There are approximately 6000 inmates parole eligible. That means on average each quarter 1500 inmates have an opportunity for parole. In practical terms, parole doesn’t even exist for parole eligible inmates.


Despair, loneliness, hopelessness, fear. Each day, inmates fear those emotions. Many quit. They give up. I choose not to. This isn’t about retribution or revenge. It is simply about justice. And justice is, in the end, about fairness, mercy, forgiveness. As President Lincoln noted: we, as a society are to act as the “better part of angels”.


Sometime all it takes is for just one person to believe in you, to love you, to pray for you, to fight for you. The movie “Conviction” is about that. The present state of Virginia’s prisons convicts all well-meaning citizens. Make a difference. Demand change.