Saying No

The PBS news broadcast “News Hour with Jim Lehrer” had a story last night about California’s response to the U.S. Supreme Court recently declaring – in Brown v. Plaza – that the state’s prison system was “inhumane” and ordered the release of 33,000 inmates over the next two years to partially alleviate the excessive overcrowding that exists in complete violation of the Eighth Amendment.

What has California decided to do in response?  According to the news report, they are just saying “No”.  The DOC director (query:  how do you keep your job after the stinging rebuke received from the court?) announced that “no inmate will be released early”.  What is their solution?  Force local jails – already overcrowded and straining under the pressure of excessive prisoners and budget shortfalls – to keep state prisoners up to three years.  As one sheriff noted “we can’t afford to have the inmates we already have.  We don’t have the space or the money.”

The few men in the building who watch PBS news instead of BET’s “Freestyle Friday” (a “rap off” hosted by the incredibly attractive “Roxie”) came over to my bunk, heads hung low.  “They aren’t doing what the court ordered”, I heard from a number of men.  “We break the law, we go to prison.  They break the law and nothing changes.”

I smiled and uttered four small words:  “You gotta have faith”.  I have never been a patient man until…until all this.

California’s DOC director is not the first political leader to “say no” to justice.  History is full of men who arrogantly presume they know better.  And those men end up as mere footnotes to the transcendent power of human beings to overcome.

It was then Governor George Wallace who stood on the steps of the University of Alabama refusing to let black students enter.  “Over my dead body” he roared.  “Segregation now and forever.”  Wallace, the loudmouth bigot, is gone as are his sick views on race relations.  Young men in my writing class find it hard to believe that fifty years ago the idea America would elect a black President was “beyond reason”.

Few people recall that the case of Brown v. Board of Ed was heard and decided twice.  The first case was held over by Chief Justice Warren.  A new justice came on board, arguments reheard and by a vote of 9 to 0 the United States Supreme Court ruled “separate but equal” unconstitutional.

Southern states thumbed their nose at the court.  The public school system my own sons attend(ed) in fact closed for years rather than integrate, all part of Virginia’s “massive resistance” campaign against integration.  Hey Virginia, how’d that work out?

My faith tells me good triumphs over evil.  Imagine sitting beside your radio in the darkest days of the Great Depression, 25% unemployment, the Midwest bread basket turned into a dust bowl.  There on the radio you heard Roosevelt say “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.

Imagine being an Israelite, enslaved for 400 years, crying out to God “when Lord, when?”  And a fugitive shows up.  Wanted for murder, this shepherd goes up to the most powerful man in the world – Pharaoh – and says “I have a message from God.  He says ‘Let My People Go’”.  Pharaoh?  He says “no”.  Plagues and pestilence follow and Pharaoh still says “no”.  Each action by God hardens Pharaoh’s heart even further.

Even after the Passover, after the death of the first-born of every Egyptian, Pharaoh still says “no”.  The waters part.  The Israelites walk to freedom.  And Pharaoh and his army?  Swallowed by the waves.

The California DOC director isn’t the first leader to say no to the drumbeat of justice.  And, he won’t be the last.  California will release inmates as will Virginia and every other state.  America can no longer afford the reckless, backward, inhumane prison system it has created.  Politicians may say “no” but the truth sees it differently.

Reality Wins 5 to 4

This past Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court, in a far reaching decision speaking directly to the rights of those incarcerated, held five to four that living conditions in California’s prisons constituted a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.  It upheld a lower court’s injunction requiring the release of over 30,000 California inmates within two years.

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 16^th 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.