Plantation Life

           The Virginia Department of Corrections is the commonwealth’s largest state agency, employing over 15,000 at a cost of over $1.2 billion a year.  It is led by a director of public safety. The DOC director, I’m guessing, provides his boss with a department “tree” detailing his own department heads and regional directors and all the prisons which fall underneath. You look at the organizational chart and you think the department is centrally run. Consistency, you tell yourself, matters. And, you’d be wrong.

            DOC operates like the antebellum South. Each prison is its own plantation; all depends on who is the warden and who is the security chief. Prison operation is a bloated business. First, it’s labor intensive. You have to have a significant number of officers to man every housing unit booth and floor. You have to have officers in the towers and in the trucks circling the perimeter. Then, there are officers on duty at vocational and treatment, and in medical and the factory. You have to have “floating” C.O.s to relieve on-duty officers twice during their twelve-hour shift. That’s just line COs. Add a layer of sergeants, “Lts” (lieutenants), two captains, and your security chief and you have a huge officer staff twenty-four, seven.

            Modern technology? Yeah, they have electronically controlled doors for the buildings, but everything else is done with keys. Every classroom door, every cabinet, every drawer, has a lock. There’s one officer whose sole job is to walk around the compound and verify that the correct key goes with the correct lock. Everything is written down; paper is everything in here.

            All that waste of money and manpower would, theoretically, be worth it if (1) society was safer; and (2) going to prison stopped a person from reoffending. Neither statement is true. In fact, just the opposite happens. There is no correlation between “tough on crime” high incarceration rates and crime rates. Want to reduce crime? Have better schools. Make sure lower income workers have a chance to reach the “American Dream” with well-paying employment opportunities and access to both health care and decent housing.

            And, going to prison doesn’t stop recidivism. It’s just the opposite. You send a low risk, non-violent offender into a prison and there’s better than a one out of three chance when they get out, they’ll break the law again. That’s prison. Even at low levels. They are zoos (perhaps zoo isn’t a fair word; zoos are much nicer). Drug use – heroin, pills, weed, you name it – is rampant. Violence is commonplace. There are health crises that brew like a toxic stew; Hep C, HIV, diabetes, not to mention staff infections (MRSA), rotten teeth, rotten skin, rotten psyches. The officers – not all, but a fair number – are corrupt. They are low-skilled, poorly paid minders who use their job to “get a little more.”

            All this goes on under the watchful eye of the warden and the chief of security, the facility major. They run the facility as they see fit, the hell with department policies or procedures. For example, DOC has specific regulations concerning facility operation. “DOPs” (department operating procedures) spell out everything from mail to visitation. And yet every facility enforces those procedures differently. Even going from one level “2” re-entry facility to another is like night and day. It all comes down to the whims and wills of the security chief. Most of the decisions that the major makes are petty and address neither safety, nor security.

            You learn which officers are straight-shooters and which ones are dirty. You watch as they create additional levels of bureaucracy which contribute nothing to the Department’s defined mission of successful re-entry of released inmates to society. Here, we have counselors who don’t counsel; they report to unit managers who worry more about the waxy shine on twenty year-old floor tiles than health and safety in the building. The three unit managers report to an  “evidence based program” manager, a fancy word for a man who should be pushing re-entry programs that matter (like real job training and drug and alcohol treatment), but instead has grown men sitting in a room every morning getting “the word of the day.”

            They have a grievance procedure in place. By law, a prison has to have a system in place that allows the incarcerated to challenge charges and arbitrary enforcement of rules (passed during the Clinton Administration to reduce the number of § 1983 Civil Rights suits flooding the federal courts by inmates). Here, the system is rigged. Due process is ignored. Officers – as uneducated as the offender population (you only need a GED to be a C.O.) – fail to meet minimum standards of evidence and fail to even correctly write charges. Still, the hearing officer almost never finds for the offender.

            All these circumstances breed a sense of victimization and contempt for the judicial system within the offender ranks. When you are in danger of being shook down or sent to the hole based on someone dropping a “note” on you; when most investigations are initiated by information provided by snitches who themselves are dirty (but their dirt is overlooked by the security apparatus), when officers are bringing in drugs and having sex with inmates and – when caught – are just “walked off” without facing prosecution, then you know it’s a rigged game. You are, to quote Bob Dylan, “workin’ on Maggie’s farm.”

            All that goes on here. And you know what – Richmond knows … they just don’t care. How else do you explain that wardens aren’t held accountable for the drug use, fights, deaths, and re-offending of those in their charge? How else do you explain majors getting inmates to wash their cars and playing favorites with snitches while limiting access to education programs?

            This isn’t a well-run department; this isn’t merely a poorly run department. This is a decentralized mismanaged rat hole where each prison runs as its own little fiefdom, its own plantation. It’s all that and it isn’t corrections. And, it doesn’t do a damn bit of good for anyone. Everyone pays for this failed antebellum plantation system: tax-payers, victims, and the families of the offenders. It is time to move corrections into the 21^st century. It’s time to clean up the prisons.