Attica at 40

In September 1971, the worst prison riot in U.S. history concluded with an all-white force of New York State police and Department of Corrections employees retaking the prison at a cost of 39 (28 inmates and 11 prison employees) shot to death.  What was initially reported out of Attica as the causes for the inmate takeover and the inmates’ behavior subsequent to the takeover to justify the rampant excessive use of force by the police was fully discredited. The simple fact is this:  39 men died in Attica as a result of Governor Rockefeller’s decision to retake the prison.  Don’t take my word, read the McKay Commission report issued years later.

This blog isn’t about Attica per se.  It is about the lessons we should have learned from Attica, but didn’t.  What happened at Attica forty years ago could happen again.  As the old adage goes “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

When Americans reacted with revulsion to the photographs of conditions inside Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, it is hard to remember that for the men at Attica those same conditions existed.  And in the 40 years since the riot, conditions throughout America’s prison system are not noticeably better.

In 1971 there were approximately 400,000 men and women behind bars.  Today, there are over 2.3 million with another six million under supervision with parole or probation offices.  America spends roughly $70 billion annually to maintain its prison apparatus.  Another nearly $200 billion is spent sustaining courts, prosecution and policing.  The vast majority of those who go through the “criminal justice” system have committed non-violent offenses.

America, “The land of the free and the home of the brave” has created a massive gulag system that dwarfs any created by Stalin.  America oversees a massive criminal-industrial complex that makes millionaires out of the owners of CCA, GEO, Keefe Foods and Global Tel-link while exploiting the incarcerated and their families.

And what did the men at Attica riot over?  They believed that even while incarcerated the Constitution guaranteed fair and decent treatment, that abuse and brutality at the hands of a prison administration and all-white guard force was illegal.  They believed that inmates deserved basic medical care, an end to prison slave labor and wages, a fair parole process, and a grievance system to address their complaints.  Doesn’t sound so radical does it?

Within the last few months inmates throughout the California prison system engaged in a hunger strike to draw attention to the inhumane practice of long-term isolation of inmates, many of whom are merely under investigation.

As Fyodor Dostoevsky profoundly noted “a society is judged by how it treats it prisoners”.  Nothing, it seems, has improved in America’s attitude about the incarcerated since those fateful, bloody days in September 1971.

With the American economy in free fall, many states are revisiting their failed corrections paradigms that suck up millions of badly needed dollars.  Yet, politicians will still not be honest with the voters.  Candidates continue to be elected exploiting the lie that increased incarceration rates make citizens safer.  Virginia spends $1 billion annually to keep approximately 40,000 men and women behind bars.  On their release they are not better; they are not “corrected”.  Prisons are places of despair, hopelessness, abuse and violence.  And people of faith who allow such a system to flourish should be ashamed.

Has anything changed since Attica?  You be the judge.  As Prison Legal News recently stated:

“Prisons should be reserved for only the truly dangerous, always with the goal of rehabilitation and release, and with adequate resources provided to achieve those objectives in positive ways.”

Forty years and it seems like yesterday.

Quick Hits this Week

DOC Loses Again



“USA Today” reported that DOC had “reached settlement with the National Lawyers Guild to allow distribution of the Guild’s Prison Lawyers Handbook to interested inmates.” This just another case brought, and won against DOC for censorship of publications.


In the last twelve months DOC has had their book censorship procedure declared unconstitutional and has agreed to change ordering procedures and allow inmates to receive both “Prison Legal News” (now available in the prison library) and the National Lawyers Guild self help manual.


All these settlements have come at a price to the taxpayers of Virginia. The state government bureaucracy refuses to concede anything to inmates. But, rights are rights.


You can lock someone up but you can’t take everything away from them. At least not yet anyway. Perhaps DOC should consider all the costs of their operation into the calculus.


Quitters and Whiners


I had an extremely frustrating week with the students in the IT program. The vast majority of these guys want A’s in their classes without putting in the requisite effort. They whine to the professors about how hard the assignments are and how much they have to do.


Here’s the thing, with the exception of 3 or 4 guys like Big S added to the program to improve the success rate, the vast majority of the students have no endurance and no motivation.


This program was designed to ensure at risk (most likely to recommit crime) inmates succeed. The problem is most “at risk” inmates are “at risk” because they lack not only the skills to succeed but the will.


I have pleaded, cajoled, praised and profaned many of these guys for the last two months. Our results after one “term” are encouraging: 36 students remain. Every student passed English lll and History; every student passed keyboarding. Five students are taking remedial math. The rest passed.


I am worn out! But at least I know Craig, DC and I made a difference. There’s no guarantee these guys will make it, but at least we gave them a shot.


Country Music TV


A few weeks ago a new digital channel was added to our cable network. “Country Music TV”. Big S has his set on it almost all day long.


I was never a big country music fan but now I find myself glued to the set asking Big S about the artist singing and writing down lyrics I hear. I have dozens of letters crafted in my mind to people I long to hear from; letters that I’ll never send using those lyrics to express my feelings better than anything I can write on my own.


But, too many of the videos, too many of the songs, hit too close to home. They remind me of love lost, of loneliness, of the family and life I miss so dearly. I watch in small doses. Sometimes it’s too painful.


Recently, I came across an artist named “Orianthi”. One of the guys had her CD and let me listen. In a letter I was told to listen to “According to You.” She sings about a new man who found her beautiful and witty. “Why aren’t you that man”, she asked? “According to you, I’m stupid. . .” I listened and my heart broke. I wasn’t the guy who said she was stupid, but somebody in their letter was telling me I was. Orianthi’s words pierced my soul. It was music as a weapon. I wanted to write the person and tell her “you know that’s not me,” but I couldn’t.


The second track began and I listened. Orianthi sang about “courage”. She described the effort it took to go on, to keep hoping. I turned the CD off, kept my mind off the videos.


I realized the answer wasn’t in a song lyric or video. I started to pray.

Iceberg Dead Ahead

DOC settled a 1st Amendment lawsuit on September 23 with the publishers of “Prison Legal News”. DOC agreed to pay PLN $125,000, allow issues previously banned to be delivered to inmate subscribers, and change the book/magazine subscription policy to allow third parties to order books and magazines for inmates.



This is a major victory for advocates of prisoner rights and 1st Amendment rights and another costly lesson for DOC – and Virginia’s taxpayers – for their hubris. DOC has long thought that Constitutional safeguards didn’t apply to them. This year, they are learning, at taxpayer expense, that they do.


For those “get tough on crime” readers: get ready. You want long sentences for inmates. It’ll cost you. And, the cost is staggering, over $1 billion a year.


This year DOC has already lost/settled three significant 1st Amendment cases. Beside the PLN lawsuit, DOC’s prohibition on spoken word CD’s was overruled. An inmate, prohibited from ordering CD’s of a minister’s sermons, successfully sued and had the DOC prohibition on spoken word tapes and Cd's thrown out.


As reported in an earlier blog, another inmate successfully challenged DOC’s censorship policy. U.S. District Court Judge James Turk found the DOC policy void as in violation of the 1st Amendment.


Still pending, a suit brought by the National Lawyers Guild over DOC’s refusal to give inmates access to a legal self-help manual.


Each of these suits cost taxpayers thousands of dollars. And, each of these suits could have been avoided, but for DOC’s arrogance. DOC is its own worst enemy. They are charged with the rehabilitation of incarcerated offenders. Instead, they create and enforce arcane rules that bear no legitimate relation to the safety, security, discipline and order of the institutions they manage.


In the PLN case, DOC took the position that inmates could not have access to court case citations and reviews. In the case before Judge Turk, a senior DOC Director attempted to suggest James Joyce’s classic novel Ulysses was properly banned because “inmates were bartering the book to read sexually explicit passages”. The Judge himself found DOC’s position “laughable”.


As I’ve noted on this blog before, DOC is broken. Literally, inmates are running the asylum. Virginia clings to the hard-hearted, illogical, unsupportable notion that longer sentences mean less crime. Study after study concludes that premise is wrong. Virginia abolished parole in 1995. At that time, there were approximately 9,500 inmates in the system. Fifteen years later, there are over 38,000 in DOC facilities and another 5,000 housed in regional jails awaiting transfer.


Over $1 billion is spent annually on DOC. Yet, the vast majority of that money is for housing and maintaining the inmate population.


Rehabilitation programs are laughable. Big S attended alcohol awareness. It met once a week, 30 minutes, ten weeks.


In my situation, I owe more than $1 million in restitution. Assuming I have to complete my entire sentence, it will cost Virginia taxpayers in excess of $300,000 to house ad maintain me. On my release I will be eligible for Social Security which is not subject to collection. I will pay nothing toward my restitution order.


Instead of creating a system that rewards good behavior, a system that gets an offender to confront his wrongdoing and make amends; DOC oversees a system that tries to make inmates feel hopeless. And, out of hopelessness comes anger and resentment.


Guys in here will challenge any rule. And, every challenge costs money. And, asinine rules cost lots of money. It is becoming painfully clear; there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of lawsuits on the horizon waiting to sink DOC and Virginia’s taxpayers.


Everyone knows the story of the Titanic; the ship that was “unsinkable”. The owners and the crew placed so much credence in their own abilities that they saw themselves as creating the indestructible. But on a dark, starless night a watchman looked up and yelled out the immortal words “Iceberg dead ahead”. Little less than three hours later the “unsinkable” Titanic went below the water.


DOC is the Titanic. Difference is, it’s already hit the iceberg. It’s taking on water. But, it doesn’t have to sink. It will take drastic efforts to save it. First, a complete new mindset. That means the old way of doing things must go. Those senior staff who have presided over this corrupt system must be replaced.


Second, reinstate parole. Have a sliding scale for inmates. Nonviolent felons would be eligible for release after 10% to 30% of their sentence is served; violent offenders’ eligible after 40% of their sentence is served. But, make it based on merit. Work hard in prison, show remorse, seek to rehabilitate, you then earn parole.


Third, make rehabilitation really mean something. Have real treatment programs, more education and vocation opportunities. And, institute “restorative justice” as a central tenet of DOC’s mission statement.


Write your delegates, write the Governor and express your views on prison reform. Better still, suggest to him that he read my blog and meet with me. I’m available 24/7. Through this experience, I’ve been given a life preserver. I don’t want the ship to sink, but I’ll be OK if it does.

Dr. Doolittle

Don’t get sick in prison. You learn that the moment you get locked up. Two weeks after my arrest, routine blood work was done. A short while later I was called back down to the medical unit and greeted by these words “you have leukemia”. Fortunately, the moronic doctor had misread the results. After six more tubes, he “discovered” his error.



Virginia has contracted out inmate medical care and the company with the contract makes money by seeing high volumes of inmates each day. As a result, the care sucks.


Our “physician” here is flat out incompetent. You wouldn’t let him treat your family pet. A sampling of his recent diagnoses:


Corey – went to medical with severe lower abdominal pain. For four days he was denied treatment. His family called; he was seen and rushed to MCV (Medical College of VA in Richmond) where they discovered his appendix had burst.


Softball Larry – a great young athlete. Larry dropped 40 pounds in less than a month. He couldn’t keep food down. The doctor’s diagnosis: “You need vitamin D. Get outside.” One evening a C.O. saw Larry shaking uncontrollably. He demanded medical see Larry. They found him with a 104 fever and rushed him to MCV. After a four week hospital stay he returned. He was found to have ulcerative colitis.


Ray – a 62 year old inmate. He complained for weeks about pain and numbness in his arm. It took repeated calls into the prison before he was given an EKG. Shortly thereafter he was taken to MCV for two stents to open up blocked arteries.


These are just three examples. I have dozens. The truth is medical care in prisons is atrocious. Every issue of Prison Legal News reports dozens of cases throughout America each month where incompetent medical care led to million dollar awards to inmates (or, in most cases, the deceased inmate’s family).


In Portsmouth, Virginia last month PHS (Prison Health Services) agreed to settle a deceased inmate’s suit for $1.6 million. The inmate died in his cell of dehydration.


For inmates to get adequate health care they have to fight. Almost every diagnosis, every request for treatment only comes about after filing repeated grievances and – in many cases – getting family and friends to call the prison and demand adequate care.


Some may say “you guys get what you deserve”. That’s not the law. When society incarcerates a person they assume the obligation to provide for that person’s basic needs. California currently is under federal court order to release 46,000 of their 172,000 inmates. Why? Because they are at 200% capacity and medial care and housing has completely collapsed. California has this case on appeal to the US Supreme Court, but the writing is on the wall! You want to “lock criminals up? Pay for it!” It is against the law to deprive incarcerated persons of adequate health care. Ironic, isn’t it. The same Commonwealth that prosecutes criminals is itself breaking its own laws in its treatment of convicts.


But, every so often an inmate “wins one”. Flo has wanted a bottom bunk for months. He got one last Wednesday. How? He went outside and faked passing out in the heat. Rushed over to medical the doctor “checking his vitals” asked if he was OK. “What can we do for you?”


As Flo was moving into his new bunk he yelled out “don’t hate the player. Hate the game!”