Image courtesy of Wallin and Klarich

In his final “Letter to Loretto,” CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who served two years in a federal prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, wrote about all the things he would not miss in prison. He’d pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) in 2012 when he confirmed the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program to a reporter.

Kiriakou wrote that among other things, he certainly wouldn’t miss “staff lies;” COs who are “bullies and punks” and those who harassed his visitors; waiting for 4 days to send or receive an email from his family or attorneys because he was considered “dangerous;” fighting to get mail; and in a later letter, after he’d been released, he said that there had been “a trollish prison employee” who tried to to set him up just as he was leaving.

But one of his worst experiences was when he was actually released: dealing with the number of inane rules for those exiting from prison, so they supposedly won’t re-offend. From the day of his release on February 3 until the end of his house arrest on May 1, he couldn’t leave his house except to go to Hope Village, a halfway house, where he was supposed to be learning life skills—besides having a family, this man had a BA and an MA from George Washington University; he couldn’t leave except to seek or do work, or to visit the doctor. He wrote, “What I [also] couldn’t do was go to PTA meetings, my children’s school events, their sporting events, or enter a private home.” The rules almost cost him a job until he finally got permission to drive because commuting from his home to Hope Village took up 6 hours of his day!

Andrea James, founder and director of Families for Justice as Healing, had been a well established practicing attorney, also with a good job and a family, before her own crazy experiences kicked in behind bars. And leaving Danbury Prison where she served 24 months, was similar to Kiriakou. While behind bars, she had written her now-published book, Upper Bunkies Unite: And Other Thoughts On the Politics of Mass Incarceration. When she left the jail, she began 3 months of home confinement. She wrote in an email:

“I was denied any halfway house time although it could have brought me back to Boston and closer to my children almost 6 months sooner than later. On the day I was released from Danbury, after being handcuffed and walked through the prison to the area where you start and end your prison stay, known as R&D, I was stripped searched one last time. My one box I was leaving with that only contained my book manuscript was searched, and I was finally allowed to walk out of the front door. My family met me in the parking lot and we drove from Danbury to the McGraph Halfway House at 699 Mass Ave. in Boston. I was told that although I was denied halfway house time and was kept in Danbury for most of my sentence, I was given a few hours to get from Danbury, CT to McGraph House to check-in and arrange my schedule, including a payment schedule for the halfway house, for the next three months, as I had to report to them weekly.

After arriving however, as my family waited for me to check in and then return to the car and finally to home, I was told that I would not be allowed to leave the halfway house that day and could be held there for up to three days because the staff needed to do a home visit before I would be allowed to return home, even after being approved for home confinement by the prison and federal probation, who had already conducted a series of home visits and back ground checks on everyone in my home. My children were devastated when I had to yell to them from the doorway of the halfway house (I was not allowed to step out of the halfway house to go back to the car), that I could not yet return home with them.”

James wrote, “The rest of the story is very much like the one told in the article about home confinement, reporting weekly to a halfway house, receiving phones calls from the halfway house all hours of the day and night, everyday, even at 3am, to make sure I was in my home, peeing in a cup in front of strangers (even though I had no prior drug related issues), and constant visits to my home by federal probation, including home searches including even my children’s bedrooms.

The women who had to live in the halfway house had a much more difficult time as they were caught in a ridiculous cycle of not being allowed to leave the halfway house unless they were going to a job interview or job. Not an easy thing to arrange if you’re not allowed to leave. Most of these women had been incarcerated in far-a-way federal prisons for the past 5-10 years. None of it made any sense and was incredibly frustrating to the women. Many wanted to be returned to the prison they came from to wait for their home-confinement date as they felt they had more freedom in the prison. This of course was not allowed because most women are not approved for home-confinement. It’s really a mess and grossly ineffective and costly, mostly to the women who have to pay the halfway house for living there at the one most important time they need their money, if they manage to find employment, to find housing.”

And so it goes, our re-entry system at its finest.

Image via ColorLines

“It blows my mind that I have to sign a law for that,” Massachusetts former governor Deval Patrick said in May 2014, after he signed into law the Act to Prevent Shackling and Promote Safe Pregnancies for Female Inmates in Massachusetts. The law was groundbreaking in that it both protected women’s health behind bars and forbid shackling of pregnant prisoners.

Currently 29 states still allow women behind bars to be shackled during birth. This occurs, in spite of the fact, reported by the Women’s Media Center (WMC) in March 2015, that “this practice has been condemned by many medical and international humanitarian organizations, including the American Medical Association, Amnesty International, and the United Nations Committee Against Torture.” WMC added that it wasn’t until 2000 that merely “one state—Illinois—enacted legislation restricting the use of restraints.”

According to the Massachusetts Anti-Shackling Coalition, the 2014 Massachusetts law went beyond banning shackling and aimed to insure a “safe healthy pregnancy, birth experience and postpartum recovery, including prenatal care, adequate nutrition, and support during labor and birth.” So would it blow Governor Patrick’s  mind, if he were to learn that indeed the law to support pregnant prisoners is not being followed in many of the places we incarcerate women throughout the state?

Barbaric restraints that never should have been used in the first place are still in use. According to Judge Nancy Gertner, in a recent op-ed in the Boston Globe, shackles and waist chains for pregnant women are “unconstitutional…a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.” Vans without seat belts are still employed to transport women to and from jails. The statute is clear: no restraints except for handcuffs up front, but facilities are not following the law, in spite of the fact that statute forbids shackles “except in extraordinary circumstances,” and as Judge Gertner clarified, “even then, without leg or waist restraints.” Healthy pregnancies, how are they faring behind bars? Early results seem to indicate that violations of the statute on that front are also alive and well. Healthy diets and suitable clothing and undergarments are not being provided.

Two major advocacy groups, Prisoners’ Legal Services (PLS) and Prison Birth Project (PBP) interviewed women who were pregnant, and some who gave birth in the last year, since the law went into effect. A few of their experiences, reported anonymously, show the ways the law is not being followed:

• “I took a shower after the birth and they put me back in bed and shackled me to the bed by my left ankle. I said it was against the law, but the female C.O. said she had never heard of that. She called the jail and whoever she talked to also said they never heard of it. So I stayed shackled to the bed.”
• “It was very uncomfortable in the back of the vans. You’d slide everywhere, it was a very bumpy ride. It was scary. I would sometimes get cramps on those rides. Me and another pregnant girl who was having twins would talk about whether we’d go into labor in the van itself. We would joke around as a way to deal with how awful it was.”
• “I hate being this pregnant, being hungry and only having access to an extra cheese sandwich. Knowing what I do about being pregnant I know I should be eating more fresh vegetables.”

Lauren Petit, an attorney from PLS, in an interview, said that when the law was passed, jails and Department of Correction (DOC) prisons received the language of the statute—no more, no less. They were to do their own implementation, and by “they”—all the county facilities that transport women, like Essex, and those that house them including jails in the counties of Bristol, Barnstable, Hampden, Suffolk, as well as the Department of Correction state prisons—Framingham MCI and South Middlesex.

Petit said that stopping the shackling of pregnant prisoners is “a huge culture shock” for correction officers. Jails have to train their officers but it seems that most do not have polices in place to do so. Petit said results are varied and inconsistent. “Chicopee Jail in Hampden County has done a good job of training in some areas”—(my note: They better, considering the recent video camera suit they lost)—but, Bristol, under Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, said Petit, is doing a “terrible job.”  Bristol often transports pregnant women in vans with no seat belts. Chicopee sometimes won’t let women go to appointments because, although they know the law, there are no seat belts in that day’s available van.

Petit added that DOC has a different responsibility than the jails per the statute. She said, The DOC “was to put together a set of minimum health care standards and consult the Department Public Health and the Massachusetts sheriffs.” But have they done this? “I can’t say 100% that they have not done it but so far it seems like they have not,” said Petit. The DOC has been unresponsive to her records’ requests.

By the end of May, Petit, Marianne Bullock, co-founder of the Prison Birth Project, and Rachel Roth, women’s health policy expert, will release a report to describe compliance throughout the state. Roth said she was heartened to discover more women behind bars than she expected had heard about the law and were educating others. She is also working on outreach to make sure everyone knows about the statute, including defense attorneys and medical professionals.

The upcoming report is a result of funding that PLS and the PBP recently received from the National Institute for Reproductive Health (NIRH) to monitor implementation of the Massachusetts law.  In an email from Roth, the NIRH was described as working “to promote reproductive rights and expand access to reproductive health care through bold advocacy, creative education campaigns, and high-impact partnerships.”

An email from Marianne Bullock said that funding will also allow the Prison Birth Project “to engage formerly incarcerated women and allies to educate community members about their rights” as well as to allow PBP to work with pregnant women in jail. Bullock and the PBP plan “to ensure that rights are respected under the new law,” and to work on advocacy with the jail administration “to update its practices and policies to reflect the provisions of the law.”

Gavi Wolfe, legislative counsel at the ACLU of Massachusetts, in the above noted article by Women’s Media Center, spoke of the importance of this law: “Women’s experiences giving birth matter. It’s also important to make a public policy statement that this is not okay. We shouldn’t have to make this kind of statement of principle in legislation because it’s so obviously unacceptable treatment, but apparently we do.”

But until the law is followed as it should be, we are left with the fury of this law’s violations. Just after Mother’s Day, and here we are with the Massachusetts Anti-Shackling Coalition‘s insistence that we tend to our mothers behind bars: “The Commonwealth has made a commitment to health care for all, which promotes the well-being of pregnant women and gives every baby a healthy start in life. We call on the Secretary of Public Safety to ensure that the state Department of Correction and all county Sheriffs fully comply with the law and take seriously the health and treatment of pregnant women who are incarcerated.”

Every semester my students from Voices Behind Bars, a class I teach at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts, go to prison. They used to visit state institutions but now that the Massachusetts state prisons do not offer tours (perhaps because it is a hassle to have outsiders trooping through them and criticizing what they see) the students take a tour of Billerica House of Correction, where they experience confinement to some degree and listen for an hour to an incarcerated man talk about his life and what it is like to be behind bars.

Originally, the Middlesex House of Correction was built in 1929 and housed 300 men. Now it has more than 1100, after a $37 million dollar expansion which prison officials say was to accommodate the closing of the Cambridge Jail —not without objections from activists and community members who opposed more prison building (actually costing $43 million per The Lowell Sun.)

I’ve always thought it’s not ideal to have my students learn about prison by going to a place where people are only kept for 2 1/2 years,  That’s the county sentence at a house of correction. Certainly a far cry from a life sentence. I told myself students couldn’t really learn as much about the strains of prison without seeing the harsher conditions that exist in state institutions. That is, until this last visit.

Most of the tour went as usual. We went through the older part of the facility where cells can get up to 110 degrees in the summer. We saw the visiting room where men talk to their loved ones through glass. The officer who showed the students around Billerica explained that prisoners must walk on the green stripes in the hallways; there were the usual men cleaning with mops and pushing large barrels down walkways; the smell was of too much cleaning fluid. We passed through the health unit where men were waiting to see practitioners and others were isolated in cells. It was prison as usual.

We no longer are allowed to see the Hole or what prison officials call the Segregation Unit, since men are there disciplined to solitary confinement which my students know Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy recently said can drive men mad. Therefore, the highlight of the tour is always taking them into what is called a “pod.” A pod is the relatively new term in prison construction where prisoners can live in a contained unit. These pods are somewhat stale and robot-like but they allow the COs the ability to see what is going on.

We entered the pod where men do drug treatment and have earned some privileges. It has the reputation of being a better place to reside than the old part of the institution which is pretty grim and can house two men in a cell. To the left is one old institutional unit at Blillerica, looking a little prettier than it really is with whitewashed grey walls, all somehow devoid of color in reality:

On the pod we entered, those incarcerated run some of the addiction groups themselves, we were told. On the tier above the day room where prisoners sit, eat, and play cards at the tables, are rows of cells where men live. Also those cells are on the first floor all around the room.  Each cell has a tiny vertical slit—a window—and when we come into their space, the men inevitably stare out the window at us. At times, they’ve pounded on their doors; at other times, they’ve all been at tables eating lunch, trying to ignore the fact that there are outsiders nearby.

This time, when the twenty of us entered, there were only a few men in their brownish beige uniforms sitting at tables. Another two were talking to the guards who policed the room, two perched at a computerized station at one end. The students all took turns entering a cell to see what it is like, a rather disturbing experience on many levels for most of them. One student, we’ll call her Sofia, suddenly turned toward me as Spanish was heard above us. She pointed up at a window where a man smiled widely and pressed his face against the slit.

“That’s my brother,” Sofia said, her eyes filling with tears.

I looked up and he waved at me, his sister’s teacher. Sofia looked away.

I asked the young woman if she had known he would be here, and yes, Sofia said, she knew he was in this  facility but no, she had no idea she might see him. She seemed torn, wanting to look, wanting to hide. She said under her breath as others continued their entrance into cells, as far as she knew, he had no hope of ever not doing drugs. She’d lost touch, she said. She couldn’t imagine he might be doing OK.

But the young man’s face, lit with joy when he saw her, and before we left that unit, it was almost as if a light went off for her too. Prison became about loneliness, about being apart, about the kind of pain that happens when families break up. It was no longer just about this space or this room or that hallway. Sofia’s brother, as close as he was, was nowhere near his sister. And would not be for a long time, perhaps never. She understood that and so did I.

When we exited Billerica that day, Sofia told the other students about her brother behind bars. Now, after walking through Billerica, and after being with Sofia, they understood why prison is not just a physical place, but a deep wound.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

There’s some good news about a bill that’s been filed by Massachusetts House Representative Kay Khan (D-Newton), now known as HD1073. The good news is that the bill aims to prevent employees of the opposite sex from the use of video cameras in jails or prisons during strip searches. At this point, some activists feel that the bill doesn’t go far enough, but hopefully that can be corrected.

A strip search in this context, refers to any search where a prisoner is required to remove all of his or her clothing. Per the language of the proposed bill which according to Khan’s office, is still under construction, a strip search “may include a visual inspection of a nude inmate’s oral, anal or vaginal cavity.”

The need for such a bill came about as a result of a lawsuit filed by the Law Offices of Howard Friedman in 2011 against Sheriff Michael J. Ashe and Assistant Superintendent Patricia Murphy of the Western Massachusetts Regional Correctional Center in Chicopee. I wrote about this case here1 and here2, explaining how taping of searches began in mid-September 2008.  According to the suit, 68 percent of the tapes show “some or all of the women’s genitals, buttocks, or breasts.” Per Friedman’s law office website: “From September 15, 2008 to May 20, 2010, males held the camera for about 70% of the strip searches.” While the jail contended that these videotapes were used for safety reasons and to document a “potentially dangerous move” from general population to the segregation unit, David Milton, an attorney in Friedman’s office, said of the jail, in a telephone interview in 2014,“No one could identify a single place in the country that videotaped strip searches.”

The suit contended that videotaping the searches violated the Fourth Amendment which protects citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures. The case was successful and Judge Michael Ponser’s decision came down on August 26, 2014. The judge ruled for Debra Baggett, the plaintiff in the class-action case, and 178 former and current detainees at the Chicopee jail. The case sent a jolt through anyone who was complacent about such horrors as the public discovered that 274 strip searches had been videotaped, all of women, mostly by men who supposedly didn’t look. An article at Think Progress, reported that Judge Ponser stated in the decision, “The fact that the male officer, while operating the video camera, may be turned to one side or have his back turned will do little, for most female inmates, to diminish the sense of embarrassment, humiliation, and vulnerability that she must inevitably feel.”

A few months after the suit was settled, in November, 2014, Lois Ahrens, director of the Real Cost of Prisons Project, wrote a letter to the editor (LTE) which first appeared on Masslive.com and then in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.  She pointed out the cost of this process to taxpayers. Through a public records request, Ahrens discovered that the Sheriff’s office had spent close to $500,000 on lawyer’s fees to defend itself, saying they had not violated women’s rights when videotaping the searches.

Governor’s Councillor, Michael Albano, who represents the counties of Hampden, Hampshire, Berkshire and Franklin—where the Chicopee jail resides— became concerned about this. Ahrens said in an interview, that his interest was sparked after reading her LTE. Albano approached Rep. Khan about a bill.

Khan’s bill aims to add new language to Chapter 127 of the Massachusetts General Laws, which governs “Officers and Inmates of Penal and Reformatory Institutions, Parole and Pardons.” At this point, the language to be added is in flux and Khan said in a telephone interview that she hopes people will come to the to-be scheduled hearing to discuss their concerns. Concerns can and have changed bill language, said Khan.

The bill states that “Strip searches of inmates, including the videotaping thereof, shall not be conducted by or in the immediate vicinity of a correction officer or other employee of the opposite sex, except under an emergency or otherwise urgent situation.” This indicates that men cannot be videotaping body cavity searches of women except in emergency situations. “But what defines an emergency?” asked Ahrens. She said this needs to be clearly spelled out.

Ahrens also raised the issue that the bill does not call for outside oversight. If videotaping is mishandled, the superintendent or designees of the prison or jail get the news and are required to file a report. But Ahrens pointed out this could be problematic as they are the ones who have ordered it. “It’s a closed loop,” she added, and that doesn’t assure regulation. “The big question,” said Ahrens, is “Why do they have to videotape strip searches at all?”

Khan was receptive to all of these issues when hearing the criticism, and hopes that the bill can be ironed out in committee after public hearings when testimony on the bill will be heard. She said she too wondered why videotaping was necessary, and would ask the Department of Correction (DOC) that same question. “Oversight is a very good point,” she said, but admitted that even when the Department of Mental Health has gone behind bars to review conditions, it has been difficult to monitor some practices in the Department of Corrections (solitary confinement, for example).

In notes from a February 28 meeting of the Massachusetts Justice Network (MJN), a group that works on policy changes for incarcerated women, there was discussion of the bill. Suggestions were made that any searches of women should be based on new recommendations for the Bangkok Rules, the new UN global standards for justice-involved women. The Bangkok Rules put it this way: “Given the risk of abuse during pat-down searches and even more so during strip or invasive body searches, they must be carried out by female staff. Alternative screening methods should be developed.”

In other words, international standards say that we should end invasive searches. Period. Never mind videotaping them. About strip searches, MJN asked: “Why not use scanners and end demeaning (and trauma-inducing) body cavity searches.” Kay Khan said she was also receptive to this idea.

The protection of women prisoners is important. When shackling was ended in Massachusetts, it took many organizations coming together to raise their voices as to why shackling should not occur when pregnant women were giving birth behind bars. Now, Massachusetts has the opportunity to prohibit the videotaping of searches behind bars. In fact, it has the opportunity to raise questions about alternatives to invasive searches. Those organizations that got behind the inhumanity of shackling women need to speak out and help create a bill that has legs, and ultimately a law that protects the incarcerated from potentially abusive treatment.

“Massachusetts is one of the first states to consider parole for juveniles previously sentenced to life. A primer on what actually happens at these hearings, told through the lens of one juvenile lifer who was granted parole.” See my new post and more at