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"It’s been seven months since the Massachusetts Drug Lab scandal broke. Why are we still in the dark about the mess that will potentially cost Massachusetts $100 million?"
Although I worked in prison for ten years, I have a confession. Never once did it cross my mind that anyone behind bars might be deaf. Not once did I imagine being hearing impaired and having doors close behind me without the familiar clang or living with the fear of what was happening when announcements came over a loud speaker and I couldn't hear them. I didn't give a thought to facing the inability to call home on a simple phone or experiencing the shock when guards came rushing by me in their hazmat suits to try and stop someone from committing suicide.
No, being deaf and being behind bars were never coupled in my imagination.
So when I heard that Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts was hosting a conference, I jumped on it. Set up by Dr. Aviva Twersky Glasner who teaches criminal justice and has done extensive research in the field of deaf adults in prisons, a nationally known expert, Dr. Brendan Monteiro was the featured speaker and there were a host of others who chimed in about this subject that seemed fairly mysterious before the day began.
But while there are some articles I found about well-known cases (Mother Jones and deafinprison, an important blog on the subject) there 's not much research out there. And worse for prisoners, there is a real deficit in the understanding that those behind bars have about how to work with the deaf. Here are a few surprising facts I learned:
James Ridgeway has written most eloquently about the plight of deaf prisoners. He says, in Mother Jones, "But according to two researchers, as many as one-third of the entire U.S. prison population of 1.7 million have difficulty hearing—with some of them being profoundly deaf… Almost two-thirds of deaf prisoners, according to some studies, are in jail for violent and often sexual offenses committed against children. (The deaf are themselves at increased risk for abuse as children, the researchers point out.)… Prisoners who are illiterate as well as deaf are especially deprived when they find themselves in the criminal justice system. They seldom have been educated beyond second grade and, as a consequence, have trouble reading and writing. Because they are deaf and without competent interpreters, they can’t go to AA meetings or drug counseling or make it through educational programs."
I think of my cousin who lost much of his hearing as a child and I try to imagine him behind bars. I can only see blonde hair and a wispy face. The taunting alone makes me cringe never mind what it would have done to him. He never needed to learn to sign but I wonder now if that was the right decision, forcing him into the world of the hearing. Normalizing him. Would he have felt more at home if he could have been one of the people I saw today, filling the room at lunch where over 70 people were signing to each other, smiling and sharing something they knew to be true while the other thirty of us watched, fascinated and a little sorry we had never learned their language.
I know I won't go into a prison again without asking officials if they have anyone on staff who is trained to work with the deaf.
Check out "Whatever Sal DiMasi Deserves, He Doesn’t Deserve This" on Sal DiMasi's medical mistreatment in prison shines light on why medical release is crucial for Massachusetts. And they say "liberal" Massachusetts? Our prison policies belie that moniker.
photo Cage Within a Cage
This past February 25th, a panel of experts on solitary confinement converged at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss the horrendous practice in our U.S. prisons that many call “cruel and unusual punishment.” While the panel detailed the disastrous effects such isolation causes, the legal challenges through the years and the “judicial and institutional apathy” towards our 80,000 people in solitary confinement nationwide – as of 2012, 8100 of those in Texas alone— what was most intriguing to me was the response to the panel by the real experts—prisoners.
You can read their words at beweenthebars.org, which describes itself as “a weblog platform for people in prison, through which the 1% of Americans who are in prison can tell their stories.” Prisoners from across the country have created over 5,000 documents for Between The Bars (BTB) since the site began in 2008. Before the panel was held, Massachusetts Institute of Technology whiz kid Charlie deTar and team members Carl McLaren and Benjamin Sugar, all who maintain the site, put out a call to hundreds of prisoners telling them about the conference. While I’ve written about Between the Bars before (See Behind Bars and Blogging for Human Rights and Boston Daily) this time, I was intrigued that prisoners were asked to share their experience with solitary confinement through their blogs. Documents were posted online where anyone could post a response. The responses were then mailed to the prisoners who had a chance to reply The circle: prisoners’ thoughts get voice; they have access to the online world; they become part of the conversation.
Texas prisoner, Guy S. Alexander, described in his blog his recent stay at the Allen B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston before his sentence of death was overturned in May, 2012. Polunsky, he wrote, took away “more of your dignity than anything… mental and long-term isolation of human contact… We had no television, or group recs, no contact visits …a small narrow window at the top back of the cells… they made a day feel horrible… the so called paranoid rules.” Alexander, who was in solitary at Polunsky for twelve years, is now in the Harris County Jail, close to his home, Houston. But he is still “in a cell 24 hours a day and it's bad, they don't even have air here… no circulation vents… I do have a TV and it helps, but a person needs input, friends to write and see and talk to.” On his profile page, Alexander wrote “I’m locked up but my soul and heart aren’t. I’m lonely and alone… an open book, not a monster.”
Jeremy Pinson, who made substantial threats against the government, is housed in a Colorado federal prison in solitary confinement in spite of the fact that he was diagnosed as mentally ill—which he writes about in his over 77 blogs. Sadly, this is not uncommon. A 2003 report from Human Rights Watch found that one-third to one-half of prisoners held in solitary units suffered from mental illness — that's tens of thousands of prisoners, says Solitary Watch, a teriffic website that covers all things solitary confinement.
Obviously bright, obviously tormented, Pinson wrote: “For 943 days I have eaten meals alone. For 943 days I have watched men's minds break down in a painfully slow process. First they become eccentric. Then they become antisocial and belligerent. Next comes anger and they lash out at their captors only to be pepper sprayed and beaten into submission. Next comes despair as they realize that they are utterly helpless. For many the next step involves a noose, a bottle of pills, or a razor blade. For a few their misery ends in death. For 943 days I have wanted to and even tried to die…How many shattered minds, bodies and souls will it take before this practice, this cruelty, this barbaric evil is ended?”
About solitary-confinement, Pinson wrote a series of questions for the panel which included: Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist who has extensively researched the psychological effects of solitary confinement; Professor Jules Lobel, the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Mikail DeVeaux, himself a former prisoner who experienced solitary and now, Executive Director and Founder of Citizens Against Recidivism, an NYC advocacy group; and Bobby Dellelo, an activist working for the American Friends Service Committee who spent five years in solitary or what he calls the “monster factory” at Walpole Prison in Massachusetts.
Hopefully, Pinson will receive responses to questions such as “Why do civil rights groups allow mentally ill inmates to be kept in solitary confinement?” and “How can individual inmates in solitary effectively challenge their abuse and that which they witness?”
L.Samuel Capers, a prisoner on Death Row in California’s San Quentin Prison, wrote of the smell of the ocean so close to their walls as “torture…We look at dirty tan brick walls, razor wire and guns all day. We breathe in frustration, we eat anger, we walk in despair.” He asked in his blog why so few people know what solitary can do to prisoners “especially when they are returned back to society without the proper psychological treatment.”
This past September, a Texas blog, Grits for Breakfast reported on the perils of reentry following solitary. The Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee was told that in 2011, 878 prisoners who'd been locked in Administrative Segregation (Ad Seg) “were released directly to the streets without parole supervision of any type after finishing out their full sentence.” Another “469 were paroled directly” from Ad Seg. This is also not uncommon. While parole has proven to be more successful than direct release to the streets, under the best of situations, it still is a recipe for disaster to send someone who has lived in solitary directly to the free world. Without time in lower security where he or she can do programs, prepare a home plan and try to get job leads, a person is almost bound to return to captivity.
At the panel, former prisoner, Bobby Delello said about his time in the infamous Department Disciplinary Unit: "There was no doubt I was crazy." Today, he told the audience, he suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and he questioned how we prepare (or don't prepare) prisoners to return to their communities.
A Wisconsin prisoner, La Ron McKinley-Bey, an artist on BTB who has his artwork posted online , theorized what many others have written about — that prison rehab is difficult when over 2.5 million people crowd our prisons. He wrote about people going to solitary as “those who couldn't adapt or conform to the structured demands of the prison environment,” and pointed out why we’ve confined so many to solitary: “Prison officials, having given up on the concept of rehabilitation, without resources or experience on how to effectively treat the mentally ill or the drug addicted, consigned many to languish in solitary confinement with the rest of the undesirables, and to add more chaos to that environment.”
While excellent websites like Solitary Watch take apart the destructive practices in prisons that these prisoners have lived through, it is the voices of those behind bars that give us the truest picture of a practice that we must work to change, the cage within the cage. Somehow, someday, I want solitary to be this:
You might want to check out this film if you're in the area, a film reviewed here by The New York Times: “The Central Park Five revisits two New York nightmares. The first and most famous was the rape and beating of a 28-year-old white woman who, very early on April 20, 1989, was found in Central Park bound, gagged, nearly naked and nearly dead, her head crushed and shirt soaked in her blood. For years she was known only as the Central Park jogger, and her assailants were widely thought to be the five black and Latino teenagers, 14 to 16, who were arrested in the attack. The directors Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns argue that the convictions, and the years the defendants served for the crime they were later absolved of, were a second, racially motivated crime."
I have to say I love Ken Burns but had a very mixed reaction to the book by Sarah Burns: The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding. For me, it was well researched but she didn't retell the story in a way that hold my interest. It's a tragic story, an infuriating story but the human face just didn't come through for me.
I am betting a discussion after the film with Burns, Ogletree and two of the actual accused will certainly put a face to the story. Check your local listings to see when this film might hit your area.