Torture Is Alive and Well in America's Prisons

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News

26 July 16

 

ast month, I wrote about the terrible conditions mentally ill inmates face in prisons and jails across America, compounded by cruel and oppressive conditions in so-called suicide watch cells (Department of Retribution: Torturing the Mentally Ill). I relayed the experiences of an inmate at the Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, Virginia.

That same inmate, I have learned, recently broke a jail record for time spent in protective, segregated confinement over his 16 months at the jail.

At Pamunkey, inmates in protective custody are kept in a lockdown state in solitary cells 23 hours per day. They have one hour to shower, make phone calls, and if they’re allowed, exercise in the prison yard.

(Exercise is allowed at the whim of whatever guard happens to be on duty. The yard at Pamunkey, however, is slated to be enclosed. Asked how prisoners could get fresh air and sunshine, the jail’s security director said that they should “look out the window.”)

This inmate, who is a childhood friend of a friend, was in protective custody not because he was in danger or because he was a danger to himself or others, but because he slept with a CPAP machine to help with his breathing. This required an electrical outlet. He offered to give it up to go into the general population, but the jail said this would compromise his health, another reason used to put prisoners in protective, solitary custody.

His neighbors were there for protective reasons and included a former police officer, transgendered people, and people with serious mental health issues who are considered dangerous to others.

Interestingly, the jail doesn’t automatically place sex offenders in solitary/protective custody, and a number of them move freely without incident in gen-pop.

The inmate sent my friend a map and description of the cell he resided in. He estimated (based on his height) that it was about 10 feet by 5 feet. It included a window through which he could be observed by jail staff, and opposite it, a metal door. A one-inch thick mattress rested on a concrete slab. There was a cubby beneath the bed to store clothing. A metal sink and toilet were just to the left of the door and opposite the window.

While the window meant that the prisoner could be observed while using the toilet, it also allowed him to view the TV in the jail dayroom. Sometimes, other prisoners would wander over to talk to him.

The inmate, who suffered for several months with an anal fissure that became a fistula, had a doctor’s order for a second mattress to provide additional padding. It was provided only after a year-long wait.

In the meantime, the prisoner had two surgeries; the second was needed to repair damage caused by the prison's lack of medication, and support normally should be provided after this kind of surgery.

Oh, and in case you wondered: the patient wasn’t permitted to have prescribed painkiller drugs in the days following both surgeries. The pain from the fistula and the area around it after it’s been excised has been likened to “sitting on a sharp knife.”

And although the prisoner was in protective custody, he was transferred for court appearances in a prison van, chained to other inmates. All inmates in protective custody are supposed to be transferred alone. The van had no seatbelts prior to Freddie Gray’s death in a Baltimore police van, and we saw what happened there. Once at the courthouse, he was also kept in holding cells with other prisoners.

The prisoner is now at Virginia’s prisoner processing facility in State Farm, where he is part of the general population. At this time he is in a two-man cell he describes as the size of a bathroom in a pre-McMansion home. Possibly because of the CPAP, he has no cellmate.

While the conditions at State Farm make Pamunkey “look like a Hilton,” (among other things, it has no air conditioning and temperatures in the summer approach the 100s) he appreciates the company of other people during meals and time in the prison yard.

As for his medications: all prisoners are taken off their medications upon arrival at State Farm and evaluated. He has been told he will be put on another antidepressant that didn’t work for him in the past.

More worrying is that he experienced two seizures, at least one a grand mal, during the first week he was taken off anti-seizure medication. My friend has alerted his attorney about this latest development.

To tell you the truth, this is not one of the worst stories that I've heard from solitary. Indeed, one of my cellmates at the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania, had his own nightmare there. And FCI Loretto is federal, which is supposed to be far, far better than any state prison or local jail.

The cellmate, whom I’ll call “James,” was a mentally ill homeless man from Pittsburgh. He’d purposefully violated the terms of his federal probation so he could spend the winter months indoors.

James was clear with both the medical staff and his cellmates that he was mentally ill and needed to be medicated. We appreciated his candor.

But the medical staff’s primary mission is to keep costs low, and drugs for serious mental illness are expensive. Since James was supposed to go home in a few months anyway, they didn’t give him his meds. You can guess what happened: James began to spiral into insanity, and he was sent to solitary confinement.

James’s struggles angered the staff. After one incident in solitary, he was stripped naked, beaten, and thrown outside. It was January, and the temperature in the central Pennsylvania mountains was 10 degrees. An eyewitness told me that James apologized and asked to be let back in. He started crying after a couple of hours in the cold. Then he curled up into a ball and fainted.

No guards were punished for what they did to James. Even if he’d reported it to the federal Bureau of Prisons headquarters, who would have listened to him? Would you believe a uniformed law enforcement officer or a mentally ill homeless man?

The guards got away with it. Across the country, prison guards get away with things like this every day.

The only solution is legislative – at both the federal and state levels. While Congress has made the right noises about reform, Congressional leaders have not allowed these reform measures to come up for a vote. Similarly, some states, like Ohio and Nebraska, have made progress by outlawing solitary for minors. But when a state like Louisiana allows individuals to be kept in solitary for more than 40 years, there is still an obvious human rights problem. The rest is up to voters. We have to demand that our candidates for statewide and national office support sentencing and corrections reform. Until then, our solitary confinement systems will remain an international embarrassment and a crime against humanity.

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John Kiriakou is an Associate Fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. He is a former CIA counterterrorism operations officer and former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.