NEWS: New York Activists Launch Fast Against Solitary Confinement in Solidarity with California Prison Hunger Strikers

July 13, 2013 by

Press Release from the Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement and Jails Action Coalition.

photo fiveNEW YORK, July 13 — Dozens of activists in New York have pledged to fast to express their solidarity with the thousands who are on hunger strike at Pelican Bay and other California prisons. The “rolling fast,” in which each person fasts for one day, began on July 8, on the same day as the California hunger strike, and organizers say it will go on as long as the prison hunger strike continues.

Those who have pledged to fast include survivors of solitary confinement, family members of people held in solitary, advocates, lawyers, mental health practitioners, clergy, and concerned community members. They belong to two local campaigns that oppose the widespread use of solitary confinement in New York’s prison and jails: the Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement (CAIC) and the New York City Jails Action Coalition (JAC).

“It is important for those of us in New York organizing around solitary confinement in our jails and prisons to support all people who are fighting to end torture in prison,” said Jennifer Parish of New York City’s Urban Justice Center. “I choose to fast because it is a way to say to people who are locked away in horrific conditions that I stand with them. It is a small way to take on some of their suffering…On the day I fast, I hope the pangs of hunger will connect me to the desperation of these other human beings who are driven to deprive themselves of food day after day.”

Five Mualimm’ak, a member of CAIC and JAC who fasted earlier this week, endured three years in solitary confinement in a New York State prison. “While you were in ‘the box,’ it would take a whole tier screaming together to gain attention if you needed help or were injured in your cell,” Mualimm’ak said. “This only proves that we have to stand united to make change…As activists, it is our duty to make a stand with those who are screaming for help.”

By fasting, the New Yorkers are affirming their support for the five core demands of the California hunger strikers, which include an end to group punishment, reform of the current process by which individuals are deemed prison gang members and sent into indefinite isolation, an end to long-term solitary confinement, adequate and nutritious food, and constructive programming.

More than 3,000 people are held in solitary in the Security Housing Units (SHUs) at Pelican Bay, Corcoran, and Tehachapi State Prisons, with thousands more in long-term isolation in the state’s Administrative Segregation Units. They spend 22 to 24 hours a day in small, windowless concrete cells–and some remain there for decades. As of 2011, California held over 500 in the SHU for over five years, and 78 for more than 20 years.

“These are the same kinds of conditions we are trying to change in New York,” said Donna Currao, who has a family member in solitary confinement in a New York prison. “I’m fasting to raise awareness for all our loved ones near or far. We are in this together. We may be thousands of miles apart but we all are fighting for fair and humane treatment.”

In New York State prisons, more than 4,000 men, women, and children are in some form of isolated confinement, while New York City’s jails hold an additional 1,000 in solitary. At least 80 percent of SHU sentences in New York are handed down for nonviolent misbehavior. New York’s prisons and jails, like California’s, isolate individuals at rates well above the national average. These facts gave rise, in the last two years, to the two campaigns dedicated to abolishing long-term solitary, CAIC and JAC.

Pastor James Giles of the Back To Basics Outreach Ministries in Buffalo, one of several clergy joining in the fast, agrees: “Fasting is about placing my needs under subjection to my mind,” said Pastor Giles. “It is a way to prepare one’s body for suffering. To do this corporately suggests that we are willing to share in each other’s suffering, to reflect our solidarity. Standing together, sharing the same affliction for the greater cause.”

Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, of the rabbinic human rights group T’ruah, said of the California hunger strikers, “As their fellow human beings, and as citizens of a country founded on a promise of justice, we fast because we are appalled that solitary confinement endures…We fast in solidarity with them today to cry out against the injustice of solitary confinement.”

To sign up for the fast, go to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhYWC9ByjceTdFVuZ3Z1QVFCd3BqbjZXSDZaRm1WWFE&usp=sharing#gid=0

For more information about the fast, contact Megan Crowe-Rothstein at megan@urbanjustice.org or Five Mualimm-ak at endthenewjimcrow@gmail.com. For more information about the New York campaigns involved, visit http://nycaic.org/ and http://www.nycjac.org/. For more information about the California prison hunger strike, visit http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/.

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VOICES: The Loneliest Place in the World

June 4, 2013 by

By Shawn Smith. Reprinted from Solitary Watch.

elmira2The following essay is by Shawn Smith, who is serving time for drug sales and assault in New York. He is one of some 4,500 individuals currently being held in isolated confinement in the state’s prison system. In a letter to Solitary Watch, he writes “I’m so lonely that I dream of human contact with the outside world…and I was hoping that you could find it in your heart to embrace me as a friend and help me get my essay up on your website. So that people can become aware of the levels of injustices and sorrow that has been bestowed upon me involving my solitary confinement experience…I feel so hopeless that I’ve spilled out my heart into this essay and I’m sending it to you in hopes that some change can come to me from it.”  Shawn Smith’s mailing address is #07A1605, Elmira Correctional Facility, P.O. Box 500, Elmira, New York 14901-0500. –James Ridgeway

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Four walls! A ceiling! And a floor eight by ten feet in dimension! In my eyes, this is the worst torture device in the history of the universe! Within this small enclave many men have fallen apart and broken down mentally into a deep stage of sorrow. That has made us (myself included) drop to our knees with lakes of tears under our eyes that cascade down our face. As we ask God “Why me? Why must I suffer this unbearable pain and burden?”

This place has made me feel so hopeless that I’ve dosed on pills two times and was rushed to the hospital where they pumped my stomach clean of the many painkillers and anti-depression pills that I digested in hopes of going to a better place! I’ve hung up with a self-made noose and sliced my wrist, because this place has driven me to the brink of insanity and I felt like I would rather be dead than live like a dog in a cage at the unwanted animal shelter.

In this place, I’ve lost and found my sanity time and time again. What really shook me up and made me find the inner strength to fight for the willpower to want to live my life and fight to survive in this place was when I saw the COs carry a friend I made in the brother in the cell next-door to me away in a black bag!

[Read more…]

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NEWS: Solitary Confinement Is Just Criminal

May 20, 2013 by

By Karen Murtagh. Reprinted from the Albany Times-Union.

elmiraThe Times  Union recently published an opinion piece by the president of the prison  guards’ union responding to a published profile of Jeffrey  Rockefeller. Due to a near lifetime of serious mental illness, Rockefeller  landed in prison and spent half of his 40-month incarceration in solitary  confinement — where he ultimately tried to commit suicide.

Contrary to the assertion that solitary confinement (aka “special housing  units”) is used to isolate inmates who are a danger to others and themselves,  less than 16 percent of the 4,500 people in solitary in 2012 were there for  violent behavior.

Brian  Fischer, the recently retired corrections commissioner, has admitted that  “solitary confinement is overused.” The significant reduction or near  elimination of the use of solitary by Mississippi, Colorado, Illinois, Maine,  Ohio and Washington, without any impact on prison safety, belies the statement  that “SHUs are the only mechanism for removing dangerous inmates from the  general population.”

The disconnect here is the failure to differentiate between isolation and  separation. Certain individuals need short-term isolation for their own safety  or the safety of others, but the rationale for such isolation is to prevent  imminent harm, not to impose months, years, or decades of retribution and  mental deterioration.

At least one study has shown that the recidivism rate for those who have been  subjected to solitary confinement is 23 percent higher than those who have not.  More than 95 percent of incarcerated New Yorkers are ultimately released to our  communities. We are all safer when formerly incarcerated individuals lead  productive lives. Spending time in solitary confinement lessens the likelihood  that an individual will be psychologically prepared to do this.

Karen  L. Murtagh is executive director of Prisoners’ Legal  Services of New York.

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VOICES: You Are Solitary Confinement

April 29, 2013 by

By Nicholas Zimmerman.

The following narrative and poem are by Nicholas Zimmerman, who is currently incarcerated at Attica. He has spent, in total, a decade in solitary confinement. The website maintained by his loved ones is  www.FREENicholasZimmerman.com. Thanks to CAIC member Desiray Smith for sharing his story.

You are the most profound form of Cruel and Unusual Punishment Know to mankind, yet the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution seems to have no effect on you?

You are only 6 feet by 8 feet in size, but your impact is devastating and long lasting.

You are a silent killer, slipping in and out of prison cells late at night to claim your next victim.

You are the Department of Corrections’ most effective weapon in inflicting mental and physical torture upon its captives.

Your existence is undeniable; you’ve been around for hundreds of years.

Numerous experts have complained about you for decades to no avail.

You are the cause of my depression, my high blood pressure, my anxiety, my sleepless nights, and my restless days.

I’ve watched you kill people with out laying a hand on them.

I’ve watched people hang themselves from your support beams within minutes of being in your clutches.

I’ve seen people slice and dice themselves with hopes of escaping your misery.

And I’ve also watched the Correctional Officers and Mental Health staff enjoy every minute of it.

You’re a Bitch in my eyes; not man enough to show your face and fight me one on one, but coward enough to attack me while I’m sleeping and inject fatal thoughts of suicide into my dreams.

Through lawsuits, maintenance, funding and security, you cause the taxpayers billions of dollars per year to stay afloat, yet they know very little about you and how unnecessary and counterproductive you really are.

Lately, you have been under fire by the media, however. But will this end your reign of terror? Only time will tell.

I’ve been battling you for the past 10 years and everyday I look at you and grin knowing that you are on your last leg. Your defeat is imminent, but your history will be legendary. Tomorrow you might be a thing of the past, but today at this very minute, as I write these words, you are torturing another soul and plotting your next murder.

And you legally get away with all of this simply because of who you are!

You are…

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT!

[Read more…]

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NEWS: No Peace Outside “The Box” for People with Mental Illness in New York’s Prisons

April 25, 2013 by

By Paul Grondahl. Excerpted from the Albany Times-Union.

atuJeff  Rockefeller never got past the eighth grade growing up in Troy. He spent his  20s in the Capital  District Psychiatric Center and has struggled with severe depression and  suicidal thoughts.

“He’s never had a day of peace in his life,” his mother said.

Now 44 years old and released from state prison five months ago, Rockefeller  spent nearly 20 months, half his 40-month incarceration, in solitary  confinement. Even as a free man, he still struggles with sleeplessness,  nightmares and crying fits. “I was locked up in a cage like an animal,” he said.  “It’s torture.”

“He’s different since he got out,” said his girlfriend, Mary, a 66-year-old  retired state worker who asked to be identified only by her first name. “He  can’t sleep. He’s jumpy. He’s having a hard time easing back into his former  life. Nobody should be treated the way he was.”

She recalled his anguished letters from prison, writing that he couldn’t take  it anymore and wanted to end his life. In phone calls from prison, he broke down  in sobs.

Rockefeller’s psychiatric problems — which helped land him in “The  Box” and worsened during his long months in 23-hour-a-day disciplinary  isolation — symbolize a form of punitive incarceration that prisoner advocates  call inhuman. Correction officials defend it as an effective method to control  unruly inmates.

Prison watchdog groups said Rockefeller’s prison experience is a sad but not  uncommon saga. On any given day, about 4,500 inmates are in solitary confinement  in New York’s prisons, according to the state Department  of Corrections and Community Services. There are currently 8,197 mentally  ill inmates out of a total prison population of 54,643. Three of the 14  prisoners who committed suicide in 2012 were in solitary confinement, according  to DOCCS records.

Prison suicides between 2001 and 2010 rose 186 percent to the highest level  in 28 years, according to the Correctional  Association of New York State, a watchdog group.

Prisoners in solitary are confined to cells 6 feet by 8 feet, with almost no  human contact. One hour per day, in newer prisons, a caged balcony is unlocked  remotely so inmates can breathe fresh air. Lights and shower are controlled  remotely. Meals are pushed through a slot in a reinforced cell door. Inmates  experience intense sensory deprivation in these so-called Special Housing Units,  or SHUs…

Read the full article for quotations from Jack Beck and Jennifer Parish and references to CAIC!

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NEWS: New York Groups Unite in Call for Alternatives to Solitary Confinement in Prisons and Jails

March 19, 2013 by

The following press release served as the official announcement of the formation of CAIC. Click here for a copy of the press release to print and email: NYCAIC Press Release 3-12-13 pdf

NEW YORK — Dozens of organizations joined together today to challenge the torturous abuse of solitary confinement in prisons and jails across New York, urging Governor Andrew Cuomo, the New York legislature, and state and city corrections officials to “Think Outside the Box.” The Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement (CAIC) is a state-wide campaign of organizations and concerned community members, including formerly incarcerated persons and family members of loved ones in isolated confinement. CAIC is engaged in public education and community outreach in order to organize support for an end to solitary confinement.

CAIC was formed in response to New York’s practice of using isolated confinement far too broadly, routinely, and for far too long a period of time. In fact, New York holds people in isolated confinement at rates significantly above the national average. On any given day, there are nearly 4,500 people, disproportionately people of color, in New York State prisons who are in special housing units (SHU) and thousands more subjected to keeplock, two forms of isolated confinement. There are also around 1,000 people in New York City jails in isolation.

All of these individuals are confined in a cell for 22 to 24 hours a day without meaningful human contact, programming, or therapy. People are often subjected to these conditions for months, years, and decades at a time. Whether called the Box, the Bing, the SHU, solitary, or isolation, such inhumane conditions often cause deep and permanent psychological, physical, and social harm both for persons who are mentally stable and for people with pre-existing mental health needs or disabilities.

[Read more…]

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VOICES: A Sentence Worse Than Death

March 11, 2013 by

By William Blake. Reprinted from Solitary Watch.

elmiraThe following essay is by William Blake, who has been held in solitary confinement in the New York State prison system for close to 26 years. Currently he is in administrative segregation at Elmira Correctional Facility, a maximum security facility located in south central New York State. In 1987, Blake, then 23 and in county court on a drug charge, murdered one deputy and wounded another in a failed escape attempt. Sentenced to 77 years to life, Blake has no chance of ever leaving prison alive, and almost no chance of ever leaving solitary—-a fate he considers  “a sentence worse than death.”

This powerful essay earned Blake an Honorable Mention in the Yale Law Journal’s Prison Law Writing Contest. Chosen from more than 1,500 entries, it will be published in the Journal this spring. He describes here in painstaking detail his excruciating experiences over the last quarter-century. “I’ve read of the studies done regarding the effects of long-term isolation in solitary confinement on inmates, seen how researchers say it can ruin a man’s mind, and I’ve watched with my own eyes the slow descent of sane men into madness—sometimes not so slow,” Blake writes. “What I’ve never seen the experts write about, though, is what year after year of abject isolation can do to that immaterial part in our middle where hopes survive or die and the spirit resides.” That is what Blake himself seeks to convey in his essay. —Lisa Dawson

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

“You deserve an eternity in hell,” Onondaga County Supreme Court judge Kevin Mulroy told me from his bench as I stood before him for sentencing on July 10, 1987. Apparently he had the idea that God was not the only one justified to make such judgment calls.

Judge Mulroy wanted to “pump six buck’s worth of electricity into [my] body,” he also said, though I suggest that it wouldn’t have taken six cent’s worth to get me good and dead. He must have wanted to reduce me and The Chair to a pile of ashes. My “friend” Governor Mario Cuomo wouldn’t allow him to do that, though, the judge went on, bemoaning New York State’s lack of a death statute due to the then-Governor’s repeated vetoes of death penalty bills that had been approved by the state legislature. Governor Cuomo’s publicly expressed dudgeon over being called a friend of mine by Judge Mulroy was understandable, given the crimes that I had just been convicted of committing. I didn’t care much for him either, truth be told. He built too many new prisons in my opinion, and cut academic and vocational programs in the prisons already standing.

[Read more…]

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NEWS: NYCLU Seeks Class-Action Status in Challenge to Use of Solitary Confinement in NY Prisons

March 11, 2013 by

Press release. Reprinted from the New York Civil Liberties Union site.

Tonja Fenton and family

Tonja Fenton and family

March 6, 2013 — In a court filing today, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the law firm of Morrison & Foerster took steps to obtain class-action status in a federal lawsuit challenging New York prison officials’ policies and practices that result in the arbitrary, inhumane and unconstitutional use of solitary confinement in state prisons.

The filing is an amended class-action complaint in Peoples v. Fischer, a lawsuit the NYCLU filed on behalf of Leroy Peoples, who spent 780 days confined in extreme isolation as punishment for non-violent misbehavior that involved no threat to the safety or security of others. Today’s filing seeks to extend the scope of the lawsuit to include all individuals incarcerated in state prisons similarly affected by Department of Corrections and Community Supervision policies and practices permitting the arbitrary and unnecessary use of solitary confinement.

“Solitary confinement and extreme isolation are uniquely cruel and debilitating punishments that are being routinely imposed on people for a range of non-violent disciplinary infractions,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said. “Prison officials’ arbitrary and inhumane use of extreme isolation for such extraordinarily long amounts of time inflicts excruciating suffering on thousands of individuals each year and makes our prisons and communities less safe. If they refuse to end this practice, we are confident that the courts will require them to do so.”

[Read more…]

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NEWS: New York State Corrections Commissioner Announces Retirement

March 6, 2013 by

fischer07bioThe Albany-based Capitol Confidential reported yesterday that Brian Fischer, commissioner of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, will retire at the end of next month. The report continues:

A Brooklyn native who has worked as a parole officer and ran Sing Sing prison, Fischer has held cabinet posts since his 2007 appointment by Eliot Spitzer. He supervised the merger of the Department of Correctional Services with the Division of Parole in 2011.

“Over the years I have seen many changes, including the ironic fact that when I came to the Department the Division of Parole was part of the agency, then it wasn’t, and now it is,” Fischer wrote in a memorandum to staff that was distributed Monday. “Together we have accomplished much, and I know that good things will continue to develop.”

No immediate word from Cuomo aides on who might be named to succeed Fischer.

Brian Fischer’s tenure as commissioner has seen a rising resistance to the widespread use of isolated confinement in New York’s state prisons. According to an article that ran last year in The Nation: “At a forum in January held by the New York State Bar Association…Fischer insisted that some segregation was necessary, but ‘I’ll be the first to admit—we overuse it.’ Even modest reductions, he said, would require that they ‘change the culture’ of corrections, including the stance of the correctional officers union. And, he added, ‘we can’t make changes without funding, without the legislature and the public.’”

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VOICES: Disciplined Into Madness and Death

February 20, 2013 by

By Sara Rodrigues. Reprinted from Solitary Watch.

bedford hillsThe following essay comes from Sara Rodrigues, formerly a prisoner at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison for women in Westchester, New York, and now further upstate at Albion. When Sara was sent to prison at the age of 16, she found her friend D there as well. Both Sara and D had life-long struggles with mental health, and while in prison, spent long periods of time in solitary confinement (both Keeplock, which is lockdown in one’s own cell, and SHU, which is the Special Housing Unit).

Sara writes about the difficulty D faced when she was finally released and put on parole, with no transitional assistance to move from prison to the free world. She ultimately ended up back in prison and committed suicide, shortly after giving birth to a baby girl. Sara Rodrigues wrote this piece in the hope of spreading awareness of her situation and the experience of many people around her. She writes, “Too many inmates in New York State under the age of 25 are killing themselves in prisons because they are literally being thrown away like garbage by the court systems.”

Thanks to Jennifer Parish of the Urban Justice Center for forwarding this essay to Solitary Watch. — Rachel M. Cohen, Solitary Watch

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

This essay is dedicated to D and all those who have given their minds and/or lives trying to pay their debt to society and to those who will forever be haunted and scarred from our justice system. Once self-worth and hope dies within our souls, what is left behind is a shell of life that can see no future, no redemption and no chance for a normal life. It is then that our minds realize how truly unwanted we are and how on a daily basis we are reminded that society has no use for us. Day by day life becomes very dark, some lose their minds, some will never be the same, and some just give in and take their own lives.

[Read more…]

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