Category Archives: Prison & the justice system

Lawyers in Criminal Courts are Necessities, Not Luxuries

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by Guest Blogger BitcoDavid  


The title of this piece is actually a quote by Justice Hugo Black, as he wrote the majority opinion in the case of Gideon v. Wainwright, on March 18, 1963 – an opinion, and a fundamental right, seen as so important to that Supreme Court, that they were unanimous in their decision.

Clarence Earl Gideon was brought up on charges in Florida, for breaking and entering. He could not afford an attorney. At the arraignment, he asked for a Public Defender, but was refused. Instead, he was told that the court was only mandated to provide counsel in capital cases. Gideon ended up serving 5 years.

     Gideon – by himself and from prison – appealed, pleading his case on Florida State Prison letterhead – in pencil – and utilizing law books from the prison library. As defendant in his suit, he named the Secretary to the Florida Department of Corrections, H.G. Cochran. By the time the case was heard, Louie L. Wainwright had replaced Cochran. Gideon successfully argued that his 6th and 14th amendment rights had been violated. His attorney, assigned him by the SCOTUS, would be none other than future Supreme Court Justice – Abe Fortas.

Upon receipt of this ruling, a new trial was held, and in it, Gideon was given an attorney. He was acquitted in his second trial. Had he had competent legal council in his first trial, he may never have had to serve time at all.

But, a lot has changed since 1963.

Where the necessary evil that is prison, existed once to serve society – and the justice system was built around an effort to keep innocents out of incarceration – we now have a prison industry that views the public as grist for its mill – fodder for its filthy lucre. States weigh the costs of providing justice against the profits of warehousing human beings.

Several paradigms have shifted since Gideon. We now have a War on Drugs complete with mandatory sentencing, gang activity, multinational military incursion and a gun lobby that relishes arming both sides in the conflict. We have the largest narcotics consumption rate in the entire world, and at the same time we fund and arm nothing short of military juntas to enforce drug laws.

We now have a war on poverty – not LBJ’s idyllic Great Society – but rather, a war on the poor, themselves. Taxpayers, suffering under the yoke of a broken economy can no longer justify paying for the needs of those less fortunate. It’s a tough row to hoe, for a politician during a close race, to ask for tax dollars to provide legal defense for criminals, especially indigent, drug addicted ones.

We now have a largely privatized prison system, which can only function when beds are full. These companies spend vast sums on lobbying legislators to pass more and more draconian laws, more and more mandatory sentences and more and more budget cuts in terms of legal defense and public civil liberties.

And, of course – as if we’re not fighting enough wars – there’s the good ol’ War on Terror. Nowadays, it doesn’t require flying jets into buildings to be labeled a terrorist. You can have a penchant for typing too much on your computer. You can try your hand at flash-mob type civil disobedience, or you can simply join a group of likeminded activists who want to rescue companion animals.

Our society has turned more punitive and more afraid, while at the same time our coffers are now bare. States are commonly seeking out ways to kneecap the Gideon ruling. In the end however, we lose. Deny America’s promise of justice to one, you deny justice to all.

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BitcoDavid is a blogger and a blog site consultant. In former lives, he was an audio engineer, a videographer, a teacher – even a cab driver. He is an avid health and fitness enthusiast and a Pro/Am boxer. He has spent years working with diet and exercise to combat obesity and obesity related illness. He can currently be found, pounding away on the keyboard at DeafInPrison.com and BitcoDavid’s BoxingBlog.

Deaf Prisoners – They’re Not Deaf and Dumb

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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:

  • According to Twersky, deaf prisoners are deafer than their counterparts in the free world. This might not make sense to you but Twersky explains this with the coupling of emotional issues that arise from incarceration.
  • Marsha Graham, an attorney who works with the deaf, said that one of the biggest problems all through the system from courts to prisons is the lack of deaf interpreters. There are only 8 certified in Massachusetts. She mentioned an example of a deaf woman being battered and police came but tased her because she was screaming so loud. She spent 4 days in a cell without an interpreter.
  • Many deaf prisoners cannot participant in their own trials
  • Many have no access to TTY equipment to make phone calls home to loved ones when they’re behind bars.
  • Medical care while dismal for everyone in prison, is especially dismal for hearing impaired prisoners who cannot communicate well with doctors and have no interpreters behind bars.
  • Police are not trained to deal with deaf people when they make arrests.  Imagine an officer approaching you from behind and you cannot hear, just for an example.
  • In England a law was passed insisting that those arrested who were deaf be given an interpreter and 70% of police officers were unaware of the guidelines.
  • Imagine being deaf in solitary confinement.

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.

Prisons Call it Ad.Seg but Prisoners Call it Torture

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                                                              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: