Dateline: 04/11/2011
PRISONER INVITED TO DELIVER SPEECH IN NEW YORK
No, the Department of Corrections isn’t likely to let me attend in person, even though I promised to return.
The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature will be held in New York City April 25 – May 1, 2011, featuring more than 100 writers from 40 countries meeting to celebrate the power of the writer’s voice as a bold and vital element of public discourse. If you’d like to read more about the festival events, visit www.pen.org/festival.
I accepted an invitation to deliver a keynote speech on Thursday, April 28, 2011, at 9:30 AM at the Desmond Tutu Center Refectory. I am the third speaker, right after the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Toni Morrison.
Acknowledging my prisoner status, the PEN Festival organizers are seeking approval from the Department of Corrections to set up an internet webcast so that I can deliver my speech live. Considering how paranoid the DOC is, I’m not holding my breath on that issue. My speech is written, and “Plan B” involves one of the international writers reading it on my behalf.
Whatever happens, it is a great honor, and I am humbled to be included in such an accomplished group. What is it about, you ask?
“In 1986, Norman Mailer PEN American Center’s then-president organized a legendary conference titled,
The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State. In it he asserted that not only did writers use their imaginations naturally and gracefully to speak to one another across national boundaries, but that governments, too, were capable of using their visions to improve the world’s troubles. To mark the 25th anniversary of this event, the PEN World Voices Festival will hold a Working Day to revisit similar questions while addressing urgent issues facing writer-intellectuals in 2011. This workshop will begin with panel discussion, including keynote addresses. It will be followed by five breakout sessions, each addressing topics related to how writers can respond to current predicaments and help find peaceful solutions. At the day’s end, the participants will release a joint manifesto, drafted by one and signed by all – the first of its kind in the festival history.” (From the PEN.org web site)
My area of expertise is prison, of course. Tuesday, April 5, 2011, marked my 33rd year of continuous imprisonment – 12,055 days. I am speaking on how prison has changed in the past 25 – 30 years. If you’d like to read my speech, I will post it after the festival.
Meanwhile, Libby and I are working hard on my updated parole release plan and “LIFE IN PRISON – A Photo Exhibit.” A parole examiner is scheduled to interview me here in June, and a full parole commission hearing will follow in Tallahassee 60 – 90 days later. Hopefully, my PEN literary festival participation will be looked at favorably.
Charlie
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
PRISON CHANGES REFLECT CHANGES IN OUR SOCIETY
Dateline: 03/10/2011
Someone once said that prison is a microcosm of society. In thirty-three years of life in prison, I’ve found that axiom to prove true.
Generations overlap in prison. When my incarceration began in the late 1970’s, I met men who’d been locked up since the 1940’s and ‘50’s. As “newcocks,” we younger prisoners listened raptly to the old timers’ stories of what prison life had once been and how it had changed since they came in decades before. Little did I know that over thirty years later I would be where they’d once been, telling newcocks how “real prison” had been “B.C.,” before crack cocaine.
One of the greatest differences between then and now is the educational and intelligence level of prisoners. I tell men who ask, “the quality of the prison inmate has gone downhill.” Don’t get me wrong! There were plenty of candidates for ‘America’s Dumbest Prisoners” in those days, but there was also a layer of intelligent, educated prisoners then that is absent now.
When I arrived at the Lake Butler Reception and Medical Center in North Florida after spending almost two years in Tampa’s Hillsborough County Jail dungeon, one of my first stops was the prison law library. I needed legal advice and didn’t trust the lawyer I believed betrayed me in court.
Everyone told me to go see Judge Joe Peel. I did. Judge Joe Peel ran the law library. His was a famous case from the 1950’s, the Chillingsworth Murders, in which Judge Peel supposedly paid Floyd Holzapel to murder Judge Chillingsworth and his wife. Floyd took them out into the Atlantic Ocean, wrapped them in chains, and threw them overboard. The case was famous not only because a judge contracted a murder on another judge, but also because it was the first time someone was convicted of murder without a corpus delicti, a dead body.
Besides the judge, a former prosecutor worked in the law library writing appeals for prisoners, along with another disbarred attorney and a couple of self-taught “jailhouse lawyers,” long-term prisoners who were just as legally talented as the law school graduates.
Judge Peel didn’t get me out, obviously, but in thirty minutes, he gave me more valuable advice than I’d received from my lawyer. Those men helped many prisoners with appeals, had convictions overturned, resulting in numerous people freed from prison.
That doesn’t happen any more. Lawyers and judges are still going to prison—one of my judges went to prison for bribery and corruption—but I haven’t seen any in years. One of the “status” jobs in prison is law clerk, and the Department of Corrections has a training program in which prisoners who meet the minimum educational requirements watch hours of video tapes, take a test, and become certified law clerks. Sadly, most of those prisoner law clerks are incompetent, and have trouble helping write a request form or a grievance. If you find one who actually has some legal ability, he is so bedeviled with pleas for help from mostly lost causes that he becomes burned out and gets a job change. Others who are too successful in pursuing court appeals and lawsuits often find themselves in lockup, transferred, facing trumped-up charges to dissuade them from being too helpful.
When I came to prison, Tom Brokaw’s remnants of “The Greatest Generation” and beyond still dominated the prisoner mentality. I met men who had fought the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II, the Chinese Communists and North Koreans in the Korean War, and the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War.
Those men were a different breed. They were serious. They were “stand-up,” and lived by the convict code. Mind your own business. Be a man. Don’t snitch. Don’t cross them! They might kill you. Many of these men were victims of the wars they fought in, plagued by alcoholism and PTSD, and had not adjusted well to life in a peaceful society, but they ran the prisons, maintained a semblance of order that the guards couldn’t.
Something I miss from those days are the intelligent conversations. There were some very smart, educated prisoners serving time then, and they tended to congregate together. Besides former college professors, I knew an actual NASA rocket scientist, an astronomer, a nuclear physicist, and a U.S. Marine Corps general. If you had a difficult question, someone could answer it. We had jet pilots, doctors and dentists. We had three chiropractors at Raiford who were constantly being called upon to crack backs and adjust necks. There were men with life experiences, successful businessmen, old-time bank robbers and safecrackers, jewel thieves, professional athletes, football and baseball players, a man who’d won two Super Bowl rings, who fell to the siren song of cocaine.
You don’t see those men in prison anymore. Perhaps they are in federal prison. Today 70% of Florida prisoners are functionally illiterate, a number I can attest. The Department of Corrections bragged recently that 2,500 prisoners were awarded G.E.D.’s in 2010, which sounds good, but when you realize there are over 103,000 people in Florida prisons, that comes out to less than 2.5%.
Prisoners have gotten younger and dumber. They are getting hooked on drugs at a younger age, become more desperate and violent, the juvenile system can’t hold them, and they graduate to “the Big House.” Mail call is very sparse nowadays. Only some of us get correspondence. Another prison axiom is you have to write letters to get letters, and if you can’t read and write, you won’t send or receive much mail. And those who do write can’t spell. Just yesterday a young man laboring over a letter home asked me, “How do you spell ‘o”?” “O?” I asked, confused, “What do you mean, ‘O’?” He explained that he was trying to tell his mother he was in debt, and needed her to send him money. “Oh!” I said, “You mean ‘owe!’ ” “That’s what I said.” “O – W- E.” “Thanks. How do you spell, ‘coffee?’ ”
Prison as a reflection and microcosm of society is also seen through our economy. In the Clinton nineties when the deficit was reined in and taxes filled state coffers, prisons went through a boom time of full funding. Real school teachers and vocational instructors taught full classes. College courses were available. Chapels had full staffs and outside religious groups coming in for services days and nights. Recreation departments offered organized sports leagues, hobbycraft and art programs that kept many prisoners occupied and out of mischief. Libraries were well-stocked and always open. The prison food was good, and they served adult portions. No one went hungry. I haven’t seen a pork chop, a fish with bones in it, or beef stew in fifteen years. Programs are virtually nonexistent now.
Then came September 11, 2001. Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda entered our vocabulary. The Twin Towers fell. We went to war. We are still at war. America will never be the same, and neither will the prison system.
We learned new words: Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Waterboarding. Rendition. I.E.D. It was only natural that the same labor pool that drew prison guards would be tapped to fill the increasing ranks of soldiers, sailors, and Marines. Guards joined the services and the Reserves were called up. Thousands took tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, and developed an “us and them” mentality. If you weren’t one of us, you were one of them, the enemy. When they came back to the States, they brought back new, harsher, angrier attitudes. They were no longer eating sand and worried about getting blown up walking through a village, but now they were entering cell blocks and looking at us as though we were their enemies, terrorists, and not fellow Americans, who, “there, but for the grace of God, go I.”
Now when the guards come in their squads for “routine shakedowns,” one would think they are looking for AK-47’s or roadside bombs. Ransack. Trash. Pull out the pepper spray, and use it. Lock up eighteen men because one made a wisecrack. Pepper spray them, ship them. Disrupt their lives and that of their families. That didn’t happen twenty years ago. Now it happens all the time. One old man who has served time off and on since 1964 addressed the issue of the new, harder, meaner prison guard. “The only difference between these guards today and the Nazi SS is these haven’t been ordered to gas us yet.” “Do you think they would do that?” I asked. “In a minute,” he said. I shudder to think that could be true.
The housing mortgage collapse—AIG—bank failures—mass bankruptcies—the recession (don’t say Depression) —Bernie Madoff. Don’t tell anyone, but if Bin Laden’s goal was to bring down America, he’s come close to succeeding. The burgeoning prison population is proof of that.
The economic stimulus has not trickled down to the prisoners. Most prisoners’ families—those that have families still supporting them—are in the hardest-hit economic class, and struggle to maintain a roof over their heads and food on the table. The prisoners are left to fend for themselves, their families unable to spare but a pittance, if that, for bare necessities only available for sale in the canteens. This results in more robberies and thefts as the “have-nots” prey on the “haves,” which leads to more violence, an escalating breakdown of prison society, reflecting our greater society. Where will it end?
Charlie
Someone once said that prison is a microcosm of society. In thirty-three years of life in prison, I’ve found that axiom to prove true.
Generations overlap in prison. When my incarceration began in the late 1970’s, I met men who’d been locked up since the 1940’s and ‘50’s. As “newcocks,” we younger prisoners listened raptly to the old timers’ stories of what prison life had once been and how it had changed since they came in decades before. Little did I know that over thirty years later I would be where they’d once been, telling newcocks how “real prison” had been “B.C.,” before crack cocaine.
One of the greatest differences between then and now is the educational and intelligence level of prisoners. I tell men who ask, “the quality of the prison inmate has gone downhill.” Don’t get me wrong! There were plenty of candidates for ‘America’s Dumbest Prisoners” in those days, but there was also a layer of intelligent, educated prisoners then that is absent now.
When I arrived at the Lake Butler Reception and Medical Center in North Florida after spending almost two years in Tampa’s Hillsborough County Jail dungeon, one of my first stops was the prison law library. I needed legal advice and didn’t trust the lawyer I believed betrayed me in court.
Everyone told me to go see Judge Joe Peel. I did. Judge Joe Peel ran the law library. His was a famous case from the 1950’s, the Chillingsworth Murders, in which Judge Peel supposedly paid Floyd Holzapel to murder Judge Chillingsworth and his wife. Floyd took them out into the Atlantic Ocean, wrapped them in chains, and threw them overboard. The case was famous not only because a judge contracted a murder on another judge, but also because it was the first time someone was convicted of murder without a corpus delicti, a dead body.
Besides the judge, a former prosecutor worked in the law library writing appeals for prisoners, along with another disbarred attorney and a couple of self-taught “jailhouse lawyers,” long-term prisoners who were just as legally talented as the law school graduates.
Judge Peel didn’t get me out, obviously, but in thirty minutes, he gave me more valuable advice than I’d received from my lawyer. Those men helped many prisoners with appeals, had convictions overturned, resulting in numerous people freed from prison.
That doesn’t happen any more. Lawyers and judges are still going to prison—one of my judges went to prison for bribery and corruption—but I haven’t seen any in years. One of the “status” jobs in prison is law clerk, and the Department of Corrections has a training program in which prisoners who meet the minimum educational requirements watch hours of video tapes, take a test, and become certified law clerks. Sadly, most of those prisoner law clerks are incompetent, and have trouble helping write a request form or a grievance. If you find one who actually has some legal ability, he is so bedeviled with pleas for help from mostly lost causes that he becomes burned out and gets a job change. Others who are too successful in pursuing court appeals and lawsuits often find themselves in lockup, transferred, facing trumped-up charges to dissuade them from being too helpful.
When I came to prison, Tom Brokaw’s remnants of “The Greatest Generation” and beyond still dominated the prisoner mentality. I met men who had fought the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II, the Chinese Communists and North Koreans in the Korean War, and the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War.
Those men were a different breed. They were serious. They were “stand-up,” and lived by the convict code. Mind your own business. Be a man. Don’t snitch. Don’t cross them! They might kill you. Many of these men were victims of the wars they fought in, plagued by alcoholism and PTSD, and had not adjusted well to life in a peaceful society, but they ran the prisons, maintained a semblance of order that the guards couldn’t.
Something I miss from those days are the intelligent conversations. There were some very smart, educated prisoners serving time then, and they tended to congregate together. Besides former college professors, I knew an actual NASA rocket scientist, an astronomer, a nuclear physicist, and a U.S. Marine Corps general. If you had a difficult question, someone could answer it. We had jet pilots, doctors and dentists. We had three chiropractors at Raiford who were constantly being called upon to crack backs and adjust necks. There were men with life experiences, successful businessmen, old-time bank robbers and safecrackers, jewel thieves, professional athletes, football and baseball players, a man who’d won two Super Bowl rings, who fell to the siren song of cocaine.
You don’t see those men in prison anymore. Perhaps they are in federal prison. Today 70% of Florida prisoners are functionally illiterate, a number I can attest. The Department of Corrections bragged recently that 2,500 prisoners were awarded G.E.D.’s in 2010, which sounds good, but when you realize there are over 103,000 people in Florida prisons, that comes out to less than 2.5%.
Prisoners have gotten younger and dumber. They are getting hooked on drugs at a younger age, become more desperate and violent, the juvenile system can’t hold them, and they graduate to “the Big House.” Mail call is very sparse nowadays. Only some of us get correspondence. Another prison axiom is you have to write letters to get letters, and if you can’t read and write, you won’t send or receive much mail. And those who do write can’t spell. Just yesterday a young man laboring over a letter home asked me, “How do you spell ‘o”?” “O?” I asked, confused, “What do you mean, ‘O’?” He explained that he was trying to tell his mother he was in debt, and needed her to send him money. “Oh!” I said, “You mean ‘owe!’ ” “That’s what I said.” “O – W- E.” “Thanks. How do you spell, ‘coffee?’ ”
Prison as a reflection and microcosm of society is also seen through our economy. In the Clinton nineties when the deficit was reined in and taxes filled state coffers, prisons went through a boom time of full funding. Real school teachers and vocational instructors taught full classes. College courses were available. Chapels had full staffs and outside religious groups coming in for services days and nights. Recreation departments offered organized sports leagues, hobbycraft and art programs that kept many prisoners occupied and out of mischief. Libraries were well-stocked and always open. The prison food was good, and they served adult portions. No one went hungry. I haven’t seen a pork chop, a fish with bones in it, or beef stew in fifteen years. Programs are virtually nonexistent now.
Then came September 11, 2001. Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda entered our vocabulary. The Twin Towers fell. We went to war. We are still at war. America will never be the same, and neither will the prison system.
We learned new words: Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Waterboarding. Rendition. I.E.D. It was only natural that the same labor pool that drew prison guards would be tapped to fill the increasing ranks of soldiers, sailors, and Marines. Guards joined the services and the Reserves were called up. Thousands took tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, and developed an “us and them” mentality. If you weren’t one of us, you were one of them, the enemy. When they came back to the States, they brought back new, harsher, angrier attitudes. They were no longer eating sand and worried about getting blown up walking through a village, but now they were entering cell blocks and looking at us as though we were their enemies, terrorists, and not fellow Americans, who, “there, but for the grace of God, go I.”
Now when the guards come in their squads for “routine shakedowns,” one would think they are looking for AK-47’s or roadside bombs. Ransack. Trash. Pull out the pepper spray, and use it. Lock up eighteen men because one made a wisecrack. Pepper spray them, ship them. Disrupt their lives and that of their families. That didn’t happen twenty years ago. Now it happens all the time. One old man who has served time off and on since 1964 addressed the issue of the new, harder, meaner prison guard. “The only difference between these guards today and the Nazi SS is these haven’t been ordered to gas us yet.” “Do you think they would do that?” I asked. “In a minute,” he said. I shudder to think that could be true.
The housing mortgage collapse—AIG—bank failures—mass bankruptcies—the recession (don’t say Depression) —Bernie Madoff. Don’t tell anyone, but if Bin Laden’s goal was to bring down America, he’s come close to succeeding. The burgeoning prison population is proof of that.
The economic stimulus has not trickled down to the prisoners. Most prisoners’ families—those that have families still supporting them—are in the hardest-hit economic class, and struggle to maintain a roof over their heads and food on the table. The prisoners are left to fend for themselves, their families unable to spare but a pittance, if that, for bare necessities only available for sale in the canteens. This results in more robberies and thefts as the “have-nots” prey on the “haves,” which leads to more violence, an escalating breakdown of prison society, reflecting our greater society. Where will it end?
Charlie
Sunday, February 6, 2011
IT’S TIME FOR A NEW “RESPONSIBLE INMATE-TAUGHT EDUCATION (R.I.T.E.) PROGRAM” IN PRISON
DATELINE: January 31, 2011
Above photo: Libby stands behind Sister Ann Raymond Wood, Sisters of St. Joseph, and others at the St. Augustine Mother House on October 16, 2010, at the Jubilee Celebration recognizing Sister Ann’s fifty years of service. Sister Ann has been Charlie’s loyal supporter and friend for over fifteen years, since she taught the “R.I.T.E. Program” at Sumter C.I. in 1995
In 1989, while we were assigned as vocational air conditioning aides to instructor Art Rabon at Polk C.I., David Tal-Mason and I spoke frequently about the state of prison educational and vocational programs. At the time the FDOC emphasized such programs, which were fully-funded and staffed by professional, certified teachers and instructors who taught a variety of courses; however, we both saw the writing on the wall, and knew that times were changing.
The Polk C.I. school provided a full range of classes during the day, including G.E.D. College business and computer classes at night were funded by individual Pell grants. Vocational Plumbing, Air Conditioning/Heating, Welding, and Upholstery classes certified prisoner graduates, who were able to get decent jobs upon their releases.
Besides working for the vocational air conditioning instructor, a retired U.S.A.F. aircraft crew chief, I tutored other prisoners in reading literacy in the school and in the college computer classes at night. Those days are long gone.
Fast forward to 1994: now at Avon Park C.I., I worked as an aide to instructor Larry Hagan in the vocational graphic arts program, tutoring computer typesetting and desktop publishing classes to the students. Ten years before, at Zephyrhills C.I., I’d worked as an aide in the Graphics Arts Program associated with the PRIDE print shop, doing the same tasks.
One day Mr. Hagan came out of his office, beckoned to me, and told me I had a phone call. A phone call? Prisoners don’t get phone calls on state telephones. He assured me it was all right. Olive Atkins, a teacher at Sumter C.I., introduced herself to me.
She explained that I had been recommended to join the “Responsible Inmate-Taught Education (R.I.T.E.) Program” at Sumter C.I., starting soon. The DOC was recruiting college-educated prisoners statewide to enroll in the upcoming R.I.T.E. Program, anticipating budget cutbacks that would reduce the paid teacher staff. Trained inmate tutors would take the place of professional teachers, keeping the educational programs going.
I asked Ms. Adkins who had recommended me for the program out of the many thousands of prisoners statewide. My old friend, David Tal-Mason, she said, had written and applied for the federal grant that paid for the one-year pilot program. She put David on the line. He encouraged me to agree to the transfer, promising that it was a worthy program I’d approve of.
I was surprised that David had been able to put together a grant proposal that actually resulted in a fully-funded program that wasn’t looted by the FDOC bureaucrats in Tallahassee. In 1980, at Raiford, my friend and fellow prisoner, Steve Opella, worked in the substance abuse program, down the street from my job in the GOLAB Program, the acclaimed prisoner self-help program that was the model for many later programs. Steve put together a $40,000 federal grant to fund the expansion of the substance abuse program, and was thrilled when he was informed that the grant had been approved. His elation turned to anger when he received a letter from Tallahassee with an accounting of how the $40,000 had been spent before it got to him.
The FDOC grant office sent a list of expenditures. $10,000 for office expenses, $8,000 for convention expenses (must have been some party). $2,500 for telephone expenses. Thousands for printing costs. When the shooting stopped, the bottom line was that the entire $40,000 of the federal grant had been consumed by the central office, and not a dime trickled down to the actual drug program at the prison level.
Steve had an influential friend who called Tallahassee and threatened to go to the feds and the news media if the officials kept all the grant money. After much dickering, the bureaucrats agreed to return ten percent, $4,000, which Steve used to buy a Sony color TV, VCR, and video camera setup for the program. Years later, I’d told my friend, David, about that, and when he submitted his grant for the R.I.T.E. Program, he inserted safeguards that prevented the DOC from hijacking the funds. Apparently, that strategy had worked.
When I arrived at Sumter C.I. on the Bluebird, the rattletrap prison transport bus, with twenty or so fellow prisoners, we were greeted by a diminutive woman with a big smile who introduced herself as Sister Ann Raymond Wood, a Catholic nun in the order Sisters of St. Joseph. She would be the R.I.T.E. Program instructor. Catholic nun? In prison? What had I gotten myself into?
The next day I was called into Roger Smith’s office. Mr. Smith was the education program manager, in effect, the prison school principal. I’d known Roger Smith for several years, having met him at other institutions when he was in charge of installing education computer systems, and he knew my background. He’d approved my entry into the program.
Roger Smith advised me that he was assigning me multiple tasks. I would participate in the R.I.T.E. training program for certification, but I was also to be Sister Ann’s aide. What she was not to be told, to be kept between us, that I was to be responsible for her personal safety. There would be no incidents. Tallahassee had informed the warden nothing would happen, that if anything happened to the Catholic nun inside the prison, everyone’s heads would roll. Mr. Smith told me that when Sister Ann arrived at 7:30 AM each morning, I was to be at the front gate waiting to escort her to the school, and unless she was in the restroom, she was always to be in my sight. At 4:30 PM, I would escort her back to the front gate and wave goodbye. They did not have the manpower to give her a security escort all day, so the job was mine. Failure would not be tolerated. Thankfully, for the year she spent teaching the all-day classes, her safety was never threatened.
Sister Ann was an English teacher by training and years of experience in Catholic schools had well-equipped her to handle a classroom of prisoners. These weren’t your ordinary prisoners—they’d been screened, had far more education than the average illiterate prisoner, and ranged from a retired Marine gunnery sergeant, to an astronomer, a contractor, real estate man, a couple of former teachers, and, among others, a college student who’d gotten hooked on drugs and committed murder. That was just in the first class. Subsequent classes were equally diverse, marked by a common desire to help their fellow prisoners. Sister Ann ably dealt with them all.
Most of the men recruited for the R.I.T.E. Program had already been working in education programs in prisons across the state, and had been recommended by their supervisors to participate. Besides Sister Ann, other teachers and occasional outside experts taught all the subjects required in prison education, including classes on how to be prepared to teach every class, which meant they had to brush up on multiplying and dividing fractions, as well as science, social studies, English grammar, reading, and writing skills.
Not every session involved hard work. Sister Ann had initially come to Sumter C.I. in past years to conduct “Shakespeare Seminars,” an experiment to discover whether prisoners would respond to and appreciate Shakespeare’s plays. Her seminars were enthusiastically received and the sign-up was always quickly filled. Prisoners appreciated the lessons and story lines of “Hamlet,” “MacBeth,” and even “Romeo and Juliet,” just as millions of others had for hundreds of years.
In the R.I.T.E. Program class, a reading of Hamlet and a commentary by Sister Ann, explaining what those archaic words meant in Modern English developed into a class play that combined Shakespeare and “Star Trek,” that entertained and educated the participants and audience.
The program was a success. The graduates went back to their respective institutions and helped their fellow prisoners learn to read, write, and hopefully earn G.E.D. certificates, a basis for further accomplishments.
After the program ran its course, Sinter Ann went on with her service to the Church and society. For many years she served as a counselor to the young men at Jesuit High School in Tampa, Florida, and became a breast cancer survivor. She continued our friendship that had commenced in such unlikely circumstances and maintained a correspondence that continues to this day, always encouraging me, praying for me, and serving as not only a positive influence, but also as an inspiration in my life by her example of selflessness and service to God and others.
In October, 2010, Sister Ann sent me an invitation to a Jubilee Celebration recognizing her fiftieth anniversary as a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, along with several other long-serving nuns. Of course, the officials at the prison would never have let me attend, even if I had promised to return afterward. I asked my dear friend, Libby, if she would attend in my place, which she happily agreed to do. The accompanying photo, among others, helped to document the event.
As for myself, the R.I.T.E. Program lives on and continues to pay dividends fifteen years later on the original investment. I continued to work in education at Sumter C.I. for three more years as an aide to Dr. Smith, tutoring the youthful prisoners in the Bootcamp Program in the G.E.D. essay test. In the years that I worked with those young men, their G.E.D. graduation rates were consistently the highest in Florida, both in prison and out.
Teaching “English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)” classes at Columbia C.I. followed, along with literacy tutoring for prisoners who could not read. Today I teach two classes of ESOL at Wakulla Annex C.I., consisting of mostly Hispanic students learning to speak, read, and write English.
With the economic crisis affecting every aspect of our society but the very rich, it seems, with the “prison crisis” being discussed endlessly as ways to cut the budget become more drastic, as education becomes a convenient target to hack away at, it is clear that the lessons learned in the “R.I.T.E. Program” fifteen years ago are applicable today.
No one disputes the fact that educational and vocational programs are important keys to prisoners getting out and staying out of prison, becoming law-abiding citizens, working at meaningful jobs, supporting themselves and their families, rather than continuing to be burdens on society.
It is also clear that out of the over 100,000 people in Florida prisons, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of educated, intelligent men and women willing to help educate their fellow prisoners if they had the proper training. This is a valuable resource that has been ignored for too long. A new “Responsible Inmate-Taught Education Program” is a cost effective way to reverse the downward spiral in prison education. Why don’t we give it a chance?
Charlie
Above photo: Libby stands behind Sister Ann Raymond Wood, Sisters of St. Joseph, and others at the St. Augustine Mother House on October 16, 2010, at the Jubilee Celebration recognizing Sister Ann’s fifty years of service. Sister Ann has been Charlie’s loyal supporter and friend for over fifteen years, since she taught the “R.I.T.E. Program” at Sumter C.I. in 1995
In 1989, while we were assigned as vocational air conditioning aides to instructor Art Rabon at Polk C.I., David Tal-Mason and I spoke frequently about the state of prison educational and vocational programs. At the time the FDOC emphasized such programs, which were fully-funded and staffed by professional, certified teachers and instructors who taught a variety of courses; however, we both saw the writing on the wall, and knew that times were changing.
The Polk C.I. school provided a full range of classes during the day, including G.E.D. College business and computer classes at night were funded by individual Pell grants. Vocational Plumbing, Air Conditioning/Heating, Welding, and Upholstery classes certified prisoner graduates, who were able to get decent jobs upon their releases.
Besides working for the vocational air conditioning instructor, a retired U.S.A.F. aircraft crew chief, I tutored other prisoners in reading literacy in the school and in the college computer classes at night. Those days are long gone.
Fast forward to 1994: now at Avon Park C.I., I worked as an aide to instructor Larry Hagan in the vocational graphic arts program, tutoring computer typesetting and desktop publishing classes to the students. Ten years before, at Zephyrhills C.I., I’d worked as an aide in the Graphics Arts Program associated with the PRIDE print shop, doing the same tasks.
One day Mr. Hagan came out of his office, beckoned to me, and told me I had a phone call. A phone call? Prisoners don’t get phone calls on state telephones. He assured me it was all right. Olive Atkins, a teacher at Sumter C.I., introduced herself to me.
She explained that I had been recommended to join the “Responsible Inmate-Taught Education (R.I.T.E.) Program” at Sumter C.I., starting soon. The DOC was recruiting college-educated prisoners statewide to enroll in the upcoming R.I.T.E. Program, anticipating budget cutbacks that would reduce the paid teacher staff. Trained inmate tutors would take the place of professional teachers, keeping the educational programs going.
I asked Ms. Adkins who had recommended me for the program out of the many thousands of prisoners statewide. My old friend, David Tal-Mason, she said, had written and applied for the federal grant that paid for the one-year pilot program. She put David on the line. He encouraged me to agree to the transfer, promising that it was a worthy program I’d approve of.
I was surprised that David had been able to put together a grant proposal that actually resulted in a fully-funded program that wasn’t looted by the FDOC bureaucrats in Tallahassee. In 1980, at Raiford, my friend and fellow prisoner, Steve Opella, worked in the substance abuse program, down the street from my job in the GOLAB Program, the acclaimed prisoner self-help program that was the model for many later programs. Steve put together a $40,000 federal grant to fund the expansion of the substance abuse program, and was thrilled when he was informed that the grant had been approved. His elation turned to anger when he received a letter from Tallahassee with an accounting of how the $40,000 had been spent before it got to him.
The FDOC grant office sent a list of expenditures. $10,000 for office expenses, $8,000 for convention expenses (must have been some party). $2,500 for telephone expenses. Thousands for printing costs. When the shooting stopped, the bottom line was that the entire $40,000 of the federal grant had been consumed by the central office, and not a dime trickled down to the actual drug program at the prison level.
Steve had an influential friend who called Tallahassee and threatened to go to the feds and the news media if the officials kept all the grant money. After much dickering, the bureaucrats agreed to return ten percent, $4,000, which Steve used to buy a Sony color TV, VCR, and video camera setup for the program. Years later, I’d told my friend, David, about that, and when he submitted his grant for the R.I.T.E. Program, he inserted safeguards that prevented the DOC from hijacking the funds. Apparently, that strategy had worked.
When I arrived at Sumter C.I. on the Bluebird, the rattletrap prison transport bus, with twenty or so fellow prisoners, we were greeted by a diminutive woman with a big smile who introduced herself as Sister Ann Raymond Wood, a Catholic nun in the order Sisters of St. Joseph. She would be the R.I.T.E. Program instructor. Catholic nun? In prison? What had I gotten myself into?
The next day I was called into Roger Smith’s office. Mr. Smith was the education program manager, in effect, the prison school principal. I’d known Roger Smith for several years, having met him at other institutions when he was in charge of installing education computer systems, and he knew my background. He’d approved my entry into the program.
Roger Smith advised me that he was assigning me multiple tasks. I would participate in the R.I.T.E. training program for certification, but I was also to be Sister Ann’s aide. What she was not to be told, to be kept between us, that I was to be responsible for her personal safety. There would be no incidents. Tallahassee had informed the warden nothing would happen, that if anything happened to the Catholic nun inside the prison, everyone’s heads would roll. Mr. Smith told me that when Sister Ann arrived at 7:30 AM each morning, I was to be at the front gate waiting to escort her to the school, and unless she was in the restroom, she was always to be in my sight. At 4:30 PM, I would escort her back to the front gate and wave goodbye. They did not have the manpower to give her a security escort all day, so the job was mine. Failure would not be tolerated. Thankfully, for the year she spent teaching the all-day classes, her safety was never threatened.
Sister Ann was an English teacher by training and years of experience in Catholic schools had well-equipped her to handle a classroom of prisoners. These weren’t your ordinary prisoners—they’d been screened, had far more education than the average illiterate prisoner, and ranged from a retired Marine gunnery sergeant, to an astronomer, a contractor, real estate man, a couple of former teachers, and, among others, a college student who’d gotten hooked on drugs and committed murder. That was just in the first class. Subsequent classes were equally diverse, marked by a common desire to help their fellow prisoners. Sister Ann ably dealt with them all.
Most of the men recruited for the R.I.T.E. Program had already been working in education programs in prisons across the state, and had been recommended by their supervisors to participate. Besides Sister Ann, other teachers and occasional outside experts taught all the subjects required in prison education, including classes on how to be prepared to teach every class, which meant they had to brush up on multiplying and dividing fractions, as well as science, social studies, English grammar, reading, and writing skills.
Not every session involved hard work. Sister Ann had initially come to Sumter C.I. in past years to conduct “Shakespeare Seminars,” an experiment to discover whether prisoners would respond to and appreciate Shakespeare’s plays. Her seminars were enthusiastically received and the sign-up was always quickly filled. Prisoners appreciated the lessons and story lines of “Hamlet,” “MacBeth,” and even “Romeo and Juliet,” just as millions of others had for hundreds of years.
In the R.I.T.E. Program class, a reading of Hamlet and a commentary by Sister Ann, explaining what those archaic words meant in Modern English developed into a class play that combined Shakespeare and “Star Trek,” that entertained and educated the participants and audience.
The program was a success. The graduates went back to their respective institutions and helped their fellow prisoners learn to read, write, and hopefully earn G.E.D. certificates, a basis for further accomplishments.
After the program ran its course, Sinter Ann went on with her service to the Church and society. For many years she served as a counselor to the young men at Jesuit High School in Tampa, Florida, and became a breast cancer survivor. She continued our friendship that had commenced in such unlikely circumstances and maintained a correspondence that continues to this day, always encouraging me, praying for me, and serving as not only a positive influence, but also as an inspiration in my life by her example of selflessness and service to God and others.
In October, 2010, Sister Ann sent me an invitation to a Jubilee Celebration recognizing her fiftieth anniversary as a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, along with several other long-serving nuns. Of course, the officials at the prison would never have let me attend, even if I had promised to return afterward. I asked my dear friend, Libby, if she would attend in my place, which she happily agreed to do. The accompanying photo, among others, helped to document the event.
As for myself, the R.I.T.E. Program lives on and continues to pay dividends fifteen years later on the original investment. I continued to work in education at Sumter C.I. for three more years as an aide to Dr. Smith, tutoring the youthful prisoners in the Bootcamp Program in the G.E.D. essay test. In the years that I worked with those young men, their G.E.D. graduation rates were consistently the highest in Florida, both in prison and out.
Teaching “English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)” classes at Columbia C.I. followed, along with literacy tutoring for prisoners who could not read. Today I teach two classes of ESOL at Wakulla Annex C.I., consisting of mostly Hispanic students learning to speak, read, and write English.
With the economic crisis affecting every aspect of our society but the very rich, it seems, with the “prison crisis” being discussed endlessly as ways to cut the budget become more drastic, as education becomes a convenient target to hack away at, it is clear that the lessons learned in the “R.I.T.E. Program” fifteen years ago are applicable today.
No one disputes the fact that educational and vocational programs are important keys to prisoners getting out and staying out of prison, becoming law-abiding citizens, working at meaningful jobs, supporting themselves and their families, rather than continuing to be burdens on society.
It is also clear that out of the over 100,000 people in Florida prisons, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of educated, intelligent men and women willing to help educate their fellow prisoners if they had the proper training. This is a valuable resource that has been ignored for too long. A new “Responsible Inmate-Taught Education Program” is a cost effective way to reverse the downward spiral in prison education. Why don’t we give it a chance?
Charlie
Sunday, January 16, 2011
AN INSIDER’S VIEW—CUT PRISON COSTS BY MILLIONS
DATELINE: JANUARY 6, 2011
Thirty years ago, when Florida’s prison population reached an estimated 20,000 inmates, no one could have foreseen the present situation: 103,000 prisoners in 146 facilities, 30,500 employees, and an annual budget of $2.5 billion. With the world economic crash, the bleak housing market with foreclosures forcing thousands of families into homelessness, widespread unemployment and reduced tax revenues, one doesn’t have to be an economist to realize that we can’t maintain the present system.
Governor Rick Scott has sent shockwaves through the Florida corrections industry by vowing to cut one billion dollars from the bloated prison bureaucracy and budget. Employees fear the loss of their jobs and pensions, with good cause. Hard times call for drastic measures. Can it be done? Can a major part of the prison budget be cut without endangering the public safety while releasing thousands of prisoners? For that is the reality. In order to reach the governor’s goal, the entire prison system must be reduced and trimmed back. The only way to do that is to release prisoners and close prisons.
The past few years the prison system has dealt with budget shortfalls by gutting educational and vocational programs, the very things that reduce the recidivism rate and give released prisoners a fighting chance to become employable, law-abiding citizens and not return to incarceration. More recently, robbing Peter to pay Paul, the Florida DOC has cut the prison food budget, virtually removing meat from the menu, substituting the controversial textured vegetable protein (TVP) into a starchy diet increasingly filled with potatoes, rice, cornbread, dried beans, macaroni, and grits.
The meager food budget, which is a minor percentage of prison costs, can only be squeezed so far. On the other hand, the largest proportion of expense goes to salaries, payrolls, and the lucrative state pension fund, sacred cows that have been off limits to reduction.
Following are four proposals that go a long way toward addressing this controversial subject, proposals that could initially save the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. A large percentage of savings would be realized in the first year.
This is only a beginning. Additional proposals will follow. As a man who has served over thirty-two years in Florida prisons, who has witnessed the wholesale squandering and waste of valuable resources over the years with little accountability, I present a viewpoint that has been previously unconsidered. It is time for everyone to step forward and present fresh ideas to solve our mutual societal problems before the entire system grinds to a halt and implodes. We haven’t reached the breaking point yet, but it is getting dangerously close.
Revamp the mandatory sentencing laws. The prisons are chock full of minor drug criminals who are better dealt with in drug treatment and rehab programs than overcrowding the prisons with the harsh minimum mandatory sentences imposed on them. Many of these draconian drug laws were passed in the 1980’s and ‘90’s as kneejerk responses to the crack cocaine epidemic that threatened to overwhelm our country. Rather than focus on the interdiction of ships and airplanes loaded with tons of drugs sent from the source in South America by the billion-dollar cartels, our government decided it would be easier to lock up all the customers, the users and addicts, the vulnerable bottom of the food chain, rather than tackle the bigger societal issues that plague our population.
This myopic view resulted in thousands of young drug users packed into the state prisons at a cost the taxpayers can no longer afford. A new sentencing commission composed of objective experts and professionals, rather than politicians who seek a tough on drug crime label, should be charged with revamping this out-of-touch statutory mess. Only by focusing on a holistic approach to drug addiction, intervening at an early age, tackling the social problems that fuel addiction, rather than the “lock ‘em up and throw away the key mentality that has filled prisons to bursting, can we hope to funnel our children away from incarceration and toward productive lives.
Stop selling cigarettes and tobacco products in prison. The Clean Indoor Air Act is violated thousands of times a day in every Florida prison. Prison officials respond to complaints of dangerous air pollution by stating that cigarette smoking is banned inside all state facilities prisoner housing areas, and anyone caught smoking is subject to disciplinary measures. This is not true. Even in lockdown solitary confinement cells, prisoners are able to obtain cigarettes and smoke, despite regular searches and shakedowns. As long as cigarettes and tobacco products are sold in the prison canteens, the illegal smoking endangering everyone’s health will continue unabated.
A high percentage of prisoners are addicted to nicotine. They can’t stop. Locked in cell blocks, dorms, and sealed secure housing, the unchecked smoking results in choking clouds of secondary smoke and spiraling health care costs in the millions of tax dollars. The unsafe environment threatens the health of thousands of prison employees, as well as the prisoners. The state of Florida is stuck with paying the tab for lung cancer, emphysema, and other smoking-related illnesses.
A few years ago, a study of cancer in Florida found that the highest per capita rate of lung cancer occurred in Union County, which also had the highest percentage of state prisoners, a damning statistic. Nicotine is more highly addictive than many banned narcotic drugs. When the state of Florida becomes the purveyor of these products, the tax revenues from prison tobacco sales are offset by the escalating health care costs the state incurs.
Tobacco products are banned in many county and state corrections facilities nationwide, eliminating the problem and saving millions of dollars in health costs, despite the doom and gloom predictions of tobacco advocates that depriving prisoners of their nicotine fix would result in widespread violence and protests. Such arguments proved to be unfounded. In fact, many prison smokers, unable to quit the deadly habit on their own, were grateful for the tobacco ban. It is time for Florida to wake up and rid the prisons of cigarettes and tobacco products.
Release five thousand prisoners with the shortest times left on their sentences. They will be getting out in the next few months anyway, so let them go now and save at least $120 million. How? Simple. The Department of Corrections budget is about $2.5 billion a year. Divide that $2.5 billion by the 103,000 Florida prisoners for an average annual cost of incarceration of a little over $24,000 per person. Five thousand early releases translates into a $120 million saving.
The logistics are tried and true--extra gain time awards. Do it in phases: grant 180 days gain time across the board to all prisoners, bringing down their release dates six months. Those who fall into the release category with the gain time awards go home, with the exception of course, of those prisoners who, by the nature of their charges, are ineligible for release. This would include sex offenders who fall under the Jimmy Ryce Act, those who have detainers or pending charges in other jurisdictions, or anyone else who otherwise pose a public risk, as a case-by-case review would determine.
Once the first batch of short-timers are released, an additional 180 days gain time would be awarded the same way, resulting in a further prison population decrease. When the 5,000 figure is reached, the extra gain time awards would end for the year.
Release the five thousand oldest prisoners at a cost savings of well over $120 million. Elderly, sick prisoners account for a disproportionate share of the burgeoning health care costs, and the older and sicker they get, the more each one costs the taxpayers. It was reported recently that prison dialysis patients cost $190,000 a year solely for that procedure, not counting the rest of their care. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV, mental illness, and a host of other illnesses are epidemic among the thousands of elderly prisoners, many who led dissolute lives of drug abuse, alcoholism and smoking that damaged their health at an early age. To many of these, the prison system has become a harsh nursing home and hospice that tends them until they die. It would be far cheaper for society to deal with these people outside the corrections framework, rather than inside.
The June, 2010, issue of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, published by the U.S. Department of Justice, “Prison Inmates at Midyear 2009-Statistical Tables,” reveals that 2,096,300 inmates were held in custody in state or federal prisons or in local jails as of June 30, 2009. Table 17 breaks down this figure by sex, race, Hispanic origin, and age. The data is revealing. An estimated 1,908,400 inmates held in custody, over 91% are between the ages of 20-54 years old. Barely 5%, 104,200 inmates, are in the age range of 55-59 (58,000), 60-64 (25,200), and 65 or older (21,000). 68,200 are 18 or 19 years old.
That is for the entire United States, over two million prisoners. Applying that 5% figure to Florida, we are incarcerating a little more than 5,000 prisoners aged 55 or older. Releasing those elderly prisoners, with the obvious exceptions of dangerous sex offenders, mentally disturbed prisoners, and those deemed incorrigibly violent, would free the taxpayers from an increasingly onerous burden.
Crime and punishment is a young man’s game, heavily weighted toward youth. By the time a prisoner has served twenty, thirty, forty, or even more years in prison, he or she is usually a broken man or woman, in body, mind, and spirit. Continued incarceration serves little purpose beyond vengeance. Let them go.
Conclusion. These measures alone would reduce the prison population by a minimum figure of 10,000 inmates the first year, resulting in closing eight major institutions at a cost-savings of hundreds of millions of dollars the first year. Job training and placement of the unneeded prison staff would have to be addressed, as well as educational, vocational, and job placement opportunities for those released who were capable of working. While not a complete solution to the problem, it is a beginning in the right direction.
Charlie
Thirty years ago, when Florida’s prison population reached an estimated 20,000 inmates, no one could have foreseen the present situation: 103,000 prisoners in 146 facilities, 30,500 employees, and an annual budget of $2.5 billion. With the world economic crash, the bleak housing market with foreclosures forcing thousands of families into homelessness, widespread unemployment and reduced tax revenues, one doesn’t have to be an economist to realize that we can’t maintain the present system.
Governor Rick Scott has sent shockwaves through the Florida corrections industry by vowing to cut one billion dollars from the bloated prison bureaucracy and budget. Employees fear the loss of their jobs and pensions, with good cause. Hard times call for drastic measures. Can it be done? Can a major part of the prison budget be cut without endangering the public safety while releasing thousands of prisoners? For that is the reality. In order to reach the governor’s goal, the entire prison system must be reduced and trimmed back. The only way to do that is to release prisoners and close prisons.
The past few years the prison system has dealt with budget shortfalls by gutting educational and vocational programs, the very things that reduce the recidivism rate and give released prisoners a fighting chance to become employable, law-abiding citizens and not return to incarceration. More recently, robbing Peter to pay Paul, the Florida DOC has cut the prison food budget, virtually removing meat from the menu, substituting the controversial textured vegetable protein (TVP) into a starchy diet increasingly filled with potatoes, rice, cornbread, dried beans, macaroni, and grits.
The meager food budget, which is a minor percentage of prison costs, can only be squeezed so far. On the other hand, the largest proportion of expense goes to salaries, payrolls, and the lucrative state pension fund, sacred cows that have been off limits to reduction.
Following are four proposals that go a long way toward addressing this controversial subject, proposals that could initially save the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. A large percentage of savings would be realized in the first year.
This is only a beginning. Additional proposals will follow. As a man who has served over thirty-two years in Florida prisons, who has witnessed the wholesale squandering and waste of valuable resources over the years with little accountability, I present a viewpoint that has been previously unconsidered. It is time for everyone to step forward and present fresh ideas to solve our mutual societal problems before the entire system grinds to a halt and implodes. We haven’t reached the breaking point yet, but it is getting dangerously close.
Revamp the mandatory sentencing laws. The prisons are chock full of minor drug criminals who are better dealt with in drug treatment and rehab programs than overcrowding the prisons with the harsh minimum mandatory sentences imposed on them. Many of these draconian drug laws were passed in the 1980’s and ‘90’s as kneejerk responses to the crack cocaine epidemic that threatened to overwhelm our country. Rather than focus on the interdiction of ships and airplanes loaded with tons of drugs sent from the source in South America by the billion-dollar cartels, our government decided it would be easier to lock up all the customers, the users and addicts, the vulnerable bottom of the food chain, rather than tackle the bigger societal issues that plague our population.
This myopic view resulted in thousands of young drug users packed into the state prisons at a cost the taxpayers can no longer afford. A new sentencing commission composed of objective experts and professionals, rather than politicians who seek a tough on drug crime label, should be charged with revamping this out-of-touch statutory mess. Only by focusing on a holistic approach to drug addiction, intervening at an early age, tackling the social problems that fuel addiction, rather than the “lock ‘em up and throw away the key mentality that has filled prisons to bursting, can we hope to funnel our children away from incarceration and toward productive lives.
Stop selling cigarettes and tobacco products in prison. The Clean Indoor Air Act is violated thousands of times a day in every Florida prison. Prison officials respond to complaints of dangerous air pollution by stating that cigarette smoking is banned inside all state facilities prisoner housing areas, and anyone caught smoking is subject to disciplinary measures. This is not true. Even in lockdown solitary confinement cells, prisoners are able to obtain cigarettes and smoke, despite regular searches and shakedowns. As long as cigarettes and tobacco products are sold in the prison canteens, the illegal smoking endangering everyone’s health will continue unabated.
A high percentage of prisoners are addicted to nicotine. They can’t stop. Locked in cell blocks, dorms, and sealed secure housing, the unchecked smoking results in choking clouds of secondary smoke and spiraling health care costs in the millions of tax dollars. The unsafe environment threatens the health of thousands of prison employees, as well as the prisoners. The state of Florida is stuck with paying the tab for lung cancer, emphysema, and other smoking-related illnesses.
A few years ago, a study of cancer in Florida found that the highest per capita rate of lung cancer occurred in Union County, which also had the highest percentage of state prisoners, a damning statistic. Nicotine is more highly addictive than many banned narcotic drugs. When the state of Florida becomes the purveyor of these products, the tax revenues from prison tobacco sales are offset by the escalating health care costs the state incurs.
Tobacco products are banned in many county and state corrections facilities nationwide, eliminating the problem and saving millions of dollars in health costs, despite the doom and gloom predictions of tobacco advocates that depriving prisoners of their nicotine fix would result in widespread violence and protests. Such arguments proved to be unfounded. In fact, many prison smokers, unable to quit the deadly habit on their own, were grateful for the tobacco ban. It is time for Florida to wake up and rid the prisons of cigarettes and tobacco products.
Release five thousand prisoners with the shortest times left on their sentences. They will be getting out in the next few months anyway, so let them go now and save at least $120 million. How? Simple. The Department of Corrections budget is about $2.5 billion a year. Divide that $2.5 billion by the 103,000 Florida prisoners for an average annual cost of incarceration of a little over $24,000 per person. Five thousand early releases translates into a $120 million saving.
The logistics are tried and true--extra gain time awards. Do it in phases: grant 180 days gain time across the board to all prisoners, bringing down their release dates six months. Those who fall into the release category with the gain time awards go home, with the exception of course, of those prisoners who, by the nature of their charges, are ineligible for release. This would include sex offenders who fall under the Jimmy Ryce Act, those who have detainers or pending charges in other jurisdictions, or anyone else who otherwise pose a public risk, as a case-by-case review would determine.
Once the first batch of short-timers are released, an additional 180 days gain time would be awarded the same way, resulting in a further prison population decrease. When the 5,000 figure is reached, the extra gain time awards would end for the year.
Release the five thousand oldest prisoners at a cost savings of well over $120 million. Elderly, sick prisoners account for a disproportionate share of the burgeoning health care costs, and the older and sicker they get, the more each one costs the taxpayers. It was reported recently that prison dialysis patients cost $190,000 a year solely for that procedure, not counting the rest of their care. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV, mental illness, and a host of other illnesses are epidemic among the thousands of elderly prisoners, many who led dissolute lives of drug abuse, alcoholism and smoking that damaged their health at an early age. To many of these, the prison system has become a harsh nursing home and hospice that tends them until they die. It would be far cheaper for society to deal with these people outside the corrections framework, rather than inside.
The June, 2010, issue of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, published by the U.S. Department of Justice, “Prison Inmates at Midyear 2009-Statistical Tables,” reveals that 2,096,300 inmates were held in custody in state or federal prisons or in local jails as of June 30, 2009. Table 17 breaks down this figure by sex, race, Hispanic origin, and age. The data is revealing. An estimated 1,908,400 inmates held in custody, over 91% are between the ages of 20-54 years old. Barely 5%, 104,200 inmates, are in the age range of 55-59 (58,000), 60-64 (25,200), and 65 or older (21,000). 68,200 are 18 or 19 years old.
That is for the entire United States, over two million prisoners. Applying that 5% figure to Florida, we are incarcerating a little more than 5,000 prisoners aged 55 or older. Releasing those elderly prisoners, with the obvious exceptions of dangerous sex offenders, mentally disturbed prisoners, and those deemed incorrigibly violent, would free the taxpayers from an increasingly onerous burden.
Crime and punishment is a young man’s game, heavily weighted toward youth. By the time a prisoner has served twenty, thirty, forty, or even more years in prison, he or she is usually a broken man or woman, in body, mind, and spirit. Continued incarceration serves little purpose beyond vengeance. Let them go.
Conclusion. These measures alone would reduce the prison population by a minimum figure of 10,000 inmates the first year, resulting in closing eight major institutions at a cost-savings of hundreds of millions of dollars the first year. Job training and placement of the unneeded prison staff would have to be addressed, as well as educational, vocational, and job placement opportunities for those released who were capable of working. While not a complete solution to the problem, it is a beginning in the right direction.
Charlie
Sunday, December 26, 2010
MICKEY MOUSE CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION: LET DISNEY PRIVATIZE THE FLORIDA PRISONS
DATELINE 12/16/10
MICKEY MOUSE CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION: LET DISNEY PRIVATIZE THE FLORIDA PRISONS
Florida is broke, and treasure chests full of cash have been squandered on the $2.5 billion state prison budget every year, with no relief in sight. Governor-elect Rick Scott has proposed cutting the costs by privatizing Florida prisons, reducing the funding by one billion dollars. What most people don’t realize is that the lion’s share of those billions of tax dollars are spent on--payroll! Excellent benefits, medical insurance, and pensions are guaranteed to anyone who lucks into a secure job at the state prison. Cutting labor costs, replacing those "certified law enforcement officers” and highly-paid administrators, cutting the morbidly obese labor costs are crucial to financial liquidation.
Can it be done? Yes! Hard times breed drastic measures, and we must seek solutions outside the tired thinking of the past-- new ideas that will not only cut the prison budget, but turn a profit. How can we do that? Walt Disney saved Florida once already back in the 1970’s, when he bought thousands of acres of empty land and built Disneyworld. Let Disney do it again, and turn the prisons over to Mickey Mouse and Company.
Think about it. Mickey Mouse Correctional Institution will be the world’s first prison theme park. Tours of the facility will highlight sights you’d never see in free society.
“On your left is a cage full of bank robbers. Notice the shifty eyes. On your right are rapists; don’t worry, the unbreakable glass protects us. Next, we have some serial killers--they are caged alone for obvious reasons. The mild-mannered man in the next cage is a white-collar criminal, an embezzler, and beside him, playing with matches is an arsonist. And we’re walking…”
A ride similar to the Haunted House would take the tourists past displays of imprisonment and executions throughout history, with robots acting out scenes such as Daniel in the lions’ den, the Crucifixion of Jesus, the burning of Joan of Arc, the Tower of London, scenes from an 18th Century English prison, hangings, beheadings, firing squads, Alcatraz, a prison shower scene, a riot, stabbings, escapes, electrocutions, and lethal injections. The fascinating life -- and death -- scenarios are endless.
Customers would pay high prices for authentic prison swill, and adults could sample prison wine mixed in genuine mop buckets and fermented in plastic jugs. Souvenir stores would sell striped prison uniforms, bull whips, canisters of pepper spray (useful to make rowdy teenagers do their homework), miniature electric chairs (batteries not included), and other interesting knick knacks unavailable elsewhere.
Mickey Mouse C.I. would also be a fully-functioning prison, with the staff dressed as Disney characters. The prison warden would be Mickey Mouse, of course, constantly smiling. The head guard, the colonel, would be Goofy. Donald Duck would be the prison doctor (quack!), and the Three Little Pigs would be the goon squad, armed with clubs to hurriedly put down any disturbances. The Seven Dwarfs would be in charge of the prison work squad, and every morning would lead several hundred prisoners to the fields to harvest crops with everyone singing, “Hi ho, hi ho! It’s off to work we go!” all the way. The Big Bad Wolf would be in charge of solitary confinement, and threaten to eat anyone who misbehaved. Cinderella’s evil stepmother would run the religious programs, and her daughters would pass out cookies and coffee to the visitors ($10.00 each).
The guards would be dressed as the other Disney characters and would be required to speak in their characters’ voices. The possibilities are mind-boggling, as are the potential profits.
With the paying customers taking daily tours in the thousands, it would not be long before Mickey Mouse C.I. began turning a healthy profit. The program could be expanded to more prisons and more theme parks each year. Imagine Sea World in charge of Death Row -- instead of lethal injections, the condemned prisoners could be fed to Shamu the killer whale. A special 50,000-seat circular arena like an oversized Roman Coliseum would surround a huge tank for Shamu. A crane would lower the chosen prisoner--feet first or head first, flip a coin--Shamu would leap higher and higher, until he could take a bite, piece by piece, complete the ritual; pay-per-view would broadcast worldwide to enraptured audiences. How much would the tourists pay to see that?
In no time at all, the State of Florida, Inc., would be a model for fiscal responsibility, the crime rate would drop, and a new era in correctional sciences would dawn. Let’s get to work!
Charlie
MICKEY MOUSE CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION: LET DISNEY PRIVATIZE THE FLORIDA PRISONS
Florida is broke, and treasure chests full of cash have been squandered on the $2.5 billion state prison budget every year, with no relief in sight. Governor-elect Rick Scott has proposed cutting the costs by privatizing Florida prisons, reducing the funding by one billion dollars. What most people don’t realize is that the lion’s share of those billions of tax dollars are spent on--payroll! Excellent benefits, medical insurance, and pensions are guaranteed to anyone who lucks into a secure job at the state prison. Cutting labor costs, replacing those "certified law enforcement officers” and highly-paid administrators, cutting the morbidly obese labor costs are crucial to financial liquidation.
Can it be done? Yes! Hard times breed drastic measures, and we must seek solutions outside the tired thinking of the past-- new ideas that will not only cut the prison budget, but turn a profit. How can we do that? Walt Disney saved Florida once already back in the 1970’s, when he bought thousands of acres of empty land and built Disneyworld. Let Disney do it again, and turn the prisons over to Mickey Mouse and Company.
Think about it. Mickey Mouse Correctional Institution will be the world’s first prison theme park. Tours of the facility will highlight sights you’d never see in free society.
“On your left is a cage full of bank robbers. Notice the shifty eyes. On your right are rapists; don’t worry, the unbreakable glass protects us. Next, we have some serial killers--they are caged alone for obvious reasons. The mild-mannered man in the next cage is a white-collar criminal, an embezzler, and beside him, playing with matches is an arsonist. And we’re walking…”
A ride similar to the Haunted House would take the tourists past displays of imprisonment and executions throughout history, with robots acting out scenes such as Daniel in the lions’ den, the Crucifixion of Jesus, the burning of Joan of Arc, the Tower of London, scenes from an 18th Century English prison, hangings, beheadings, firing squads, Alcatraz, a prison shower scene, a riot, stabbings, escapes, electrocutions, and lethal injections. The fascinating life -- and death -- scenarios are endless.
Customers would pay high prices for authentic prison swill, and adults could sample prison wine mixed in genuine mop buckets and fermented in plastic jugs. Souvenir stores would sell striped prison uniforms, bull whips, canisters of pepper spray (useful to make rowdy teenagers do their homework), miniature electric chairs (batteries not included), and other interesting knick knacks unavailable elsewhere.
Mickey Mouse C.I. would also be a fully-functioning prison, with the staff dressed as Disney characters. The prison warden would be Mickey Mouse, of course, constantly smiling. The head guard, the colonel, would be Goofy. Donald Duck would be the prison doctor (quack!), and the Three Little Pigs would be the goon squad, armed with clubs to hurriedly put down any disturbances. The Seven Dwarfs would be in charge of the prison work squad, and every morning would lead several hundred prisoners to the fields to harvest crops with everyone singing, “Hi ho, hi ho! It’s off to work we go!” all the way. The Big Bad Wolf would be in charge of solitary confinement, and threaten to eat anyone who misbehaved. Cinderella’s evil stepmother would run the religious programs, and her daughters would pass out cookies and coffee to the visitors ($10.00 each).
The guards would be dressed as the other Disney characters and would be required to speak in their characters’ voices. The possibilities are mind-boggling, as are the potential profits.
With the paying customers taking daily tours in the thousands, it would not be long before Mickey Mouse C.I. began turning a healthy profit. The program could be expanded to more prisons and more theme parks each year. Imagine Sea World in charge of Death Row -- instead of lethal injections, the condemned prisoners could be fed to Shamu the killer whale. A special 50,000-seat circular arena like an oversized Roman Coliseum would surround a huge tank for Shamu. A crane would lower the chosen prisoner--feet first or head first, flip a coin--Shamu would leap higher and higher, until he could take a bite, piece by piece, complete the ritual; pay-per-view would broadcast worldwide to enraptured audiences. How much would the tourists pay to see that?
In no time at all, the State of Florida, Inc., would be a model for fiscal responsibility, the crime rate would drop, and a new era in correctional sciences would dawn. Let’s get to work!
Charlie
Monday, December 20, 2010
Merry Christmas from Charlie and Libby!
Santa came to see me in the form of my dear friend, Libby. I borrowed her elf hat for this photo in front of the Christmas tree. At least that hasn't been taken from us.
2010 has been a difficult year for us, but we pray that 2011 will bring better outcomes.
On behalf of both of us, I want to wish you a blessed, safe, and joyous holiday season.
With our love,
Charlie and Libby
Sunday, December 5, 2010
ANATOMY OF A PUNITIVE PRISON TRANSFER
Dateline November 30, 2010
ANATOMY OF A PUNITIVE PRISON TRANSFER
You heard the news. On Thursday, November 18, 2010, at 2:30 AM, I was awakened by the little, bald-headed, myopic prisoner in the next bunk telling me he was being transferred.
“You? Are you sure?” I asked. “Did you put in for a transfer?”
“No. I only have two months left before I go home.”
That didn’t sound right. I was still groggy, having been awakened from a dream about – I couldn’t remember. You know how dreams are. But I told him he should double-check with the guard, to make sure. I had a sneaking suspicion they’d mistakenly awakened my neighbor in bunk 116, when they meant to wake me up. I’d been fighting the prison warden and his minions at Tomoka C.I. (Daytona Beach, Florida) since the previous February, when the self-righteous mailroom clerk informed me she had confiscated a book , Wordsmith 2010, an anthology of award-winning short stories, essays, and poems, published annually by the Tampa Writers Alliance, mailed to me.
Why was the book confiscated? She said she’d read the article I’d written, and felt it was “a threat to security.” A threat to security? How could that be? The article in question, “To Protect the Guilty,” was a 2400 word excerpt from the “Prison Diary Project” sponsored by the Anne Frank Center USA in New York City, in 2008, in conjunction with the PEN American Center’s Prison Writing Program. That particular essay—a memoir—recounted my negative experiences with Ku Klux Klan (KKK) prison guards at a North Florida prison several years before. I couldn’t imagine how that could be construed as a threat to security. The recollection was from years before, at a distant, unnamed prison, and involved unnamed guards who had retaliated against me in retribution for my perceived insults to the character and intelligence of KKK members, prison guards or otherwise. Hmmm…perhaps she was in the women’s auxiliary of the Klan, the little women who sewed up the sheets and pillowcases into those white robes and pointed hats worn by the menfolk as they danced around a burning cross in a cow pasture, reminiscing about the good old days, when they were the masters and the slaves answered “yassuh” and “nahsuh” to the overseers as they hoed those endless rows of cotton.
Word came down a few days later that “The warden wants your ass in jail!” The mailroom clerk had gotten the formal complaint I’d filed about the improper confiscation, had taken the book to the warden, who read the KKK memoir and was offended by it, too. Hmmm…why was he offended? Had I touched a sensitive nerve? How deep did the KKK roots go in the Florida prison system? With the head of the 30,000-plus employee DOC being a black former police chief in Tallahassee, the state capital, one would think that any prison employees who professed white supremacist, racist organization links would keep their heads down, maintain a low profile, not draw attention to themselves. But no, they couldn’t resist the impulse to retaliate against the messenger, the prisoner who talked about them, the urge to strike back was too strong. And they did.
The offended warden ordered his subordinate to write a bogus disciplinary report against me for multiple unwarranted “mail regulations violations,” for violating the strictures against advertising for a pen pal (never did, don’t have any pen pals), running a business while incarcerated (absolutely false), entering contests and sweepstakes (nope-not even a Saturday night Powerball ticket), and commercially advertising for money, goods, and services (they should have checked my account—the court found me indigent, a fancy word for “poor”). Never happened. Didn’t matter.
They call prison disciplinary hearings “Kangaroo Courts” for a reason. I don’t know why Kangaroos have such animosity toward us, but the two kangaroos who presided ever the two hearings I had refused to listen to a word I said, as I was standing against the far wall with my hands cuffed behind my back. I presented evidence refuting the false charges, and requested staff witnesses who could verify my statements. Denied without any reason. Guilty. Thirty days in solitary confinement, thirty days loss of gain time. Do not pass “GO.”
It snowballed from there. I went to lockup, served every day of the thirty, no “good behavior,” unlike those caught smoking pot, possessing drugs or other contraband, who got out early. The colonel told me, when I asked why, “There’s a reason for that.” Yes, it’s called retaliation.
One characteristic of Normans is that we fight. We’ve been fighting for over a thousand years of recorded history. It doesn’t matter if we’re outnumbered. A hundred Norman knights on horseback attacked and scattered ten thousand Saracen (Muslims) foot soldiers besieging a city in Sicily on the way back from the Crusades, a long time ago. I once fought eight attackers to a draw at Raiford in my much-younger days. But all I had to fight these false charges was my pen, and they took that!
I fought and fought, on paper, lost every battle (of course), and finally filed a lawsuit in the circuit court in Leon County, the state capital. Once you get out of the prison decision chain (denied, denied, denied) and into judicial review, one’s chances of receiving a fair hearing are increased.
What else could the prison officials do to me, to fire another arrow, now that my appeal war is in the hands of the court? Punitive transfer!
My neighbor double-checked with the guard. He came back. “It’s you,” he said.
Just what I suspected. The guard had made a mistake, woke up the wrong guy. I packed.
We’d been hearing about it for weeks, even months. One dorm was falling apart, collapsing, had been condemned, and 150 prisoners had to be sent elsewhere before Thanksgiving. Like the tomato fields on the side of the road, it was “U-PICK-EM.” The very people who’d retaliated against me were the ones who picked the 150 chosen to go. The word was that they were taking the opportunity to get rid of all the “troublemakers.” I knew my time there was short.
A “punitive transfer” can usually be identified by certain characteristics. Traditionally, it is accomplished by putting a prisoner on a bus and shipping him to a distant, less-desirable prison much farther from his family and loved ones. Not only does that get the troublemaker out of their hair, but it also punishes him by imposing physical and financial hardships on those who would visit him. In this economy of foreclosures, unemployment and prohibitive travel expenses, the possibility of aging and infirm loved ones making difficult treks to distant prisons are greatly reduced, effectively punishing the prisoner’s family members, too, who are only guilty of caring about their loved one in prison and wanting to support and reassure him to keep him connected to the “outside” world.
A second characteristic of a punitive transfer is that it was unrequested. There is a procedure in the prison rules for requesting a “good adjustment transfer” to the prison of one’s choice. Maintain a clean record, behave yourself, don’t get in trouble, work hard, earn “gain time” each month, participate in programs, and the prison authorities will approve you to go to a better prison, usually closer to one’s family or visitors.
That is a great incentive for good behavior and positive accomplishments. “Give me a year of hard work and I’ll transfer you wherever you want.” We’ve all been told that. Some favorable prisons with good vocational programs, education, or paying jobs (PRIDE Prison Industries), have long waiting lists of a couple of years to get there.
Not so for “punitive transfer,” however. Few if any want to go to some distant prison out in the boondocks, far from the major population centers, unless they live down the road. I had been previously approved to go to Sumter C.I., near Bushnell, forty miles from my family. No more. The defendants in my court case made the decision for me. They didn’t like seeing me in the visiting park each week with my loved ones. “Let’s ship him to Alabama,” they most likely said, gleefully. “That’ll teach him.”
The third and most crucial characteristic in this anatomy of a punitive transfer is that it is retaliatory in nature. It punishes a prisoner for some act on his part. In my case, it is perfectly clear. They were offended by the KKK prison guard article. They retaliated by concocting false disciplinary charges and throwing me in solitary confinement. I responded by filing formal complaints and appeals to higher authorities, as the law says I am entitled to do. The Bill of Rights, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guarantees several rights to all citizens, freedom of speech, and the right to redress grievances to the government –to officially complain of government actions— among them.
Even prisoners are guaranteed these rights, the freedom to pursue legal remedies without fear of reprisals by government officials. Think again.
Reprisals and retaliation have a “chilling effect” on prisoners, who already suffer hardships and denials of “due process” by the very nature of their incarceration. The message is clear to all—complain at your own risk, see what happened to him?—it will happen to you.
Former D.O.C. Inspector General Dave Brierton once said, “Prisoners are put in prison as punishment, not for punishment.” That statement was in response to an investigation into abuses and brutality by guards at Florida State Prison. Brierton understood that being in prison was the punishment, and the guards’ jobs weren’t to inflict their own brands of additional punishment as they saw it.
Chained in leg irons, carrying heavy bags of my court documents, I stumbled onto the crowded, rickety prison transport bus with 45 of my fellow prisoners. Who were they? The vast majority were Jamaican, Latino, and Miami ghetto prison gang members, drug dealers, and strong-arm robbers who preyed on weaker prisoners. One older white prisoner was infamous for having castrated himself with a razor blade years before. The monthly testosterone shots he got at medical resulted in occasional rages and assaults, keeping him in and out of lockup, an obviously mentally-ill person. Get rid of him. Another transferee was a mentally-deficient younger man whose sole possession was a pair of flip-flops he carried in his back pocket. Not a toothbrush, nor a pair of socks. He helped carry one of my heavier bags, since his hands were free. And then there was me, the troublemaker.
The first question the prison gang members asked me was, “What are you doing on the bus with us?” They knew why they were being transferred. “Norman, you never get in trouble. Why did they get you?”
I explained that I had filed a lawsuit against the administration. “Oh—okay.” That explained it. They knew the drill.
That was Thursday. The occupants of the Friday and Monday transport buses were mostly those who had been filing institutional grievances, one of them a man with hepatitis C, Crohn’s disease, and other highly infectious terminal illnesses who complained about being assigned to the kitchen. I didn’t want him in there, either. Ship him. One thing about their strategy—ship out everyone who filed complaints and the assistant wardens’ workload drastically diminish, not that they have a lot to do anyway. For the past several months, a dozen or so “officials” from the warden down to the assistant wardens, colonel, majors, classification officers, and others spent one day a week going into each housing area “shaking down,” (searching bunks and lockers), and supposedly “inspecting” each dorm, ranking them in an arbitrary order of feeding. What a waste of taxpayers’ money! Close to a million dollars in annual payroll, and they are going around doing the dorm officers’ jobs for them.
Who was running the prison while the entire administration was confiscating extra rolls of toilet paper from lockers? The secretaries! Fire the administrators, Governor Rick Scott, and let the secretaries run the prison! They’re doing it already.
That’s what I was up against at Tomoka. The truth can be told at last. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the reprisals and retaliations are over. They have telephones, and can easily call their friends at other prisons and ask them to continue the process for them. Hopefully, by illuminating the tactics, that will lesson the chances of more adverse actions. Or maybe not.
The law says that once a plaintiff makes allegations of reprisal, backed up by specific details and facts, the burden shifts to the defendants to prove that they would have taken the same disciplinary actions in the absence of the constitutionally--protected activity. That’s a legalistic way of asking would they still have locked me up if I hadn’t written the KKK article two years before, or punitively transferred me later? The answer seems clear—no. Everything proceeded from the constitutionally-protected activity. If I were a functionally-illiterate prisoner, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
That’s the way it is in prison in Florida. Stay tuned for further developments.
Charlie
ANATOMY OF A PUNITIVE PRISON TRANSFER
You heard the news. On Thursday, November 18, 2010, at 2:30 AM, I was awakened by the little, bald-headed, myopic prisoner in the next bunk telling me he was being transferred.
“You? Are you sure?” I asked. “Did you put in for a transfer?”
“No. I only have two months left before I go home.”
That didn’t sound right. I was still groggy, having been awakened from a dream about – I couldn’t remember. You know how dreams are. But I told him he should double-check with the guard, to make sure. I had a sneaking suspicion they’d mistakenly awakened my neighbor in bunk 116, when they meant to wake me up. I’d been fighting the prison warden and his minions at Tomoka C.I. (Daytona Beach, Florida) since the previous February, when the self-righteous mailroom clerk informed me she had confiscated a book , Wordsmith 2010, an anthology of award-winning short stories, essays, and poems, published annually by the Tampa Writers Alliance, mailed to me.
Why was the book confiscated? She said she’d read the article I’d written, and felt it was “a threat to security.” A threat to security? How could that be? The article in question, “To Protect the Guilty,” was a 2400 word excerpt from the “Prison Diary Project” sponsored by the Anne Frank Center USA in New York City, in 2008, in conjunction with the PEN American Center’s Prison Writing Program. That particular essay—a memoir—recounted my negative experiences with Ku Klux Klan (KKK) prison guards at a North Florida prison several years before. I couldn’t imagine how that could be construed as a threat to security. The recollection was from years before, at a distant, unnamed prison, and involved unnamed guards who had retaliated against me in retribution for my perceived insults to the character and intelligence of KKK members, prison guards or otherwise. Hmmm…perhaps she was in the women’s auxiliary of the Klan, the little women who sewed up the sheets and pillowcases into those white robes and pointed hats worn by the menfolk as they danced around a burning cross in a cow pasture, reminiscing about the good old days, when they were the masters and the slaves answered “yassuh” and “nahsuh” to the overseers as they hoed those endless rows of cotton.
Word came down a few days later that “The warden wants your ass in jail!” The mailroom clerk had gotten the formal complaint I’d filed about the improper confiscation, had taken the book to the warden, who read the KKK memoir and was offended by it, too. Hmmm…why was he offended? Had I touched a sensitive nerve? How deep did the KKK roots go in the Florida prison system? With the head of the 30,000-plus employee DOC being a black former police chief in Tallahassee, the state capital, one would think that any prison employees who professed white supremacist, racist organization links would keep their heads down, maintain a low profile, not draw attention to themselves. But no, they couldn’t resist the impulse to retaliate against the messenger, the prisoner who talked about them, the urge to strike back was too strong. And they did.
The offended warden ordered his subordinate to write a bogus disciplinary report against me for multiple unwarranted “mail regulations violations,” for violating the strictures against advertising for a pen pal (never did, don’t have any pen pals), running a business while incarcerated (absolutely false), entering contests and sweepstakes (nope-not even a Saturday night Powerball ticket), and commercially advertising for money, goods, and services (they should have checked my account—the court found me indigent, a fancy word for “poor”). Never happened. Didn’t matter.
They call prison disciplinary hearings “Kangaroo Courts” for a reason. I don’t know why Kangaroos have such animosity toward us, but the two kangaroos who presided ever the two hearings I had refused to listen to a word I said, as I was standing against the far wall with my hands cuffed behind my back. I presented evidence refuting the false charges, and requested staff witnesses who could verify my statements. Denied without any reason. Guilty. Thirty days in solitary confinement, thirty days loss of gain time. Do not pass “GO.”
It snowballed from there. I went to lockup, served every day of the thirty, no “good behavior,” unlike those caught smoking pot, possessing drugs or other contraband, who got out early. The colonel told me, when I asked why, “There’s a reason for that.” Yes, it’s called retaliation.
One characteristic of Normans is that we fight. We’ve been fighting for over a thousand years of recorded history. It doesn’t matter if we’re outnumbered. A hundred Norman knights on horseback attacked and scattered ten thousand Saracen (Muslims) foot soldiers besieging a city in Sicily on the way back from the Crusades, a long time ago. I once fought eight attackers to a draw at Raiford in my much-younger days. But all I had to fight these false charges was my pen, and they took that!
I fought and fought, on paper, lost every battle (of course), and finally filed a lawsuit in the circuit court in Leon County, the state capital. Once you get out of the prison decision chain (denied, denied, denied) and into judicial review, one’s chances of receiving a fair hearing are increased.
What else could the prison officials do to me, to fire another arrow, now that my appeal war is in the hands of the court? Punitive transfer!
My neighbor double-checked with the guard. He came back. “It’s you,” he said.
Just what I suspected. The guard had made a mistake, woke up the wrong guy. I packed.
We’d been hearing about it for weeks, even months. One dorm was falling apart, collapsing, had been condemned, and 150 prisoners had to be sent elsewhere before Thanksgiving. Like the tomato fields on the side of the road, it was “U-PICK-EM.” The very people who’d retaliated against me were the ones who picked the 150 chosen to go. The word was that they were taking the opportunity to get rid of all the “troublemakers.” I knew my time there was short.
A “punitive transfer” can usually be identified by certain characteristics. Traditionally, it is accomplished by putting a prisoner on a bus and shipping him to a distant, less-desirable prison much farther from his family and loved ones. Not only does that get the troublemaker out of their hair, but it also punishes him by imposing physical and financial hardships on those who would visit him. In this economy of foreclosures, unemployment and prohibitive travel expenses, the possibility of aging and infirm loved ones making difficult treks to distant prisons are greatly reduced, effectively punishing the prisoner’s family members, too, who are only guilty of caring about their loved one in prison and wanting to support and reassure him to keep him connected to the “outside” world.
A second characteristic of a punitive transfer is that it was unrequested. There is a procedure in the prison rules for requesting a “good adjustment transfer” to the prison of one’s choice. Maintain a clean record, behave yourself, don’t get in trouble, work hard, earn “gain time” each month, participate in programs, and the prison authorities will approve you to go to a better prison, usually closer to one’s family or visitors.
That is a great incentive for good behavior and positive accomplishments. “Give me a year of hard work and I’ll transfer you wherever you want.” We’ve all been told that. Some favorable prisons with good vocational programs, education, or paying jobs (PRIDE Prison Industries), have long waiting lists of a couple of years to get there.
Not so for “punitive transfer,” however. Few if any want to go to some distant prison out in the boondocks, far from the major population centers, unless they live down the road. I had been previously approved to go to Sumter C.I., near Bushnell, forty miles from my family. No more. The defendants in my court case made the decision for me. They didn’t like seeing me in the visiting park each week with my loved ones. “Let’s ship him to Alabama,” they most likely said, gleefully. “That’ll teach him.”
The third and most crucial characteristic in this anatomy of a punitive transfer is that it is retaliatory in nature. It punishes a prisoner for some act on his part. In my case, it is perfectly clear. They were offended by the KKK prison guard article. They retaliated by concocting false disciplinary charges and throwing me in solitary confinement. I responded by filing formal complaints and appeals to higher authorities, as the law says I am entitled to do. The Bill of Rights, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guarantees several rights to all citizens, freedom of speech, and the right to redress grievances to the government –to officially complain of government actions— among them.
Even prisoners are guaranteed these rights, the freedom to pursue legal remedies without fear of reprisals by government officials. Think again.
Reprisals and retaliation have a “chilling effect” on prisoners, who already suffer hardships and denials of “due process” by the very nature of their incarceration. The message is clear to all—complain at your own risk, see what happened to him?—it will happen to you.
Former D.O.C. Inspector General Dave Brierton once said, “Prisoners are put in prison as punishment, not for punishment.” That statement was in response to an investigation into abuses and brutality by guards at Florida State Prison. Brierton understood that being in prison was the punishment, and the guards’ jobs weren’t to inflict their own brands of additional punishment as they saw it.
Chained in leg irons, carrying heavy bags of my court documents, I stumbled onto the crowded, rickety prison transport bus with 45 of my fellow prisoners. Who were they? The vast majority were Jamaican, Latino, and Miami ghetto prison gang members, drug dealers, and strong-arm robbers who preyed on weaker prisoners. One older white prisoner was infamous for having castrated himself with a razor blade years before. The monthly testosterone shots he got at medical resulted in occasional rages and assaults, keeping him in and out of lockup, an obviously mentally-ill person. Get rid of him. Another transferee was a mentally-deficient younger man whose sole possession was a pair of flip-flops he carried in his back pocket. Not a toothbrush, nor a pair of socks. He helped carry one of my heavier bags, since his hands were free. And then there was me, the troublemaker.
The first question the prison gang members asked me was, “What are you doing on the bus with us?” They knew why they were being transferred. “Norman, you never get in trouble. Why did they get you?”
I explained that I had filed a lawsuit against the administration. “Oh—okay.” That explained it. They knew the drill.
That was Thursday. The occupants of the Friday and Monday transport buses were mostly those who had been filing institutional grievances, one of them a man with hepatitis C, Crohn’s disease, and other highly infectious terminal illnesses who complained about being assigned to the kitchen. I didn’t want him in there, either. Ship him. One thing about their strategy—ship out everyone who filed complaints and the assistant wardens’ workload drastically diminish, not that they have a lot to do anyway. For the past several months, a dozen or so “officials” from the warden down to the assistant wardens, colonel, majors, classification officers, and others spent one day a week going into each housing area “shaking down,” (searching bunks and lockers), and supposedly “inspecting” each dorm, ranking them in an arbitrary order of feeding. What a waste of taxpayers’ money! Close to a million dollars in annual payroll, and they are going around doing the dorm officers’ jobs for them.
Who was running the prison while the entire administration was confiscating extra rolls of toilet paper from lockers? The secretaries! Fire the administrators, Governor Rick Scott, and let the secretaries run the prison! They’re doing it already.
That’s what I was up against at Tomoka. The truth can be told at last. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the reprisals and retaliations are over. They have telephones, and can easily call their friends at other prisons and ask them to continue the process for them. Hopefully, by illuminating the tactics, that will lesson the chances of more adverse actions. Or maybe not.
The law says that once a plaintiff makes allegations of reprisal, backed up by specific details and facts, the burden shifts to the defendants to prove that they would have taken the same disciplinary actions in the absence of the constitutionally--protected activity. That’s a legalistic way of asking would they still have locked me up if I hadn’t written the KKK article two years before, or punitively transferred me later? The answer seems clear—no. Everything proceeded from the constitutionally-protected activity. If I were a functionally-illiterate prisoner, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
That’s the way it is in prison in Florida. Stay tuned for further developments.
Charlie
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