Psychologist sues California prisons over anti-LGBT harassment

Housing unit at Vacaville

Prisons are not known as bastions of healing energy. One of the challenges faced by prison clinicians in the violent and hypermasculine culture of prison is how to uphold their professional ethics when they witness abuse of prisoners by staff. Psychologists may feel internally conflicted, but they rarely file formal complaints that might jeopardize their careers or even their personal safety.

So a lawsuit brought by a California psychologist against the Department of Corrections for alleged harassment of sexual minority prisoners is both rare and potentially groundbreaking.

Lori Jespersen, who identifies as “an openly genderqueer lesbian,” states that she was harassed and ostracized after she began blowing the whistle on rampant mistreatment of transgender and gay prisoners at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.

Examples of prisoner abuse alleged in her lawsuit, filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, included an instance in which three prison employees “outed” one of Dr. Jespersen's transgender patients on Facebook, providing the prisoner's name and location, identifying her as a mental health patient, and referring to her as “he/she” and “that thing.”

In another alleged incident, a prison employee left a door unlocked while a gay prisoner of color was showering, enabling another prisoner who had been assaulting sexual minority prisoners to enter the shower and assault him. When Dr. Jespersen filed a report under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), she says it was never investigated. 

Dr. Jespersen alleges that due to her efforts to call attention to the abuse of LBGT prisoners, she was subjected to constant name-calling and threats of violence, including being locked alone on a housing unit with dangerous rapists. She stated the harassment caused her anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance and weight gain, and that she now “lives in constant fear of violence and harassment at work and at home.”

Transgender prisoner at Vacaville

Dr. Jespersen, 41, went to work for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) in 2008, the same year she became licensed. The following year, she transferred to the Medical Facility at Vacaville, which has specialized programming for transgender prisoners.  

No safe haven?

If true, her allegations are especially disturbing in that Vacaville has long been regarded as a haven for transgender prisoners. In 1999, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, it became one of only two prisons in the country with specialized medical services for trans prisoners, the majority of whom were infected with HIV.

Dr. Jespersen’s attorney, Jennifer Orthwein, a former forensic psychologist whose practice focuses on gender and sexual orientation discrimination, said that the main goal of the lawsuit is to bring attention to the issue of systemic discrimination, in order to compel a cultural change.

“This case really has the potential to shine a spotlight on what is the key barrier to making progress to protecting vulnerable inmates in these facilities,” echoed Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, in an interview with public radio’s The California Report, “and that is this prison culture of silence and retaliation.”  

Trans prisoner at CDCR, UC Irvine study

Transgender prisoners are more than 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than the general prison population, according to a 2009 study by hate crimes scholar Valerie Jenness at UC Irvine’s Department of Criminology. About 59 percent of transgender prisoners in California reported being sexually assaulted, compared to less than 5 percent of other prisoners. 

Allegations of prisoner mistreatment are not new for California’s massive prison system, which has been under federal oversight for more than a decade due to chronic shortcomings in the treatment of mentally ill and low-functioning prisoners.

The lawsuit also comes at the same moment as a major power shift in the direction of the California Medical Facility. Under the state’s 2017-2018 budget, the intensive 24-hour inpatient psychiatric program at Vacaville and two other prisons has been shifted from the Department of State Hospitals to the Department of Corrections, which has been awarded an extra $254 million and nearly 2,000 new jobs to run them. The shift has caused consternation among mental health personnel, who worry about the quality of psychiatric care and the potential for increased suicides under CDCR management.

Prison psychologist awarded $1 million over racial bias

Although it is rare for prison psychologists to engage in whistle-blowing or file lawsuits, the last time such a case went to trial, the jury awarded the psychologist $945,480 in damages for racial discrimination, a judgment that was upheld unanimously on appeal.  

That case was especially disturbing, in that by all accounts Terralyn Renfro was a highly dedicated clinician who went above and beyond her formal duties in her desire to rehabilitate the men in the California prisons where she worked as a contract psychologist. Indeed, it was her very zeal that apparently cost her her career.

According to testimony at her trial, her supervisors did not approve of her attempts to facilitate prisoner self-help groups. They were especially upset that she had set up a self-help library, which became very popular with prisoners at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione.

The manner of Dr. Renfro's firing was humiliating. Without warning, a prison bureaucrat walked up to her one day and handed her a termination notice giving her 75 minutes to leave the prison or be physically ousted by guards. He stayed by her side and escorted her out the gates and to her car. A “DO NOT HIRE” note was placed in her file, so she was repeatedly rejected for jobs at other state prisons. No one ever explained who placed the note, or why.

The Third District appellate court upheld the jury’s nearly $1 million verdict against the prison system for racial discrimination in the firing. Dr. Renfro was the only African American psychologist at Mule Creek Prison at the time.

“Discrimination does not always present as in a scene from To Kill a Mockingbird or The Birth of a Nation,” the appellate court noted. “Even the most racially intolerant manager will often appreciate the need for circumspection, so smoking guns are rarely found.... [T]he jury drew a reasonable inference of discrimination from a pattern of deception, obfuscation, and mistreatment.”

But from the information in the record, the larger impetus for Dr. Renfro’s firing was her zealousness in prioritizing the interests of the prisoners in her care over those of the bureaucrats to whom she reported. The same behavior, perhaps, of which Dr. Jespersen may ultimately be deemed guilty.

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The complaint in Jespersen vs. CDCR is online HERE.  The appellate opinion in Renfro vs. CDCR is HERE.

Piper Kerman presents 3-point plan for prison reform

It can be fortunate for the world when a middle-class person with a social conscience gets hauled off to prison.

After spending a year in a women's prison, Piper Kerman wrote the bestselling memoir Orange is the New Black, which spawned a hit Netflix series that has galvanized the public. Now, she is jet-setting around the country, raising awareness on the U.S. prison crisis among people who have given it nary a thought up until now.

Last night, San Francisco's intelligentsia came out en masse to hear the celebrity ex-prisoner at a City Arts and Lectures benefit for an innovative university program at San Quentin Prison. The venue was the splendid Nourse Theater, a newly renovated, 1,800-seat Beaux-Arts palace that had been shuttered for decades.

Kerman did not disappoint. She remained poised and affable as her interviewer, author Nancy Mullane, peppered her with a series of alternately prurient and silly questions about sex in prison, her life as a 10-year-old, and similar drivel. It was disappointing yet illuminating to see Mullane -- who should know better, given her recent interviews with ex-convicts for her book Life After Murder -- fritter away a golden opportunity. Instead of helping Kerman express her critical message, she ogled and dehumanized her guest as an exotic "other," ironically showcasing the very disrespect of ex-convicts that Kerman has dedicated herself to combating.

It was not until the informed and perceptive audience's turn to ask questions that Kerman got the air space to expound on her vision for reforming America's prisons, which are bursting at the seams with 2.4-million members of this wealthy nation's neglected underclass.

Three transformative steps we could take to restore rationality, in Kerman's view:

1. Reform draconian sentencing laws. The harms outweigh the benefits of sentences longer than five years, especially for nonviolent crimes. Reentry becomes more difficult, harming not just the prisoner but his or her family, community and larger society.


2. Provide adequate defense services. If everyone was afforded access to zealous representation, a far smaller proportion would end up in prison. Public defender offices throughout the nation are stretched too thin, leading to unjust outcomes for the poor.


3. Stop criminalizing children. Paying attention to at-risk children and adolescents makes more sense than waiting until they have become hardened criminals and then warehousing them. And, stressed Kerman, children should never, ever be sent to adult prisons. 

A perfect agenda.

Taylor Schilling plays "Piper Chapman" in the TV series

(Of course, it assumes a degree of rationality that is absent from contemporary U.S. policies, and it is also at odds with the massive privatization movement that relies on prisoner bodies for its profits.)

Kerman also answered a couple of questions that I had been curious about, including her motivation for writing the book, and what she thought of the TV show that radically distorts her memoir.

Kerman said she is not disturbed by the liberties taken by Jenji Kohan in writing the Netflix adaptation. Going to prison is an introspective experience that can only be captured in writing, whereas a TV drama relies on interpersonal conflict to keep its audience's attention, explained Kerman, herself a theater major in college.

From Season Two, premiering June 6

In her memoir, Kerman projects herself as a typical privileged person. The young Smith College graduate fell into a relationship with an older woman who turned out to be a drug smuggler, and ended up smuggling a suitcase full of drug money across international borders. Years later, a federal indictment was handed down, and she landed in federal prison, an awkward setting for a young middle-class woman, and most especially a blonde.  

But the story she revealed last night was a bit more nuanced, and helps to explain how she ended up in her present role as a voice for justice. She was raised in a progressive, feminist household, with two teachers for parents. This likely equipped her both to get along well and make connections in prison, as she did, and to be outraged and galvanized by the inequities she witnessed.

She wrote her memoir neither as an exercise in catharsis (she didn't even keep a journal in prison, she confessed) nor to share with other prisoners and ex-prisoners (although she is happy that many of them can relate), but with the aim of reaching a mainstream audience heretofore ignorant of prison realities.

In that, she has undoubtedly succeeded beyond her wildest expectations.

* * * * *

Thanks to Lorelei for providing helpful feedback. For more background, and my reaction to the book and TV series, see my Jan. 20 post, Orange is the New Black – Read the Book!

(c) Copyright Karen Franklin 2014 - All rights reserved

Orange is the New Black -- Read the book!

Taylor Schilling plays Piper Kerman in the TV series

Hollywood prison scenes are so revolting. Most revolting are the depictions of women’s prisons. They superimpose onto female prisoners the worst stereotype of male prisoners as hulking, sexually aggressive brutes. And, even more so than for male prisons, the public has little direct information to counter this distorted image.

Blasting apart this image is Piper Kerman’s outstanding memoir. Detailing her year in a minimum-security federal camp, Orange is the New Black is a first-rate effort to educate the public about the realities of women’s prison.

Promo for blockbuster Netflix spinoff

Kerman tiptoed into prison with the trepidation one might expect of a white, college-educated woman thrown into the lion’s den. But instead of prisoner-on-prisoner predation, she found a sense of community, where women survived by forging family-like relationships among their “tribes.” The greatest dangers in prison came not at the hands of other women, Kerman found, but from the agents of bureaucracy who wielded the threat of the SHU* (Security Housing Unit) or loss of good-time credits for any petty misstep.

I found myself grateful that, once in a blue moon, a middle-class person with a social conscience is sent to prison. Kerman’s bad luck is the public’s fortune. With the overwhelming mass of prisoners voiceless, who else can speak the truth and be heard? Kerman is the everywoman; through recognizing ourselves in her, we feel the prisoner’s plight as our own.

Her sense of not belonging among the underclass was shared by correctional officers and prisoners alike, who more than once asked the blond-haired, blue-eyed Smith College graduate: “What’s someone like you doing in a place like this?!”

Laverne Cox as trans prisoner Sophia Burset

Don’t think that if you’ve seen the blockbuster TV spinoff, you know the story. While colorful, the series is by comparison shallow and exploitive. Netflix does a public service by counteracting Hollywood’s crude stereotypes, portraying incarcerated women as diverse human beings, but the semi-fictional show’s biggest accomplishment may be to steer intelligent viewers toward the book. (As an aside, it has also given greater visibility to the issues of transgender women of color, with trans actress Laverne Cox outstanding in the role of a transwoman prisoner.)

For a real-life visual representation of the lot of the woman prisoner, I recommend the documentary Crime After Crime. The story of battered woman Debbie Peagler’s struggle for justice is far more heart-wrenching than Kerman’s memoir, but both dramatize how a soulless bureaucratic machine chews up and spits out human potential.

The real-life Piper Kerman

Kerman is a fluid story-teller, and her saga is intrinsically gripping. But, as writer Mary Karr points out in a recent interview, the "through-line" of an effective memoir is the character’s transformation. Seeing herself through the eyes of other women in the bleak prison milieu, Kerman realizes virtues in herself that she never knew. And she confronts for the first time her own complicity in her comrades' oppression, through her former role as an international heroin smuggler.

The sincerity of Kerman’s transformation is evident in her life since leaving prison nine years ago. She serves on the board of the non-profit prison reform group Women’s Prison Association and does public education on the plight of women prisoners -- especially the two-thirds who are mothers -- through influential media outlets such as National Public Radio. As she writes in a recent op-ed in the New York Times:  

"Harshly punitive drug laws and diminishing community mental health resources have landed many women in prison who simply do not belong there, often for shockingly long sentences. What is priceless about JusticeHome, however, is that it is working not only to rehabilitate women but to keep families together -- which we know is an effective way to reduce crime and to stop a cycle that can condemn entire families to the penal system."

* * * * *

*I listened to the audiobook version. The reader was quite good. Her only false steps came in reading the word "SHU": She read it aloud as "S-H-U," instead of the way it is actually pronounced in prison ("shoe"). The SHU is too ubiquitous to merit three syllables at every utterance.

(c) Copyright Karen Franklin 2014 - All rights reserved

California prisons careening closer to cliff

For a minute there, it looked like California's prisons were on the verge of positive reforms. But the current situation in the state's massive prison system -- one of the largest in the world -- is far from encouraging. It's been a kaleidoscope of bad news lately.

Chemical weapons

Private prison company annual report (credit Huff Post)

Guards have been videotaped tossing chemical grenades and pumping pepper spray into the cells of psychotic prisoners, some of them screaming and delirious. In one case, the prisoner's offense was not taking his psych meds; an asthmatic prisoner was sprayed for refusing to leave a holding cage, according to AP news coverage. A federal judge will rule next week on whether the public has a right to see the disturbing videos as part of a legal case challenging abusive discipline of mentally ill prisoners and inadequate mental health care for prisoners on death row. An expert observer described the chemical arsenals possessed by California guards as "shocking."

Realignment woes

Another snippet from the Correctional Corp of America

Meanwhile, things are getting worse in many of the state's 58 county jails. The state's "realignment plan," in which nonviolent offenders stay in county jails rather than going to prison, is causing lots of headaches for jails and prisoners alike. The idea was to reduce prison overcrowding while keeping prisoners closer to home and within range of reintegration services. But the plan shifts the burden onto cash-strapped counties that are ill-equipped to handle a large influx of convicts. In state prisons, convicts get yard time and some educational or vocational programming. In many jails, in contrast, they can sit in a room the size of your bathroom for five years or more. Sheriffs are complaining of a rise in violence, and forecasting a rash of lawsuits like those dogging the state prisons. According to an ACLU report, rather than reforming incarceration policies, counties are scrambling to add new jail beds. One exception is in progressive San Francisco, where jailers, prosecutors and defense attorneys alike have embraced realignment as an opportunity to create community-based alternatives to incarceration.


Hunger strike

Private prisons benefit from immigration crackdowns

After two months, prisoners ended their hunger strike over long-term isolation without any tangible victories. In a remarkable show of solidarity, the strike initially included more than 30,000 prisoners from around the state. By the end, the numbers had dwindled to about 100. The strike was called off after two legislators – Loni Hancock and Tom Ammiano -- announced they would hold public hearings into the prisoners’ complaints over the security housing units, or SHUs. Hancock said that concerns over the use and conditions of solitary confinement in California's prisons "can no longer be ignored."

Private prisons

Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, on Monday a massive private prison corporation announced that state Governor Jerry Brown had signed a deal to ship 1,400 prisoners to its private facilities. The GEO Group, formerly the infamous Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, is a Florida-based corporation that manages 96 facilities with about 73,000 beds worldwide, including in the USA, Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom.  

Click on image to visit Huffington Post infographic and related resources

The states of fiscal emergency in the public sector encourage governments to contract with private prisons that promise cost savings. But private prison corporations like Geo Group and the Corrections Corporation of America are short-sighted quick fixes. They encourage prison growth by mandating that governments guarantee them a certain minimum occupancy. It's kind of like when the American Psychological Association contracts with hotels in a convention city; if not enough psychologists rent rooms, the APA must pay the difference. In a report released this month, In the Public Interest found that nearly two-thirds of contracts between private prison companies and state and local governments included such quotas. Arizona recently paid $3 million to a prison company for failing to meet a 97 percent occupancy quota, the Huffington Post reported.  

The Post, one of the few media outlets to regularly cover this disturbing trend, has published an infographic illustrating the widespread nature of these contracts, which discourage criminal justice reform by "leaving taxpayers footing the bill for lower crime rates." As part of its coverage, the Post took a peak at annual shareholder reports of the Corrections Corp. of America that reveal its "aggressive business strategy based on building prison beds, or buying them off the government, and contracting them to government authorities." (The drop quotes in the post are just a few of the nuggets they unearthed.)

"Profits, after lining the pockets of shareholders, are used to create more beds and to lobby state and federal agencies to deliver inmates to fill them," the Post reports. "The resulting facilities can be violent and disgusting."

As one example, the Post reported on the horrendous conditions that quickly developed after the Corrections Corp. of America bought a formerly public prison in Ohio. Educational programming for prisoners and salaries of staff were slashed, violence and drug use skyrocketed, and correctional officers jumped ship en masse, leaving newcomers to run the facility. Prisoners in isolation were left to wallow in their own filth, with no access to running water or toilets.

Forensnips aplenty, forensnips galore

Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes, Everybody knows

I can't seem to get Leonard Cohen’s haunting Everybody Knows out of my mind.

Perhaps it's because I was just down in Alabama, the belly of the beast, working on a tragic case. With the highest per capita rate of executions in the United States, the Heart of Dixie State kills people for crimes that other nations punish with probation. No exaggeration. It was jarring to drive around  Montomery and see the close proximity of historic mansions to abandoned homes and decaying housing projects. The juxtaposition is fitting, as Montgomery claims the dual distinctions of being the "cradle of the Confederacy" and the "birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement."  

Montgomery, Alabama (c) Karen Franklin 2013

Or maybe it's a flashback to Elysium, in which the one percenters have left Earth’s teeming masses to rot away while they luxuriate on an idyllic orbiting satellite. The scene in the parole office, with a robot parole agent delivering a quick risk assessment and then pushing meds, is worth the price of admission, although the film is marred by interminable hand-to-hand combat scenes and a ridiculous Hollywood ending.

David Miranda, held hostage
by British security forces

Or, it could be because I’m still riled up over the British government's abuse of David Miranda. He is the Brazilian partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald (think Edward Snowden). In what can only be called an outrageous effort to intimidate journalists, the Brits detained Miranda at Heathrow Airport for nine solid hours -- the maximum allowed under the British Terrorism Act -- before finally releasing him sans his laptop, cell phone and camera. Under the Terrorism Act, he was not entitled to counsel, nor to decline to cooperate. I sure hope it backfires and incenses journalists; it certainly fired up USA Today columnist Rem Rieder (whose column I highly recommend).

* * * * *

I feel bad about the dearth of posts recently. It's been a hectic period. I'll try to make up for my lapse by packing this post with lots of links to forensic psychology and criminology news and views from the past few weeks:

Evidence-based justice: Corrupted memory

Nature magazine's profile of Elizabeth Loftus and her decades-long crusade to expose flaws in eyewitness testimony is worth a gander.

Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch

New research published in the journal Brain indicates that psychopaths do not lack empathy, as is often claimed. Rather, they can switch it on and off at will. The study, out of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, is freely available online. BBC also has coverage.  

The demographics of sexting

Sexting is becoming increasingly commonplace. But practices and meanings differ by gender, relationship and sexual identity, according to a new article, also available online, in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

Brainwashed video discussion

New York Times columnist David Brooks just interviewed psychiatrist Sally Satel and psychologist Scott Lilenfield about their new book, Brainwashed, which is getting quite a bit of media buzz. The book is a workmanlike, if a bit superficial, exploration of the allure of "mindless neuroscience." If you’ve got 65 minutes, I recommend watching the video discussion.

Prison news: Hunger strike, juveniles, the elderly, women

On the prison front, a lot has been going on. California prisoners are into Day 50 or so of their hunger strike over solitary housing (a condition that the Department of Corrections denies, despite many men being kept in segregation units for years and even decades) and other cruel conditions. With prisoners' health deteriorating, a court order has been issued allowing force feeding if necessary to forestall deaths. Mainstream media reporting has been minimal, but at least Al Jazeera's got you covered.  

Even more local to me, a lawsuit has been filed over solitary confinement of juveniles in Contra Costa County. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, accuses county officials of flouting state laws mandating that juvenile detention facilities be supportive environments designed for rehabilitation.

Meanwhile, NBC news is sounding an alarm over the increasing number of elderly people in U.S. prisons. NBC sounds mostly worried about the cost to taxpayers of prisons teeming with upwards of 400,000 elderly prisoners by the year 2030. Read ithttp://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/29/.UeV62HppQL8.twitter, and weep. 

Piper Kerman, author of the memoir Orange Is the New Black that's become a trendy Netflix series, is also sounding an alarm. In a New York Times op-ed, she writes about a federal plan to ease overcrowding in men's prisons by shipping about 1,000 women from Connecticut down to Alabama and points beyond, where they will be even more estranged from their families. As Kerman notes: "For many families these new locations might as well be the moon." I recommend her thoughtful essay on alternatives for low-risk women prisoners. 

In a more promising development, the U.S. Justice Department has announced efforts to curtail the stiff drug sentences that have caused much of this overcrowding in the first place. The U.S. prison system is so bloated, so costly, and so irrational, that even conservatives are calling for reform. Better late than never, I suppose.

By the way, Florida has executed John Errol Ferguson, the prisoner whose controversial case I blogged about earlier this year, whose competency was contested in part because of his insistence that he was the "Prince of God." The American Bar Association had filed an amicus brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify the standard for competency for execution being applied in the case. 

Sex offender news

In yet another in a series of registry-facilitated vigilante attacks, a South Carolina man has been arrested for killing a sex offender and his wife in the mistaken belief that the man was a child molester. At the same time, there are signs that overzealous laws that contribute to such stigmatization are being scrutinized more closely. For example, a federal judge has struck down a Colorado city's ordinance restricting where registered sex offenders can live, ruling that it conflicts with a state law requiring parolees to be reintegrated into society. An appellate panel in North Carolina has also struck down a law that banned registered sex offenders from using social media sites. The state Court of Appeals agreed with the challenger that the law violated his Constitutional rights to free speech and freedom of association. 

Dispute over expert witness credentials

Finally, there's a big brouhaha in South Dakota over the credentials of a psychologist who frequently testifies as an expert witness in child custody cases. The credentials of the widely respected psychologist, Thomas Price, became an issue during a child custody dispute. It was ascertained that he had earned his PhD in behavioral medicine from an online degree mill called Greenwich University on Norfolk Island, Australia, that was subsequently shuttered by the Australian government. According to an expert on diploma mills quoted by the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, degree mills often adopt the names of respected English universities. Price's resumé says he earned a Ph.D. in behavioral medicine from Greenwich University, without noting the Norfolk Island location. "Typically," notes the article, "people don’t get caught using an unaccredited degree until they assume a high-profile position ... or they do something that causes another person to research their backgrounds…. If you stay under the radar, you can get by."

Science blogger

Finally (this time I really mean it), for those of you who are into offbeat science, I've just added a new blog, Mike the Mad Biologist, to my blog roll (which can be found a little ways down the right column of my blog site). Mike is prolific and wide-ranging in his news links, with a creative spin. 

Hat tips to Jane, Terry, Kirk and others

Summer reading, and more

My regrets for the dearth of blog posts as of late. I am feverishly working to prepare all of my upcoming seminars and trainings (while keeping up with forensic case work!). I hope to see some of you next month, either in Honolulu (at my APA workshop) or at Bond University in Queensland, where I will be hosting seminars and a forensic training. I hope to bring you blog posts about these and other experiences, as time allows. In the meantime, here are a few snippets and recommendations for summer reading:

High Price: A neuroscientist’s journey of self-discovery that challenges everything you know about drugs and society 

You have probably heard of the rat studies in which rats -- allowed to press a lever to get either drugs or food -- will repeatedly choose drugs, thereby starving themselves. What you may not know is that those rats are locked in little cages all by themselves, with no friends or partners and nothing to do. Give them a pleasant life -- buddies to pal around with, cuties to hook up with, and games to play -- and they don't get strung out. It would be like running a drug study on prisoners in solitary confinement, and then claiming that your results generalize to the free world.

This is one of the more illuminating examples in Harvard psychology professor Carl Hart's new page-turner, High Price. Hart's goal is to show that current U.S. drug policy is more about racism than brain science. Unusually, his vehicle for this message is a memoir rather than an academic text. It's a courageous memoir, in which he describes his own background and upbringing in a rough section of Miami, Florida. The book is weighted more toward autobiography than the scientific research, but is quite intriguing nonetheless, illuminating the chance factors that shape our lives, and the destructive impact of drug laws on African American communities in particular.

Hart also describes studies by him and his colleagues at Columbia, in which they recruited cocaine and methamphetamine addicts to live in a lab for a couple of weeks, and get paid to take high-quality drugs. Not a bad deal. Again contrary to the dominant messages about zombie drug fiends (think of those fried-egg ads about "your brain on drugs"), the addicts made quite rational choices about whether and when to take drugs, thereby highlighting the potential for rehabilitation.

My Amazon review is HERE; video interviews with the author can be viewed HERE.

The other Wes Moore: One name, two fates

Speaking of the chance factors in life (and also drugs, race and memoirs), I have just been listening to the audio version of a fascinating book about two young Black men with the same name and similar backgrounds, both with ties to the same troubled section of drug-plagued Baltimore (think The Wire). One grew up to become a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran, White House Fellow and business leader, while the other ended up a convicted murderer serving a life sentence for a botched jewelry-store robbery.

"The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his," Moore writes.

Moore alternates the voices to narrate the stories of both men and, by extension, "a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world."

The book is HERE. 

Don't trust your memory: New study on Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out.

(No, wait. Wrong lead. That was the one we used to play in the newsroom on boring days. We would each start a story with the dark-and-stormy-night lead, and go from there. Let me start again.)

It was New Year's Eve during your deployment in Afghanistan. Suddenly, a missile exploded. Gravel flew. Only through sheer luck was no one injured.

Surreptitiously fed information about this fictional event and then asked about it seven months later, about one out of every four Dutch soldiers in a larger study on PTSD falsely recalled experiencing the missile attack. Individuals with lower intelligence and those who experienced high arousal and more stressors on deployment were more vulnerable to believing misinformation.

It’s yet one more study in a growing body of data suggesting that we should take what people say with an enormous grain of salt -- especially in the contexts in which we forensic professionals often work, involving high-stress events and subjects with cognitive vulnerabilities.

The article, from the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, is available online (without a subscription) HERE.

Dark period in U.S. history: Widespread abuse of mentally ill prisoners documented

It has been an extraordinary three weeks in the history of the American penal system, perhaps one of the darkest periods on record. In four states, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, the systemic abuse and neglect of inmates, and especially mentally ill inmates, has been investigated, chronicled and disclosed in grim detail to the world by lawyers, government investigators and one federal judge. The conclusions are inescapable: In our zeal to dehumanize criminals we have allowed our prisons to become medieval places of unspeakable cruelty so far beyond constitutional norms that they are barely recognizable.

So begins a hard-hitting expose in the Atlantic regarding the U.S. government's refusal to investigate allegations of "grotesque abuses" of mentally ill prisoners in federal penitentiaries, in the wake of similar exposes of conditions in state and local lockups.

The informative article continues HERE.

A tale of two prison systems: Whither the future?

Group therapy, San Quentin Prison, California

California's beleaguered prison system got more bad headlines today for suppressing a report warning that prison suicide-watch practices were actually fostering suicide. The suppressed report, by a national expert on prison suicide, described suicidal prisoners being stripped of their clothes, placed in “safety smocks,” and then held for days "in dim, dirty, airless cells with unsanitized mattresses on the floor," according to today's Los Angeles Times. The horrific conditions encouraged prisoners "to declare they were no longer suicidal just to escape the holding cells. Many of them took their own lives soon after."

The state directed its consultant, Lindsay Hayes, to write a sanitized version of his report to give to a court monitor and lawyers for prisoners, according to court records reviewed by Times reporter Paige St. John. And when prisoner lawyers were nonetheless able to get a copy of the full report, which called the treatment of suicidal prisoners "punitive" and "anti-therapeutic," the state made an unsuccessful effort to have a judge order the report destroyed.

There were 32 prison suicides in California in 2012, above the national average in the United States.

Convict sunbathing on porch of his bungalow,   
Bastoy Prison (photo credit: Marco Di Lauro)

Meanwhile, more than 5,000 miles and an ocean away, sits a peaceful island prison which has not seen a single suicide in its two decades of operation. Bastoy, an island prison in Norway, with no bars or concertina fences, bills itself as "the first ecological prison in the world."

It might not seem fair to compare California prisons with those in Norway, a small and homogeneous nation with only 4,000 prisoners all told. But Norway's forward-looking penal philosophy is worth a gander. The idea is to build people up into productive citizens, rather than to tear them down. To "generate hope instead of despair" in the words of Erwin James, himself a former prison lifer in the UK who recently toured Bastoy and wrote about it for the Guardian. 

Debarking from the ferry, James found an atmosphere more akin to a religious commune than the British prisons he was accustomed to. "There is a sense of peace about the place," he wrote, describing the brightly painted wooden bungalows where the island's 115 prisoners live in groups of up to six, cooking their own meals with money earned from prison jobs and food purchased at the "well-stocked mini-supermarket."

A quick dip after work, Bastoy Prison

Norway has no death penalty or life sentences; the maximum sentence is 21 years. Prisoners can apply to Bastoy when they are down to the last five years of their sentences. They must commit to non-violence and a drug- and alcohol-free lifestyle.

Who wouldn't take a deal like that, to live in an idyllic beach resort while learning the life skills necessary to reintegrate into society? Even when the sea ice was frozen solid last winter, not a single convict walked away.

"In closed prisons we keep them locked up for some years and then let them back out, not having had any real responsibility for working or cooking," explains director Arne Nilsen, a clinical psychologist. "In the law, being sent to prison is nothing to do with putting you in a terrible prison to make you suffer. The punishment is that you lose your freedom. If we treat people like animals when they are in prison they are likely to behave like animals. Here we pay attention to you as human beings."

The proof of Norway's philosophy is in the pudding: Balstoy's re-offense rate of just 10 percent is by far the lowest in Europe. Compare that to California, where seven out of ten released prisoners bounce back into custody within three years, the highest rate in the United States.

Click on image to see 5-minute YouTube feature on Bastoy

One of the guards showing James around the island looks at him with disbelief when he tells her that prison officer training in the UK lasts only six weeks. In Norway, the training takes three years. Here in California, meanwhile, basic training lasts 16 weeks, with a focus on "effective use of force," "restraint devices" and "cell searches."

Ad for prison suicide smock

And what, pray tell, are the guards in Norway spending all of that time studying?

"There is so much to learn about the people who come to prison," the guard explains to James. "We need to try to understand how they became criminals, and then help them to change."

With a rehabilitative philosophy like that, let's just hope that Bastoy -- and not California or the UK -- represents the way of the future. After all, by treating prisoners with respect and humanity, Norway is also creating a safer world.

Hat tip: Jane

Iran hostage takes on California prison SHU's

"Free country" throwing thousands in hole for their beliefs

Shane Bauer spent 26 months in Iran's Evin Prison, four of them in solitary, after he and two fellow hikers were apprehended on the Iraqi border in 2009. Seven months after his release, he visited the segregated housing unit (SHU) at the infamous Pelican Bay Prison in his home state of California.

In Iran, his cell was twice as big as those at Pelican Bay. He slept on a mattress, rather than a thin piece of foam. And he wasn’t required to defecate at the front of his cell, in full view of guards. But, most of all, the investigative journalist noticed the lack of windows in the SHU cells:

"Without [the] windows, I wouldn't have had the sound of ravens, the rare breezes, or the drops of rain that I let wash over my face some nights. My world would have been utterly restricted to my concrete box, to watching the miniature ocean waves I made by sloshing water back and forth in a bottle; to marveling at ants; to calculating the mean, median, and mode of the tick marks on the wall; to talking to myself without realizing it. For hours, days, I fixated on the patch of sunlight cast against my wall through those barred and grated windows. When, after five weeks, my knees buckled and I fell to the ground utterly broken, sobbing and rocking to the beat of my heart, it was the patch of sunlight that brought me back. Its slow creeping against the wall reminded me that the world did in fact turn and that time was something other than the stagnant pool my life was draining into."

Bauer's investigative piece in Mother Jones is the most thoroughly documented report I have seen on the politics of long-term solitary confinement in California. The ex-hostage convincingly demonstrates that a tool supposedly created to staunch prison gang violence is being used to torture prisoners who engage in prison activism, hold Afro-centric worldviews, or simply read the wrong books.

As even prison administrators admit, only a small minority of those being held in long-term solitary confinement are classified as gang members; even fewer are gang leaders. Rather, most are so-called "gang associates." It's hard to see how a prisoner serving a lengthy term can avoid all associations with the ubiquitous prison gangs. But the evidence used to toss prisoners into long-term SHU isolation can be very thin, including possession of such written materials as:

• "Black literature" (including The Black People's Prison Survival Guide which, ironically, counsels prisoners to stay away from gang leaders)
• Publications by California Prison Focus, a prison reform group that advocates the abolition of the SHUs
• Bestsellers such as Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Machiavelli's The Prince

(A list of the types of items that can get prisoners thrown into solitary is HERE; a sample list of one prisoner's suspect materials is HERE.)


Most troubling is the lack of due process. Prisoners are not entitled to legal representation at the 20-minute hearings that decide their fate for decades. There is no judicial oversight to prevent trumped-up evidence from being introduced. Indeed, one judge ruled that it is not illegal for prison authorities to fabricate information in order to lock somebody away in solitary.

Click on image  to experience interactive SHU cell as narrated by Bauer

"Other than the inmate, there is only one person present -- the gang investigator -- and he serves as judge, jury, and prosecutor. Much of the evidence -- anything provided by informants -- is confidential and thus impossible to refute. That's what Judge Salavati [in Iran] told us after our prosecutor spun his yarn about our role in a vast American-Israeli conspiracy: There were heaps of evidence, but neither we nor our lawyer were allowed to see it."

In the wake of last year’s hunger strikes, California prison officials claim they are reforming the system. SHU prisoners are now allowed calendars, as well as handballs to use in the small concrete dog runs in which they can exercise, alone, for one hour each day. If they abstain from gang activity for a year, they can now get a deck of cards; three years earns them a chessboard.

But there's a major catch. The Department of Corrections is vastly expanding the list of serious rules violations. Mere possession of articles or pictures depicting "security threat groups" (the new name for gangs) will constitute "serious rule violations on par with stabbing somebody," Bauer reports. And the list of such groups has expanded to 1,500, including everything from Juggalos (followers of the popular hip hop group Insane Clown Posse) to "revolutionary groups” to "Black-Non Specific," a term that, as Bauer notes, suggests that "any group with the word 'black' in its name can be considered disruptive."

The rationale for this repression that has been repeatedly condemned by international and U.S. human rights groups is the need to reduce gang influence in prisons. However, Bauer explains,there is no evidence that such solitary confinement regimens reduce prison violence. To the conrary, prisons that have reduced or eliminated supermaxes have seen parallel reductions in prison violence.

I highly recommend reading the Mother Jones report, "Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons."

My most recent blog post on the Pelican Bay SHU, focusing on an Amnesty report and a class-action lawsuit and containing links to prior related posts, is HERE.

Related: National Law Journal report, The graying of the penitentiary

My Amazon review of the new movie ARGO, about the 1979-1980 Iranian hostage crisis, is HERE; if you find it helpful, please click on "yes" at the bottom.

Amnesty issues scathing report on prolonged solitary confinement

Critique follows lawsuit alleging psychological torture at infamous Pelican Bay  

Tucked away in a remote corner of Northern California is one of the most brutal behavioral experiments of the modern era: Upwards of 500 men housed for more than a decade straight in tiny, windowless, concrete tombs.

Pelican Bay, which opened in 1989, was specifically designed to foster maximum isolation. Prisoners are denied phone calls, contact visits, and recreational or vocational programming. But the designers did not plan for the sensory deprivation to be perpetual; stays in the "SHU" (Segregated Housing Unit) were originally intended to last 18 months or less.

Now, in a scathing report, Amnesty International has lambasted conditions in the SHU as "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" punishment that violates international law on the treatment of prisoners.

California holds more than 3,000 prisoners in SHU's, with more than 1,000 at Pelican Bay. No other U.S. state is believed to have held so many prisoners for such long periods in indefinite isolation, the Amnesty International investigators found.

A spokesman for the prison system responded with the rather outlandish nonsequitur that California has no solitary confinement, because SHU prisoners are able (if they have funds) to buy televisions and watch cable channels, including ESPN.

The Amnesty report follows on the heels of a class-action lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Law on behalf of 10 SHU prisoners who claim that long-term isolation is slowly destroying their bodies and minds, in violation of international standards against torture and inhumane treatment.

The lawsuit, Ruiz v. Brown, alleges that prisoners have no means to escape solitary confinement, other than to become government informants against prison gangs, which would put them and their families at risk.

While the prison system claims these are the "worst of the worst," the men claim they are being held in solitary confinement as punishment for their lack of cooperation with prison administrators, based on very thin evidence of gang affiliation. For several, their housing status alone prevents them from being eligible for parole.

Evidence of their supposed continued gang affiliation, the lawsuit says, includes:

• Saying "hello" to a prisoner from a different gang
• Possessing a drawing of an Aztec tattoo
• Possessing a pamphlet in Swahili, a language spoken by 60 million Africans that is categorized by the Department of Corrections as a "banned language"
• Having a Black Power tattoo
• Having a book about George Jackson (Paul Liberatore's The Road to Hell: the True Story of George Jackson, Stephen Bingham, and the San Quentin Massacre)

Plaintiff Paul Redd, for example, has spent 33 of the past 35 years in solitary confinement, the last dozen at Pelican Bay. He would be eligible for parole if not for his purported status as a "captain" in the Black Guerrilla Family despite no evidence of any gang activity in the past six years. His SHU status is allegedly based on old confidential memoranda stating he had communicated with other BGF members, plus possession of drawings, collages and booklets related to George Jackson and the Black Panthers.

A hunger strike last year, supported by up to 6,600 prisoners at 13 other prisons around the state, led to raised hopes, but so far no meaningful reform.

Psychological effects of long-term isolation

What happens when you lock humans inside a concrete sensory deprivation chamber for a period of decades, denying them all physical connection, human warmth, and even glimpses of nature?

In their lawsuit, prisoners who have spent a mind-boggling one to two decades in solitary confinement describe an inexorable descent into hopelessness and despair, with crippling loneliness and a constant struggle to stave off psychosis. They report pervasive insomnia, anxiety, hallucinations, mood swings, violent nightmares, panic attacks and a profound rage that they attempt to stifle by numbing all feeling. One prisoner described feeling like "walking dead," while another said he hears disembodied voices and feels like he is "silently screaming 24 hours a day."

Plaintiff Danny Troxell, for example, reports that he does not initiate conversations, is not motivated to do anything, and feels as if he is in a stupor much of the time. He often becomes "blank" or out of touch with his feelings.

These symptoms echo the findings of mental health experts who examined Pelican Bay prisoners as far back as 1995, six years after the prison opened, in connection with an earlier lawsuit (Madrid v Gomez) over the mental health effects of solitary confinement. At that time, Stuart Grassian, MD, an expert on segregation psychosis, found many men were already deteriorating into psychosis, paranoia, suicidality, and other psychological reactions to their unnatural isolation. Craig Haney, meanwhile, found that nearly all of the prisoners he sampled during that period reported symptoms of psychological distress such as intrusive thoughts, oversensitivity to external stimuli, difficulties with attention or memory, profound depression and social withdrawal.

Over time, prisoners can barely recall what it feels like to experience physical contact with another human being. Luis Esquivel, for example, has not shaken another person’s hand in 13 years and fears that he has forgotten the feel of human contact; "he spends a lot of time wondering what it would feel like to shake the hand of another person," according to the class-action lawsuit.

And what about mental health treatment?

"Every two weeks, a psychologist walks past the prisoners' cells, calling out 'good morning,' or 'you okay?' The psychologist walks past eight cells in approximately 30 seconds during these 'rounds.' "

Last year, a Special Rapporteur with the United Nations declared that prolonged solitary confinement constitutes torture, and that even 15 days in solitary confinement violates an individual’s human rights.

In the wake of its investigation, Amnesty is calling for ratcheting down isolation so it is only used as a "last resort" for severely unruly prisoners who endanger others, immediate removal of prisoners who have already spent years in the isolation units, and improving conditions for those who remain by allowing them more exercise and opportunity for human contact and phone calls to their families.

The Amnesty report can be found HERE; the amended petition in Ruiz v. Brown is HERE. An online petition in support of the SHU prisoners' demands is HERE.  The featured artwork is by Gabriel Reyes, one of the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit. More information on Reyes and his art is HERE.

Related blog posts:

• Supermax: Hell on earth or . . . not as bad as we thought? (Jan. 6, 2011)

• Historic hunger strike by Supermax prisoners continues (July 15, 2011)

• Willie Bosket: Tale of a wasted life (Sept. 23, 2008)

• Why does the United States lock up so many people? (Jan. 29, 2012)

• Claim in 15-year-old girl's stabbing will highlight prison failures (Nov. 9, 2007)