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Last Updated: Jul 27, 2009 - 6:12:11 AM |
Standing in the well of a jail on New York’s Rikers Island as
profanities rain down on you from the cells above, you realize the
absurdity of academia’s most celebrated book on incarceration.
Discipline and Punish, by the late French historian Michel Foucault,
criticized jails and prisons for subjecting inmates to constant,
spirit-crushing surveillance. The truth is that surveillance goes both
ways in correctional facilities. Inmates watch their keepers as
intensely as they are watched—and usually much more malignly.
Illustration by Jock.
Jails are the ideal testing ground for romantic myths about
incarceration. As policing has gotten more efficient at nabbing
wrongdoers over the last decade and a half, it has pumped a growing
volume of increasingly troubled individuals into the jail system.
Governing that population is a management challenge more complex than
that faced by any other criminal-justice institution. Yet jails, unlike
prisons, remain largely out of sight and out of mind. This public
ignorance is unfortunate, because jails have been evolving important
principles for controlling criminal behavior of late, ideas that
directly contradict the Foucauldian critique.
To understand the difficulties of running a large jail, imagine that
your job is personally to shepherd each of the thousands of commuters
streaming through New York’s massive Penn Station to their trains
safely and on time . . . except that the commuters are all criminals
who keep changing their travel plans, and their trains, to which they
don’t want to go, have no fixed timetables. A cross-section of the
entire universe of criminal offenders, from the most hardened murderer
to the most deranged vagrant, cycles through the nation’s 3,365 jails.
But the majority of jail inmates show up with no predictable release
date, since they have as yet only been charged with a crime and are
awaiting a trial that may or may not occur and whose duration is
unknown. Even before their trials begin, they may make bail at any
moment and be released. Planning for pretrial detainees is therefore no
easy task. “The ones who stay less than 36 hours drive you out of your
mind,” says Michael Jacobson, a former corrections commissioner in New
York City. “You think: ‘Couldn’t you have made bail ten hours ago
rather than coming into my facility?’ ” Prisons, by contrast, hold only
post-conviction defendants who have been found guilty or pleaded guilty
and have been sentenced to a known term of more than a year. (Prisons
and jails differ as well in their government overseers: the former are
run by states and the federal government, the latter by cities and
counties.)
Jail administrators are obligated to get pretrial detainees back and
forth to court on time and to keep them safe until their cases are
completed. But pretrial detainees are just less than two-thirds of the
nation’s approximately 780,000 jail inmates. The remainder consists of
post-conviction defendants with a sentence of a year or less, who serve
their time in jail; post-conviction defendants sentenced to more than a
year and awaiting transfer to prison; parolees and probationers who
have violated their conditions of release; illegal immigrants detained
for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and inmates in transit
between prisons.
These populations show up at all hours, often with no background
information on who they are. Their turnover rate is extremely high:
jails process as many admissions and releases in two months as state
and federal prisons (which hold about 1.5 million inmates) process in a
year. Managing that “churning mass of humanity” is a nightmare, says
Jacobson, who now directs the Vera Institute for Justice. “So many
arrestees lead unbelievably disorganized lives”—but as soon as they
enter a jail, the jail becomes responsible for their well-being.
Two men in street clothes amble down the wide, buffed corridor of the
Otis Bantum Correctional Center, one of ten razor-wired fortresses on
Rikers Island that together hold nearly 14,000 inmates. They’re as odd
a couple as any pair of Shakespearean rustics: one short and white,
with mismatched eyes that look as though they’ve been squished by a
pickup truck; the other tall and black, with a gap-toothed smile
spreading broadly across his craggy face. The very picture of bonhomie
and goodwill, the two flag down a passing official to share the happy
news: they have just made bail after a day inside and are going home.
“Congratulations. Now please don’t come back to my hotel again,” Deputy
Chief of Staff of Operations Mark Cranston responds cheerfully.
The chances that they will honor Cranston’s request are slight. At
Rikers, 40 percent of all inmates return within a year of release. Such
recidivism is typical; all jails have “frequent fliers” who cycle
through repeatedly. “I see these guys leave and they’re back in two
days,” says Gerald, a slender, already-sentenced drug offender in a
green uniform who is swabbing the floors of the Otis Bantum intake
area. Fifteen men are standing, sitting, or lying down in a holding pen
inside the bustling intake office. Plexiglas covers one side of the
cell to protect the staff from “splashing” incidents—drinks or bodily
fluids thrown at them by cell occupants. One tall detainee in a Yankees
jacket is talking on a phone that reaches into the cell, trying to line
up bail. As Gerald cleans, he keeps his distance from the new admits.
“This place can get you in trouble; there’s no need to get involved,”
he says.
Over the next few days, Rikers officials will try to gather as much
information as they can on the men in the pen, seeking to determine how
securely to house them and whether they need medical or psychological
care. They will analyze their criminal records, intake questionnaires,
medical examinations, and current behavior. Such inmate classification
is the cutting edge of jail management. Jails are only now starting to
recognize the importance of rigorously analyzing information to
maintain order, just as policing has in the last decade. Some jails
still practice “open bed” classification, housing an inmate wherever
there is an empty bed or, at best, separating felony and misdemeanor
pretrial detainees. But careful inmate classification acknowledges that
a Mike Tyson in on a drunk-driving charge, say, is likely to be more
dangerous than many a felony auto thief—and should be housed
accordingly.
At Rikers, new inmates spend up to 72 hours under observation in
quasi-quarantine, until the results of their tuberculosis and other
medical tests come back. Outside one such quarantine area, a square,
windowed dormitory filled with rows of mussed beds, a sentenced inmate
working as a suicide-prevention aide roams the hall every ten minutes,
checking on new admits suspected of suicidal tendencies. Inside, a
pallid transvestite with widely set eyes, several missing teeth, and a
curtain of hennaed hair stares intently at a group of visitors. Though
he claims that he has just been slapped for not providing a sexual
favor to another inmate, the 28-year-old heroin addict otherwise isn’t
worried about getting attacked. “At Rikers, unlike New Jersey, they
cater to you,” Della says. “They won’t put me in protective custody
here”—isolating an inmate for his own safety, that is—“or make me feel
like an animal.” (Recent studies suggest that rape among inmates is far
less prevalent than was previously claimed.)
The spread of quality-of-life policing, which targets low-level
offenses like aggressive panhandling, public urination, and littering,
has brought a more mentally unstable, troubled population into
jails—one that mental hospitals would have treated before the
deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s and ’70s shuttered most
state mental hospitals. In fact, jails have become society’s primary
mental institutions, though few have the funding or expertise to carry
out that role properly. Mental illness is much more common in jails
than in prisons; at Rikers, 28 percent of the inmates require mental
health services, a number that rises each year. “People are coming
right off the streets with a whole range of street problems,” Jacobson
reports. “You have to deal with them immediately and figure out: ‘Are
you a dangerous lunatic, or just tough?’ ”
Jail administrators worry constantly about inmates’ killing
themselves—in 2008, Rikers spent $5.3 million in overtime pay for
officers to sit watch, 24 hours a day, outside the cells of potential
suicides. Mentally ill jail inmates stay longer than other inmates
because of pretrial competency hearings and other self-induced
complications. One mentally ill Rikers inmate has been incarcerated for
five years, during which time he has staged numerous diversionary
courtroom dramas to defer his case. Another “has defied all efforts to
safely get her to court by injuring herself every time a hearing is
approaching,” sighs Assistant Deputy Warden Helena Smith, who oversees
a Rikers mental health ward.
The Kent County Correctional Facility, a pair of squat, striped
cylinders housing 1,300 inmates in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a leader
in correctional mental health care. Mental clinicians sit in on every
intake interview, and they have access to mental health records on
every inmate dating back to 2003—an unparalleled degree of medical
record-keeping. Every morning, clinicians and corrections supervisors
discuss each detainee who has been placed in a suicide cell—a
camera-monitored cell lacking a table or any kind of fixture that the
inmate could use to hang himself. The discussion sounds as though it is
taking place in a hospital, not a jail.
The head clinician brings up a picture of a bedraggled female on a
PowerPoint screen. “Miss Wilson is a frequent flier,” she begins. “I
tried to direct her to the positive aspects of her life; she said she
didn’t have any.” “Does she have a place to go?” asks a supervisor.
“She wouldn’t engage with me,” the clinician answers. A series of men
appears on the screen. “Derek wanted someone to talk to; he has a
strained relation with his child’s mother. I allowed him some time to
process those thoughts and feelings. Mr. Taylor continues to be
evasive. He smiles and reported that he doesn’t want to hurt himself,
but if he had to move, he would make no promises for his safety. He
says he hears voices, but he doesn’t tell me what they say.”
The night before, a man just sentenced to life imprisonment for
second-degree murder had been moved into a suicide cell under protest.
He now lies on Cell 34’s green bunk, under a long horizontal slit of a
window, tightly wrapped in a blanket like a shroud, his face invisible;
a dictionary, slippers, manila envelopes, and rolls of toilet paper
litter the floor. In his old cell, a dozen sheets of paper are attached
with toothpaste to a wall, each displaying a softly shaded word: judas,
guilt, death, sinner, empty, fear, pain, lust, hope? A blob of
green-and-white soap on the wall holds a pencil. This convict has
required more than 1,000 staff interventions during his 20-month stay,
over ten times the number of incidents that a typical non–mentally ill
inmate would generate over a comparable period.
Outside the convict’s cell, other mentally ill inmates wander around
the cell block’s dayroom (the common area where inmates not on lockdown
spend their time) following a group-therapy discussion; a few sit at a
table with a jigsaw puzzle. John, an elfin Sudanese drunk driver who
looks as though he has been dusted in flour, complains in barely
comprehensible English about getting bossed around and says that he
refuses to take showers. Spencer, a 45-year-old unmarried father in on
an assault-and-battery charge that he won’t discuss, says with an
affectless, unblinking gaze that he has tried to get a job but gets too
stressed out to hold it.
A few mentally ill inmates defeat all efforts to get them to take their
medication. They cannot be forced to do so without a court order, but
they refuse to go to court, thus requiring a judicial order to extract
them from their cells. Others hide the pills or spit them out. Once
treated and sobered up, some mental-needs inmates become model
prisoners, while others remain difficult to control. The question of
whether mentally ill inmates are disproportionately violent is a
fraught topic. The Wisconsin state auditor reported in March 2009 that
mentally ill state prisoners commit nearly 80 percent of assaults on
staff, though they are 30 percent of the state prison population. At
Rikers, the rate of fights in the mental health observation units is 12
times greater than in the general population.
One day in February, a black-uniformed search team is mustering outside
Rikers Island’s redbrick Robert M. Devoren Center after an assault by a
mentally ill teen. A delusional 17-year-old robbery suspect who fancies
himself “King the Punisher” has slashed a fellow adolescent’s ear with
a razor fashioned from radiator metal. A perennial troublemaker, the
assailant has been at Rikers for two years while his trial stretches
on. Now the elite search team, drawn from security officers across the
island, will search every crevice of the jail for more weapons, while
the victim goes into protective custody. The assailant is at a court
hearing as the search team gathers; when he returns, officials will try
to bring a new charge of attempted murder against him.
Two of Rikers Island’s “punitive segregation” wings—areas where inmates
who have broken the rules stay confined up to 23 hours a day in a
single cell—are devoted to mentally ill detainees, like King the
Punisher. improve the moment, exhorts a mural leading into the two
wings, located in the George R. Vierno Center, a low tan building with
blue corral-type rails on top. The most violent mentally ill offenders,
almost all of whom have assaulted staff, are housed in the Mental
Health Assessment Unit for Infracted Inmates (MHAUII), a long,
double-tiered room of cells with heavy doors. The hatches in the middle
of the doors where officers deliver food are bolted like safes, because
they also serve as complicated mechanisms for handcuffing inmates.
Before a detainee can leave the MHAUII for a visit to the doctor or
other appointment, he must be handcuffed and searched for weapons, all
while isolated beyond striking range of another human being. He is
first cuffed from behind through his food tray while in his cell, then
escorted to a small cage containing a battered gray magnetometer. There
he is uncuffed through an opening in the cage and asked to strip and
walk through the magnetometer. After dressing again, he is recuffed
through the cage. Even these precautions don’t always protect officers.
A cuffed and scanned inmate on his way to the health clinic has just
kicked an officer in the face, cutting him deeply. That inmate will now
have leg irons as well as handcuffs when outside his cell.
The violence of MHAUII inmates exceeds the jail’s capacity to punish
it. No Rikers inmate may spend more than 90 days at a time in punitive
segregation, but the most recalcitrant accumulate far more punitive
time (known at Rikers as “bing days”) than they can pay in a single
stretch. The average MHAUII resident owes 303 bing days; one current
inmate owes 4,000. When an inmate with a backlog of punitive
segregation leaves the island, his debt stays on the books. If he
returns, he’ll go right back to punitive segregation to start paying
down his bing days again.
Even in punitive segregation, mentally ill Rikers inmates continue to
receive treatment from a clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist, who
try to persuade them to enter behavior-modification therapy. As a
reward for good behavior, a group of MHAUII detainees in orange
jumpsuits clusters around a TV set in a tall glassed-off room. Outside
several cells on the block, single officers sit on stools, each staring
at the cell’s door. Rikers, unlike Kent County, may not film inmates on
suicide watch inside their cells; instead, it must post an officer
outside each cell, 24 hours a day. One such detainee, a jailhouse bully
awaiting trial on gun, assault, and drug charges, is curled up in a
ball under his green mattress, while his monitor sits watching.
Illustration by Jock.
Such surveillance, said Foucault in Discipline and Punish, turns
inmates into powerless subjects of the “disciplinary” state. Foucault
called jails and prisons “Panopticons,” after a circular prison model
by eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham that let guards
observe a large number of inmates from a central position.
But jails and prisons are also reverse Panopticons; to walk around one
is to be under constant observation from the inmates. The moment that
Deputy Warden Thomas Hall enters another Rikers punitive segregation
unit, inmates watching from their cells unleash a torrent of
obscenities: “Fucking Hall!” “Call Hall!” While the authorities’
surveillance of inmates is often protective—as in the ubiquitous
suicide watches—the inmates’ surveillance of the authorities can be
aimed at corrupting them. Like surveillance, power in jails flows
between officers and inmates in multiple directions.
Rikers Island’s most dangerous inmate stands watching at his cell door
in Twelve Main, a small, square space that contains the island’s
maximum-security prisoners. Lee Woods, tall and well built, with a
broad mouth, has just been sentenced to life in prison for the murder
of New York police officer Russel Timoshenko. Woods was driving a
stolen SUV with two other thugs on the night of July 9, 2007, when
Officers Timoshenko and Herman Yan pulled it over. Gunfire burst from
the SUV. Timoshenko died of face and neck wounds five days later, and
Yan was seriously injured. Now the former Bloods leader and career
criminal stares impassively at some visitors, a white T-shirt tied
rakishly around his head, as a corrections officer sits outside his
cell.
Woods is in Twelve Main—where the walls are made of reinforced steel so
that inmates can’t rip out sinks and toilets for weapons—because of the
eerie power he exercises over corrections officers. After his arrest
for the Timoshenko murder, he arrived at Rikers owing 3,000 bing days,
accumulated from 14 assaults on staff, three arson attempts, and
several contraband violations during previous stays. In earlier
state-prison stints, he had devised homemade razor blades and thrown
feces at staff. Yet on his current visit to Rikers, this monster
managed to seduce at least six staff members to break the rules on his
behalf. Two rookie officers brought him marijuana, tobacco, and
alcohol; another two officers supplied him with a cell-phone memory
chip and a handcuff key (the key was discovered inside his bowels by a
magnetometer); a female officer exchanged photos with him during her
frequent stops outside his cell (a violation of fraternization rules);
and a captain let him make a phone call without supervision. When news
of Woods’s treatment broke in the summer of 2008, New York police
officers were so angry that they allegedly went on a ticket-writing
spree against vehicles belonging to the Department of Correction, a
separate entity from the NYPD.
Woods could corrupt his keepers because of the two-way nature of
surveillance and power in jail. “You’re in a mirror as a corrections
officer,” says Rikers captain Sean Jones. “The inmates watch you
continuously; they can get a heads-up on you before you get one on
them. They know when you get a haircut, whether you’re wearing your
wedding ring any longer. ‘Your hair looks great today,’ they’ll say, or
‘I see you took your ring off.’ ” If a supervisor berates an officer,
they will appear to sympathize.
The goal is to gain control of the officer. An inmate’s most potent
method of corruption is to persuade an officer to break the rules for
him. “Inmates know that once they get a corrections officer to do
something for them, even if it’s just bringing them a cheeseburger from
McDonald’s, they own the officer,” says Frank Straub, the police
commissioner of White Plains, New York. It is illegal to bring an
inmate so much as a stick of gum, as corrections officers learn from
their first day in the academy. But there will always be a few officers
who are turned by a skilled con man. The manipulators test officers
quickly—looking for a sign of weakness or perhaps kindness to exploit,
or using intimidation to try to bring an officer to heel. “Inmates say
it all the time: ‘I’ll see you when I get out,’ ” says Jones.
The threat can be realistic because at Rikers, as at other urban jails,
inmates and officers often share community ties. The Rikers workforce
is predominantly minority; there is a proud tradition in black families
of correctional work, dating from the time when police and fire
departments were less friendly to blacks. Given the black incarceration
rate, the chance that an officer and an inmate know each other is not
negligible. Most officers don’t let any prior acquaintance they have
with an inmate—which they’re supposed to report to supervisors—affect
them; most perform their vital law enforcement function with honor. But
for a few, familiarity with an inmate or intimacy with the culture of
crime raises the risk of malfeasance, and not just because of fear of
retribution when the inmate is released. The president of the New York
corrections officers’ union recently addressed the problem of
fraternization on the union’s website. “Are you just willing to
surrender all that you’ve worked for and all that your family is proud
of just because of some individual who lives down the street from you
and you want to be a part of some acceptable click [sic]?” wrote Norman
Seabrook. The 1 percent of officers “who say it’s ok to bring in that
cell phone or that contraband for an inmate, because they are ‘friends’
” put the lives of their colleagues at risk, Seabrook warned. “Today
it’s a cell phone; tomorrow it’s a 9 millimeter.”
The results of any favoritism, even if it’s less shocking than bringing
contraband to a cop killer, are disastrous for a jail. “When a
corrections officer builds a relation with an inmate, the system starts
to collapse,” says Straub, who has studied corruption in New York
prisons. “The whole process is undermined.”
On October 18, 2008, four months after the Woods contraband scandal
came to light, 18-year-old Christopher Robinson was killed in his
Rikers cell by three fellow adolescents. Investigation into the murder
revealed a different locus of corruption.
Officers Michael McKie (“Mack”) and Khalid Nelson (“Nel”), with help
from Officer Denise Albright (“Mama A”), had licensed 12 young thugs
(the “Team”) to enforce discipline on their cell blocks by means of an
extortion racket. New inmates had a choice: they could join “the
Program,” which meant forking over a percentage of their commissary
accounts and telephone privileges to the Team; or they could receive
“spankin’s” (beatings) in their cells. Nelson and McKie taught the Team
how to beat the holdouts so as to avoid bruises that supervisors might
detect. Team members got to dictate who sat on which chairs in the
dayroom, who went to the bathroom and when, and who could go into and
out of his cell. Lowly lookouts policed the communal seating areas,
“pop-off dummies” delivered the beatings, and the top dogs controlled
the housing areas. In exchange for their extortion privileges, Team
members were to keep order on the wing.
Throughout the history of corrections, officers seeking to maintain
order have tried to exploit the brutal authority that inmates exercise
over one another. Mississippi and Louisiana prison officials, among
others, issued pistols to selected prisoners to keep other inmates in
line in the 1940s and 1950s, writes John DiIulio in Governing Prisons,
with predictably predatory results. A respected Texas prison
commissioner, George Beto, tried to civilize this so-called con-boss
system in the 1960s by more carefully choosing the inmates who would
perform staff functions, but the same abuses developed, including
quasi-official beatings of noncompliant inmates. Other institutions,
like the small South Dakota jail where Kent County captain Randy Demory
once worked, had more informal means of delegation. “A guard got a
local college football player out of a cell and put him into another
cell with instructions to Ωsettle these boys down,≈ ” Demory recalls.
“The football player took care of business and was rewarded with extra
food.”
McKie and Nelson’s Program had a particularly dire outcome. Rikers
officials had transferred Christopher Robinson into McKie and Nelson’s
housing unit in an effort to disrupt Robinson’s own predatory behavior
toward fellow inmates in a different cell block. Accustomed to being
the top dog himself, he refused to join the Program. Two days later,
three inmates known as “Pop Brim,” “Ant Luv,” and “Fire” beat him to
death.
Such delegation arrangements are no longer officially tolerated, yet
they keep breaking out. Why? Perhaps because keeping a lid on inmate
violence is so difficult. After all, the other benefits to corrections
officers from such schemes appear modest. Police corruption usually
entails considerable financial gain for the dirty cop, but in jail
there are few deep pockets. At best, McKie and Nelson were freed from
the necessity of patrolling the cell block every hour or so. They were
undoubtedly lazy (and probably also part of the same criminal culture
to which their charges belonged), but what we should learn from the
Program scandal is just how great the challenges for corrections
officers are. Left to its own devices, inmate society is not
carnivalesque spontaneity, as the Foucauldians might have us believe,
or grassroots democracy, as proponents of the misguided 1970s and ’80s
“prisoner self-governance” movement suggested, but Lord of the Flies
cruelty in which the strong try to control and exploit the weak.
The symbols of detainee power would be laughable if the means of
attaining them weren’t so dangerous. Power-seeking inmates will try to
control bathroom use and food consumption. Low-status inmates will wind
up excluded from the dayroom. Commissary accounts, with which inmates
purchase snacks and personal hygiene items from the jail store, are an
obvious target for extortion. And chairs are a particularly useful tool
of domination. A detainee sitting on a stack of four chairs is
broadcasting: “I’m king.” A battle-gray adolescent dayroom at Rikers
recently got rid of its freestanding chairs in favor of a green cement
picnic table with attached benches. “The inmates were trying to control
the seating: stacking chairs and not allowing certain people to sit,”
says Edmund Duffy, the tall, energetic warden who now runs the jail
where the Robinson murder occurred. Eliminating movable chairs solved
another problem as well: they’re the first thing grabbed during a fight.
The predatory drive is particularly strong among younger inmates. Not
only are young detainees in thrall to their hormones, but only the
worst of the worst adolescent criminals go to jail, rather than to the
far milder juvenile-justice system. Three-quarters of the adolescent
detainees at Rikers are awaiting trial for the top felonies, such as
homicides, shootings, and robberies, a far higher percentage than in
the detainee population at large.
In such a world, ordinary objects must be viewed as potential
weapons—such as a King of Hearts card containing a razor blade made
from a battery shell that had just been discovered during one of my
trips to Rikers—and attacks can come at any time. Moments before I
entered Rikers’s Central Punitive Segregation Unit, which houses
non–mentally ill infractors, an inmate had thrown an unknown liquid at
a guard—it could have been water or urine—angry that he had to wait to
use the showers. Red lights flashed throughout the facility, and a team
in riot gear trotted by to make sure that the unit stayed calm, as the
inmate looked coolly around while being escorted to a medical
evaluation.
Simply directing the movement of bodies in a jail can be a monumental
task. Officers work alone or in pairs, vastly outnumbered by the
inmates. One evening at the intake area of Rikers’s Anna M. Kross
Center, a 1960s facility whose anachronistic baby-blue geometric
security gates appear to have been inspired by Mondrian, several dozen
inmates press their faces against the barriers of six small pens, their
features barely visible through the fine blue mesh. A table outside the
pens is strewn with the recent admits’ sneakers, MP3 players, and
jeans. A wiry inmate with dreadlocks in an orange jumpsuit shouts at a
visitor, “You have food poisoning, too!” as he is escorted from a pen
into the main jail. The detainees are all on different trajectories to
and from court, the Bellevue mental hospital, and punitive segregation,
and all need to be searched or are waiting to be fed. Getting 20 bodies
from court and through the search procedures without a fight requires
considerable command presence and finesse, especially if some inmates
have previously been separated for security reasons.
Now, imagine that you are a corrections officer in such a situation.
Your safety depends on inmates’ cooperation. But there’s a very fine
line between saying, “Hey, guy, work with me here,” and letting an
inmate call the shots. Time and again, officers have crossed that line,
trying to solve the inmate-control problem by ceding authority for
order maintenance to the inmates themselves. “It’s not easy managing
this kind of humanity,” says former corrections commissioner Jacobson.
“One way to do it is to make deals between yourself and the people.”
Observers are divided over how devastating a managerial failure the
Robinson case represents. Most acknowledge that in an institution as
large as Rikers, some bad things will happen, despite management’s best
efforts. Bernard Kerik, whose accomplishments as New York corrections
and police commissioner in the 1990s have been tarred by a federal
indictment for corruption and tax fraud, is the most damning. “If the
supervisors were doing their job, there is no way that you could have
enforcers,” he says. “Where was the captain? If he was making his
rounds, inmates should have told him.”
Current New York City corrections commissioner Martin Horn disagrees.
The Robinson corruption scandal was essentially undetectable, he
argues. The noise of opening and shutting heavy gates to cell blocks
means that supervisors can’t secretly enter a housing area, and
participants had a system of signals to alert one another about
approaching visitors. “I have to rely on the integrity of my officers,”
says Horn. “Without integrity, all the staff in the world won’t make a
difference.” The ethic among inmates and officers against informing
further complicates efforts to detect corruption, Horn adds: “There may
be no secrets in a jail, but there’s also no snitching.” A month before
Robinson’s death, the mother of an inmate on the McKie-Nelson wing told
Rikers officials that her son’s eye socket had been fractured after he
refused to join the Program—but when questioned by authorities, the
inmate responded, “I ain’t talkin’.” Horn doesn’t know whether other
officers were aware of the ring, though the likelihood that no other
adults saw what was happening seems small. In a paramilitary
organization, however, bad news does not flow easily up the chain of
command; a jail leader constantly needs to figure out ways to extract
the facts on the ground, such as showing up at 3 am to talk to inmates
and staff.
Compared with New York police-corruption cases—such as the Dirty 30 in
the NYPD’s 30th Precinct in the early 1990s, in which more than two
dozen officers were stealing drugs and money from West Harlem drug
dealers—the McKie-Nelson affair is peanuts and does not discredit
Commissioner Horn’s achievements overseeing the most complex jail
facility in the country. He has continued to drive violence down at
Rikers through data-driven managerial accountability; the jail bears no
resemblance to the inmate-dominated anarchy of the mid-1990s (see “Why
the Jails Didn’t Explode,” Spring 1999). In 1995, there were more than
1,000 inmate slashings; in 2008, there were 21, with a total population
down by just 2,000 or so. Horn has kept the facility clean and orderly
through rigorous attention to prisoner classification and Broken
Windows–type detail. New York City’s jail-homicide rate is a small
fraction of Baltimore’s, Philadelphia’s, Chicago’s, or Los Angeles’s.
Nevertheless, recent revelations of officially sanctioned favoritism
toward inmates further suggest that top management has lost contact
with some operations on the ground. The most damning disclosure
concerns the royal treatment that the politically influential Hasidic
rabbi Leib Glanz secured for Jewish inmates, benefits that included an
elaborate, catered bar mitzvah in a Manhattan jail for the son of an
inmate; semiweekly feasts for Jewish inmates in the rabbi’s office; and
inmate use of the rabbi’s private phone to call girlfriends and
bookies, according to the New York Post. When such special treatment is
conducted with the approval of jail officials, as Glanz’s apparently
was, it is even more destructive of correctional fairness than
surreptitious favors passed from a guard to an inmate—and when targeted
at an already resented ethnic or religious group, it is the most
inflammatory of all.
However outrageous the Jewish dispensation in the New York City jail
system, the more common problem throughout corrections is inmate
misbehavior and secret guard corruption. Such corruption is best
prevented by ensuring order through discipline and as much
information-gathering on inmates as possible. These principles remain
abhorrent to a Foucauldian perspective on corrections, but they’re
essential to sound management.
Foucault criticized visual surveillance as an oppressive encroachment
on inmate autonomy. In fact, visual surveillance has only a limited
effect on inmate behavior and leaves officers largely ignorant about
what happens on the cell block. The D1A pod in the Kent County
Correctional Facility is a semicircle of cells on the second floor of a
maroon atrium, holding the jail’s most assaultive inmates. It’s a
pie-slice-shaped version of Bentham’s Panopticon—guards stay behind a
glass barrier observing the cells in front of them, emerging only for
their prescribed tours of the cell block. Recently, the occupant of
Cell 37 chiseled out the plate holding his window to the point where he
could stick his hand out. Every time he heard the guard entering the
cell area, he would replace the plate with a papier-mâché version made
out of toilet paper. “The incident resolved for all time the question:
‘Do we know what’s going on inside the cells?’ ” observes Captain
Demory.
More important than visual surveillance is information-gathering. Just
as the NYPD started debriefing every suspect it arrested in the 1990s
to collect knowledge about unsolved crimes, progressive corrections
officials recognize the need for grassroots information in fighting
jail crime. “We teach our officers that the most important thing they
can do is to listen to the inmates,” says Rikers deputy warden Hall.
“Jot things down: Who’s Big Daddy, or Red-O? Feed it up the chain so we
can figure out who’s running things, who the predators and victims are.
When someone gives you information, be receptive; don’t shut it off.”
The Kent County jail reports the information it gathers to the Grand
Rapids Police Department—in 2008, 70 reports about unsolved crimes,
including 23 homicides and six robberies.
The imperative to be open to information from inmates is in tension
with officers’ instinct to erect a wall between themselves and their
charges, a useful check against corruption. Corrections officers
develop a strong degree of skepticism toward everything they hear. “If
it’s not verifiable, you have to take it as not true until you can
prove otherwise,” says Rikers captain Jones. Indeed, officials can
develop a hair-trigger authority reaction to the barrage of claims and
requests that they face. As Ernest Lewis, assistant warden of New
York’s Westchester County jail, walks though a high-security area, a
wiry inmate with a history of making trouble shouts through a barred
cell: “I’m about to lose my cool. Can I switch to a pen?” In a flash,
the previously relaxed warden turns on his command presence: “You
better chill out,” he warns.
Illustration by Jock.
Despite the complexity of the officer-inmate relationship, an emerging
philosophy of correctional design, “direct supervision,” seeks to break
down the physical and psychological barriers between officers and
inmates. In traditional prisons and jails, the corrections officer
stays behind a barrier at a workstation, emerging only to make his
rounds on a predetermined schedule, while inmates spend their day
either in their cells or in a group dayroom. “It’s difficult to manage
behavior under such conditions,” says Demory, “because for 59 minutes
of the hour, the inmates control the turf.” The traditional design’s
passive management style is good at containment but not at shaping the
culture, he adds. Demory wouldn’t let me into the remotely supervised
high-security D1A pod because the inmates, beyond the influence of the
guards, would likely start exposing themselves and throwing bodily
fluids when I entered. “Right now, it’s settled down; the officers like
it nice and quiet,” he explained.
In a direct-supervision facility, by contrast, when inmates congregate
out of their cells, the corrections officer is in the same space,
either at an accessible workstation or circulating among them, like a
community-policing cop walking his beat. The objective is to break down
any distinction between the territory of inmates and of officers; the
officer is supposed to talk with inmates, set the tone, and intervene
immediately in predation and misbehavior.
The direct-supervision model has had impressive results in managing one
of Rikers Island’s most difficult populations. A few dormitories of the
adolescent jail are devoted to a program in which officers engage
constantly with detainees to try to encourage self-control and respect
for authority. One day in February, about 50 teenagers enrolled in the
Institute for Inner Development sit quietly on immaculately made cots
that extend in three rows down a long, shady hall; a fellow inmate is
mopping the floor. Francis X, a slender, goateed officer, speaks
deliberately and with mellow self-assurance to the group: “I have to
say that y’all are quite remarkable. You make me proud. You’ve only
been here for a week or two, but there’s already a trust factor here.”
Officer X invites me to point to a boy at random. I choose a hefty boy
with soft features. “Rodriguez, stand up!” X commands. “Why do you want
to be here, Rodriguez?” Awkwardly, but still audibly, Rodriguez, in on
a drug charge, answers: “To try to learn discipline, to try to change.
I came here saggy, I came here with a temper, but if you get jail time,
this is the place to be.” Another boy is summoned to stand. “Sharif,
tell me something about maturity, brother!” Sharif is awaiting sentence
on an attempted murder and armed robbery charge. “When I came here, I
was running around, but Brother Francis told me what I was doing was
wrong and how to humble myself to others. Hopefully, I’ll take Brother
Francis’s teaching when I go upstate. When I come out, I’ll be an
adult.”
In the next wing, a laid-back female officer, Anisah Watkins, leads a
rambling discussion with young inmates. A few lay their heads down on
their folded arms—the classic ghetto gesture of classroom
indifference—while another is lying on his bed. In short order, the
discussion tacks from what it means to grow up too fast (it means “you
grew up with no father,” a boy suggests) to sexual relations between
boys and girls (“sometimes the mom had babies just like her teen
daughter”) to the need to be prompt and organized in life (here the
only insights come from the officer). The boys push back against the
implacable Watkins, complaining that the regimen in the Institute for
Inner Development is too strict. She calmly reminds them: “That’s how
it’s gonna be down here; it’s not going to change.”
“We’re trying to take the urban street that’s inbred in the detainees
and file it down, soften it a bit, in order to make them productive
members of society,” says Officer Alfonzo Miller, a tall, composed man
standing in a glass vestibule overlooking another Institute for Inner
Development dorm. Still, Rikers officials stress that the main purpose
of the Institute is maintaining order, not reducing recidivism when
detainees get out. It has accomplished that goal, lowering the fight
rate in what was once the jail’s most violent area. One boy ejected
from Officer X’s wing for violence now wants back in. Patrick, a
diminutive 17-year-old gun defendant, presses his face against the
light-green bars of his cell in the Administrative Segregation Unit and
calls Warden Duffy over. As a gesture of courtesy, Duffy opens the
food-tray door and starts to bend down toward it (some inmates prefer
to speak through the open slot, where there is no screen). Patrick
remains standing, however, and asks Duffy in hushed tones if he can get
back into the Institute. “I want to get my GED. It’s hard to focus
here. I need structure,” he says. “With a high school diploma, you can
get a good job.” Duffy says that he doesn’t know if there’s still room
in the program but that he’ll look into it.
Direct-supervision theory is evolving further in the direction of
community-policing concepts. “Place-based management,” for instance,
teaches officers to think of themselves as owners of the housing units
they supervise. They’re accountable for everything that happens on
their watch, just as a community-policing officer should feel
responsible for what happens on his beat. Too often, says Demory, who
trains jail officials in the concept for the National Institute of
Corrections, “if a fight breaks out, the officer thinks, ‘They’re just
fools,’ rather than, ‘I’m the manager. How did that happen?’ ”
Very few jails offer rehabilitation-oriented programming for the
pretrial population because the length of pretrial detainees’ stay is
unknown and usually brief. Merely getting them safely to and from their
legal appointments on time consumes most jails’ attention and budgets.
However, the Westchester County jail, a redbrick hilltop facility north
of New York City and surrounded by geese, recently began an
antiviolence program for adult pretrial detainees that combines direct
supervision with intense group therapy.
The 44 inmates in the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP) are
all awaiting trial on murder, rape, robbery, and other top felonies or
have just been sentenced and await transfer to prison upstate. On
Monday mornings, they sit in a large oblong circle in the light-filled
atrium of their two-tiered cell block, arms crossed,
orange-jumpsuit-clad legs splayed out in front of them, paying close
attention to an unusual conversational ritual. Pat, a designated inmate
leader, begins. “I heard you say, Fred, that I discounted you. You said
you were angry. Can I ask you a clarifying question?” Fred’s response
is less than clear, but Pat presses on: “Can I propose an agreement
that we support each other and let us nurture each other?” Another man
chimes in: “Can I validate that I heard you say that you propose an
agreement that you support each other?” A third inmate picks up: “I
support you validating the agreement that they support each other,” and
everyone claps.
The men are performing their “one-on-ones,” public interactions between
two inmates who bring up any tense moments they’ve recently had with
each other, discuss what they learned the previous week about
controlling and expressing their emotions, and announce what they
intend to learn as the day progresses. The conversational conventions
would undoubtedly be familiar to group-therapy habitués, but without
such therapy experience, the self-referentiality of the discussion
seems like a madly literalistic enactment of social-contract theory.
The participants turn to the future. “Now can I give you some feedback,
Greg?” the leader starts. “My kernel of truth is that I’m excited
because I’m expecting a visit on Saturday.” Greg responds: “Pat, can I
give you some feedback? Would you like me to validate it? I heard you
say that your kernel of truth is that you are happy because you are
expecting a visit; my kernel of truth is that I’m happy, too.” Pat
replies: “I heard you say that you heard me say that I’m asking for
validation; however, you said . . .” Some members of the ring aren’t
paying rapt attention to this exchange. A facilitator rebukes them: “Is
that respectful that you are talking while these brothers speak?” The
inattentive detainees soberly apologize.
That men with a criminal inability to control violent impulses can
participate in this artificial ritual, known as “conscious languaging,”
with seeming sincerity says a lot about human malleability. What will
remain of these conversational mannerisms when they collide with the
code of the streets is unknown. But program director Eddie Concepcion
says that the inmates are already bringing their new language to court.
“A detainee will say to the judge: ‘I hear you say that if I take this
plea, I can go home. Can I ask you a clarifying question?’ The court
personnel are blown away. Usually these guys are cussing out the judge.”
RSVP aims to train the inmates to think twice about their reactions
before acting on them and to take responsibility for everything that
they do. If a participant even hints at blaming drugs, alcohol, or
anger for his past violence or a present conflict, program leaders will
call him out. “Every day, we remind them that they are violent and are
responsible for being violent,” Concepcion says. The Westchester RSVP
is too new to have produced reliable post-release outcomes yet, but the
rate of infractions among its members is a small fraction of those
among the inmate population at large. Graduates who have been sent
upstate to prison have requested the RSVP manuals so that they can
start their own groups there. And the San Francisco prototype of RSVP
does boast a significant impact on recidivism: the one-year rearrest
rate for violent offenses dropped 82 percent for participants who spent
16 weeks in the program; participants who spent less time in the
program had higher rearrest rates.
The challenges of running jails exceed anything that the academic
world—and most of us—can begin to understand. In addition to the huge
problems of logistics and safety that jails present on their own,
commissioners also face a well-organized inmates’ rights lobby that
fights commonsense antiviolence measures. Until recently, for example,
New York City officials weren’t allowed to put pretrial detainees in
uniform, which made detecting contraband more difficult. Only last year
did Commissioner Horn win the right to monitor detainees’ phone calls.
Adolescents arrive at Rikers with their criminal histories largely
concealed from officials to protect their privacy, hindering the
determination of their security risk.
But the order that the lobbyists, academic critics, and
neo-Foucauldians see as oppressive is inmates’ only hope for safety and
even, perhaps, rehabilitation. The recent insights of urban
policing—that order matters, that small violations lead to greater
crimes, and that information must be gathered and analyzed—are all
equally pertinent to jails, where chaos and corruption always threaten.
Source:Ocnus.net 2009
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