Pressure from advocates for incarcerated people and investigative reporting pushed California officials to take action in recent years. In 2021 state lawmakers passed a reparations program to provide $35,000 to each person who was involuntarily sterilized while in state custody. 

But that program has compensated only a fraction of the around 800 women identified by a state audit who underwent procedures that could have resulted in sterilization while imprisoned between 2005 and 2013; that state audit also found that prison doctors regularly violated the consent process for such procedures during that time. As of June, the California Victim Compensation Board (CVCB), the body tasked with determining who gets reparations under the program, has approved compensation for roughly 120 of those survivors, according to documents from the board.

The board has denied more than 430 of the 549 applications it reviewed, rejecting about 4 in 5 people who sought compensation, according to documents from the board. The board told Bolts in a statement that more than 200 of the applications it denied came from “currently incarcerated male inmates.”

Advocates helping people seek redress for being involuntarily sterilized in state custody say the high denial rate is a result of the board’s narrow definition of sterilization. For instance, until recently, the board rejected cases of women subjected without consent to endometrial ablations—a procedure that, while not clinically defined as sterilization, greatly reduces the chances of pregnancy and leads to much more dangerous pregnancies for people who can still become pregnant.

This summer, the state compensation board was forced to reconsider an application from Geynna Buffington, who underwent an ablation procedure in prison without her consent that made her unable to get pregnant. The board had denied Buffington’s application four times before she sued and an Alameda County Superior Court judge ordered the board to reconsider, ruling that she was wrongfully denied compensation. The board approved her application about two months later.

After the June court ruling, California lawmakers passed a law that gave people who had previously been denied up until Jan. 1, 2025 to appeal their rejections and ordered the board to reconsider those cases. A board spokesperson told Bolts in a statement that it sent letters to applicants who had previously been denied telling them they could still appeal. 

John Moore, an Oakland attorney who represented Buffington, says her case should force the board to approve other people who sought compensation for ablations. But he’s also worried that, with just weeks to go until the January deadline, many victims still don’t understand that the board will now reconsider a previous rejection. 

Moore also says the extended deadline to appeal rejections won’t help women who experienced forced or involuntary sterilizations in prison who never applied in the first place because of the compensation board’s narrow approach. The board stopped receiving new applications at the end of 2023. And while the board conducted outreach to victims when it was receiving applications, Moore says those efforts overlooked people who didn’t fit their limited standards for sterilization procedures.   

“I think there’s a whole population of hundreds of other women who didn’t even know about the benefit program because they never got the notice that the state was required to send, because the state determined that if you had an ablation you didn’t qualify for benefits,” Moore told Bolts.

Advocates say the state’s compensation program created another burden that retraumatized those who already experienced an injustice by the state. Jennifer James, associate professor at the Institute for Health & Aging at the University of California, San Francisco, had been working with incarcerated women who were sterilized with an ablation procedure and said it seemed like many have given up on seeking restitution.

“For some people who were denied, they just feel like once again, no one cares, and that’s incredibly heartbreaking,” James said. “I think that it felt to some people like it was more of a fight than it should have.”

California’s shameful history of involuntarily sterilizing people goes back to the early 1900s, when about 20,000 Californians were forcibly sterilized in state-run facilities, mostly mental institutions, from 1909 to 1963 to rid society of people labeled “feeble-minded” or “defectives.” California was such a leader in eugenics that historians say the Nazis sought the state’s advice for their own sterilization program in the 1930s.

News about the forced sterilizations in California’s state-run prisons came to light in 2013 with an exposé by the Center for Investigative Reporting, which uncovered that doctors under contract with the state prison system sterilized nearly 150 women without the required approvals between 2006 and 2010. 

The news outlet also interviewed an OB-GYN at Valley State Prison, James Heinrich, who claimed he was providing an important service to poor women. “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for those unwanted children—as they procreated more,” he said in 2013.  

In 2014, the California State Auditor found many violations of the consent process leading up to the sterilization procedures, including physicians failing to sign documents certifying that the women “appeared mentally competent and understood the lasting effects of the procedure.” They also found that the sterilizations were not always reported if they were conducted alongside another procedure, such as a woman giving birth.

The audit also found that the majority of women who were sterilized were between the ages of 26 and 35, and most had a high school reading level. Of the women who received a tubal ligation procedure, which blocks or removes fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy (one of the only procedures the compensation board previously deemed eligible for reparations), between 2005 and 2013, 50 were white, 47 were Hispanic, and 35 were Black. For most, it was their first time being incarcerated.

The report led California to enact a law in 2014 that explicitly prohibits prisons and jails from performing sterilization procedures for the purpose of birth control. Through organized workshops, letters, emails, and social media posts, advocates had raised awareness about the forced sterilizations and fought for more protections.

“Pressuring a vulnerable population into making permanent reproductive choices without informed consent is unacceptable, and violates our most basic human rights,” said the bill’s author, state Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, in a statement following its passing.

James said that there may be even more women who experienced involuntary sterilizations in prisons who might not have realized it happened to them. Some were told they were having minor procedures like a biopsy only to end up undergoing a full hysterectomy. James says women often underwent sterilization procedures for non-legitimate reasons. 

“They were told they had cancer but they didn’t have cancer, and they were told the only option was a hysterectomy and not offered anything else,” James said. “We will never know how many of those 800 people just from 2005 to 2012, their sterilization happened with proper informed consent and with medical necessity and without any infringements upon people’s autonomy, any coercion.”

Following the law banning sterilization as birth control in prisons, advocates began rallying for reparations for those who already experienced forced and involuntary sterilizations. The California Coalition for Women Prisoners and Justice Now were among some of the advocacy groups that pushed for a compensation program during multiple legislative sessions before it finally passed in 2021. The California Victim Compensation Board (CVCB) began hearing applications in 2022. 

The board is a three-member body currently comprised of Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton, who was selected for the board by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021, State Controller Malia Cohen, who was first elected to her office in November 2022, and Secretary of Government Operations Amy Tong, a Newsom appointee who has led the state agency that oversees the board since early 2022. 

Advocates say they quickly found that the board’s process excluded many women based on the type of sterilization procedure they experienced. 

“They didn’t believe that ablation was part of sterilization,” said Chyrl Lamar, an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners who has been helping some of these women appeal their denials. “This is not fair. Some people had gotten out and were trying to have kids with zero results. They can’t have kids.”

Moore, who represented Buffington in her appeals, said the board’s narrow approach made it difficult for many victims to make claims because prison doctors had used several different procedures to sterilize women besides the ones approved by the board as eligible for compensation. Moore said that advocates and lawmakers explicitly left the definition of a “sterilization procedure” open because of this history. He said they “didn’t want women who were entitled to benefits to be frustrated by the state doing exactly what the state did, which is to say, ‘Well, you had an ablation procedure, but that’s not sterilization.’”

According to CVCB documents, 104 of the 431 people who were denied compensation for their sterilization tried to appeal their denial before the court overturned Buffington’s rejection this summer. Of those appeals, only one was found eligible and the rest of the denials were upheld. 

Since this summer’s court decision, advocates like James and Lamar have been trying to reach currently and formerly incarcerated people to let them know that they have until Jan. 1 to file a letter with the compensation board asking them to consider their case.

Lamar says she regularly receives letters from incarcerated women asking questions about sterilization procedures that they didn’t realize they underwent or confused by the procedure they were coerced into that stripped them of their reproductive freedom. She uses a Global Tel-Link account to message women who have reached out about their sterilizations, and helps them work on their appeals. She said that outside of the women who reach out, it can be difficult to identify others who could benefit from the compensation program and help them.

“The problem is a lot of people have parole, go home, change prisons, so I can only really reach the people that are inside,” Lamar said. “Some of the people have given up.”

James said that she has heard women who experienced sterilizations in prison talk about how traumatizing it is, and the process of having to apply and appeal can add to that pain. She said that many have become discouraged or given up.

“There’s no amount of money that’s enough to compensate for having your organs taken away,” James said, “But I think that for folks who have been able to be compensated, there’s a feeling of legitimation, like this did happen, like this was a harm, and that is really meaningful, in addition to the money being a huge help to folks.”

(This story was updated Dec. 20, 2024 after further comment from California’s victim compensation board.)

The post For Survivors of Forced Sterilization in California Prisons, a Rushed Shot at Justice appeared first on Bolts.

The passage of Prop 36 will also lengthen the sentences of some existing felonies up to three years if the crime, like felony theft causing property damage, was committed together by three or more people. It will also require that felony convictions for selling drugs be served in state prisons, whereas currently some of those sentences are served in county jails. The measure will also create a new category of offense, a “treatment-mandated felony,” which carries a prison sentence of up to three years for people with previous drug convictions who fail to complete court-ordered treatment.

Prop 36 reverses some of the changes California voters made a decade ago when they passed Prop 47, which made some felonies misdemeanors in order to reduce severe overcrowding in the state’s prisons. The state estimates that the reduced incarceration from Prop 47 helped save $800 million over the past decade, the majority of which was reallocated to mental health and drug treatment services.

Advocates who supported those reforms a decade ago are now bracing for a reversal of those trends, as the state’s own analysis predicts that costs associated with increased punishment and prison will soar as state funds allocated to treatment services fall with the passage of Prop 36. While this year’s ballot measure was put forth as a way to make communities safer, opponents worry it will bring a drop in services that erodes community safety. 

“Rather than strip money away from resources, we should have doubled down and really fund these things that actually worked,” said Jose Bernal, Political Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “The safest communities are the ones that are the most resourced, and so that’s the alternative. That’s what we’ve been fighting for.”

Advocates for incarcerated people fear that Prop 36 will also exacerbate the overcrowding and dangerous conditions that still exist inside many local jails and state prisons. Sam Lewis, executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, one of the groups that opposed Prop 36, said jails are already severely overcrowded and understaffed, and sending more people to jail will prevent them from getting treatment and prevention.

“We’re going to fill them up with more people, that means people are going to die in there, it means people are going to take a longer time to be able to go to trial, that means more people in the county jail will be suffering instead of actually receiving the treatment that they need.” 

Prison overcrowding, and the dangerous and squalid conditions that it created behind bars, helped motivate California to take a step away from mass incarceration with the 2014 passage of Prop 47. 

At the time, California prisons held about 156,000 men and women in custody, almost twice their holding capacity. The prison system averaged around one death each week as overcrowding created dangerous conditions inside. Civil rights lawsuits over inadequate medical and mental health care eventually led to a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had violated people’s Eighth Amendment rights. The 5-4 ruling, which found that overcrowding was the primary cause for lapses in treatment, upheld a lower court’s order for the prison system to decrease its population by 46,000. 

“Prop 47 was passed because we decided that we want to change felony [charges] so people would not be incarcerated, cost us millions of dollars and human lives,” Lewis said.

From the time the measure passed in 2014 to now, the incarcerated population has fallen from about 131,200 to over 91,800. But after a decade of falling prison populations, Prop 36 is now set to rapidly grow the number of people behind bars in the state. According to an analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative, elevating penalties for theft and drug crimes could increase California’s prison population by 35 percent over the next five years, which would fully undo the reductions the state has seen over the past decade.

A state legislative analysis estimated that implementing Prop 36 would increase state spending on criminal punishment “ranging from several tens of millions of dollars to the low hundreds of millions of dollars annually.” The analysis also estimated that local criminal justice authorities like jails and police departments could see costs increase “by tens of millions of dollars annually.”

The Prop 47 reforms a decade ago funneled savings from decarceration toward community-based support services like mental health and addiction treatment, school truancy and dropout prevention, and job training and housing assistance. Since 2014, the state has allocated around half a billion dollars in savings from Prop 47 to local programs that have helped reduce recidivism for low-level offenses across California. 

As those savings dry up thanks to the passage of Prop 36, so will state funding for those local programs, according to the legislative analysis, which estimated a reduction of state spending “in the low tens of millions of dollars annually.”

Bernal with the Ella Baker Center said he would often hear people who supported Prop 36 say that they thought the measure supported programs for people who needed treatment or housing. He said that grassroots organizers who opposed the measure struggled to convince voters concerned about public safety that it could actually threaten community programs that help prevent crime. “I think the people who voted in favor of Prop 36 really want to live in safe communities and don’t want everyone locked up, particularly Black and brown folks,” Bernal added. “But I think folks were misguided.”

Prop 36 was introduced as an effort to assuage voters’ fears about surging rates of shoplifting and commercial theft, which did increase during the pandemic. This time also saw dramatic videos of so-called smash-and-grab burglaries that spread widely across social media and national news. 

But a longer-term view reveals an opposite trend: Property crime rates are at some of the lowest levels they’ve been in 40 years. More recent analysis by the California Budget and Policy Center shows that rates of shoplifting remain below pre-pandemic levels. 

At the same time, a study of the Prop 47 reforms published in the journal Criminology & Public Policy found that its passage had no impact on homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery and burgalary; while motor theft and larceny rates went up, California’s rates still remained below the national average. Bradley Bartos, a professor of government and public policy at the University of Arizona who co-authored the study, said he doesn’t think that “the nitty gritty technical details of the proposition are going to address the change to the landscape of property crime.”

The authors of Prop 36 have also stated that it is aimed to reduce homelessness, but studies show that formerly incarcerated people are ten times more likely to become homeless than the general population. Accordingly, California’s leading homeless policy organizations have come out against the measure. 

Already, observers are characterizing the passage of Prop 36 as part of a larger “pendulum swing” towards harsher punishment in California politics. At the same time voters approved Prop 36, they rejected another measure—Prop 6, which would have prohibited slavery and banned forced labor in California. Los Angeles also ousted progressive District Attorney George Gascon in favor of his more conservative opponent, and in Oakland, voters recalled progressive prosecutor Pamela Price after just two years. More California counties voted red than in 2020. Bartos said “it certainly is movement in the opposite direction California had been moving” over the last decade.

But advocates point out that this swing has much more to do with public perceptions of crime than facts on the ground. Lewis attributes the measure’s success to scare tactics pushed by politicians and harmful narratives from news media that led people to believe that crime was going up, despite FBI data showing otherwise.

“The narrative has been one to scare people, to believe that if we lock people up for addiction, that’s going to help us,” Lewis said. “We did that before, and we found that it didn’t work.” 

Bartos at the University of Arizona concurs: “People’s perception of how at risk they are has changed over the last four years,” he said, in large part due to shoplifting videos that have gone viral on social media.

The Prop 36 “yes” campaign was backed by large retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Home Depot, which collectively gave more than $4 million to the campaign, as well as statewide prosecutor and prison guard organizations. Bartos fears Prop 36 will give law enforcement officials the discretion to arrest and prosecute low level offenders.

“If police and prosecutors interpret this as a broad countering crime mandate, you may start to see them act as such and be more willing to arrest, pursue,” Bartos said. “It’s going to be a question, how people view it more so than how it changes the calculus of crime.”

Ricardo Garcia, the Los Angeles County Public Defender who opposed Prop 36, said California has “gone back in time 10 years” and predicted a decline in services that will likely lead to worsening drug addiction, substance abuse and trauma.

“After this election, we may find ourselves in the most challenging landscape for the criminal legal system and reform that we’ve seen in decades,” Garcia said. “But it doesn’t mean that we stop the struggle or that the struggle is over. Elected officials need to own the solutions that bring us real safety, accountability and justice, and they need to be proud of them.” 

Lewis points out that poverty is a main driver of criminal behavior, and that addressing people’s material needs is a more lasting solution, rather than mass incarceration. He points to instances he has heard of people being arrested for selling baby formula, for example.

“When we think about people that are committing these petty crimes, do you think they’re trying to take over the world and make a million dollars from that? No, they’re trying to feed their children, but those are also the type of people that will be locking up,” Lewis said.

Numerous advocates have said that they will continue to push local and state elected officials to find ways to fund resources that are going to lose money following the passage of Prop 36. The goal, they said, is to redirect resources into proactive measures like substance treatment, schools, creating jobs, and affordable housing for individuals and families. 

“We’re not going to stop, we’re going to keep fighting,” Lewis said. We’re going to do the things that the government that’s supposed to represent us, that’s supposed to really fight for us. If they won’t do it, we’ll do it.”

The post How California’s Embrace of a Tough-on-Crime Measure May Undo a Decade of Reform appeared first on Bolts.

Cynthia Mendoza’s first pregnancy, in the free world, was a time of enveloping love and anticipation. But in 2006, six months into her second pregnancy, Mendoza was arrested and jailed pre-trial in a Lynwood facility overseen by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Once there, she was sent to solitary confinement, where every good thing she remembered about pregnancy became a horror. “I had nobody to talk to, I had nobody to comfort me,” she told me. Cut off from human contact and the warmth of the sun, Mendoza’s mental health quickly deteriorated. Her access to proper nutrition was so poor that her hair started falling out.

Mendoza gave birth shackled to a hospital bed, and she only got to spend three days with her newborn son. On the third day, jail officials handed him off to her father. Then, already suffering from postpartum depression, she was sent back to solitary confinement. “It felt like I was just stuck in this black cloud, and I could not see a foot in front of me,” she said. She would remain there for nearly three more years—all while she was still innocent in the eyes of the law. 

Some 16 years later, in 2022, a broad coalition of organizers in California introduced an ambitious bill to limit the use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons, jails, and detention centers—and outlaw it entirely for pregnant people, as well as a few other categories of vulnerable individuals. They called it the Mandela Act after the South African leader, who was held in solitary confinement for at least six of the 27 years he spent jailed. “Solitary confinement, if done a certain way, drift[s] into the area of torture—and these are correctional facilities, not torture camps,” California Assembly Member Chris Holden, the bill’s sponsor, told me. 

Mendoza watched the bill’s progress with excitement. If it passed, she thought, no one else would have to go through what she did. No other children would have to grow up, like her son had, grappling with the realization that the time they spent in their mother’s womb had been, for her, a time of total deprivation and isolation. 

In 2022, the Mandela Act was passed by the state legislature, but California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it. In 2023, organizers negotiated with the governor’s office to try to come up with a compromise of the Mandela Act that he would consider signing into law. Then, this year, a different organization picked up the Mandela Act’s provision banning solitary for pregnant people and included it in a separate bill focused on improving nutritional standards for pregnant and postpartum women in custody.  

While the Mandela Act stayed stuck this year, this new, narrower bill was adopted by lawmakers in August and signed into law by Newsom in September. But by then, it had grown so unrecognizable to its original community sponsor that they withdrew their endorsement.

The initial bill would have banned solitary confinement for anyone who is pregnant in a California jail, detention facility, or state prison. The version that became law no longer applies to local jails and detention centers, meaning that someone like Mendoza wouldn’t be covered. 

And instead of outright banning solitary confinement, it capped the number of days it can be used. But the result is that the new law expressly allows prison officials to put pregnant women in isolation for up to five days at a time in certain cases. Advocates are alarmed that, for the first time, the legislation has codified in California law that it is permissible to use solitary confinement against pregnant women.

The divergent fate of the two bills is a tidy illustration of what can happen to grassroots efforts to change criminal legal policy in the face of two powerful forces: the California prison system, which enjoys great influence over the state’s elected leaders and tends to resist efforts to impose limits on its authority; and Newsom, whose efforts to style himself as a national leader on prison reform have often involved letting that system guide how and when it wants to change. 

Keramet Reiter, a law professor at UC Irvine who wrote a book on the rise of solitary confinement in California, was frank in her assessment of the new law. “This is an abomination,” she told me. “There are categories of people who unequivocally never, ever should be in solitary confinement, and one of them is pregnant women.”

The debate over solitary confinement in California has been a multi-decade battle between the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) on one side, and the prisoners it puts in solitary confinement on the other, alongside survivors of the practice and their family members and supporters. In 2013, a historic prisoner hunger strike organized by four men in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay led to a lawsuit and eventual settlement, Ashker v. Governor of California, that was meant to lead to significant changes, including an end to the practice of indefinite isolation, which left people languishing in solitary for years on end with little recourse.

But in 2022, when Holden introduced the Mandela Act, he told me that the bill was partially a response to CDCR’s failure to abide by the reforms laid out in Ashker. “CDCR, you have been told by the courts to change how this solitary confinement process works and how it’s being utilized—and to no avail. So we write a bill to say, ‘Okay, we’re just asking you to do what the courts ask you to do,’” he said.

In California, 10 percent of all state employees work in corrections, and their union, CCPOA, has a great deal of lobbying power in Sacramento. The association regularly flexes its muscle via political donations, but its spending on Newsom has been especially notable: the union sunk $1 million into TV ads promoting his gubernatorial run in 2018, and they have more recently spent $1.75 million opposing the recall effort and $1 million on Proposition 1, Newsom’s marquee mental health treatment plan. The latter two expenditures alone represent nearly a third of all CCPOA’s political donations since 2001, according to a recent Cal Matters analysis. 

Newsom has championed some aspects of prison reform during his nearly six years as governor, moving to shut down some facilities and placing a moratorium on the state’s use of the death penalty. But he has also overseen raises and perks for prison guards that even California’s office of legislative analysis found unwarranted. And after the same office determined that five more prisons could be shut down, Newsom declined to implement further closures. (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story).

Solitary confinement has remained a cornerstone of prison officials’ strategy for managing incarcerated populations, as they insist that they need to be able to continue to separate people from the general population for safety reasons. And Newsom has repeatedly erred on the side of trusting CDCR’s discretion and allowing the agency leeway to shape its own policy on this issue. (The CCPOA officially opposes the Mandela Act.)

Reiter, however, contends that it’s not an all-or-nothing decision. “Certainly people get in situations in prison where they need to be removed from the rest of the population, but there are ways to do that without restricting their access to natural light, to human contact, to time out of their cell,” she told me. To Reiter, Newsom’s willingness to let CDCR guide its reforms casts doubt on his stated commitment to changing the state’s carceral system. “It raises real questions to me when a governor who claims to be so invested in reform defers again and again in these ways,” she said.

In 2022, after the Mandela Act made it to the governor’s desk, Newsom returned it unsigned. In his veto message, the governor called the bill “overly broad.” He granted that solitary confinement in California was “ripe for reform,” but chose to put the prison system in charge of overseeing that reform, directing CDCR to implement changes to its solitary confinement policies. 
The department waited nearly a full year to do so, until the Mandela Act was once again being debated and nearing the final deadline for Newsom to sign or veto bills. Then, it proposed its own policy changes that would reduce the number of offenses that land someone in solitary and raise the number of hours of mandatory out-of-cell time to 20 per week, meaning that someone in solitary confinement could still be held in their cell for more than 21 hours per day.

At the same time, Newsom’s office was seeking to winnow the Mandela Act into a data collection bill that outlawed solitary only for pregnant women. The Mandela coalition refused these changes, considering them an unacceptable compromise that would allow Newsom to tout a seemingly progressive reform while failing to address the structural problems with prison isolation. Instead, they opted to pause on the legislation in order to keep negotiating with the governor the following year. They already had all the votes they needed in the state Assembly to get it back on Newsom’s desk: “We were simply parked right outside the governor’s door,” coalition member Hamid Yazdan Panah, co-executive director at Immigrant Defense Advocates, told me. 

But come 2024, Newsom wouldn’t engage. The coalition tried to negotiate, but they didn’t get far. In late July, a staffer from the governor’s office emailed the coalition to let them know the door was closed, referencing the recent CDCR changes as justification. “Given CDCR’s relatively recent update to their regulations on the use of [solitary] the [Governor’s office] isn’t comfortable making further changes to [solitary] policy this year,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, organizers with the gender justice organization Essie Justice Center, based in LA and Oakland, were trying to advance separate legislation that would improve the treatment of pregnant people in custody. As initially conceived, Assembly Bill 2527 included a blanket ban on solitary confinement for pregnant women in jails, detention facilities, and prisons across the state. 

Assembly Member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, the bill’s legislative sponsor, had also supported the Mandela Act, but she told Politico that she wanted to ensure these sorts of protections regardless of whether Mandela made it through. But the bill’s focus on pregnant people happened to resemble the narrowed version of the Mandela Act that Newsom’s office pushed in 2023. “Internally within Sacramento or in the capital, I think this bill was pitted against the California Mandela Act,” Essie policy associate Ellie Virrueta Ortiz told me. Virrueta Ortiz believes that legislators and the governor’s office “wanted this to be the smaller, narrower, much more palatable version.”

This summer, as they worked on drafting the bill, Bauer-Kahan’s office called together policy representatives from Essie as well as CDCR. The prison officials were pushing for an exception to the blanket ban: If the move was for their own protection, pregnant women could still be housed in solitary confinement for up to 10 days at a time. 

When I reached out to CDCR asking why they would advocate for this sort of exception, the department’s press secretary responded: “By moving the person from their housing (often a dormitory environment) to a more protective area, CDCR is allowed a window to determine a safe housing alternative. The bill also includes provisions for CDCR works to ensure the pregnant person is allowed to remain enrolled in their programs.”

Essie’s representatives pushed back. The group’s executive director, Gina Clayton-Johnson, told me that their group wasn’t opposed to amending the legislation, but the exception that CDCR was asking for was a bridge too far. 

“No amount of solitary confinement of a person while they’re pregnant is ever fine,” she said.

Soon after, Bauer-Kahan’s staff informed Essie that they had accepted a version of CDCR’s request: The bill was being amended to allow up to two days of restrictive housing at a time for pregnant people. A subsequent draft of the bill raised the time limit from two to five days. Bauer-Kahan’s office didn’t respond to my request for comment.

When Essie’s members saw the new draft that had been submitted to the Senate Appropriations Committee, they learned that it no longer applied to pregnant women held in jail or immigration detention facilities. 

For Essie, this news was a gut punch. “It was something that really, truly was last minute and was unexpected,” Virrueta Ortiz told me. “We know that the real problem is in the jails.” 

Vanessa Ramos, a community organizer with Disability Rights California and a survivor of solitary herself, didn’t mince her words: “The California legislature is viciously and violently co-opting bills from the community, encouraging folks to take obnoxious amendments that not only water down the bill, they create a false narrative that the California legislature is working with CDCR and county jails, to improve conditions—and they’re not,” she told me. 

When organizers with Essie reached out to the coalition supporting the Mandela Act to ask their advice, a member offered language that would enshrine the sort of provisions Reiter outlined: safe isolation that still allowed out of cell time and proper medical care. Bauer-Kahan’s office didn’t accept these amendments.

Finally, Essie made the difficult decision to withdraw their support for the bill. “So many human rights groups had really called us and said, ‘This is not something that we want to see in the state,’ and we really had to listen to that,” Clayton-Johnson said. Over 80 organizations sent a letter to Bauer-Kahan and Newsom expressing their opposition. They urged the governor to veto the bill. A day of action that was originally intended to galvanize supporters of the Mandela Act but became a protest against AB 2527 instead, where Mendoza spoke about her experience in solitary. “It was the most degrading, inhumane thing that I’ve ever gone through,” she told the crowd, her voice shaking. 

But it was too late. The bill breezed through both chambers. “No one paid attention to it, because everyone thought it was the same bill as before,” Yazdan Panah said. On Sept. 27, Newsom signed it into law, leaving the coalition outraged that California had explicitly enshrined into its statutes the use of solitary confinement for pregnant women.

This development “follows a decades-long pattern of nominal reform in this state where the prison system in particular gets just one millimeter ahead of the bare minimum with their policies,” Reiter said. “It feels like reforms that are calculated to avoid actual reforms.”

For now, the fate of the Mandela Act is uncertain, but organizers vow to continue the fight. Ramos credited the veterans of the fight to end solitary confinement in California for refusing to give in to efforts to water down the bill. “The Mandela Act could have very easily been passed, but the receiving end would have been some fucked up bill,” she said. “The Mandela Act has not passed because of the integrity of the people that are leading these efforts.”

“I don’t see the movement slowing down,” Reiter said. She outlined a number of positive changes that have occurred since the days of the 2013 hunger strike: vastly more public attention on the harms of solitary, policy changes that have ended indeterminate confinement. “But are we still overusing solitary confinement? Is the ultimate winner still the Department of Corrections, who’s shown again and again that they’ll set the policies and the terms and that they control the elected politicians?” she said. “So we have a long way to go.”

Holden, the Mandela Act’s sponsor, is termed out of the state legislature this year. I asked him for his reflections on the bill’s future after three unsuccessful legislative sessions and whether he believes that CDCR can reform solitary confinement by itself. 

“If there’s a system that’s working for some, they don’t think that it really needs to be modified to any great extent, then they’re not going to necessarily have the motivation to see that extended change happen,” Holden said. He also noted that CDCR still has never fully complied with the Ashker settlement requiring extensive changes to the state’s use of solitary confinement—and, as of this January, the settlement is now closed. “I think that CDCR is now able to operate in a lane of making the changes that they see appropriate to make, unless directed by the legislature to do something different,” he said. “And that time has not yet come.”

Cynthia Mendoza’s son is 18 now, but the conditions of his birth linger. “It definitely has affected him,” she told me. He has a hard time talking about it, she said, but lately, “we have been working on his feelings and what he went through, having to be born in jail, and then having to visit his mom in prison.”
It remains a tough subject for Mendoza as well, but she told me that she will continue to speak out about her experience despite the difficulty of revisiting the worst moments of her life. “I will never lose hope that my story can help change the narrative for other women,” she said.

The post On Solitary Confinement, California Officials Side With the Prison System—Again appeared first on Bolts.

Anthony Ehlers and another of Broadway’s friends in a cell next door heard him say he was having trouble breathing and called out to a guard, according to an affidavit written by Ehlers. Roughly 15 minutes later, a nurse arrived, but she didn’t want to climb the stairs to Broadway’s cell. “It’s too hot. I’m not going up there,” she said, per the affidavit. “Tell him to come down here.” 

By the time she ambled up the stairs several minutes later, Broadway was unconscious. His history of severe asthma was well-documented, and prison medical staff had prescribed him medications for the condition. Yet the nurse instead twice administered the overdose reversal drug Narcan as she yelled at Broadway to open his eyes, according to medical records and an affidavit from someone in the cell next door. Two guards in the cell took turns giving him chest compressions while she looked on.

The guards reached for the stretcher—but it didn’t have straps or handles. A man one cell over offered up his bedsheet and eventually helped two guards carry his friend’s limp body downstairs. By the time an ambulance arrived at the prison to take Broadway to the hospital, he wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. An autopsy later revealed he died of bronchial asthma, with heat stress listed among “significant contributing conditions.”

The medical care Broadway received at the end of his life is commonplace for the nearly 30,000 people incarcerated by the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC). Wexford Health Sources, the company the state has paid for prison health care services for decades, has long faced accusations of neglect and abuse, including enforcing a “one good eye” policy and providing such poor treatment to older people with dementia that court monitors compared it to elder abuse. 

“Mike was far from the first, and unfortunately, he won’t be the last,” Ehlers wrote in a message to Bolts. “He died as a result of being less than in the eyes of the people who oversee us. … The staff in these prisons DO NOT see us as human beings.”

Terah Tolner, an attorney representing Broadway’s family, said his experience is “just one example of many of IDOC and Wexford’s pattern of delay and unpreparedness and inadequate medical treatment.” Illinois has been bound by a federal consent decree to improve the quality of treatment it provides incarcerated people since 2019, after a lawsuit alleging poor medical care triggered intervention by the courts. 

Nonetheless, earlier this year, IDOC inked a 5-year, $4 billion contract with Wexford, raising fresh questions about the state’s commitment to improving quality of care for incarcerated people.

Sarah Grady, a civil rights lawyer who has represented a number of incarcerated people in lawsuits against IDOC and Wexford, is disappointed in state leaders like Governor JB Pritzker and Latoya Hughes, the governor’s pick to lead IDOC as interim director since March 2023 for awarding Wexford a new contract despite its tumultuous history. 

“It was a really incredible opportunity for the governor and the state to really think about a model that does not embrace this privatization,” she told Bolts. 

Pritzker, who has heralded progressive legal reform efforts like eliminating cash bail, did not respond to a request for comment. Naomi Puzzello, an IDOC spokesperson, declined to comment on Broadway’s death, citing an ongoing investigation. “The Department has not foreclosed any reasonable ways to provide healthcare services to the patients in its custody,” Puzello said in an emailed statement. “At present, the Department remains committed to continuing to provide medical services [to] the individuals in custody through its emergency contract with Wexford.”

Wexford also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

State prison officials are constitutionally bound to provide a very basic level of care to the people they incarcerate. While there’s no express guarantee of health care in the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled that prison staff cannot knowingly ignore incarcerated people’s severe illnesses. Writing in a 1976 opinion, Justice Thurgood Marshall established the standard when he held that “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners” violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

For much of the nation’s history, this care was provided directly by state prison or health authorities. But around the 1980s, as the number of people behind bars skyrocketed, privatization took root as state lawmakers began to outsource these and other functions. Today, roughly two dozen states use for-profit health care contractors.

The industry is now dominated by a handful of corporations, including Corizon Health, Wellpath, and Wexford. All three have long histories of lawsuits and problems with staffing and quality of care. Corizon paid Arizona officials $3 million in penalties over six years for chronic understaffing. In May, Massachusetts officials declined to renew their contract with Wellpath following complaints that the company routinely denied care and used restraints and solitary confinement on people experiencing mental health crises.

Wexford has a long and complicated history with Illinois dating back to the 1990s, when state officials first began privatizing prison medical care. In 2005, the company had secured a $547 million contract to provide health care services to most state prisons. The following year, Illinois prison officials opened an investigation into a deputy warden who was accused of also working as a paid lobbyist for Wexford in New Mexico. Then in 2008, a former IDOC director was sentenced to two years in prison for accepting $50,000 in bribes from lobbyists, including a Wexford lobbyist. (The company itself was not accused of wrongdoing in the case.) 

By 2010, the prison watchdog group John Howard Association of Illinois was warning of serious deficiencies in the psychiatric care that Wexford provided inside the state’s main women’s prison. Around the same time, from his cell at Stateville prison, Don Lippert filed a typewritten complaint in federal court alleging that he was routinely denied treatment for his diabetes, causing him headaches and nerve damage.

Despite the mounting problems under Wexford, in 2011 the state nonetheless awarded the company a 10-year, $1.3 billion contract to provide virtually all medical care to people incarcerated in Illinois prisons. 

That same year, Lippert teamed with civil rights lawyers to argue that “widespread and persistent mistreatment” of incarcerated people extended far beyond indifference among specific staff members and was “a consequence of overarching policies and procedures put in place and executed by both IDOC and Wexford.” Others eventually joined the lawsuit, and in 2017 U.S. District Judge Jorge Alonso granted class-action certification. A court-appointed medical expert, in a report accompanying Alonso’s opinion, concluded that the state “has been unable to meet minimal constitutional standards with regards to the adequacy of its health-care program for the population it serves.”

In January 2019, the parties settled the case. A five-year consent decree, included as part of the settlement, required IDOC and Wexford to overhaul their medical and dental services by increasing staffing, improving record-keeping, and implementing policies that better protect incarcerated people. An independent monitor was tasked with overseeing the reforms and regularly updating the court.

But as the lawsuit played out in court, medical care for incarcerated people remained dismal. In 2018, a medical expert told the court that of 33 deaths behind bars studied, 12 were preventable. Another seven, the report noted, might’ve been preventable, while five others could not be determined because the deaths weren’t adequately documented.

Even now, bound by a consent decree, heinous treatment continues to plague Illinois prisoners. The independent monitor wrote in a 2020 report that one nurse continued to pass out medication despite being asked by a guard to check on a person who was drooling and unresponsive. In 2023, the monitor flagged the case of an 80-year-old man with dementia who drank bleach from a soda bottle that had been left in his room. 

Wexford’s 2011 contract with Illinois expired in 2021. After decades of business with the state, millions of dollars in settlements, and a trail of horror stories, incarcerated people and advocates on the outside hoped perhaps a change was finally in order.

But the company continued to provide care in Illinois prisons while IDOC solicited bids for a new provider. It received just two: from Wexford and VitalCore Health Strategies. Prison officials scored the two proposals based on the providers’ capability and experience, technical ability and methodology, resources, references, commitment to diversity, and pricing, according to Puzello, the IDOC spokesperson. Once approved by an independent state purchasing officer, the IDOC commissioner, appointed by the governor, can officially enter into the contract.

In January, IDOC announced it was again choosing Wexford—this time to the tune of more than $4 billion over five years, with an option to renew for another five. Contract talks with Wexford remain ongoing. In June, IDOC extended an emergency contract with the health care provider through the end of the year while they finalize the terms of a new agreement.

In May, four months after IDOC announced that it was again choosing Wexford, Judge Alonso agreed to extend the consent decree and court monitoring of health care in Illinois prisons for another five years. In making his decision, Alonso noted that half of the staff positions Wexford is contracted to provide remained unfilled, medical staff continued to administer incorrect medications, and IDOC still had not developed a comprehensive set of health care policies nearly four years after a July 2020 deadline.

Alan Mills, executive director of Uptown People’s Law Center, is a perennial prison litigator and one of the lawyers fighting IDOC and Wexford in the Lippert case. He questioned the factors that IDOC considered in choosing Wexford over VitalCore, which bid lower for the contract. “Clearly, the quality of medical care being provided is not ranked high enough,” he said.

Mills told Bolts that for-profit companies like Wexford have “a built-in economic incentive to provide only the minimum level of care that gets your contract renewed.” Since contractors are paid a flat rate, rather than by the services provided, “every time they actually provide care, it comes off of their profits.”

A 2020 Reuters investigation found that, of 500 state jails surveyed between 2016 and 2018 across the U.S., those that contracted with one of the five largest private providers had higher death rates than those run by government agencies.

The issue is bigger than any one company, said Grady, the civil rights lawyer. Improving medical treatment for incarcerated people in Illinois requires a culture shift, where profit motives no longer drive decisions about care.

She called for greater oversight from state lawmakers, and she urged Prtizker and Hughes to think transformatively about a system that prioritizes quality of care over profit. (Pritzker’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

“If you spend just a little bit of time looking at this system,” Grady continued, “there can be no doubt that it is not good for the state–including the taxpayers–and it’s certainly not good for the vulnerable people who are forced to suffer because Wexford is more interested in making a profit than caring for patients.”

The post In Illinois, a Private Prison Company’s Long Trail of Deaths and High-Dollar Contracts appeared first on Bolts.

The last job that Jared Villery had before his 21-year prison sentence ended was working “quick chill” in the main kitchen at Valley State Prison in California, where he would help flash freeze meals to be dispersed for the entire population. The job required Villery to lift trays that he said could weigh up to 60 pounds. But Villery had cartilage damage to his right knee, for which he had metal plates, and he also had pins in his ankle. He said it hurt to do any heavy lifting.

On several occasions, Villery told officers about his knee and that he could be injured on the job. He asked them to put him in a different position, but they refused and threatened to give him a write up if he didn’t work, which would have impacted his impending parole board hearing. Villery was worried that speaking up might cost him his release date. He had no choice but to work the job. 

“I couldn’t refuse or else I’m guaranteed denial of parole, you know, I’m not going to go home,” Villery said. “So I worked, and I kept doing the job.”

Just as he’d warned, Villery’s knee buckled one day when he was lifting a tray out of the freezer, which caused him to fall and hit his head. He had to walk with a cane for two years after that.

“All of it could have been avoided if I had any say whatsoever in how job assignments are made,” Villery said. “But they don’t care. All that mattered was filling the positions.”

Like Villery, many people incarcerated in California don’t have a say in the job they work, and can be met with retaliation if they refuse. They can be forced into prison labor because the state never fully abolished slavery.

California’s state constitution contains the same loophole that’s in the 13th Amendment to the federal constitution, which formally abolished chattel slavery but allowed it to continue as punishment for crime. This allows prisons to force incarcerated people to work jobs they have little to no say in for as little as pennies an hour. Even if someone wants to attend rehabilitative programs or college classes to prepare them for reentry, they can be forced to miss out on those opportunities to work jobs like yard crew, kitchen staff or janitor, which advocates say is counterproductive to the supposed goals of rehabilitation.

In November, Californians will vote on whether to end forced labor in the state’s prisons and jails. Proposition 6, which will appear on the statewide ballot, would amend the state’s constitution to ban involuntary servitude behind bars and prohibit punishment for refusing work assignments.

If passed, the amendment would make California the latest state to close the prison-labor loophole by adding anti-slavery language to state constitutions. In 2022, voters passed anti-slavery amendments in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont. 

Nevada is the only other state this year to be voting on a similar measure. California and Nevada are currently among 16 states that haven’t closed the loophole.

In California, a coalition of advocates, many of whom are formerly incarcerated, have pushed for years to amend the state constitution. They say banning involuntary servitude will give more agency and dignity to people in prison. 

“Forced labor does no good for anyone,” Villery said. “If you are stealing someone’s decency, the innate human dignity that they have by telling them ‘We’re going to force you to do whatever we want’, I don’t see how anybody can ever truly rehabilitate in that situation.”

J Vasquez never minded his work as a porter in a California prison—the job got him out of his cell. But as he started turning his life around, he wanted to seek out programming to focus on healing and accountability. Vasquez had heard about a victim impact class that he wanted to attend, which would help him learn more about the harm he caused. He wasn’t allowed, though, because it interfered with his responsibilities of sweeping and mopping the prison floors.

“Had I put down that broom and went to that victim impact class to take accountability, to learn about the ripple effect and victimization and to work on my own healing journey, I would have gotten a write up,” Vasquez said. “I would have been punished.” 

Like Vasquez, many people in prison may be forced to miss out on healing and rehabilitative programs if they conflict with a job. Vasquez said that having people work meager prison jobs does not get to the core issue of whatever trauma or underlying problems people faced when they entered the system. Work assignments can sometimes make it impossible to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, substance abuse treatment, anger management classes, trauma awareness sessions and college courses with opportunities to earn a degree, said Vasquez. 

“People should not be punished for simply trying to better, heal and rehabilitate themselves,” Vasquez said. “That’s what Prop 6 would do, give incarcerated people the autonomy, the agency to choose what rehabilitative path works best for them at the moment where they’re at in their life.”

A representative for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told Bolts that it has already made some changes since April in alignment with Governor Gavin Newsom’s “California Model”, including raising the minimum wage from eight cents an hour to $0.16 an hour, and transitioning up to 75 percent of full-time jobs to part-time.

“CDCR’s goal is for every incarcerated person to take advantage of positive programming and rehabilitative opportunities such as education, self-help, vocational and other programs,” said the spokesperson. “These career pathways are intended to ease the transition back into their communities and reduce recidivism.”

Advocates for the amendment say prison jobs don’t prepare people for reentry, and that the low pay can make it harder to reintegrate into society and be successful once released. 

“We’re contracted as laborers inside the prison, and the system reaps the benefits as well because we do not have any funding that goes to our social security or retirement,” said Ivan Serrano, peer support specialist at Starting Over, an organization that offers transitional housing and reentry services to formerly incarcerated people.

When Serrano was serving a 25 year sentence at Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, his job assembling eyeglasses was considered one of the better jobs because he made 87 cents an hour. 

Even though he was able to learn skills from the job, Serrano says it did little to help him find work after release from prison, which was already an uphill battle because of his felony. 

He said giving incarcerated people more say over their work would help them better prepare for life outside.

“Forced labor inside doesn’t provide the options to educate yourself or anyone that is serving time in our prison system, because you do not have an option,” Serrano said. “They just tell you that this is the line of work you’re going to do, and you have to do it. You have no choice.”

Villery says his experience with his “quick chill” job wasn’t the first time he had problems with supervising officers. While working a job as a porter in 2015, he faced retaliation from officers who antagonized him for his history of filing complaints. He said that at one point, they even turned away his family after they had driven two hours to see him, using his job assignment to justify canceling the visit. 

Even when Villery did get a doctor to issue a medical restriction saying he couldn’t go up stairs, he said officers would tell him to clean the top floor of the prison despite knowing about his bad knees. He says that one time when he refused to climb the stairs to the top tier, officers took away his property, restricted his access to showers and put him in solitary conditions where he was only allowed to leave his cell an hour a day up to three times a week.

“They held it over my head for months, that if I did anything they didn’t like, they would write me up in connection with that job assignment, because they were my supervisors,” Villery said.

If someone refuses to work, they can also face issues with the parole board when determining their release, Villery said. Sometimes getting a write up can result in loss of good time credits, which usually take time off a person’s sentence, making the time they stay in prison even longer.

Villery, a fellow with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition who has been active in the campaign to pass Prop 6, says he hopes it will take away some of that discretion away from correctional officers and give people inside more control over their lives.

“It’s something that’s so long overdue, having spent so long inside and seeing just the core coercive nature that officers have and the way in which job assignments are used as more punishment than like character development,” Villery said.

A large network of grassroots organizations, as well as other nonprofits across the state, have been advocating for years to stop forced prison labor, since the End Slavery in California Act was first introduced in 2020. That measure passed the state Assembly with bipartisan support but died in the Senate in 2022 after opposition from Newsom’s administration, which raised concerns about how much it might cost. Newsom’s finance department opposed the measure, warning it could cost around $1.5 million to pay people in prison a minimum wage—a policy that was nowhere in the amendment. 

Activists continued to rally around the amendment and proposed it again last year, with added language allowing the state to set up volunteer work assignments for people to earn credits to take time off sentences. Lawmakers passed it this summer, putting the issue on the ballot for voters this fall. 

Most of the advocates who have been pushing for the change are formerly incarcerated themselves or have loved ones in prison. Ahead of the November vote, they have been holding rallies, promoting the ballot measure on social media and educating the public about the dynamics of forced prison labor inside California prisons. Advocates say they often find that the public is not aware that a form of slavery still exists in California. A poll of likely voters conducted in September by the Public Policy Institute of California showed 50 percent opposed to the measure and 46 percent in support.

“One of the most important things that we’re fighting for is for people just to have the autonomy to be able to choose how they want to spend their time when they’re incarcerated and not be penalized when they choose not to work,” said Stephanie Jeffcoat, founder of Families Inspiring Reentry and Reunification for Everyone. 

“This would mean a lot to the people inside, because they don’t have to no longer live in fear of being punished for not going to work,” she added.

Opponents of Prop 6 say that incarcerated people should be required to perform work that helps offset the costs of their incarceration. The editorial board for the San Diego Union Tribune recently urged voters to reject the amendment, arguing it could undermine victims’ rights “by allowing prisoners to refuse to make court-ordered restitution payments.” 

If the amendment passes, advocates say that many incarcerated people will still seek out work to get outside of their cell. Someone might do yard crew just to spend extra time outside, or work in the kitchen to have more access to food. They say Prop 6 would just give consent to the work arrangement and give the people inside more autonomy. 

Even if voters pass it, the amendment alone might not immediately end forced labor in the state’s prisons. 

As Bolts reported last year, incarcerated people in Colorado, the first state to pass an anti-slavery amendment in 2018, are still punished for refusing work assignments long after the vote.

Vasquez says that advocates for Prop 6 hope that it will allow people in prison to have more say in their job decisions and rehabilitative path. He says that if the measure passes, advocates are prepared to ensure CDCR implements it. 

“We want to actually change the conditions for the people on the inside to go to choose what jobs they want to work at, whether they want to work in rehabilitation or education or drug treatment instead of a job,” Vasquez said. “We want to make sure that that is going to happen in practice.”

The post The California Ballot Measure That Could End Forced Prison Labor appeared first on Bolts.

After giving birth in 2011, Eboney Ellis says she didn’t get any time to bond with her new son. Ellis, who was incarcerated and in the custody of the California prison system, says her baby was taken away so fast that she could barely even lay eyes on him and didn’t learn the baby’s gender. 

Ellis says she was given prenatal vitamins from the time she first got to prison during her pregnancy but never got access to a personal social worker she could consult if she had a question. For incarcerated women who are pregnant, social workers can be the middle person between them and an intentional start for a newborn, as they often help facilitate things like family finding, information sharing, lactation, and more. She still considered herself lucky because her family was there to pick up her baby, unlike some women whose children are quickly taken by child protective services.

“I was never able to see this child,” Ellis said. “From the moment the child was taken out, it was taken away from me.”

Ellis is now part of a coalition of advocates pushing for more humane treatment of pregnant people in California prisons. This year, they have been rallying behind proposed legislation that would mandate that people get to spend at least three days with newborns after giving birth in state prison custody—an increase from the current one to three days before removing the child and returning them to prison. Advocates say that currently, many women get little to no time with newborns after giving birth, and there is no current standard to protect and expand that time.

The proposed legislation, Assembly Bill 2740, would also codify that prison officials connect pregnant people with social workers within a week of entering prison custody or being identified as pregnant. Additionally, the bill requires prison staff to expedite the visitation process so that incarcerated mothers can have overnight visits with their newborns as soon as possible. It would also require an incarcerated mother to be permitted to breastfeed their newborn and pump breast milk to be stored and provided to the child once they’re separated.

Ellis says she is advocating for AB 2740 because it is her personal story. “It was such a horrific thing,” Ellis said. “It meant everything for me to reach back and do whatever I can to make that situation a little bit more softer, a little bit more personal.”

During a legislative hearing in late May, State Assemblymember Marie Waldron, who introduced AB 2740, said that it “recognizes the fundamental rights and health needs of women and their babies in state custody.” 

“It is undeniable that prenatal and postpartum care are very important,” Waldron said during the hearing. “Reimagining outcomes of infants born in California state prisons will strengthen family bonds and reduce recidivism.”

The bill passed with unanimous approval during a May 22 floor vote in the state Assembly but has yet to clear the state Senate, which is in its final stretch of hearings before this year’s legislative session ends on Aug. 31.

As it stands, care provided to pregnant women in California prisons amounts to little more than prenatal vitamins and OB-GYN appointments, as described by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Operations Manual. De Anna Pittman, a program manager with the Young Women’s Freedom Center, which is part of the coalition pushing the reform bill, says the state needs to bolster care for people who give birth in CDCR custody. She points to research showing that a lack of bonding time and breastfeeding puts newborns at increased risk of poor health and worse developmental outcomes. 

“The state of care for incarcerated pregnant people in California is not what it should be. There’s no dignity in giving birth in prison,” Pittman said. “There’s just a lot of confusion and honestly a lot of heartbreak. The process of giving birth is already a traumatic process, and to have your baby ripped away from you instantly is terrible.” 

Pittman also emphasized the importance of access to social workers and expedited visitation because she says that many women could still get released while their children are young. Research shows that when incarcerated people have strong family ties, recidivism decreases.

“We want to give parents the tools that they need, so when they get out, they’re not coming back in,” Pittman said.

Just two days after Jonala Vann found out she was pregnant in 2011, she was sent to jail for a nonviolent probation violation. She said the care she was able to obtain while incarcerated at a Riverside County Jail in Southern California paled in comparison to the time she was pregnant with her daughter outside of prison two years prior; Vann said she was not given prenatal vitamins and was only given an ultrasound a handful of times.

Right before she went into labor, Vann had gone to a court hearing to see whether her case would go to trial or be dropped. She hoped a judge would let her go home to have her baby, but instead she was sent back to jail.

“I was really hoping just to have my daughter, even if I had to serve out my time, I just wanted to have her free,” Vann said.

After she gave birth, Vann was only given 16 hours with her baby. She said she did not sleep after childbirth because she didn’t want to miss any moments with the baby and knew they would soon be separated. She stayed up singing “You’ll Be in My Heart” from the Disney movie “Tarzan”, a song she sang to her baby all the time when pregnant, hoping her daughter could recognize her voice.

“[Those 16 hours] were really hard because I knew that I was going to have to give her up,” Vann said. “I was trying to enjoy them but at the same time I couldn’t help but feel really sad and upset that I put myself in the situation.”

It would be about seven months before Vann got to see her daughter again. She remembers the first visit as “the best and the hardest at the same time. It was nice holding my daughter and getting time to bond, but it was difficult when it came down to leaving.”

Research on pregnancy and incarceration estimates that some 55,000 pregnant people are admitted to U.S. jails every year and about 1,400 to U.S. prisons. Carolyn Sufrin, an OB-GYN who started the Pregnancy in Prison Statistics Project to advocate for reproductive justice for incarcerated people, says that treatment of pregnant people typically varies from facility to facility and that there are often barriers to the kind of care pregnant people might expect to get on the outside. 

“You can’t control your own access to health care, you’re completely reliant on the facility for that. Sometimes that works out, but many times it doesn’t,” Sufrin said. 

Being incarcerated while pregnant can also pose health risks. When Martha Torres was pregnant in a Los Angeles County jail, the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping the country. She said the virus was making its way through the facility, and eventually she contracted it and was worried because she didn’t know how it would affect her pregnancy.

Torres went into jail a month and a half into her pregnancy for a probation violation. She said there were times she was not listened to when she voiced her concerns about the virus and was sometimes not allowed to take walks around the yard. 

Torres was eventually able to enter an alternative incarceration during her pregnancy that allowed her to live with her newborn daughter after she gave birth so that she could bond with and breastfeed her. Torres also had another son at home who was less than a year old when she went to jail, and said it was traumatic to be separated from him and difficult to repair their bond when she got home.

“There’s a huge difference, you miss out on all your milestones, and it’s actually very traumatic for the parent and for the child,” Torres said.

This year, California lawmakers filed a series of bills aimed at improving treatment for pregnant people who are incarcerated and protecting the bonds between newborns and incarcerated mothers. One would prohibit state prisons and county jails from putting people in solitary confinement during pregnancy or for 12 weeks postpartum. Another would encourage judges to consider alternatives to incarceration for pregnant and postpartum women so they could bond with their newborns during their first year. None of the bills have yet to pass as the legislature enters its final days of this year’s session, which ends on Aug. 31.

The effort to pass new protections for pregnant people in jails and prisons follows other policy reforms at the intersection of incarceration and pregnancy in recent years. In 2020, California passed AB 732 mandating new treatment guidelines for people incarcerated in any state or county correctional facility, including transport to a hospital during childbirth and prohibitions on tasing or pepper spraying pregnant people in custody. Before that, in 2012, California passed a bill outlawing the shackling of pregnant incarcerated people, including the use of leg irons and waist chains. 

Other reforms to accommodate pregnant women and new mothers in jails and prisons have hit a wall. In 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the California Healthy Start Act, which would have expanded a program where women in prison could live with their children to include incarcerated women regardless of the conviction type or length of their sentence. The same year, the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act died in the state Assembly’s Appropriations Committee.

“We want to keep that mother and that baby bonded together for life so they actually get to be raised by their mothers, instead of having to believe in the system or by a grandparent,” said Tyrique Shipp, a policy fellow with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition.

Shipp pointed out the lack of oversight standards to ensure consistent physical and emotional care for the complexities of incarcerated pregnant women. Even if legislation passes that sets better baseline standards for treatment of incarcerated people during pregnancy, Shipp says more oversight is needed to ensure consistent physical and emotional care for incarcerated pregnant women, mothers and infants. 

“A prison cell is no place for somebody who is pregnant or somebody after pregnancy — it’s not safe, it’s not clean — and so the focus is just trying to make sure that we can create a safe environment for these women,” Shipp said.

The post “There’s No Dignity in Giving Birth in Prison”: New Bills Would Improve Care Behind Bars appeared first on Bolts.

When Kendra Drysdale was groped by a prison guard during a pat-down, she knew that reporting it internally within her facility, the federal prison FCI Dublin, would only make things worse. So she emailed a report to what she thought was a direct line to the Department of Justice. But Dublin leadership caught wind of the email, accused her of lying in order to file a false report, and ordered her into a disciplinary hearing. 

“What do you want to keep?” Drysdale remembers an officer asking her during the disciplinary hearing. She thought immediately of her 22-year-old daughter, who’d lost her dad and had only her to rely on, and asked through tears to keep access to phone calls so they could still communicate. “And she said, ‘Okay, I’m taking your phone. I’m taking your email. I’m taking your video visits, I’m taking your in person visits,’” Drysdale recalled. The prison also took away her job, her access to commissary, and, most crushingly, her early release credits, leaving her in prison for several months past the date she was supposed to go home.

Drysdale’s story is just the tip of the iceberg at FCI Dublin, the now-notorious federal prison in Northern California whose employees preyed on the prisoners in their custody for years in a culture so pervasive that prison staff nicknamed it “the rape club.” The chaplain was abusing women. Medical staff were abusing women. The warden, who had trained staff on the Prison Rape Elimination Act, was abusing women. 

At FCI Dublin, “Everybody knew something, everybody had observed something,” said Tess Korth, who worked as a correctional officer at the prison for 25 years until she says she was forced out for calling out the abuse. “In my opinion, they enabled all this stuff to continue going on.” Internal attempts to address the situation went nowhere: 

Korth told Bolts that she made reports of the abuse within the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for six years, starting in 2016, with no results.

These violations finally came to light in 2021 after an investigation by the Department of Justice, which oversees the BOP, led to the indictment of a guard. Eventually, seven FCI Dublin employees, including the warden, were convicted of sexual abuse (an eighth will stand trial next year). In February, the California Coalition of Women Prisoners (CCWP), a member of the Dublin Prisoner Solidarity Coalition, filed a class-action lawsuit against the BOP. This past March, a federal judge appointed a special master to look into the allegations, which advocates hoped would bring some measure of oversight. Then, in April, the BOP announced it was closing the facility entirely. 

Drysdale and a few others whose sentences were ending were released, but nearly everyone else was transferred, sent to over a dozen different federal prisons throughout the country, some thousands of miles from their family and children. Women were retaliated against further on the drive there, as Lisa Fernandez, who has covered sexual abuse at FCI Dublin since early 2022, reported recently for Rolling Stone; many face ongoing retaliation at their new facilities.

It’s difficult to imagine a more serious abuse of power than a prison guard who preys on a person whose every action he already controls—her communication with the outside world, her visits with her family; her access to food, supplies, showers, medical care. Federal prison officials allowed this type of abuse to go on unchecked for years. Now that the story has broken open, the litigation, prosecutions, and efforts to establish broader federal oversight are really attempts to answer one central question: What does an appropriate remedy look like? 

Lately, lawyers representing the survivors are trying a novel strategy: compassionate release. The mechanism, generally conceived of as a last-resort option for dying or medically incapacitated prisoners, is for the first time being considered as a reparative measure for women who were sexually abused while in federal custody. 

“We thought, what’s more extraordinary and compelling, which is the standard for compassionate release, than being sexually abused by prison guards after your sentence has been imposed?” said Shanna Rifkin, deputy general counsel for Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), who is spearheading the effort. “No federal judge sentences people to be sexually abused in prison.” 

FAMM and the pro bono lawyers working with them have helped secure compassionate release for 17 former inhabitants of FCI Dublin thus far, and they’re evaluating 95 additional requests for legal aid from women formerly held at the facility. But seeking this remedy has come with its own challenges—ones that underscore precisely why it’s so difficult to eradicate sexual violence in prison. 

The Department of Justice has stressed that it is seeking long sentences for prison employees charged with these crimes. In response to a request for comment, a DOJ spokesperson emphasized the 20 BOP employee prosecutions the Department has brought since January 2021, and wrote in a statement that “The Department of Justice has and will continue to prioritize seeking justice for victims of sexual assault by FBOP employees.” But survivors and advocates say that prosecution alone, fails to help victims of sexual abuse heal—nor does it stop the harm at its root, given how far the cover-up and retaliation at FCI Dublin extended beyond the officers charged with criminal offenses. 

“The issues at Dublin really had a spotlight on them for good reason, but the issues run all the way up the ladder to the highest points of BOP,” said Courtney Hanson, the development and communications coordinator for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. Given that sexual assault in federal prison is widespread, FAMM estimates many more people could be eligible for compassionate release around the country. 

Bolts reviewed data compiled by CCWP on the current whereabouts of more than 100 women who were being held at Dublin when it closed, and found that the vast majority were transferred to other federal facilities with a documented history of sexual abuse by guards. “It’s prevalent through the whole BOP,” Drysdale said. “They’re not safe anywhere.”

Since Congress established federal compassionate release via the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, the process has been open to anyone who can prove an “extraordinary and compelling” reason that they should be freed before the end of their sentence—at least in theory. In practice, compassionate releases are rare, though a 2018 reform that allowed prisoners to petition the courts themselves led to a sharp increase in the number of applications, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic began.

FAMM has long pushed for reforms to the compassionate release process at both the federal and state level, where access can be even more patchwork and dysfunctional. After the revelations of widespread abuse at FCI Dublin, Rifkin helped convene a group of pro bono lawyers to bring compassionate release cases before federal judges. They argued that sexual abuse in custody should qualify as a reason for release—both as a concrete reparative measure the government can offer, and as a necessary precondition to healing—and many of the judges agreed. 

Seventeen former FCI Dublin prisoners have now won their freedom after arguing that the sexual abuse they experienced in prison constituted an extraordinary and compelling change of circumstances. The road ahead is by no means easy, but Rifkin noted that release has allowed women to reconnect with their children and access resources like peer support and therapy. “Just being able to be outside, just being with your family—there’s a lot that that offers,” she told Bolts.

To Kelly Savage-Rodriguez, who worked to reform state-level compassionate release in California in 2022 and now works with CCWP, the reasoning behind release is simple. “You can’t get healed and deal with the trauma of that sitting in a cell,” Savage-Rodriguez told Bolts. “You need to be able to get counseling… not be told to shut up and sit down and this is why we’re gonna punish you more.”

In order to facilitate these individual compassionate release applications, FAMM sought to enshrine the principle that sexual abuse in custody qualifies as a reason for release within federal sentencing policy. To do so, they had to go through the people who decide what “extraordinary and compelling” means: the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent federal agency made up of seven presidential appointees. (Its most famous recent alumna is Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson).

Douglas Berman, a professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and the author of the Sentencing Law and Policy blog, told Bolts that the commission has an enormous amount of influence over sentencing policy, even as it has historically chosen to take a modest and conservative view of its own power. “I think it could do an awful lot and dramatically shape many aspects of our nation’s criminal justice systems,” Berman said. “But even in its more sort of focused role that it’s adopted, the federal sentencing guidelines are still central to literally every single federal sentencing that takes place—and that’s upwards of 60–70,000 persons every year.”

Starting in early 2019, the Sentencing Commission lacked a quorum after two rounds of Trump nominees proved too controversial for Senate confirmation (one, a federal judge known as “Hang ‘Em High Henry,” once said “I live to put people in jail”). For several years, nothing got done. But all seven of Biden’s nominees eventually proved more successful, and by mid-2022, the commission was back in action with four Democrats and three Republicans, in keeping with requirements to seat no more than four members of the same party. 

In April 2023, after FAMM’s request, the commission significantly expanded eligibility for compassionate release, including adding sexual abuse in custody as a criteria. It seemed like a victory—but it was actually about to make winning compassionate release even more challenging for survivors.

At the DOJ’s behest, the sentencing commission added two hurdles that people sexually assaulted by prison employees have to clear in order to be considered eligible for compassionate release: The sexual contact must be penetrative, and proof that the abuse occurred must come in the form of a criminal conviction, a civil admission or finding of liability, or an internal administrative finding. These changes took effect on Nov. 1, 2023. Berman said this sort of deference to the DOJ is not uncommon, even though this commission is notably more progressive than past incarnations. “Under any leadership, under any structure, we’ve long seen the Department of Justice and its voice find significant attention in the work of the Commission,” he told Bolts. 

But Rifkin says these hurdles ignore the reality of what sexual violence in prison looks like and how it’s adjudicated. “Many of the people at Dublin were sexually abused in a way that was intense stalking and harassment and abuses of power, but not penetrative genital contact,” she told Bolts. “We have a lot of people for whom a guard would stand outside their cell and say, ‘I’ll only let you use the shower if you take off your shirt and flash me’ or, ‘I’ll only let you leave and go to the lunch line if you touch yourself in front of me.’” 

The admission of liability requirement also runs counter to the way that sexual assault claims are often handled by the BOP. A 2023 investigation by The Appeal, for instance, found that many civil cases alleging abuse at another federal prison, FCI Tallahassee, were settled out of court. 

Ironically, after the new sexual assault criteria became effective, Rifkin said, these compassionate release applications faced a steeper uphill battle than when there were no criteria in place at all. “After November 1 and this new policy statement, we’ve seen many federal prosecutors who are really kind of digging their feet in the sand and saying, ‘If you don’t meet these exact standards, we’re not going to agree to the case. And we will oppose it,’” she told Bolts. 

Rifkin said that FAMM will be petitioning the Sentencing Commission to reconsider the evidentiary hurdles, highlighting their “unintended consequences.” But she stressed that it’s well within the DOJ’s power to “make clear to U.S. Attorneys Offices across the country that they should be cooperating with survivors of abuse and their attorneys to help move these cases forward.”

Bolts asked the Department of Justice whether the agency has given U.S. attorneys’ offices explicit guidance on how to approach compassionate release cases that involve sexual abuse in custody, and for a response to FAMM’s pushback on the evidentiary hurdles. A DOJ spokesperson responded, “While only a federal court can grant a petition for compassionate release, the Department fully supports the FBOP Director [Colette S. Peters] as she continues to move for compassionate release for victims in appropriate cases.” Sentencing Commission data for Fiscal Year 2023 shows that Peters used her authority to bring just 7 of the 431 compassionate release petitions that a federal judge ultimately granted (There is no indication of whether any of those 7 were victims of sexual abuse by prison staff). 

In a statement to Bolts, a BOP spokesperson said, “The FBOP is prioritizing compassionate release for victims of sexual abuse by FBOP employees. While the FBOP can’t directly reduce sentences, we recommend eligible individuals to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The FBOP is also revising the Compassionate Release policy to broaden eligibility.”

If the Sentencing Commission reconsiders the evidentiary hurdles, it could pave the way for a slew of new compassionate release cases; Rifkin says there’s no telling just how many federal prisoners might be victims of sexual abuse by BOP employees. Besides the 95 cases it’s evaluating from FCI Dublin, FAMM and its network of lawyers have accepted five compassionate release cases on behalf of women incarcerated at FCI Tallahassee, where sexual abuse has been reported for decades. (At least three guards have been indicted in the past two years; and the prison was the site of a shocking shoot-out in 2006, when a guard indicted in a sexual bribery scheme opened fire on federal agents who had come to arrest him and five of his colleagues).

In December 2022, a congressional probe led by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff found that sexual violence is rampant in federal custody. “The BOP is failing systemically to prevent, detect, and address sexual abuse of prisoners by its own employees,” Ossoff said during the hearing, calling the culture of abuse “cruel and unusual punishment.” A bill resulting from this research, the Federal Prison Oversight Act, passed the U.S. House in May.

Before she was transferred to FCI Dublin, Kendra Drysdale spent 11 months at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Texas, where she says sexual abuse by guards, and retaliation for reporting it, was also rampant. Scores of women at Dublin have since been transferred to other federal facilities with documented histories of guard sexual abuse, including Carswell. And women have reported retributive solitary confinement, strip searches, medical neglect, denial of food, and verbal abuse at their new prisons. “There’s sexual assault victims all over the country right now being severely retaliated against—ongoing, ongoing, ongoing—because they spoke out,” Drysdale said. 

Since her release in April, Drysdale has thrown herself into the process of recovery. “I went in diagnosed with compound trauma disorder, and I came out of it feeling like I just got more and more trauma than I ever had,” she told Bolts. She said she is lucky to be able to stay with family on a farm in the Santa Cruz mountains, where she tries to push herself to explore nature, despite naturally gravitating toward the studio apartment she sleeps in after spending years in a cell. She has found a therapist and other peer support. She finds herself crying a lot these days, which she takes as a sign that she finally has a safe place to begin to process everything she went through. 

And Drysdale has begun working with the Dublin Prisoner Solidarity Coalition to advocate for women’s rights in federal custody, which she sees as a crucial component of her recovery. “Doing this helps me get better because I know I am doing what I can to help others still suffering,” she told Bolts. 

The FCI Dublin developments come as state and local prison and jail systems also fail to prevent sexual abuse by employees within their walls. The Texas Office of the Inspector General has received more than 600 complaints of sexual abuse by prison guards over the past five years, Texas Public Radio reports. In New York, the Adult Survivors Act has paved the way for more than 700 lawsuits over alleged sexual abuse at Rikers Island. 

And the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is currently facing its own scandal over sexual abuse in custody. This January, attorneys filed a lawsuit on behalf of over 130 women who say they were abused in custody at California’s two women’s prisons; one guard allegedly assaulted more than 22 women over a decade-long span and now faces 96 abuse charges. As with the federal Bureau of Prisons, CDCR has been reluctant to consider releases as a remedy for survivors of sexual abuse, CCWP’s Savage-Rodriguez said. 

Meanwhile, organizers with the Dublin Prisoner Solidarity Coalition say they will keep fighting for releases, along with a host of other protective measures, for everyone transferred out of FCI Dublin this spring. Hanson said that CCWP’s work has shown that the problem of sexual abuse within prison is fundamental to the institution of prison itself. “In every single carceral institution where we’ve ever worked with people, we hear stories of gender violence and assault,” she told Bolts. “While Dublin has been a particularly egregious example, we think ultimately, we need other systems of care and accountability altogether.”

Updated (July 8) with comment from the Bureau of Prisons.

The post “What’s More Extraordinary and Compelling?” appeared first on Bolts.

Suares and Zoe, the couple’s then-three-year-old daughter, left home early enough that morning to see the sun rise during the two and a half hour drive to the facility. When they arrived to check in at the prison entrance, Suares and Zoe removed their shoes and jackets, lifted up their shirts to show guards their waistbands, and walked through a metal detector before proceeding to the visiting room.

Zoe hadn’t seen her incarcerated father since around the time she turned a year old, but she remembered his face from a photo she carries around with her in a ziplock bag, and recognized his voice from their frequent phone calls. Her father called out to her—“Zoe, mamas!”—as she entered the visiting room before scooping her up in his arms. During the rest of the visit, they drew together, read the bible, played with a deck of Trolls-themed Uno cards, and shared a meal from vending machines. Now that Zoe can visit almost every weekend, this has become her normal routine with her father. 

“Having to raise her by myself without her seeing him was one of the most difficult challenges that I had to face,” Suares told Bolts. “So when she got to see him again, I’ll never forget how she ran to him.” Being separated “was one of the hardest things that happened to them,” Suares added. “They had to rekindle their relationship, and so she would sit right next to her father, and they would share a meal.”

Every Friday through Sunday, families with loved ones in California prisons can sit across from each other to talk, play board games and choose from a selection of exorbitantly priced vending machine food during visits that usually last between two and six hours. But even though visitation is a lifeline for incarcerated people and can be a critical factor for rehabilitation, families often face barriers when visiting loved ones in prison. 

California changed visitation from a right to a privilege in the mid-1990s to give correctional officers more control over prison activities. Prison staff can block visits for incarcerated people at their discretion, including for allegations of misconduct unrelated to visitation. State officials may also restrict visits at their choosing; for instance, a budget revision California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed last month calls for reducing visits from three to two days per week in the state’s high-security prisons. 

People who visit incarcerated family members may also be ordered to submit to a strip search based on an officer’s suspicions and blocked from visits if they refuse. 

Suares is the founder and executive director of Jesse’s Place, an organization that advocates for incarcerated family members. She’s part of a larger Coalition for Family Unity in California that has sponsored legislation to reduce barriers to visitation. The bills they have proposed this year, Assembly Bills 2959 and 2709, aim to limit the reasons for which prison staff can block visits, codify three days of visits per week into state law, and lower the sky-high cost for vending machines in visitation rooms. 

The state Assembly overwhelmingly approved both bills in May. They now sit in the Senate Public Safety Committee.

Lawrence Cox, interim director of the Coalition for Family Unity, says the reforms are needed to protect and emphasize the importance of visitation and family connections as a rehabilitative apparatus for those in prison.

“There’s no rehabilitation if you can’t restore and rebuild bonds between family members and their communities,” Cox told Bolts. “Visitation can help a parent who’s estranged from their kids to have an opportunity to still be a part of raising them and building that bond.”

Prisons as a “captive audience”

During their first visit back, the Suares family sat at a children’s table for arts and crafts, eating popcorn and chips from the vending machines as cartoons played on the television.

To buy food and drinks from vending machines, the only meal option available during the hours-long visits, people visiting family members in California prisons are allowed to bring up to $70 in cash per day, plus an additional $40 per child—a sign of the significant markups they face. Prices for snacks, ice cream and other frozen goods like pizzas and burritos can be two to three times the cost in most local stores, according to the Coalition for Family Unity. While a single frozen cheeseburger might cost $1.25 at the store, it could be anywhere from $7 to $14 in a prison vending machine, depending on the vendor and the facility, according to the coalition.

As such, vending-machine meals can compound the financial strain that comes with visiting family members in lockup. Most families must travel far and end up spending hundreds of dollars on gas, motel rooms, and sometimes even flights in order to visit. Advocates with incarcerated family members estimate that families in California spend at least $435 in travel costs for a weekend visit. 

Suares says she often limits what she eats when visiting so there’s enough money for her daughter and husband to share meals. Sometimes they have to miss a weekend visit in order for her to pay rent. “When she would start crying that she wanted to see her dad, I would do my best to get there. But then the money was even shorter,” Suares said. “We would have to sacrifice somehow.”

In addition to costs related to visiting, families also typically pay high commissary prices and send care packages in order to provide basic hygiene or food products for loved ones in prison, as incarcerated people typically make less than a dollar. Private companies that contract with prisons and jails around the country can typically charge whatever they want because people who are incarcerated and their families can’t go anywhere else. 

Bianca Tylek, founder and executive director of Worth Rises, a nonprofit organization fighting to end exploitation by prison industries, says that it is past time to curb predatory and exploitative business models that exist inside of prisons and jails. She applauded the efforts by California advocates impacted by incarceration, which is part of a larger groundswell of activism around cutting the high costs families pay to maintain connections with incarcerated loved ones. In recent years, advocates have pressured several states and large jail systems to mandate free communications for incarcerated people. In California, Suares and others impacted by incarceration helped pass laws that took effect last year mandating free prison phone calls and reducing price-gouging for commissary items. 

“It is unconscionable to prey on marginalized people as a captive audience who can’t go anywhere else, with the most excessive prices for products that we all enjoy on the outside at largely better prices and better quality,” Tylek said.

AB 2959, one of this year’s bills sponsored by the coalition of people impacted by incarceration, aims to reduce food costs in visiting rooms by restricting prices to the average market retail price in the community in which the facility is located. The bill also has language encouraging the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to provide “affordable, fresh, and nutritious food items in prison vending machines”; currently, the most available options consist of candy, salty snacks, sodas, and frozen food.

Angel Rice visits her husband, who is currently serving a life sentence in a California prison, nearly every weekend. But Rice, co-founder of the nonprofit advocacy organization Empowering Women Impacted by Incarceration, which advocates for incarcerated family members and is also part of the Coalition for Family Unity, said her husband typically can’t keep his plant-based diet if he wants to share a meal with her during visits. The visiting room at the facility where he’s incarcerated often doesn’t have fresh fruit, but sometimes has simple salads, which might cost $3 in a grocery store but go for $10 inside the prison walls. So he often resorts to a cheese pizza or grilled cheese during the visit. 

“He doesn’t eat cheese, but he’s forced to eat it because that’s what’s available, instead of having to resort to just eating chips and candy for six hours,” Rice said.

Suares and Rice, who have for years helped advocate for reform legislation to reduce barriers to visitation and excessive pricing, began working on AB 2959 after seeing the stress that spending hundreds of dollars on vending machine food adds to families already struggling with travel costs to visit loved ones. 

“You’re sitting there for six hours trying to feed you and your loved one off $70, and because of the pricing, it’s really not affordable,” Rice said. “When people are sentenced, the families are also left behind to do the time along with them. The families are the ones who provide the financial support, the mental support, the emotional support.”

Restoring family connections

In addition to advocating for what they call the “vending machine” bill, the coalition of advocates impacted by incarceration are also pushing for AB 2709, which would remove barriers faced by families during the visiting application process, such as denial of visiting for omissions or errors on visiting applications. The bill also places limitations on when California prison officials can take away an incarcerated person’s visiting privileges. 

Currently, visitation can be taken away by California prison staff at their discretion. Cox said that prison staff often blocks visits for incarcerated people over allegations or conduct that has nothing to do with visitation. “CDCR staff arbitrarily abuse their discretion to deny or take a person’s visit simply because a person has done something on the yard, gotten a write up on the yard or some other type of infraction,” Cox said. 

Under the new bill, prison staff wouldn’t be able to block someone’s visits unless it is a disciplinary measure for a security violation specifically related to visitation—such as possessing contraband or committing violence during a visit. 

A CDCR spokesperson told Bolts that the agency does not comment on proposed legislation in response to questions for this story. The spokesperson also provided a statement saying the agency “recognizes visiting is an important way to build and maintain family and community ties and is a powerful aid in rehabilitation,” and that it is “dedicated to supporting and continuously improving visiting programs.”

The proposed legislation also aims to eliminate strip searches of children during visit processing and restrict it to a last resort for adults. Denying a strip search could cost someone their visit. Last summer CDCR made it easier to justify a strip search by changing their standard from “reasonable cause” to “reasonable suspicion.” 

The CDCR representative told Bolts that unclothed body searches are used only when all other contraband interdiction efforts have been exhausted. To be searched, the CDCR representative said the subject of the search must agree by signing a form and the reason for the search must also be documented on the form.

“All people who enter institutional grounds are subject to a search of their person, private property, and vehicles for contraband and illegal drugs,” the spokesperson said. “In some cases, a determination may be made that an unclothed body search is necessary.” 

When a visitor has a child with them, they often end up strip searched in front of the child, according to Cox. “Children can be subjected to this, too, and they have,” he said. “This practice has always targeted women of color,” he added. “There are some facilities and staff that overly utilize the rules … subjecting them to these inhumane and deplorable cavity searches. A lot of times nothing is found.”

AB 2709 also calls for incarcerated people at all California prisons to be allowed three days of visitation per week. That would codify into law a change the CDCR made last summer, when the agency expanded visits from two days to three days in all facilities. Newsom recently sought to reel back that policy, releasing a revised budget proposal that calls for cutting the third day of visiting in the state’s high-security facilities. 

Impacted families say Newsom’s proposed rollback underscores the urgency of the legislation. “This bill, 2709, seeks to codify that exactly for these reasons, so another administration, or the same administration wouldn’t come back and try to take that third day of visiting,” Cox said. “It’s another attack on our ability to restore the visiting apparatus, as far as allowing it to be a real rehabilitative mechanism and not a punitive mechanism.”

Decades of social science research have shown that strong family ties decrease recidivism and improves mental health. Cox said visits are also key to helping impacted children who feel the absence of their parents. Nationally, around 1.25 million children have incarcerated parents, but two-thirds of parents haven’t received visits from them due to restrictive visit policies and financial or logistical barriers.

Cox said budget accommodations shouldn’t be made at the cost of affecting rehabilitation programs that help decrease recidivism. He says that when advocates approached CDCR with concerns about the impact to incarcerated people who would lose a day of visits each week, the agency responded by saying the reduction would encourage positive behavior by providing more incentive for people to move to lower-level prisons. 

“It was disheartening,” Cox added. “We fought so hard and so long to get this third day of visiting at all facilities, because we prioritize and we lift up building those family bonds. That’s rehabilitation.”

To Suares, weekend visits feel like a getaway—her husband gets to be away from the same prison walls he sees everyday, and she gets to raise her daughter with her partner before heading back to life as a single mom. 

But leaving is always hard. After they said goodbye, Suares’ daughter cried for her father while clinging onto the picture they drew together during the visit. “I want my pa,” Suares recalled her saying. When her daughter fell asleep in her carseat, Suares listened to music during the drive back. After a while, she turned it off to enjoy the silence before returning to single motherhood.

“I just hope for change because at the end of the day, they were given the sentence but it’s like we’re living that sentence also,” Suares said. “Us families need to be humanized and treated with respect. I just want things to be better.”

The post Californians With Family in Prison Inspire Legislation to Remove Barriers to Visitation appeared first on Bolts.

Inez Bordeaux had heard horror stories about the St. Louis jail commonly known as the Workhouse—named so for prisoners held there in the 1800s who were forced to labor for their freedom—but it was only once she was sent there herself in 2016 that she realized: “Everything I’ve heard about the Workhouse is absolutely true.”

There were rats, roaches, black mold. There was the pervasive odor: “I don’t know if I have the words to accurately describe it, but it just smells rotted,” she told Bolts. “It smells like mildew and rot—and, like, despair.” And there was rampant neglect and abuse. “The way people are treated inside of the facility—like you are something that someone has scraped off the bottom of their shoe,” she said. 

In 2018, spurred by the memory of the six months she spent inside, Bordeaux got involved in the group Arch City Defenders’ fight to close down the Workhouse (today, she works as the group’s Deputy Director of Community Collaborations). The early 2021 mayoral win of Tishaura O. Jones, who had called to shutter the Workhouse as early as 2016, was a boon for the movement: Jones largely emptied the jail later that year, and permanently shut its doors in mid-2022. That might have been the end of some campaigns. In St. Louis, it was just the beginning.

Many prisons and jails that get emptied of one incarcerated population still end up warehousing people under another carceral function: they become ICE detention facilities, or simply hold prisoners for another jurisdiction. St. Louis was determined to chart a different course. 

Once the Workhouse was officially closed, the city embarked on an 18-month-long process to envision a future for the space, quite literally called Reenvisioning the Workhouse. It involved soliciting input from 2,500 St. Louis organizations and individuals, including residents who live near the site, and, critically, people who had been incarcerated there. It would all lead up to a final report to be presented to the mayor’s office with recommendations for the building and its surrounding land. As different groups came together to work through divergent ideas for the site, and ultimately produce a host of proposals about what might replace the Workhouse, the process tapped into a deep wellspring of feeling about a building that for many represents nothing but sorrow.

Then in March, two months after the Workhouse transition team released their final report, Jones announced a different plan: she wanted to use the site to build tiny homes for unhoused people. The move came as a shock to many organizers, including those who were involved throughout the process and believed that putting homeless people at the site, far away from community and services, was akin to an act of banishment. “It feels like a punch in the face for a mayor who has said that she understands the Workhouse, who was calling for the closure of the Workhouse before the Close the Workhouse campaign even existed, to once again attempt to disappear the people that are seen as undesirable to a facility that we know is not fit for human habitation,” Bordeaux said. 

The Close the Workhouse campaign is continuing to press the mayor and the city’s Board of Alders to reconsider and implement the recommendations laid out in the report, and the mayor’s office stresses that no official decisions have been made yet regarding the site, “If it can be changed, I want to change it,” said Jada Scaife, another community design organizer for the Reenvisioning the Workhouse steering committee who also spent time in the jail. But, they added, “they already heard us—that’s what the report was for—and they still chose to go the way they went.” 

Both the report process, and the fracas that has accompanied the revelation of the city’s new plan for the site, illustrate the possibilities that arise when prisons and jails close, as well as the conflicts that likely accompany any serious discussion over what’s next. Is the ground a jail sits on a plot of land like any other, with the potential to provide a practical, stopgap fix to another ongoing municipal crisis? Or should it be treated with more reverence, akin to former sites of racial terror or confinement that have been commemorated with creative memorial projects? Should it be a place of remembrance?

Over the past two decades as the U.S. has begun to reevaluate the harsh approach to criminal justice that ballooned carceral populations in the 1980s and 1990s, prisons and jails have closed their doors across the country, leading to a reduction of at least 81,000 beds, according to an analysis from The Sentencing Report. “There are active closure conversations happening this year in California and New York, Virginia, Washington state,” said Nicole D. Porter, the advocacy director at the Sentencing Project and the author of two reports on prison closure and repurposing. 

Porter has observed that many closed carceral facilities end up holding migrants for ICE or otherwise furthering carceral purposes. But she has also documented a small but growing number of prisons and jails that have undergone adaptive reuse processes, transforming into upscale mixed-use developments, whiskey distilleries, film studios, homeless shelters, and more. 

The vast majority of these end up as for-profit spaces, and some have even seemed to capitalize on the building’s past in a way that invites accusations of particularly poor taste. Take “The Cell Block” hotel in Clifton, Texas, which invites guests to “break the chains of monotony” and promises “luxurious solitary confinement,” as Harper’s reported recently. In her report, Porter notes that Virginia organizers criticized one adaptive reuse project in Lorton, Virginia, for planning a “Nightmare Prison” haunted house event for Halloween just a few months after George Floyd’s murder. 

A few projects have involved community participation or discussion around community reinvestment—the idea that proceeds from future site operations should go toward building up services in the neighborhoods where most incarcerated people come from. In 2019, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms hired the Oakland-based abolitionist design firm Designing Justice + Designing Spaces to reimagine the Atlanta City Detention Center, in what the firm called the city’s “largest and most transparent community engagement process.”

Ultimately, the process stalled; today, the jail remains open. And Porter notes that she hasn’t yet seen successful examples of governments requiring companies to allocate funds towards community programs. “I think it’s something that needs to happen,” she said. “But at the end of the day, there’s not very many of these discussions happening… from my perspective, any outcome that permanently takes offline carceral capacity is a good outcome at this point.” 

Given this landscape, the Reenvisioning the Workhouse process was charting largely unexplored territory. Three justice-oriented design firms facilitated the process, and the steering committee’s core group consisted of six formerly incarcerated locals and organizers, including Bordeaux. It also included several people who lived near, had worked at, or had family members formerly incarcerated at the Workhouse. 

To come up with an initial round of ideas for the future of the jail and its land, participants canvassed neighborhoods, held community meetings, distributed flyers, and solicited input via social media. They took the initial batch of ideas they got, winnowed them down, sent them back out to procure people’s thoughts on more concrete proposals, and then worked with the city to examine whether the ideas were practically feasible. The end result would be a detailed, 64-page report, to be presented to the city, with concrete recommendations for the site’s future. 

Local organizations also participated in the process. Kristian Blackmon, the coalition coordinator at the housing justice organization Homes For All’s St. Louis chapter, told Bolts that in her informal conversations with the group’s base, mostly low-income tenants, many people liked the idea of replacing the Workhouse with a green space that could benefit the surrounding area, which is predominantly Black. Others, Blackmon said, just wanted to demolish the building. 

For Bordeaux, the process was personally challenging given her past experience at the jail. “From the moment I stepped out of the building, I wanted to burn the Workhouse to the ground and salt the earth,” she told Bolts. “I think that the facility itself, and the land, has had such a horrific legacy that I at first was having a difficult time wrapping my brain around how it could be anything positive or useful.”

Bordeaux credited the careful process and the various people involved with helping expand her imagination. Ultimately, she said, “we were able to come up with things that I am comfortable with, and other directly impacted people are comfortable.”

As they got to work building out the report, the complexities of incorporating the views of a wide range of stakeholders—including people with no direct or indirect experience of incarceration—were encapsulated in one discussion over the prospect of turning the site into an animal shelter, with some amount of transitional housing for their unhoused pet owners, who tend to be blocked from nearly all other shelters. While the report notes that the idea received “overwhelming public support” from the broader community, participants who’d spent time in the Workhouse detected an uglier subtext: “We were treated like animals there,” one said in response. Meanwhile, Scaife worried that including any housing recommendation on the site, however conditional, would open the door for the city to turn the entire site into housing. “Us saying that anything could live there made it where it was basically saying it’s okay to live there, period,” they told Bolts. After an emotional discussion, the committee ultimately decided to endorse the animal shelter option.

An additional challenge centered around the site’s isolation and possible environmental hazards; the Workhouse is located in an industrial zone along a truck corridor, and the soil it sits on contains contaminants such as arsenic, lead, and other potentially dangerous chemicals. Any earnest attempt to transform carceral facilities will likely come up against the reality that prisons and jails tend to be built on remote, undesirable land: A 2017 report by Truthout and the Earth Island Journal found that at least 589 prisons in the U.S. are located within 3 miles of a federal Superfund site. 

Given the site’s dark past—Arch City Defenders has documented at least seven people who died at the jail between 2009 and 2019—and concerns around pollution, the report ultimately lays out a vision that largely does not recommend services for community members on site. Instead, it recommends the creation of a community resource hub somewhere closer to the heart of St. Louis.

For the Workhouse itself, the report lays out a range of options; the animal shelter, for one, plus solar panels, prairie restoration, or industrial uses that could benefit the community indirectly. It additionally suggests the erection of a marker memorializing the site.

The report team knew that these recommendations were ambitious. The city had never promised to implement the report’s conclusions, but some team members were hopeful given the fact that the city had initiated the process in the first place. They were similarly cheered by the extent to which officials dug into feasibility as the process unfolded, looking into every major idea to make sure it was viable. But the visioning process had also unearthed St. Louisans’ frustrations about participating in public processes only to see no real results or impact. As part of a “General process recommendation,” the report advises: “Community members have expressed being tired of repeatedly saying what they need only to end up in a report or recommendation that seem to only be followed when convenient, seen and celebrated at a meeting, or potentially put away on a shelf.” 

Last August, participants were about halfway through the Reenvisioning the Workhouse process: after going through one round of community outreach and feedback, they were preparing to embark on a second round to sharpen their recommendations for the site. However, unbeknownst to the steering committee, the city of St. Louis was exploring its own ideas for the old jail. 

Emails between members of the city’s Board of Public Service, obtained by Bolts through a public records request, show that they discussed hiring an engineering firm to perform an environmental review of the site as early as mid-August. “I want these tests to verify that neither the soil or air contains anything that would prohibit the construction of this tiny home village for the unhoused,” the board’s president wrote on Aug. 15. “Please keep me in the loop as time is of the essence.” Two days later, he followed up, asking for an update to pass on to the mayor’s office.

The firm sent a work proposal to the city on Aug. 29 and completed its report in December. But the steering committee says it didn’t learn of the plan until late March,, almost two months after they had released their own report. After extensive participation from the city throughout the process, and signals from the mayor that she supported the idea of deeper change, many felt betrayed. One activist pointed to Jones’ own words in 2022, when the Workhouse closed, that the step wasn’t just a reform, but rather “a transformation of our city’s approach to public safety.” 

“You have no idea how incredibly frustrating it is to take time and energy and blood and sweat and tears and go through this entire process only to find out that it was just something [Jones] was checking off a to-do list,” Bordeaux told Bolts. 

City officials in St. Louis have emphasized practical considerations in their decision to place a shelter at the Workhouse site. They stressed that local ordinances requiring the signed consent of at least 50 percent of nearby business owners or registered voters in order to open a homeless shelter in more populated areas of St. Louis leave them with few other options. “There aren’t just ‘challenges’ to establishing homeless shelters in more populated areas, it’s downright impossible right now in the city because of ordinances already on the books,” a spokesperson for the mayor, Conner Kerrigan, told Bolts via email. At a recent meeting, one alderperson said, referencing the area’s frigid winters, “I don’t want to spend time in any jail, but I’d rather spend time inside the Workhouse than freeze to death outside.” Later in the meeting the CEO of an existing tiny homes project testified that they can be a good way to get people back on their feet. 

Blackmon of Homes For All agrees that the city’s housing and homelessness crisis is severe. St. Louis, she said, “ranks extremely low for affordable housing for folks of color, specifically Black folks.” The city hasn’t successfully opened a new shelter in years, and “the ones that we do have aren’t necessarily the best,” she said. “Most of them are almost always consistently full. So there’s always additional need.” But Blackmon also felt that the city’s complaints about lack of options were disingenuous: “Most of those in positions of power do not want shelters in their wards.” Individual alderpeople have frequently opposed the construction of homeless housing near them; last year, the mayor opposed an alderperson’s proposal to lower the signature threshold for establishing new shelters. 

Blackmon acknowledged the tension that the tiny homes plan has provoked for local groups working on housing and homelessness. “What do you do when you might have a space that can house some people—but then it’s also like, at what cost?” she asked. “People don’t deserve…to be put in an area that’s secluded from many other people in the community,” she went on, “and to be somewhere on a piece of land that has a horrific history of violence and death and oppression.” 

The city has downplayed environmental concerns about the site, noting that the environmental review recommended dumping gravel on top of the contaminated soil. Jones has committed to not using the space for carceral purposes, which Porter of The Sentencing Project stressed is a victory in itself. The mayor has also indicated that she will support the placement of a community memorial on the site alongside the tiny homes, one of the report’s recommendations.

Bordeaux, though, feels that the other suggestions are more materially significant. “I think the way that we really honor the legacy of the Workhouse, and the harm that it’s caused in so many communities, is by addressing the needs that cause most of us to end up in the Workhouse in the first place,” she said. Asked whether the mayor’s office would commit to funding community investment or reparations for Workhouse survivors, Kerrigan referenced the likelihood of a memorial and also mentioned the mayor’s new Office of Violence Prevention).

Organizers with the Close the Workhouse campaign say they’ll continue to fight to get its recommendations implemented and advance their goals, including reparations for people who’ve been held in the Workhouse, throughout the ongoing city budget allocation process.

The idea of reparations, especially, raises the question of what it means to try to heal the scars of one jail, to memorialize one site, when the larger structure it belongs to persists. St. Louis has another jail, the City Justice Center, where the Workhouse’s remaining population were transferred when it closed in 2022.

“Some of the same issues that were affecting people in the Workhouse are affecting people at CJC—like being indiscriminately maced, not having access to competent medical care, COs turning off the water of people who are being detained in CJC as punishment,” Bordeaux said. “I look forward to the campaign to close CJC also, if there ever is one—it will have my one thousand percent support.”

The post How Do You Repurpose a Closed Jail? Competing Visions Clash in St. Louis appeared first on Bolts.

But whatever the names, Brown and other people incarcerated in these units say they only replicated the punitive solitary conditions that triggered state reforms several years ago, evading the reforms’ goal to reduce prolonged isolation in the Massachusetts prison system. Over the past year, Brown and others incarcerated in state prisons who say they suffer from long-term isolation have gone to great lengths to protest their conditions and advocate lawmakers for reforms—from launching a hunger strike last October to testifying remotely before a legislative committee in January.

“Can you imagine being secluded in a tight space that’s the size of some of your bathrooms?” Brown and nine other hunger strikers described in a letter pleading with the attorney general to investigate SAU conditions. “The Secure Adjustment Unit was put in place in an effort to end solitary confinement, but has mirrored the same conditions as those previous restrictive housing units.” 

People who remain isolated in Massachusetts prisons argue that officials are violating provisions of the Criminal Justice Reform Act, a law the state adopted in 2018 that limited solitary confinement, known as restrictive housing within the state’s prison system. The law limited placement in restrictive housing to no more than six months and prohibited it for anyone with a release date of fewer than 120 days unless that person “poses a substantial and immediate threat.” 

The 2018 law also required that jails and prisons report the number of people in restrictive housing and offer them programming, showers three times a week, and access to phone calls and visits. 

Officially speaking, nobody remains in solitary confinement in Massachusetts prisons. That’s because, in response to the 2018 reforms, the Massachusetts Department of Correction created new units, such as the Behavioral Adjustment Units (BAUs) and Secure Adjustment Units (SAUs), to replace restrictive housing for people who threaten security or orderly operations within prisons. (The DDU and the prison in Cedar Junction closed in 2023.) 

In December 2018, Massachusetts state prisons held 392 people in restrictive housing. It was not until 2020 that the state consistently held fewer than 300 people in restrictive housing and not until the end of June 2023 that the state phased out all of its restrictive housing units. 

But as of mid-February, the BAUs and SAUs isolated roughly the same number of people, over 270, as had been in restrictive housing in January 2020. The Behavioral Assessment Units had 157 people; 18 had been there for more than 90 days. The Secure Adjustment Units confined 120 people, 72 of whom had been there for more than 90 days. 

In response to questions for this story, a Massachusetts Department of Correction spokesperson told Bolts the agency followed the mandate of the 2018 reforms by implementing “a strategic initiative to eliminate restrictive housing, close its disciplinary unit, and stand up new adjustment units that deliver personalized programming plans.” 

While the BAU was meant to temporarily isolate those who pose a possible safety risk, prison officials define the SAU as “a highly structured unit that is not Restrictive Housing which provides access to cognitive behavioral treatment, leisure time activities, and mental health services for those inmates assessed as needing a specific structured program intervention to support positive adjustment.”

People who remain in long-term isolation and lawmakers who want to reduce solitary claim that lockups have simply renamed the practice. 

“What’s clear is that the Department of Corrections is not following the spirit of the law, they just changed the acronyms,” state Representative Erika Uyterhoeven, who toured the SAU this past January, told Bolts. 

Uyterhoeven and other Massachusetts lawmakers are again trying to pass legislation restricting solitary confinement in the state. Last year they introduced a bill to ensure at least eight hours of out-of-cell time without restraints for people incarcerated throughout the state. The bill also seeks to expand visits and access to vocational and educational programming. If passed, this would affect everyone behind bars: state prison data shows that in 2023, only one-third of people in Massachusetts prisons were enrolled in any type of prison programs and over 90 percent were on wait lists. 

The bill languished without action in the Joint Committee on Public safety and Homeland Security for a year until this past January, when the committee finally held a public hearing on it. Nearly 30 people incarcerated inside Massachusetts prisons, including Brown, signed up to testify at the Jan. 23 hearing via video conferencing—marking the first time that the committee ever heard testimony directly from incarcerated constituents. 

During his allotted three minutes before the committee, Brown described not being allowed access to programs or even phone calls—which are now free for people in Massachusetts prisons. Instead, he says he is left with a sense of “repetitive meaninglessness.” 

“I wake when they wake me, I eat when they decide to feed me, [and] the day ends when they say it does,” he said.

Dominic Rezendes also spoke to lawmakers from inside the SAU during January’s committee hearing. The 34-year-old has spent the past 13 years in prison and is slated for release within the next year and a half. But, he told lawmakers, in the SAU, he has been unable to access reentry services or programs despite asking on a near-daily basis. “I have never had a license or apartment,” he testified. “I have nothing but a brand-new start.” 

“The only way to describe this experience is ‘mentally deteriorating,’ (understatement!)” Rezendes wrote in a message to Bolts. “Being sent to SAU has been hands down the most mentally destressing and overall worst part of my 13 years locked down.”

According to department policy, Massachusetts prison staff and treatment providers are supposed to develop a plan to release someone from solitary conditions whenever they’re sent to an isolated housing unit. Under that policy, officials should make a written progress review for people in solitary housing every 90 days, but several people told Bolts those reviews rarely happen. 

“It’s one thing to be in segregation and be reviewed to see if you still pose a threat,” said Bonnie Tenneriello, who has litigated numerous solitary confinement cases as staff attorney at Prisoners Legal Services of Massachusetts. “It’s another to be in a unit with severe deprivations and be told, ‘This is your housing placement.’” 

Each 90-day placement review requires three staff members—a guard, a program officer, and a mental health clinician—thus requiring overtime from existing staff. This poses major demands on the prison system, when the Department of Correction stated in a February court filing that it had a shortage of 744 guards and program officers and an unspecified shortage of mental health staff. 

Even then, people say they go much longer than three months without review. Over the past two years in solitary housing, Brown says he received one progress review—and only after he and other men repeatedly inquired about them.

“These reviews are designed to be a sham,” he told Bolts. “It seems their only interest is what a person has done in the past.” 

By October 2023, Brown had had enough and embarked upon a hunger strike, joined by at least 18 other men in the SAU. In their letter to state Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell that month, the hunger strikers demanded that the office investigate their living conditions, a demand echoed by both advocacy organizations and lawmakers. In a separate letter to the attorney general, Brown accused prison officials of sweeping both the hunger strike and SAU conditions “under the rug” and stated that nothing has changed despite their protest. 

At least he was able to testify. Jensen Peraza-Rivera, who was placed in the BAU in August 2022 and assigned to the SAU in March 2023, said that he would have signed up had he known about the hearing and that incarcerated people could testify via video. Peraza-Rivera’s description of his conditions illustrate the extreme isolation: He’s allowed two and a half hours outside his cell each day, 90 minutes of which is outdoor recreation alone in a large cage and an hour inside, seated with one arm handcuffed to a table and both legs restrained. Sometimes another person is restrained across from him at the same table; occasionally, they might even be given a chess set with missing pieces. Sometimes, all the men can do is talk to each other or shout to the handful of men shackled to the other tables for an hour.

Even then, Peraza-Rivera said few men choose to undergo the required strip search before and after each recreation period simply to sit restrained at a table. He himself has not gone to indoor recreation for a year, he told Bolts. No staff has ever told him what steps he needs to take to be released from the SAU and, he says, they often skip his cell when taking people to the programs that are offered. 

Jesse White, policy director with Prisoners Legal Services of Massachusetts, said that the organization collaborated with other prison advocacy groups to do outreach inside Massachusetts prisons ahead of the legislative hearing in January. Eighty people throughout the prison system expressed interest in testifying. After the committee limited testimony from prisons to 90 minutes total, the group asked incarcerated people to collaborate and choose spokespeople to deliver testimony.  

Even then, not everyone was able to speak. Champree Dinkins, who was incarcerated in the BAU inside the state’s only women’s prison at Framingham, says she put in a request to testify at the hearing, but never received a response. On the day of the hearing, prison officials told Prisoners Legal Services that Dinkins, as well as a man in another prison, would not be allowed to testify because of their placement in the BAU. 

Dinkins told Bolts that she “suffered from deep anxiety” during her 30 days inside the prison’s BAU, saying she was allowed outside her cell three hours a day—90 minutes indoors to watch television or play cards, and another 90 minutes outside in a cage. She says that many days she had to choose between going outside or eating breakfast, saying prison staff would throw out her meal by the time she got back from rec. Now in the SAU, Dinkins says she’s allowed two more hours of out-of-cell time, five hours total, but says she still cannot participate in educational programs. 

“I have one semester left of Babson [College] and I haven’t been given the opportunity to finish from the SAU,” she wrote in a message to Bolts. 

The inability to testify wasn’t the only barrier to publicizing conditions that some people inside faced. Bolts also had difficulties corresponding with people in isolated housing. The Massachusetts prison system contracts with CorrLinks to provide electronic messaging. But Brown and others in SAU who testified at the January committee hearing say they never received numerous messages with questions for this story.

After over a month of silence from Rezendes, Bolts learned that, in a fit of desperation, he had set a fire in cell in early February and was placed on mental health watch, where he had no access to his tablet to send or receive electronic messages. CorrLinks automatically deletes messages after 30 days, whether they have been read or not. By the time Rezendes was returned to the SAU and allowed access to CorrLinks, Bolts’ many follow-up messages had been erased.

Tenneriello notes that people confined to higher security units have fewer opportunities to participate in educational, rehabilitative or therapeutic programs. But in prison, the inability to participate in programs translates to not earning time off one’s prison sentence. It can also negatively impact chances at parole. “It also means that they’re not being prepared to succeed when they get out,” she added, setting them up for a higher risk of recidivism. “The whole system is a vicious cycle. This legislation aims to reverse that vicious cycle and help people get out and stay out successfully.”

Rezendes echoed the need for more programming in his testimony to the legislative committee in January, urging lawmakers to pass the bill and telling them, “When you give people the resources and access to do better, they usually will.” 

The bill to expand programming and out-of-cell time for all people incarcerated in Massachusetts is still sitting in the same committee where it’s been stalled for a year; lawmakers took no action after February’s hearing. The committee, which is chaired this year by Democratic Senator Walter Timilty and Representative Carlos González, both of whom are Democrats, has until April 8 to vote on the bill, which would then still have a long voyage to pass through both chambers. The legislative session ends on July 31.

The solitary reforms, which would also apply to jails, face sharp criticism from sheriffs who run local lockups. Carrie Hill of the Massachusetts Sheriffs’ Association testified that, while the association supports the bill “in theory,” she stressed that it remained “crucial that the sheriffs’ office have flexibility [for programming requirements]” and that “eight hours may not be the best for the safety and security of the institution.”

Uyterhoeven, a co-sponsor of the House bill, refutes that assertion. “It’s not actually about security,” she said. “Is putting someone in a deeply traumatizing environment really going to help them when they are released? There are other ways that we could be helping address those underlying issues that led to why they were punished in the first place. But we’re not addressing any of that by throwing people in solitary confinement.”

White with Prisoners Legal Services says the bill builds on the reforms that state lawmakers passed in 2018 to establish baseline standards for living conditions. “It’s asking the Commonwealth to make a commitment to baseline human dignity, to meeting people’s needs and to lifting up a culture that will focus on the potential for human and community growth and safety,” she told Bolts. 

Massachusetts law allows legislators access to its correctional facilities. In early January, a week before the public safety committee hearing, Uyterhoeven and Steven Owens, another representative who supports the bill, made a surprise visit to Souza, the maximum security prison, to examine the isolation conditions themselves. 

One week before their visit, a man had set his cell on fire after receiving no response to his repeated requests for medical care. Uyterhoeven said the stench of smoke still lingered inside the halls. Men they encountered in the SAU complained about the lack of medical and mental health care and said they rarely received the mandated 90-day reviews of their placement in solitary. Uyterhoeven says everyone they encountered in isolation was Black or brown except for one man.

The lawmakers decided to measure the outdoor recreation cages after hearing the men call them “dog kennels.” They ranged between about 200 and 300 square feet, with nothing inside and a covering overhead so that you can’t see the sky. 

“What I saw on the visit was truly mortifying,” Uyterhoeven recalled. “It’s just such a clear violation of the law.” 

The post After Reforms to Solitary Confinement, Massachusetts Prisoners Say Officials Just Renamed It appeared first on Bolts.