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.

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.

When Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva lost his reelection bid in November 2022, it seemed to mark a default cessation of hostilities between him and the Board of Supervisors, the county’s five-member governing body. The conflict spanned his four-year tenure, from an early clash over Villanueva’s rehiring of a deputy fired for allegations of domestic abuse to his dispatching a team of deputies armed with battering rams to raid one of the supervisor’s homes just before the 2022 election. There was no shortage of choice words, either: At one point, the sheriff said the supervisors “need to be taken to the shed and they need to be beat down so they start doing their job.” 

Recently, though, Villanueva has reemerged from retirement with a novel provocation: He is seeking to join the ranks of the body he long antagonized. In September, he announced his bid for county supervisor, running against Janice Hahn, a centrist Democrat with deep roots in LA politics. Perhaps predictably, the other four sitting supervisors have endorsed Hahn, who promptly issued a statement calling Villanueva “a fraud and a failure.” In response, Villanueva told Bolts: “Janice Hahn is a fraud and a failure, hands down.” 

All this feuding can seem petty, but the stakes are quite literally life and death for some Angelenos. 

Jail deaths steadily increased each year Villanueva was in power. “Under Villanueva, the conditions in the jails deteriorated significantly,” said Claire Simonich, associate director at Vera Action, “[there were] people with serious mental illness being chained to chairs for days at a time, dozens of people being crammed together in overcrowded facilities.” 

In response to a request for comment on the jail deaths, Villanueva emailed Bolts: “Aw gee, did something called the pandemic happen during my tenure?” He also touted his efforts to reduce the jail population during the pandemic. However, a UCLA report found that despite an initial decline in the population, overall people were actually held in custody pretrial longer during the pandemic, in part due to the sheriff department’s practices. 

But the crisis has continued since Villanueva’s exit. At least 46 people have died inside LA County jails or elsewhere in the sheriff’s custody thus far in 2023. These numbers make the jails in Los Angeles deadlier than Rikers Island, the New York lockup that frequently makes national headlines for its intolerable conditions. An 18-year-old also died in one of the county’s juvenile detention facilities in May.

Part of the responsibility falls on Villanueva’s successor, Sheriff Robert Luna. But the county’s Board of Supervisors also possesses an extraordinary amount of power over this situation: it sets the county’s $46.7 billion budget, including how much money goes toward incarceration and how much goes to alternatives to incarceration like inpatient mental health treatment, and holds oversight power over county jails and the sheriff’s department.

“On the flip side,” Simonich said, “the board does have responsibility to build up the types of services that will prevent crime from happening in the first place and invest in housing, invest in mental health care, invest in substance use disorder treatment.” The supervisors have dragged their heels on funding for the mental health beds the county desperately needs, and continuously failed to close the dangerous and dilapidated Men’s Central Jail, a move they first committed to in 2019.

The showdown between Hahn and Villanueva, then, underscores just how drastically the sheriff’s department and the board alike have failed to protect the people in their care.

Their race may be resolved as early as the March 5 primary if a candidate receives more than 50 percent across District 4, an area in the county’s southern part. That’s a strong possibility, with only two lower-profile candidates in the race. Otherwise, Villanueva’s comeback bid may continue into a Top 2 runoff in November.

But local advocates are also eying the two other seats on the board that Angelenos will decide this election, hoping to put in place a stronger alliance next year willing to finally flex the board’s power to improve jail conditions. 

“The Board of Supervisors, apart from when they are forced to discuss in-custody deaths, have been entirely silent,” said Ambrose Brooks S., the campaign and advocacy manager for Dignity and Power Now, a member of the Justice LA Coalition. “This is urgent, this is an emergency, and their silence is not going to make us stop advocating for them to do something.” 

Thanks to a state transparency law that went into effect on New Year’s Day, 2023, the LASD now maintains an in-custody death tracker. As of December 18, the list includes 45 names: men between the ages of 20 and 91, most of them pretrial, who allegedly died by suicide, because of illness, or a drug overdose, or, in three instances, at the hands of another person. But the majority of deaths listed are attributed to “natural causes” or are pending a final autopsy report.

There is at least one person whose death is nowhere to be found on that list: Stanley Tobias Wilson, Jr. Wilson was a talented athlete who attended Stanford and went on to play football in the NFL. But unresolved trauma from childhood sexual abuse combined with CTE from years of football proved devastating to his mental health, his mom, Dr. D. Pulane Lucas, told Bolts. Last November, Wilson was deemed incompetent to stand trial for a recent break-in. Unbeknownst to Lucas, a judge ordered that her son be moved from where he was being held at Twin Towers, the county’s second largest jail, to Metropolitan State Hospital, which specializes in psychiatric care, by no later than Dec. 5. 

Nearly two months later, he was dead. A County Medical Examiner employee initially told Lucas he’d been found unconscious in his cell. “And then the story changed,” Lucas said. Now, they were telling her he’d fallen out of a chair and died of a pulmonary embolism while waiting to be admitted to Metropolitan. Lucas, who runs a policy nonprofit in Virginia, flew to Los Angeles to try to figure out what had happened, visiting the sheriff’s department to request records, then to Metropolitan, where her son had allegedly collapsed. “And that’s when they told me that they’ve never had anyone by the name of Stanley T. Wilson Jr. admitted,” she said. “I was blown away…now all of a sudden to get the message in person that Stanley did not die there and was never a patient there?”

Lucas sought another autopsy. “There’s blatant evidence of violence against him,” Jason Major, an autopsy technician who performed the independent death review, told Bolts. “He had a footprint on his face that’s clearly visible…he had abrasions on his knuckles, on his knees.” 

To Lucas, it is impossible to square the simple answer for her son’s death—a pulmonary embolism—with the errors, shifting narratives, and obfuscations surrounding Wilson’s death that she received from the County Medical Examiner’s office. (The office did not respond to a request for comment). Major and Lucas both believe that the truth is closer to the County Medical Examiner’s original version of the story; that Wilson collapsed and possibly even died at the jail, and that deputies transported him to the hospital after realizing that they were in flagrant violation of the judge’s order to transfer him months earlier. “They never even checked him in,” Major said. “He basically was dropped off, like Weekend at Bernie’s.” 

Nick Shapiro, the director of the Carceral Ecologies lab at UCLA, says that Wilson’s case is characteristic of jail deaths in LA County. Fatalities that get chalked up as natural often stem from a complicated interplay of factors such as poor mental health treatment, racialized violence, and negligence, he told Bolts. “The Black population has been subject to specific racial violence from deputy gangs [within the jails]… there’s been very long-term, documented gang related activity in the mental health ward.” 

In a 2022 analysis of 58 autopsies of people who died in LA county jails between 2009 and 2018 (just a small fraction of the total number owing to the county’s refusal to release most records), Shapiro and his co-author, Terence Keel, the founding director of the UCLA Lab for BioCritical Studies, found that more than half of the deaths classified as “natural” exhibited signs of violence on the body. They also found that Black people’s deaths were much more likely to be categorized as “natural” than those of other races. “There’s a problem in thinking about ‘natural death’ being the same for incarcerated populations that have no free will to choose what they eat, to choose what they drink, to bathe themselves on their own schedules, to wear appropriate clothing for the weather,” said Shapiro. In a recently published follow-up report, the researchers conclude that these classifications serve to downplay the responsibility of deputies and other jail staff for these deaths, whether through negligence and deprivation of care or outright violence—essentially blaming incarcerated people for their own demise. 

“What we’re looking at is really capital punishment through other means,” Keel told Bolts. 

To Lucas, one of the most suspicious aspects of her son’s death was how the official story changed and coalesced over time: “They’re telling their story after the fact and it appears that they’ve all gotten together because they’re all saying the exact same little story, you know, word for word.” (Lucas said that LASD has refused to release video footage she’s requested). 

Lucas told Bolts that Wilson’s omission from the official LASD tracker leads her to suspect that there are other deaths missing, too. (She recently wrote an editorial for The Appeal exploring this issue). “Within one month of when they started counting—here’s Stanley,” she said. “The beacon to say: look, some of us aren’t being counted. And here’s Stanley with a mama who’s not just going to accept the medical examiner’s statement of how he died.” 

In September, Lucas flew once more to Los Angeles to attend a vigil for those lost inside county jails. The following day, she gave public comment at the Board of Supervisors meeting. “While it’s too late for Stanley, I’m here to speak to the importance of providing needed services for inmates with mental health services, and also to support alternatives to incarceration,” she told the board. 

The board has a complex record on both of these issues. “Historically, the board has taken first steps to establish ‘care first’ practices in Los Angeles,” said Simonich of Vera Action. They’ve pledged to shut down Men’s Central Jail, established an “Alternatives to Incarceration” working group to explore implementing a variety of services that can preclude jail time, and created a Justice, Care, and Opportunities Department to one day move pretrial services out of the Probation department and instead develop community programs to support people awaiting trial. “Where the board continues to falter is on follow-through.” 

Simonich told Bolts she wanted to see the board immediately commit to a clear timeline to close Men’s Central Jail, which has been responsible for a disproportionate share of deaths this year. “It’s now been more than two years since the board commissioned the report on how to close Men’s Central Jail, and no actual plan has been adopted. No timeline has been put in place,” she said. 

For Brooks S. of Dignity and Power Now, the single most important intervention to alleviate the jail death crisis would be for the Board of Supervisors, in collaboration with the County CEO, to fast-track funding for more county mental health beds. Dignity and Power Now has been working with a woman whose son was jailed about a year ago while suffering from paranoid schizophrenia ; a judge ordered him released to inpatient mental health treatment this fall, but he’s still in jail, and won’t be released until sometime this month because there are so few spaces available. “If there was no waitlist, all of the people who were ordered by the court for mental health diversion could go the day that the order is made,” Brooks S. said. “That would drastically decrease the jail population.” 

The board could see a serious shakeup in several directions during the 2024 elections, from the arrival of Villanueva to the replacement of its most conservative member by a staunch progressive. Two supervisors besides Hahn are up for reelection: Holly Mitchell, whom Justice LA considers the foremost champion of the ’Care First, Jails Last’ agenda, and Kathryn Barger, the board’s lone Republican. 

Mitchell faces three challengers, at least one of whom is questioning her support for criminal justice reforms; the consensus among local observers is that she’ll be the clear favorite in a district that covers South Los Angeles and western portions of the county.

Barger, whose district encompasses LA County’s relatively conservative, exurban Northeast but also includes left-leaning cities like Pasadena and Burbank, faces a challenge from two progressive Democratic candidates, Assemblymember Chris Holden and Burbank Mayor Konstantine Anthony. Two other candidates, Perry Goldberg and Marlon Marroquin, are also in the race. (Here too, the top two candidates will face off in November if no one receives more than 50 percent on March 5.)

Though Hahn has dismissed Villanueva’s candidacy, her political choices in recent months appear directly influenced by his presence in the race. After the former sheriff blamed her for voting for a hiring freeze on deputies in 2022, Hahn spoke emphatically at a recent event against defunding the sheriff’s department, noting that the Board has increased LASD funding by over a billion dollars over the past decade, even boasting that her office had stepped in to pay for extra patrols in some unincorporated communities. Recently, she cast the lone vote against moving parking enforcement out of the sheriff’s department and into the department of public works, which would remove some funding from the sheriff. “To me, that suggests Hahn tacking to the right and specifically playing into law enforcement,” Brooks S. said. 

A spokesperson for Hahn emphasized to Bolts that the supervisor was concerned about rushing the measure without prior study. She added that fully funding LASD and investing in mental healthcare, job training, and youth programs was “not a contradictory effort.” 

One of Hahn’s other challengers, Rancho Palos Verdes City Councilor John Cruikshank, is also running to her right, calling for more detention and support for sheriff officers.

Meanwhile, Barger has recently demonstrated more serious interest in investing in mental health care in the county. But the supervisor has also long expressed support for building a locked mental health facility in place of Men’s Central Jail, which organizers have denounced as a jail by another name. When Supervisors Hilda Solis and Lindsay Horvath introduced a motion seeking to immediately reduce the jail population in April, both Barger and Hahn expressed their opposition, citing public safety concerns. (Solis ultimately withdrew the motion). “We are desperate for Supervisor Hahn and Supervisor Barger to take the situation in the jail seriously,” said Brooks S. 

In a statement to Bolts, Barger reemphasized her stance on closing the jail. “I believe Men’s Central Jail should be permanently closed and I stand by my belief that we need to replace it with a state-of-the-art facility that is secure, safe, and provides high quality care for those who pose a danger to themselves and the community,” she wrote.

Anthony, the Burbank mayor running against Barger, criticized her record in an interview with Bolts, including her support for a locked mental health facility to replace Men’s Central Jail. “On day one, if it hasn’t been agendized, I will agendize the closing of Men’s Central Jail,” he said. “I will absolutely vote for a speedy timeline. It’s well overdue.” Anthony also told Bolts he’d move to fast track mental health beds, as long as they weren’t supplied through Care Courts, a novel form of court-ordered mental health treatment championed by Governor Gavin Newsom that has drawn criticism from disability rights and civil liberties advocates. “We can build outreach centers…that the county simply funds, and [are] run by the local city or jurisdiction. We need to spread out the help,” he said. 

Holden, Barger’s other challenger, didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview. He has supported police and prison reform at the state level, writing a bill known as the “George Floyd law” to establish greater consequences for police who fail to intervene when a colleague is using excessive force, and most recently sponsoring the Mandela Act, which would bring California in line with U.N. restrictions on the use of solitary confinement—including in the local Los Angeles jails. 

Anthony said he hoped to hasten the Board of Supervisors’ halting advancements towards a county system that prioritizes care over incarceration. “By running in this race and getting elected, I’ll be able to flip one of the seats that is preventing a lot of this progress, and hopefully that will get rid of many of the barricades that we’re seeing,” he told Bolts. 

Los Angeles faces the strange possibility of emerging from these elections with four supervisors who have expressed a commitment to advancing criminal legal reform at the county level—and Alex Villanueva. And while it may seem that just one supervisor couldn’t do much to throw a spanner in the works, Simonich of Vera Action cautioned that each member of the Board holds enormous power, from choosing what to place on the agenda for public hearings, which can have significant policy ramifications, to appointing commissioners, including to two separate boards with oversight power over LASD and the jails—and positions such as the Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner. 

Keel, the UCLA researcher, hopes that the March primaries spur a broader reconsideration of how the county responds to these deaths. He wants the Board of Supervisors to establish an independent medical board to provide a secondary autopsy for everyone who dies in state custody, “whether that’s in jail, or on the streets.” 

 “We are not helping to create a better county if we continue to just assume these people died as a result of their own will and their own poor biology, rather than saying, No, we’re culpable, we’re accountable,” he said. “We need to be thinking differently about inequality—and how the ultimate cost of inequality is death.” 

Correction (Jan. 2024): This article has been updated to reflect the final version of Terence Keel’s and Nicholas Shapiro’s report on LA County Jail autopsies.

The post As Los Angeles Politicians Trade Barbs, Jail Deaths Keep Mounting appeared first on Bolts.

If you drive into Susanville, California from the southwest, one of the first things you will see coming over the mountains and beginning the descent into town is a green road sign declaring the population of this remote outpost in the state’s rural northeast. The sign says that 17,500 people live in Susanville, an outdated number from the 2010 census; today, it’s more like 13,000. It does not specify that nearly one third of those residents are not free citizens but incarcerated people: around four thousand men locked inside two facilities a few miles farther down the valley. 

All of Susanville’s residents are in a way tied to these prisons. The construction of the two facilities, completed in 1963 and 1995, has created a sort of forced dependency for the town’s free residents. The prisons drive the local economy; they have even shaped the physical landscape of the city, bringing new businesses and driving out others. Counting incarcerated people in the city’s official population helps boost everything from healthcare funding to money for local schools. Susanville is a prison town, a label that sits uneasily with its residents but a fairly accurate description of a place where half of the city’s free population labor behind prison walls. Everybody on the outside has a brother, cousin, or friend who works inside—as an office tech, nurse, janitor, guard. 

Last April, California Governor Gavin Newsom disrupted that strange balance by announcing that Susanville’s California Correctional Center (CCC) would cease to operate by June 30, 2022, fulfilling an earlier pact to close two of the state’s 33 prisons. The governor has framed these closures as a fiscally sensible response to California’s shrinking prison population: closing the CCC would, in the state’s estimation, save $122 million out of an approximately $14 billion prison system budget. State officials offered to transfer guards to other prisons, though they acknowledged there would be layoffs, and stressed to the public that closures did not mean early releases. Don’t worry, they seemed to imply, nobody’s getting out. 

Newsom’s plan to close the CCC appears in line with many Californians’ demands for a state less reliant on prisons and policing. However, the state has charted a course over the past year that seems to have satisfied no one: neither the free nor the incarcerated residents of Susanville, and not even the activists who fought for prison closures in the first place.  

In the months following Newsom’s announcement, Susanville officials filed a last-ditch lawsuit against the state that sought to halt the CCC’s closure, alleging a series of procedural violations. The closure, the lawsuit claimed, would “cause the City of Susanville to suffer massive economic loss.” It quoted Lassen County representatives who said the planned closure “proves yet again that the leaders of our state agencies couldn’t care less about the livelihood of residents of the North State.” 

The statewide coalition Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) supported the prison closures, but it was also demanding more. The coalition argues that the state must close 10 prisons by 2025, targeting the most decrepit, dangerous, environmentally hazardous facilities; use the closures to advance the release of elderly and sick people as well as those serving very long sentences; and invest the money saved back into communities whose members are likely to be highly policed and imprisoned in the first place. 

Central to this ambitious agenda is a belief that California cannot leave behind all the people who have been bound up in its decades-long prison expansion project. CURB likes to invoke the notion of a “just transition”—a phrase popularized by climate activists and labor unions to describe a shift away from reliance on fossil fuels that doesn’t abandon that industry’s workers —to invoke a vision of decarceration that pairs prison closures with a reinvestment in communities, workers, and people. 

“We don’t agree with the argument that a prison should stay open—human cages should stay open—because that’s the only way to run an economy,” Courtney Hanson, an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a CURB member, told me. “But we do believe that the state of California and the California Department of Corrections has a responsibility to work with those on the ground in these communities, and particularly those incarcerated in those communities, to envision and implement alternatives.” In Susanville, that might look like retraining programs for former prison workers to do forest management or firefighting, work that has become ever more critical as the risk of wildfires in the region continues to mount. 

Susanville made me wonder about the potential for overlapping aims, solidarity even, between the people who wanted to close the prison—close all prisons—and the people in town fighting for it to stay open. There were obvious political and cultural rifts to bridge. The official demographic count for Susanville denotes one of the Blackest cities in Northern California, but its free residents are mostly white, though there is also a sizable Native community in town. Many residents are conservative; Lassen County voted overwhelmingly for Newsom’s recall last September. CURB is a progressive, multiracial coalition of activists, many of them abolitionists, and many of whom have felt the sting of incarceration themselves. 

But there was one commonality between groups advocating for the free and incarcerated people of Susanville: neither was satisfied by the state’s plans for closing the prisons. And in the activists’ calls for a better world, I saw a glimpse of possibilities that might suit the residents of Susanville as well—an economy that didn’t revolve around a prison, a country where losing your job wasn’t tantamount to ruin, a future that looked brighter than the past.

Susanville’s lawsuit to keep the California Correctional Center open is a window into the city’s selective dependency on its imprisoned residents. The men inside the prison are counted when it is useful to the town, or the region, but they do not count: as voters, as citizens, as people with a say in what happens to them. People incarcerated at the CCC are technically residents with a stake in how city officials represent them in court, yet they were not consulted during the drafting of the lawsuit, which mentions them only in passing. 

Conscious that people locked inside the prison had been left out of discussions about its future, organizers with CURB tried reaching as many people inside the CCC as they could. It was the summer of 2021: The Dixie Fire, one of the largest in the state’s history, threatened Lassen County, and Covid-19 was spreading rapidly across the state. Once activists made contact, they realized that people incarcerated there had already begun organizing themselves. 

Two men, Duane Palm and Timothy Peoples, had helped other incarcerated men file grievance reports, detailing everything from inadequate Covid-19 protections to retaliatory behavior from guards who were angry and stressed about the planned closure. They had noticed that people’s transfers were getting held up for no reason, and the power often cut out right when an anticipated game or show came on TV.  

Both men had been at the CCC for just over three years. They had spent the entire pandemic there, an interminable series of lockdowns that blurred together. Both came from the Los Angeles area, more than 500 miles from the prison, and a world away from the people who staffed it. Timothy was from Pomona. Duane grew up in the San Fernando Valley, where his mother still lived; his wife and daughters lived in Torrance. Duane’s oldest daughter, Iman, was attending grad school remotely at NYU, and he hadn’t seen her in person since she was in her mid-teens. “It’s hard to promote family when this place is so far away,” Duane told me. 

Duane and Iman communicated mostly by letter, and he tried to be as active a parent as he could despite the barrier between them. When I spoke to Iman, she told me that when they did speak on the phone, it was almost as though her father tried to concentrate his parenting into those sporadic, fifteen-minute intervals. 

“It’s a lot of life lessons he’s learned, things I should avoid,” Iman said, adding that he rarely spoke about himself. “I don’t know,” she went on. “Maybe it’s just a nice connection to the outside world, like let me not focus on my situation, what’s going on—because he deals with that 24/7.” 

Duane and Timothy and I first started trying to communicate in January, when the facility was on an extended lockdown owing to the Omicron variant, and I wasn’t able to have a proper phone conversation with either of them until early March. In the intervening weeks, each time one of them called while my phone was in the other room, or the call inexplicably dropped, or we made a plan to talk and the phone never rang at the appointed time, I thought back to something Duane had written to one of the CURB organizers: “Consistent communication from outside to in and vice versa is … critical to decarceration moving forward.”

To talk with the free people of Susanville, I merely had to show up, make a few calls, visit them at their homes. I would come to know Duane only as neat, shapely handwriting; as a deep, calm voice interrupted by the prison phone system’s automated reminders that our conversation was not private, that anything and everything we said to each other effectively belonged to the state. 

For both Duane and Timothy, last summer’s wildfire was a breaking point. “The Dixie fire proved CCC disregard for prisoners’ life,” Timothy wrote. “We were the subjects of constant ash and smoke, no power, no ventilation.” 

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (the agency added that last word to its name in 2005) told me in an emailed statement that the CCC used generators during the fire to “ensure appropriate prison operations.” The agency also says it gave men inside the prison N95 masks “to lessen the impact of unhealthy air days,” adding, “At no time was anyone injured, nor was there any imminent danger to the population and staff.”

Duane and Timothy remember the lights inside the prison going out for nearly a month. They choked on the smoke that filled their cells and covered their faces with wet towels in order to breathe. “It made me feel like we were irrelevant as human beings,” Duane told me flatly.

Driving up to Susanville from Los Angeles at the end of February, I thought of the bus journey from LA to Sacramento that the scholar and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore depicts at the outset of Golden Gulag, her definitive account of prison expansion in California. The passengers, a diverse crew of prison reform advocates, “embodied 150 years of California history and more than 300 years of national anxieties and antagonisms,” in Gilmore’s telling. The final stretch of my brutal, 11-hour voyage up the 5, the interstate connecting Southern and Northern California, ran through a desolate valley filled with the dead husks of trees that the Dixie Fire had incinerated the summer before.

Susanville is one wide main street, also known as State Route 36, nestled in a plain beneath the mountains. At one end is the town’s historic Uptown district, which includes a stately hotel, a movie theater with a neon marquee, small shops, and a mural of the town’s founders. But nearly every storefront there is shuttered. The interior of one, the Grand Café, looked perfectly preserved, as though the world had stopped just before the owner came in to set up for a breakfast shift. While I was walking down the main drag, a man working at a jewelry shop ran out to offer me a sheet of paper that listed 24 vacant Uptown properties and businesses. He’d thought I might be a potential buyer. The other end of the street looks like a different town entirely: dollar stores, Walmart, Payless Shoes, Starbucks, Panda Express.

In 1963, when the number of people incarcerated in state prisons in California was just over 26,000, the state had conceived of the CCC as “the world’s first correctional conservation center.” It was a prison with no cells, no guard towers, no bars on its windows, where people held in minimum-security lockup would be trained in firefighting and land stewardship. But in the late 1980s, a Level III unit was added, along with ominous, high-voltage electric fences. The expansion was part of a massive prison building boom that occurred both in California and across the nation in the 1980s and 1990s, just as laws like California’s’ Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (1988) and Three Strikes Law (1994) and their federal analogues significantly lengthened sentences. More people were going to prison, and for longer periods than ever before. Between 1982 and 2000, California’s prison population more than quadrupled. 

Over the course of the 1990s, according to the scholar and filmmaker Tracy Huling, a new prison opened its doors in rural America every 15 days. In California, large tracts of former farmland were becoming available, and as a plan to build a new prison in East Los Angeles collapsed under unexpected community opposition, state prison officials decided to focus instead on rural areas. 

CDCR began to dispatch employees—mostly women—around the state to convince rural residents of the benefits of placing prisons in their backyards. Lillian Koppelman was one of them. “I had a script,” she told me. “We would say that we intended to hire predominantly locally—which, as a matter of fact, wasn’t the case. You can’t really open a prison with brand new people.” 

Lillian and her colleagues promised rural residents money, local contracts, economic “rejuvenation.” In the early 1990s, when the state sought to place a second prison in Susanville after nearby Plumas County rejected it, 57 percent of residents voted yes. High Desert State Prison opened its doors in 1995. Susanville had become a company town, and the business was incarceration. 

Back in the late 1980s, on one of those prison outreach trips, Lillian had found herself in Susanville, where the CCC’s warden told her that the prison was looking to hire female correctional counselors. She felt hesitant about moving somewhere so rural, but she had also been wanting to leave Sacramento and try something new. “I don’t think I really had much of a notion about prisons at that time,” she told me. “When I did go work and live in a prison town, I would say my ideas changed quite a bit.”

During the seven years and four months she worked at the CCC, Lillian developed a stress-related health condition, filed a sexual harassment complaint against a coworker, and endured anti-Semitic comments from guards. She also saw who ended up in prison. Most of the men she met had grown up in poverty. People would end up back inside after being accused of parole violations as petty as a broken tail light. “It’s a hungry system,” she reflected. When men were about to be paroled out, she took to warning them: “Make sure everything’s working on your car—because they would be violated for something that small.” 

As time went on, Lillian found her job almost intolerably stressful. “I just saw all the inequities,” she said. It didn’t seem right to be drawing such a nice salary off the misery of other human beings, most of them people of color. She worried something fundamental might shift within her; at one point, she asked her family to please let her know if they ever noticed her personality starting to change. 

By the time she quit her job in 1996, Lillian couldn’t wait to leave. She walked out of the CCC with a folder of poems that the men inside had given her. Around that time, plans were coalescing for a new federal lockup in Herlong, not far from Susanville. Lillian, who had spent years traveling around California selling locals on the benefits of a prison in their backyard, went to protest it.  

In an absurd stroke of journalistic luck, my Airbnb host in Susanville was Quincy McCourt, one of the city’s five councilmembers. He had never worked at the prisons, but like most people in town, he had a connection to them: His dog, Millie, had been trained by one of the men incarcerated at the CCC. Quincy remembered how the man cried when saying goodbye to Millie the day he picked her up at the prison.  

Quincy’s true love is the natural world, and he grew up in a good place for it, surrounded by the Sierra Nevadas. For a long time, Susanville’s main industries involved cultivation of the natural world: agriculture, mills. The logging trucks used to go up and down Main Street all day long. But as the second half of the 20th century wore on, the mills left town, and family farms dwindled. 

Quincy introduced me to Greg Baston, a retired prison guard who lived in Janesville, the town over. After graduating from high school in 1978, Greg had gone to work at a grocery store in Susanville. For eight years, he made decent wages and benefits. Then the store sold to a non-union competitor, and his pay went from $13.50 to $10 an hour overnight, a $9-per-hour pay cut in today’s wages. Greg took stock of his life—a wife, two small children—and went to work at the CCC. 

Greg had taken his prison job out of economic necessity, but the money he made from it effectively allowed him to move up the economic ladder to enjoy the sort of comfortable, middle-class lifestyle that seems increasingly out of reach in the United States. Some of his coworkers couldn’t bear it, and quit, but Greg never had any problems. For him, the prison was just a job. 

“I had a family I was raising, and I wanted to take care of that,” he told me. “It was my number one priority.” He put in 30 years, long enough to claim his pension, and retired on Christmas Day in 2015. 

The prisons brought prosperity to many of Susanville’s residents, but their presence had also produced a stratified economy: One class of people lived well while the other struggled, working hard for little pay. After High Desert was built, a Walmart came to town, and many local businesses folded, unable to compete. 

“You could see the little shops just closing,” Lillian recalled. Chain stores at the east end of town, which had proliferated in the years after the second prison’s construction, paid very little. Many of Quincy’s friends had master’s degrees but made barely over minimum wage. Plenty of them worked for the government, too—the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service or the Department of Fish and Wildlife. But workers outside the prisons didn’t have the benefit of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the state prison guard’s union, which Gilmore has called “the most powerful lobby group in California.” In 1998, the union spent $2.3 million helping elect Governor Gray Davis. Four years later, he gave them a 33.67 percent pay raise over five years. 

Those wages went further in Susanville than they did in LA or San Francisco. I met Tim Nobles at his prefab construction company, one of the biggest nongovernmental employers in Lassen County, which he operates out of one of Susanville’s former sawmills. A strong believer in unions, Tim spent over $50,000 a month on his employees’ health insurance; still, he had trouble competing with the prison for workers. “If I tried to match some of the wages out there, I wouldn’t be in business,” he told me.

It frustrated Tim how the money people made at the prison didn’t seem to translate to a vibrant community or thriving local economy. “We have these prisons which create really good jobs, especially for our area,” he said. “But our town just seems to just be dying. I can go to towns that are half the size of Susanville that have more dining, more restaurants, more bars.” To Tim, it felt like a self-perpetuating cycle: Locals were less likely to take a chance on starting up their own business when the prisons offered stability and a comfortable retirement; there were few options for dining or entertainment; people with money to spend went to Reno to spend it; and so on. All the shuttered storefronts uptown started to make sense. 

Tim also saw a link between vanishing economic opportunities across the U.S.—stagnant wages, the destruction of organized labor—and California’s incarceration rates. “Private sector unions have been destroyed since Ronald Reagan,” he told me. “I think we do lock up way too many people—but there’s no good jobs out there anymore!” It was all connected: Fewer good jobs meant that more people ended up in prison, but it also made prison labor artificially attractive, because it was some of the only work left that came with great benefits, a living wage, and an early, comfortable retirement. 

Even Tim, with his thriving independent business and his frustration over the prisons’ impact on his hometown, wasn’t immune to those incentives. An ineluctable penchant for Motocross had left him barely insurable, with huge medical costs even after the Affordable Care Act passed. So in 2014, his wife went to work as an office tech at High Desert State Prison. Through her, the prison system gave him something that neither the state of California nor the federal government would have offered otherwise: high-quality, affordable health insurance.

Amidst the chaos and confusion of the Dixie Fire, it wasn’t difficult for Duane and Timothy to convince other men incarcerated at the CCC to start fighting back. “It felt like it was the perfect time to jump on board,” Duane told me. “There’s a lot of people who feel like I feel, but they lack a voice.” The two men sent in the grievances they’d collected. “Magically,” Duane said, “we received a new generator— the power never goes off anymore.”

On August 14, Duane and Timothy wrote to Governor Newsom, demanding an expedited closure for the CCC, and detailing the retaliation they had faced in the wake of news about the closure. “Since the announcement by your office and the Secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that CCC will be shut down, we have constantly experienced abuse in some form or another,” the letter read. “Currently this mistreatment is manifesting itself in unconstitutional restrictions to our access to yard and dayroom recreation, no power and medical staff that have joined in with correctional staff to downplay health hazards.” 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Newsom didn’t respond. So they wrote to Dianne Feinstein, CDCR Secretary Kathleen Allison, and the Commission on Judicial Performance. They wrote to Newsom again, attaching two pages of supporting signatures from the other incarcerated men. Duane said that nobody ever wrote back. 

None of the petitions mentioned the prospect of the men’s freedom. The state had made it clear when they announced the prison closures that there would be no early releases. “It just means they’re gonna be transferred to another prison in another small town in California,” Duane’s daughter Iman told me. “That’s not prison reform.” 

Meanwhile, life inside the CCC was becoming intolerable. Duane told me that the prison had become so understaffed that it was hardly operational. “It’s a place to warehouse human beings,” he said. He could tell the guards were terrified of losing their jobs. “Eventually this place will close, they believe,” he said. “They’re leaving to go to different places where they can provide for their family.”

On March 12, Timothy wrote me a letter describing the conditions he and the other men were facing because of staffing shortages. “CCC has not only become non-operational, but uninhabitable for human living and development.” He went on: “We are often forced to remain in our cell for twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes a day. The fifteen minutes we are given is by a choice to either use the telephone or to take a shower.” Every time one of them had tried to call me and I didn’t pick up, because I was sleeping or on my computer or simply not paying attention, it meant that they had chosen to forego a shower that day. “Our daily atmosphere,” Timothy wrote, “is to expect nothing at all but learn as much as possible [about] how to remain with a sane conscience.” 

In an emailed statement, CDCR said that staffing vacancies had caused “intermittent suspension” of some operations at the prison but denied that people are ever kept in their cells for nearly 24 hours a day.

I wasn’t sure how much of this Duane had told his daughter during their infrequent phone conversations. When we spoke, Iman referenced an article in the New York Times about the controversy over the prison closure, which had focused mainly on the frustration of Susanville residents. 

“I get it,” Iman said. “People need jobs . . . but I think we should also take into account, like, those are people in there. It’s not machines, it’s not something you can make money off of, turn on and off when the day ends. Those are people that have lives—yes, they made bad decisions, but they have families. I don’t know how else to say—they’re people.”

When he announced his plan to shutter two state prisons by 2025, Governor Newsom called prison closure a “core value” of his administration. But in communicating the decision to close the CCC to the residents of Susanville, the state hadn’t presented a vision of prison closure that affirmed life, community, a healthy economy—that offered anything other than a sudden lack. Why would anybody in Susanville, especially people whose jobs were tied to the prison, support that? 

CURB organizers had tried to reach out to Susanville residents to discuss their competing vision for the town’s future. “I think it’s really important to meet people where they’re at,” Courtney Hanson told me. “We all have a limited understanding based on our unique perspective and what experiences we’ve had or haven’t had.” But they hadn’t succeeded in reaching many people—nobody I spoke to in Susanville had been contacted by an organizer or even really knew about the group—and they hadn’t gotten very far with the people they did reach. Most residents didn’t return their emails, and locals sympathetic to the cause of prison closure didn’t want to rock the boat; the prison would go or stay, but they had to keep living alongside their neighbors. 

When I asked people in Susanville about CURB’s argument that the state of California had a responsibility to provide a better alternative for prison-dependent towns facing closures, most seemed to think the idea was too fanciful to even consider. Arian Hart, the chair of the local tribal council, seemed skeptical of the notion that state government owed Susanville a just transition. “Yeah, I mean, I really can’t….like, you’re talking reparation type of stuff,” he said, laughing. 

“The state has the power to do whatever they want,” Mike McCourt, Quincy’s father, told me. Mike moved away from Susanville in 2020, but he still felt invested in the place that he had called home for so long. He had fond memories of Susanville—he recalled how, after he first moved to town in 1967 at just seventeen, the woman who owned the Grand Café kept him fed, selling him soup for a quarter. Mike felt like the state government didn’t really care about what happened to Susanville. “You can have all the injunctions you want, but if it’s made its mind up and it’s not efficient for the state’s budget, you’re history,” he told me. 

This pessimism, I thought, could be linked to any number of things: a deep-seated suspicion of the state in communities that have long been disenfranchised; the feeling of political alienation common in rural areas; the general sense of most people living in America that government is not really working for them. These sorts of feelings couldn’t be uprooted by a single conversation with an organizer—it might take a lifetime of listening and arguing. Ultimately, Courtney told me, CURB was focused on the big picture. The office of the Legislative Analyst had determined back in 2020 that, given declines in the state prison population, California could save money by closing at least five prisons by 2025. There was only so much their coalition could do. “We’re very concerned with what’s going on on the ground in Susanville, and at the same time, we’re fighting more broadly for the state to commit to closing 10 prisons by 2025,” she said. 

Quincy saw that the prisons had not been “the end-all-be-all savior of our city—It’s clearly not, otherwise we’d be better off than we are.” But he never had the chance to talk with CURB organizers about their ideas. Quincy was also elected to represent the people of Susanville, and the majority of the city’s residents—at least, those who had any say in the matter—wanted the CCC to stay open, and so he was supporting that effort. 

In August 2021, a Lassen County superior court judge found that the CDCR had skipped over a number of bureaucratic steps in trying to shutter the CCC, and delayed the closure until an environmental review and other measures take place. In the meantime, Quincy was looking for other solutions. He had been working on an economic development plan for the city, which more and more people were starting to take seriously as the threat of prison closure loomed. For the first time anyone could remember, thanks to Quincy and Arian, the city, the county, and the tribal council were all working together. 

Despite the prisons, the city’s budget is threadbare and has been for years—there’s no money for major projects, and local government offices remain seriously understaffed. When I asked Quincy what he might do if the state simply gave Susanville the $122 million that closing the CCC had been projected to save, he wrote out a list: a four-year college, a community arts center, a bypass to revitalize the Uptown district. Maybe the CCC could focus solely on reentry, or be converted into a data center. 

Quincy believed deeply that people could change, whether they had done something that landed them in prison or were just set in their ways. “I’m probably more of an idealist than anything,” he told me. And he believed his town could change too, even if he didn’t know for sure what that might look like yet. 

True change may require the kind of coalitions that Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes about in Golden Gulag. The book concludes with another bus ride, but this time, it’s the precursor to an incredible organizing feat: rural residents and urban anti-prison activists coming together for a conference in Fresno about the fight for environmental justice and against prisons. The gathering is an unlikely one—“for quite some time each group imagined that the other, in a general way, was the reason for its struggles,” Gilmore writes—which is precisely why it’s so powerful.

In Fresno, that solidarity had come about because organizers managed to link the struggles of two groups that seemed impossible to unite. In Susanville, the pandemic and the city’s remote location had thwarted organizing attempts. The lawsuit and the state’s wall of silence calcified the divisions that already existed, and exacerbated intolerable conditions for the town’s incarcerated residents. The free residents of Susanville never saw their fate as tied to the people behind bars. On its own, each group was easy to dismiss: the locals arguing to keep their prison, who would not find much sympathy from liberal, urban California; the incarcerated organizers, battling a system designed to keep them hidden and silenced; and the activists, whose abolitionist aims are constantly being waved away as extreme, unrealistic. 

But more prisons will close in California, and those closures will bring with them the same window of possibility, the same choices that Susanville offered. And they will show, once again, how we are all tied to these prisons—free and incarcerated people alike. We may not work at them, we may not be locked inside them, but they were built in our name.

The post A Future for Susanville appeared first on Bolts.