Inside America`$ Toughest Federal Prison

Inside Arneric&os Toughest Federal Frison - NYTimes.com
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Inside America'$ Toughest Federal Prison
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LhliEd, fuh$, srlyfederal superma< fa
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By
MARKBINFTII
MARCH
26,2}ts
In prison, RodneyJones told me, everyone had a nickname. Jones's was Saint E's,
short for St. Elizabeths, the federal psychiahic hospital in Washington, best known
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for housing John HinckleyJr. after he shot Ronald Reagan. Jones spent time there
- as we[ ltqy-tog shown srgns of mental illness from an early age; he first attempted
tQdrbR"arater,hebecameaddictedto
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I met Jones a few blocks from his childhood home in LeDroit Park, a D.C.
neighborhood not far from Howard University. It was a warm October afternoon,
but Jones, 46, was wearing a pufri black vest. The keys to his grandmother's house,
where he currently lives, hung from a lanyard around his neclc His face was thin, a
tightlv cropped beard undergirding prominent cheekbones, and he had a lookout's
drifting more than dartingbut always alert.
Jones had been out of prison for three ygars; a record for him, at least as an
adult, but he still sounded a bit like Rip Van Winkle as he marveled at how gentrified
his old neighborhood had become. We sat on a cafe's sun-dappled terrace,
gaze,
surrounded by creative-class types. A chef wandered outside to pluck some fresh
rosemary from a planter. Jones was the only black patron at the cafe and probably
the only person who remembered when it used to be a liquor store. "You wouldn't be
sitting here," Jones said. He nodded at some toddlers playing across the street. "That
park right there, that wasn't a park That was just an open field where everybody
gambled. At any given time, you would hear shots ring out."
From the age of t5, Jones found himself in and out ofjuvenile detention, St.
Elizabeths or prison - never free for much longer than a month or so. lbe outside
world came to feel terri$ring; once, he wanted to get back inside so badly, he bought
a bag
of crack and called the cops on himself. "That was the world that I knew," he
said.
It hadn't been easy for Jones to transition back to a life of freedom. He managed
to stick it out, he said, because he was determined not to return to the plaee where he
spent the final eight years of his last sentence: the United States Penitentiary
Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo., known more colloquially as the
ADX. The ADX is the highest-security prison in the country. It was designed to be
escape-proof, the Alcatraz of the Rockies, a place to incarcerate the worst, most
unredeemable class of criminal - "a verysmall subset of the inmate population who
show," in the words of Norman Carlson, the former director of the Federal Bureau of
Prisons, "absolutely no concern for human life." Ted Kacz5mski and the Atlanta
Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph call the ADX home. Tbe 9/n conspirator Zacarias
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Moussaoui is held there, too, along with the t99g World Trade Center bombing
mastermin* nu*4Fusef; the Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols; the underwear
runffigffiiffi*gnaylmi
w*nmeF*onanno crime-family
T'iwent"sastiairu:"Mieh*ul3waugt4'a'ser{al=killiug't}ocior
boss
who may have poisoned
6o of his patients, is serving three consecutive life sentences; Larry Hoover, the
Gangster Disciples kingpin made famous by rappers like Rick Ross, is serving six;
the traitorous F.B.I. agent Robert Hanssen, a Soviet spy, 15.
Along with such notoriols inmates, prisoners deemed serious behavioral or
flight risks can also end up at the ADx men like Jones, who in zoo3, after racking
up three assault charges in less than a year (all fights with other inmates) at a
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medium-security facility in Louisiana, found himself transferred to the same ADX
cellblock as I(aczynski.
Inmates at the ADX spend approximately z3 hours of each day in solitary
confinemeal Jones had never been so isolated before. Other prisonem on his
cellblock screamed and banged on their doors for hours. Jones said the staff
psychiatrist stopped his prescription for Seroquel, a drug taken for bipolar disorder,
telling him, "We dont give out feel-good drugs here.'Jones experienced. severe
mood swings. To cope, he would work out in his cell until he was too tired to move.
Sometimes he cut himself. In response, guards fastenedhis arms and legs to his bed
with a medieval quartet of restraints, a process known as four-pointing.
One day in zoo9, Jones was in the rec yard and spotted Michael Bacote, a friend
from back home. The familiar face was welcome but also troubling. Bacote was
illiterate, with an I.Q. of only 6r, and suffered from acute paranoia. He had been sent
to the ADx for his role as a lookout in a murder at a Texas prison, and he was not
coping well. His multiple requests for transfers or psychological treatment had been
denied. He was convinced that the Bureau of Prisons was trying to poison him, so he
was refusing meals and medication,
You would have to be blind and crazyyourself
uot to see that this guy had issues,o Jones said, shaking his head. "He can barely
function in a normal setting. His comprehension level was pretty much at zero."
Bacote had paperworkfrom previous psychiatric examinations, so Jones went to
the prison's law library (a room with a computer) and looked up the address of a pro
bono legal-aid group he had heard about, the D.C. Prisoners' Project. Because Bacote
couldn't write, Jones ghosted a query. "I suppose to have a hearing before coming to
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the AD&" Jones, as Bacote, wrote. "They never gave me a hearing." He contiuued,
please help me.,'
_ nee9:soS9-!elp cause I have facts!
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"I
nimtgamn*e united states Bureau of
-*'Fristius"isegius;ttttprubatrly'euuugirywiifutliis;'
itet':"geborah Golden, the director of
the D.C. Prisoners'Project, fields approximately z,ooo requests each year, but
Bacote's, r,rlhich she received in October 2oo9, caught her eye. "I thought I might be
missing something, because it was inconceivable to me that the Bureau of prisons
could be operating in such a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional manner," she said.
Golden was referring to B.O.P. regulations that forbid the placement of inmates who
"show evidence of significant mental disorder'in prisons like the ADX.
Groups like Golden's D.C. Prisoners'Froject tend to focus their reform efforts on
state-run prisons in partbecause the Prison Litigation ReformAct, passedby
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Congress in 1996, made it more difficult for prisoners to file federal lawsuits, and in
part because the federal government possesses, as Golden put it, "an inexhaustible
supply of resources." A drolt 4z-year-old attorneywho once considered rabbinical
school, Golden has spent her entire career practiciag human rights law. As she
investigated Bacote's claims, she came to realize there were dozens of inmates at the
ADXwith comparable stories, orworse: cases of self-mutilation, obvious psychosis,
suicide. Her organization had never considered filing such an enormous suit.
Because it is so difficult to win cases against the federal government, challenging the
B.O.P. "just didn't fit into anyone's strategic goals,o Golden explained. Ttre las-t major
B-O.P. lawsuit to result in a settlement was in the mid-'gos (Lucas v. White, brought
by a group of female inmates who had been sexual$ assaulted). But the clarity of
Bacote's claims gave herpause.
'?lot
of cases we see involve matters of
interpretation: I{ho knewwhat andwhen," she said. "This didn't seem to involve
that kind of uncertainty. I wasn't sure if we had a chance. But it seemed like a court
had to see it."
Since opening in 1994, the ADX has remained not just the only federal
supermax but also the apogee of a particllar strain of the American penal s5retem,
r'riherein abstract dreams of rehabilitation have beea entirely superseded by the
architecture of control. Throughout our country's history, there have been different
ideas about what to do with the oworst of the worst" of our criminal offenders,
ranglng from the rgth-century chain gangs, wtro toiled in enforced silence, to the
phpical isolation of Alcatraz Islaad. The use of solitary confinement in the United
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States emerged as a substitute to corporal punishments popular at the end of the
r$th century. The practice was first promoted in 1787, by a group of reformers called
ffiftst{ffi
e#Sffiddqt$effieR$Sffiublic Prisons. At a salan
+ftssteri'iry-Ee*janrinFial*$irys'ptlriphlet.was'r.eailt**lling for the construction of a
"',,','*',',';
"house of repentance,o in which solitude could work to soothe the minds of criminals
an enlightened alternative, the group believed, to inhumane "public punishments'
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like "the gallows, the pillory, the stocks, the whipping post, and the wheelbarrow."
Inmates at Philadelphia's Bastern State Penitentiary, uihich opened in 1829, were
completely isolated from one another in cells outfitted with slqylights, toilets and
access to private outdoor exercise yards, uihere they worked at various trades, took
all meals and read the Bible. Other states tried, but quickly abandoned, the so-called
Pennsylvania System, and an r8go Supreme Court ruling against the use of solitary
on Colorado's death row noted that "a considerable number of the prisoners fell,
after even a short confinement, into a semifatuous condition, &om which it was next
to impossible to arouse them, and others became violenfly insane; others still,
committed suicide, while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally
reformed.."
The concept soon fell out of favor, andbeginning in the rggos, the hardest cases
ia the federal system men like Al Capone and George (Machine Gun Kelly) Barnes
were housed in the converted military prison on Alcatraz Island, until it was
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closed in 196g because of the costly upkeep inherent to an island prison. By the end
of the decade, many of its prisoners had been transferred to the new "control units"
at a federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., where theywere kept in solitary
confinement. In 1983, after tfie assassination of two guards in separate attacks on
the same day, by members of the Aryan Brotherhood, the Marion penitentiary was
converted to the first modern all-lockdown facility, the entire prison now a solitary
unit, (One of the guards''killers, Tommy Silverstein, is now at the AD)L He has been
in solitary confinement for the past zz years.)
Beginning in 1989 with California's Pelican Bay, states began building their own
lockdown penitentiaries, inspiredbythe Marion model. The reneweduse of solitary
coincided with the era of mass incarceration and the widespread closing of state-mn
mental-health facilities. The supermax became the most expedient method of
controlling an increasingly overcrowded and psychologicallyvolatile prison
population. A result of this unfortunate confluence has beeu a network of ever more
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