California Attorney General Kamala Harris Must End the Barbaric Practice of
Solitary Confinement
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/california_attorney_general_kamala_harri
s_must_end_20150816/
Posted on Aug 16, 2015
By Bill Blum
California Attorney General Kamala Harris with then-U.S. Attorney General
Eric Holder, to her immediate right, in this Justice Department photo from
2013.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris is nothing if not ambitious. Not
content with being the Golden State's top law enforcement officer-a position
she has held since 2011, after serving seven years as San Francisco County's
district attorney-she's currently running for the U.S. Senate and is the
clear favorite to replace Barbara Boxer, who is retiring in November 2016.
Harris has been hailed by a chorus of influential Democratic
standard-bearers, ranging from Elizabeth Warren to Kirsten Gillibrand, as
"special" and "exactly the kind of leader we need." Photogenic, attractive
and of mixed-race background, she's even been dubbed "the female Obama."
But before Harris departs Sacramento and climbs another rung on the ladder
to success and power in Washington, I have one urgent message for her:
Settle the class-action lawsuit of Ashker v. Brown, which challenges the
state's solitary confinement practices at the notorious Pelican Bay State
Prison, as quickly and comprehensively as possible. Doing so won't just
burnish your resume, Ms. Harris, making you look even more politically
appealing at those limousine-liberal fundraisers you'll be attending over
the coming months, it will literally restore the lives of hundreds of
inmates who are housed under the most grinding and inhumane conditions.
Although settlement negotiations are underway-and according to the
plaintiffs' attorneys, they have reached a critical stage-the case remains
relatively obscure. That's unfortunate because it's undoubtedly one of the
most significant pieces of prison litigation pending across the country.
Located outside Crescent City, in the northwest corner of the state just 13
miles south of the Oregon border, Pelican Bay opened its doors in 1989. As
the facility's official mission statement declares, the institution was
designed to detain the state's "most serious" convicts. More than half of
the inmate population of 2,715 is confined in a standard maximum-security
setting.
Nearly 1,200 others, however, are held in the Security Housing Unit, the
SHU, constructed to intern men whom the state's Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation (CDCR) deems the "worst of the worst," too dangerous to
mingle with their "general population" counterparts. The penitentiary's
mission statement euphemistically describes the SHU as having a "modern
design" engineered in a series of separate cellblock pods to meet the
"management concerns" its occupants present.
In fact, the SHU is a high-tech hellhole, a science-fiction nightmare come
to life.
I know this not just from reviewing the pleadings on file in the Ashker
case, or from discussing the suit with some of the lawyers working on it, or
even from reading news articles about the SHU, including a lengthy story on
the psychological damage caused by solitary confinement, published earlier
this month in The New York Times. I know it because I've visited the prison
and seen it firsthand.
I went to Pelican Bay with an attorney colleague a year or so after it
opened to interview an inmate in connection with a death-penalty appeal I
was handling. I'd previously met the inmate elsewhere and remembered him as
having a cool, almost unflappable demeanor.
The man I spoke to at Pelican Bay, however, was on the verge of a breakdown.
He described an unyielding routine of being held alone in a tiny, concrete,
windowless cell with no access to other prisoners, much less the outside
world. His meals were slipped to him through a mailbox-like steel slot; his
access to books, writing materials and toiletries was severely restricted.
The door to his cell was controlled electronically, and when the guards
spoke to him, they did so over an intercom system. The monotony was broken
only by an hour of daily exercise, also conducted alone, in a barren,
concrete pen known as the "dog run" that contained no gym equipment and
offered only a narrow view of the sky through a metal mesh gate.
Luckily for my interviewee, his stay at the SHU was short. Not so for the
plaintiffs in the Ashker case, many of whom have languished there for
decades.
The lead litigant, 52-year-old Todd Ashker, has spent more than 25 years in
SHU custody, having been convicted of second-degree murder for stabbing
another prisoner to death in 1987 while serving time for a burglary at the
New Folsom Prison northeast of Sacramento. Ashker was subsequently
transferred to Pelican Bay and has been kept there ever since because of his
past affiliation with the white-supremacist Aryan Brotherhood.
In 1990, the Berkeley-based Prison Law Office filed a federal class-action
suit (Madrid v. Gomez) alleging that conditions in the SHU were cruel and
unusual, in violation of the Eighth Amendment. In 1995, U.S. District Judge
Thelton Henderson handed the inmates a partial win, issuing a lengthy
decision aimed at eliminating excessive force by correctional staff,
improving health care and removing prisoners with confirmed mental illnesses
from the SHU. A special master was appointed by the judge to monitor
compliance with the decision and remained on the job until the case was
formally closed in 2011.
The Madrid ruling, though welcome, left Ashker and most other SHU inmates in
place because they lacked certified mental-health diagnoses. But in the
interim, Ashker honed his skills as a jailhouse lawyer and in 2009 he and
another inmate, Danny Troxell, filed a federal lawsuit of their own, seeking
to overturn their indefinite detention in the SHU.
For the next two years, the suit gathered dust in district court. Then,
without warning or fanfare, something extraordinary happened, says veteran
civil-rights lawyer Anne Weills of the law firm of Siegel & Yee in Oakland,
Calif.
"The inmates on Ashker's pod," Weills told me in an interview last week,
"found a way to talk to one another through their cell doors." More
important, she said, "they found a way to cooperate," even though many were
natural enemies with ties to rival ethnic gangs.
The inmates decided to announce a set of five wide-ranging demands,
including expanded visitation and telephone privileges, better and more
nutritious food, and abolition of the CDCR's dreaded "debriefing" program,
which required inmates to report on the gang activity of other prisoners if
they ever wanted to see their way out of the SHU.
To add force to their demands, Ashker and his pod-mates also decided to
stage a hunger strike, which began on July 1, 2011. They were joined in
short order by more than 1,000 other Pelican Bay prisoners and, as word
spread, by at least 6,000 inmates at 13 additional facilities across
California.
The strike caught the attention of Weills and activist lawyers from the
Legal Services for Prisoners with Children office in San Francisco, the
Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York City and others.
Weills set up a meeting at Pelican Bay with Ashker and the SHU strike
leaders. "The experience," she wrote in an email to associates, "was
mind-blowing. Starving and weak, they were being subjected to further
punishment with freezing air blasted into their cells while wearing only
underwear. It became very clear that they were wedded to their nonviolent
protest to win improved conditions for all those men in solitary
confinement, whatever the personal costs to themselves."
The hunger strike ended in October 2011, and the following May, Weills and
her cohorts intervened in the lawsuit Ashker and Troxell had initiated,
transforming the case into the current class action.
With Jules Lobel, president of the CCR and a professor at the University of
Pittsburgh School of Law, serving as lead counsel, the legal team sought to
represent two classes of SHU inmates at Pelican Bay: a larger group
consisting of all those who had been denied their 14th Amendment due process
rights as a result of the procedures the CDCR used to assign them to the
SHU, and a smaller subclass of inmates who had spent more than 10 years in
the SHU without justification, in violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban on
cruel and unusual punishment.
Although the California Department of Justice, under Kamala Harris'
direction, has tried to have the case dismissed and, incredibly, has
steadfastly insisted that incarceration in the SHU doesn't amount to
solitary confinement, District Judge Claudia Wilken certified both classes
in June 2014. According to CCR staff attorney Rachel Meeropol, who also
works on the case with Weills and Lobel, the 14th Amendment class as of this
June consisted of 854 inmates while the Eighth Amendment class numbered 75.
What the lawsuit demands specifically, Meeropol explained, is a declaration
from Judge Wilken that the CDCR's confinement practices at the Pelican Bay
SHU are unconstitutional. The attorneys also want a series of injunctions
that will order (a) the release from the SHU of all prisoners who have spent
more than a decade there, (b) the implementation of new procedures and
policies that will alleviate the conditions of sensory deprivation and lack
of social and human contact experienced by any remaining SHU inmates, and
(c) meaningful administrative review of the continued need for SHU
confinement of any remaining inmates.
Clearly, a plaintiffs' victory in the case would have profound ramifications
not only for Pelican Bay but also for the three other SHUs run by the CDCR
at New Folsom and the state prisons in Tehachapi and Corcoran. A victory
could also have profound implications nationally and around the world in the
struggle against solitary confinement.
The Internet-based project Solitary Watch estimates that as many as 80,000
federal and state prisoners in the U.S. are held under conditions (22.5
hours of daily isolation) generally defined as solitary confinement. The
practice has been increasingly condemned by human rights authorities across
the globe, including the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, who
declared in a 2011 speech: "Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular,
lockdown, Supermax, the hole, Secure Housing Unit . whatever the name,
solitary confinement should be banned by States as a punishment or extortion
technique."
To its credit, the CDCR to date has implemented some small reforms in
response to both the Ashker case and another statewide prisoner hunger
strike in 2013. The debriefing program has been shelved, and a five-stage
"stepdown" process has been implemented to facilitate inmate rehabilitation
and release from SHU custody.
But the bulk of the case remains undecided, and Judge Wilkens has set a
trial date for December. Until then, Attorney General Harris and her minions
will be busy with the ongoing settlement negotiations. Let's hope she gets
the message and does the right thing, both for the sake of her career as a
progressive Democrat and, far more importantly, for the sake of justice
generally. Harris must not miss this historic opportunity to resolve the
case and end solitary confinement in California.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
California Attorney General Kamala Harris Must End the Barbaric Practice of
Solitary Confinement
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/california_attorney_general_kamala_harri
s_must_end_20150816/
Posted on Aug 16, 2015
By Bill Blum
California Attorney General Kamala Harris with then-U.S. Attorney General
Eric Holder, to her immediate right, in this Justice Department photo from
2013.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris is nothing if not ambitious. Not
content with being the Golden State's top law enforcement officer-a position
she has held since 2011, after serving seven years as San Francisco County's
district attorney-she's currently running for the U.S. Senate and is the
clear favorite to replace Barbara Boxer, who is retiring in November 2016.
Harris has been hailed by a chorus of influential Democratic
standard-bearers, ranging from Elizabeth Warren to Kirsten Gillibrand, as
"special" and "exactly the kind of leader we need." Photogenic, attractive
and of mixed-race background, she's even been dubbed "the female Obama."
But before Harris departs Sacramento and climbs another rung on the ladder
to success and power in Washington, I have one urgent message for her:
Settle the class-action lawsuit of Ashker v. Brown, which challenges the
state's solitary confinement practices at the notorious Pelican Bay State
Prison, as quickly and comprehensively as possible. Doing so won't just
burnish your resume, Ms. Harris, making you look even more politically
appealing at those limousine-liberal fundraisers you'll be attending over
the coming months, it will literally restore the lives of hundreds of
inmates who are housed under the most grinding and inhumane conditions.
Although settlement negotiations are underway-and according to the
plaintiffs' attorneys, they have reached a critical stage-the case remains
relatively obscure. That's unfortunate because it's undoubtedly one of the
most significant pieces of prison litigation pending across the country.
Located outside Crescent City, in the northwest corner of the state just 13
miles south of the Oregon border, Pelican Bay opened its doors in 1989. As
the facility's official mission statement declares, the institution was
designed to detain the state's "most serious" convicts. More than half of
the inmate population of 2,715 is confined in a standard maximum-security
setting.
Nearly 1,200 others, however, are held in the Security Housing Unit, the
SHU, constructed to intern men whom the state's Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation (CDCR) deems the "worst of the worst," too dangerous to
mingle with their "general population" counterparts. The penitentiary's
mission statement euphemistically describes the SHU as having a "modern
design" engineered in a series of separate cellblock pods to meet the
"management concerns" its occupants present.
In fact, the SHU is a high-tech hellhole, a science-fiction nightmare come
to life.
I know this not just from reviewing the pleadings on file in the Ashker
case, or from discussing the suit with some of the lawyers working on it, or
even from reading news articles about the SHU, including a lengthy story on
the psychological damage caused by solitary confinement, published earlier
this month in The New York Times. I know it because I've visited the prison
and seen it firsthand.
I went to Pelican Bay with an attorney colleague a year or so after it
opened to interview an inmate in connection with a death-penalty appeal I
was handling. I'd previously met the inmate elsewhere and remembered him as
having a cool, almost unflappable demeanor.
The man I spoke to at Pelican Bay, however, was on the verge of a breakdown.
He described an unyielding routine of being held alone in a tiny, concrete,
windowless cell with no access to other prisoners, much less the outside
world. His meals were slipped to him through a mailbox-like steel slot; his
access to books, writing materials and toiletries was severely restricted.
The door to his cell was controlled electronically, and when the guards
spoke to him, they did so over an intercom system. The monotony was broken
only by an hour of daily exercise, also conducted alone, in a barren,
concrete pen known as the "dog run" that contained no gym equipment and
offered only a narrow view of the sky through a metal mesh gate.
Luckily for my interviewee, his stay at the SHU was short. Not so for the
plaintiffs in the Ashker case, many of whom have languished there for
decades.
The lead litigant, 52-year-old Todd Ashker, has spent more than 25 years in
SHU custody, having been convicted of second-degree murder for stabbing
another prisoner to death in 1987 while serving time for a burglary at the
New Folsom Prison northeast of Sacramento. Ashker was subsequently
transferred to Pelican Bay and has been kept there ever since because of his
past affiliation with the white-supremacist Aryan Brotherhood.
In 1990, the Berkeley-based Prison Law Office filed a federal class-action
suit (Madrid v. Gomez) alleging that conditions in the SHU were cruel and
unusual, in violation of the Eighth Amendment. In 1995, U.S. District Judge
Thelton Henderson handed the inmates a partial win, issuing a lengthy
decision aimed at eliminating excessive force by correctional staff,
improving health care and removing prisoners with confirmed mental illnesses
from the SHU. A special master was appointed by the judge to monitor
compliance with the decision and remained on the job until the case was
formally closed in 2011.
The Madrid ruling, though welcome, left Ashker and most other SHU inmates in
place because they lacked certified mental-health diagnoses. But in the
interim, Ashker honed his skills as a jailhouse lawyer and in 2009 he and
another inmate, Danny Troxell, filed a federal lawsuit of their own, seeking
to overturn their indefinite detention in the SHU.
For the next two years, the suit gathered dust in district court. Then,
without warning or fanfare, something extraordinary happened, says veteran
civil-rights lawyer Anne Weills of the law firm of Siegel & Yee in Oakland,
Calif.
"The inmates on Ashker's pod," Weills told me in an interview last week,
"found a way to talk to one another through their cell doors." More
important, she said, "they found a way to cooperate," even though many were
natural enemies with ties to rival ethnic gangs.
The inmates decided to announce a set of five wide-ranging demands,
including expanded visitation and telephone privileges, better and more
nutritious food, and abolition of the CDCR's dreaded "debriefing" program,
which required inmates to report on the gang activity of other prisoners if
they ever wanted to see their way out of the SHU.
To add force to their demands, Ashker and his pod-mates also decided to
stage a hunger strike, which began on July 1, 2011. They were joined in
short order by more than 1,000 other Pelican Bay prisoners and, as word
spread, by at least 6,000 inmates at 13 additional facilities across
California.
The strike caught the attention of Weills and activist lawyers from the
Legal Services for Prisoners with Children office in San Francisco, the
Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York City and others.
Weills set up a meeting at Pelican Bay with Ashker and the SHU strike
leaders. "The experience," she wrote in an email to associates, "was
mind-blowing. Starving and weak, they were being subjected to further
punishment with freezing air blasted into their cells while wearing only
underwear. It became very clear that they were wedded to their nonviolent
protest to win improved conditions for all those men in solitary
confinement, whatever the personal costs to themselves."
The hunger strike ended in October 2011, and the following May, Weills and
her cohorts intervened in the lawsuit Ashker and Troxell had initiated,
transforming the case into the current class action.
With Jules Lobel, president of the CCR and a professor at the University of
Pittsburgh School of Law, serving as lead counsel, the legal team sought to
represent two classes of SHU inmates at Pelican Bay: a larger group
consisting of all those who had been denied their 14th Amendment due process
rights as a result of the procedures the CDCR used to assign them to the
SHU, and a smaller subclass of inmates who had spent more than 10 years in
the SHU without justification, in violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban on
cruel and unusual punishment.
Although the California Department of Justice, under Kamala Harris'
direction, has tried to have the case dismissed and, incredibly, has
steadfastly insisted that incarceration in the SHU doesn't amount to
solitary confinement, District Judge Claudia Wilken certified both classes
in June 2014. According to CCR staff attorney Rachel Meeropol, who also
works on the case with Weills and Lobel, the 14th Amendment class as of this
June consisted of 854 inmates while the Eighth Amendment class numbered 75.
What the lawsuit demands specifically, Meeropol explained, is a declaration
from Judge Wilken that the CDCR's confinement practices at the Pelican Bay
SHU are unconstitutional. The attorneys also want a series of injunctions
that will order (a) the release from the SHU of all prisoners who have spent
more than a decade there, (b) the implementation of new procedures and
policies that will alleviate the conditions of sensory deprivation and lack
of social and human contact experienced by any remaining SHU inmates, and
(c) meaningful administrative review of the continued need for SHU
confinement of any remaining inmates.
Clearly, a plaintiffs' victory in the case would have profound ramifications
not only for Pelican Bay but also for the three other SHUs run by the CDCR
at New Folsom and the state prisons in Tehachapi and Corcoran. A victory
could also have profound implications nationally and around the world in the
struggle against solitary confinement.
The Internet-based project Solitary Watch estimates that as many as 80,000
federal and state prisoners in the U.S. are held under conditions (22.5
hours of daily isolation) generally defined as solitary confinement. The
practice has been increasingly condemned by human rights authorities across
the globe, including the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, who
declared in a 2011 speech: "Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular,
lockdown, Supermax, the hole, Secure Housing Unit . whatever the name,
solitary confinement should be banned by States as a punishment or extortion
technique."
To its credit, the CDCR to date has implemented some small reforms in
response to both the Ashker case and another statewide prisoner hunger
strike in 2013. The debriefing program has been shelved, and a five-stage
"stepdown" process has been implemented to facilitate inmate rehabilitation
and release from SHU custody.
But the bulk of the case remains undecided, and Judge Wilkens has set a
trial date for December. Until then, Attorney General Harris and her minions
will be busy with the ongoing settlement negotiations. Let's hope she gets
the message and does the right thing, both for the sake of her career as a
progressive Democrat and, far more importantly, for the sake of justice
generally. Harris must not miss this historic opportunity to resolve the
case and end solitary confinement in California.
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