Throughout Abron Arrington’s decades-long incarceration in Colorado, he often found himself in solitary confinement—not because he was causing trouble, but simply because he refused to work. He didn’t see the point given he was paid 13 cents an hour and figured his time could be better spent learning physics.

Before Arrington was incarcerated in 1989, he was studying to get his aircraft mechanic license. But within weeks of returning home from the U.S. Air Force, at 22 years old, he was arrested and ultimately sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. In 2019, he received clemency from Governor Jared Polis and was released after three decades behind bars.

“I was actually 30 years a slave,” Arrington, who is Black, told a crowd of people gathered in one of Colorado’s oldest Black churches on Juneteenth, the federal holiday that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. “So, this is deeply personal to me.”

As part of an event celebrating Juneteenth, Arrington sat on a panel to discuss prison labor, which panelists referred to as the last frontier of slavery in the United States. While the 13th Amendment of 1865 formally abolished chattel slavery, it legally remained as a punishment for crime.

Michael Gibson-Light, an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver and author of the book “OrangeCollar Labor: Work and Inequality in Prison,” said during the panel that “slavery was not abolished” with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, “it just changed. It evolved, it transformed.” 

“Laws popped up that made it easier and easier for criminal legal institutions to continue to literally capture and extract the labor of the very same people whose labor was extracted under chattel slavery,” he added. “But now, the justifications were different. They had to do with law-breaking. They had to do with vagrancy. They had to do, eventually, with drug use.”

In 2018, after years of community organizing, Colorado sparked a national movement when voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment A, a ballot measure that deleted half a sentence from the state constitution that allowed slavery and involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Colorado was the first state to do so since the signing of the 13th Amendment. Since Colorado removed its language, Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Oregon, Alabama, and Tennessee have followed suit with similar constitutional amendments. Organizers in around a dozen more states are now pushing to get similar ballot measures in front of voters during the 2024 elections. 

“This is a fast-moving train,” said Kamau Allen, the lead Colorado organizer and the co-founder of the Abolish Slavery National Network.

But in some ways, Colorado’s Amendment A only abolished prison slavery on paper. That’s because the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) has continued to punish those who refuse to work. Since 2018, there have been at least 727 documented instances where an incarcerated person was disciplined for failing to work, according to a 9News investigation this past summer, with punishment ranging from changes in housing to loss of privileges and delayed parole.

Now, some of the same organizers who crafted Amendment A are hoping to strengthen the state’s anti-slavery law through litigation. A lawsuit filed against Polis and his Department of Corrections in state court last year contends that compulsory labor in prison under threat of punishment and coercion violates the amendment approved in 2018. The plaintiffs, two incarcerated men who say they were punished for refusing work assignments that increased the risk to their health during the pandemic, are seeking a permanent injunction requiring Colorado prisons to “cease requiring compulsory labor” and a court order “declaring unconstitutional the statutes and regulations that mandate incarcerated people must work against their will.” 

Advocates said the lawsuit—and their organizing efforts outside the court—are focused on banning forced labor, not whether incarcerated people have opportunities and incentives to work behind bars. They say they are not trying to get rid of prison work programs. 

“That’s never been the intent,” said Kym Ray, a community organizer with Together Colorado who helped draft Amendment A. “People do want to work, they want the opportunity to earn money.”

“The intent is to give people the choice,” she added.

Today, incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion each year in goods and commodities, and over $9 billion in services for the maintenance of the very prisons that confine them—all while being paid pennies an hour or nothing at all, according to research conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic. Their labor enables mass incarceration by offsetting the cost of the country’s ballooning prison system, which has grown by 500 percent over the last 50 years.

State and local governments rely heavily on incarcerated workers for various needs: highway and road work; cleaning governors and mayoral estates; maintenance of hiking trails; making furniture for state and government buildings, including for public universities; and even doing hospital laundry. Incarcerated workers also conduct vital public services during times of crisis, from fighting wildfires to making personal protective equipment throughout the pandemic.

“It’s a massive labor force that is completely hidden from view,” Gibson-Light told Bolts. “And that’s by design.”

In addition to off-setting costs for federal, state and local governments, approximately 4,100 companies in the U.S. have directly profited off of prison labor, a number that is likely an undercount—including large companies like Walmart, McDonald’s, Starbucks, IBM, Tyson Foods and Microsoft, according to a database created by the advocacy organization Worth Rises.

“A lot of people are making a lot of money off the system,” said Arrington, who has worked for the reentry nonprofit, Second Chance Center, since his release. “It is no different than it was 200 years ago.” 

Nationally, the minimum wage for incarcerated workers is anywhere from $0 to 35 cents an hour, according to an ACLU report. Some jobs can pay more than a dollar an hour, but those jobs are rare. The pay for people incarcerated in Colorado prisons ranges from 33 cents to more than $2 an hour for some jobs. At least nine states—Maine, Nevada, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida—pay incarcerated people nothing for almost all prison jobs. 

Gibson-Light says better wages alone don’t address the main problem with prison slavery: forced labor under threat of punishment.

“Had, in the 1800s, Abe Lincoln said, ‘Everyone who was enslaved in the Confederate States shall now be given three cents a day,’ the abolitionists of the time would not have been satisfied,” he said. “There’s a reason it’s the Emancipation Proclamation, not the compensation proclamation. It’s not a question about wages. The question is about freedom.”

Valerie Collins, an attorney with Towards Justice, the nonprofit worker’s rights law firm that is representing the incarcerated workers who sued in Colorado, told the crowd at the Juneteenth event that’s precisely why their case doesn’t make arguments about wages.

“In a lot of ways, that kind of muddies the water,” Collins said. “We did not bring wage claims …to keep the focus on the forced nature of the work itself, in the coercion that is used to extract that labor.”

That strategy differs from the one advocates took in 2020, when four incarcerated people filed a lawsuit against the state contending that the 10 cents an hour they were making amounted to “slave wages.” The men asked for minimum wage and to be considered state employees and receive worker benefits such as sick leave and medical benefits, but a state judge dismissed their claims.

The current lawsuit was filed on behalf of Harold Mortis and Richard Lilgerose, who are both incarcerated at the Fremont Correctional Facility in Canon City. It alleges that the men were disciplined for refusing to work in the prison’s kitchen during the COVID-19 pandemic due to existing physical and mental health conditions. ​​A correctional officer threatened that Mortis would be removed from his incentive living program if he didn’t work in the kitchen, according to the lawsuit. When he refused, they removed two days of his earned time—extending his time in prison. Similarly, Lilgerose lost four days of earned time and was threatened with losing more privileges such as recreation time and visitation for refusing to work.

Colorado Department of Corrections policies state, “All eligible offenders are required to work unless assigned to an approved education or training program.” Consequences for refusing to work can include “restricted privileges, loss of other privileges, delayed parole hearing date, and not being eligible for earned time”—all the things incarcerated people use to “better or maintain your body and your mind,” Gibson-Light said. Attorneys for the state of Colorado have argued that they are “incentivizing work” and not forcing it. 

“Many programs provide certified classroom education, apprenticeships, and certificates as well as on-the-job training and experience in a variety of in-demand industries,” a CDOC spokesperson said in a written statement to Bolts. “In addition to technical skills, our programs also teach critical soft skills that help prepare inmates to interact professionally with others in a work setting. These skills help contribute to the successful rehabilitation of inmates.”

State prison systems typically justify forcing people to labor for little to no money under the threat of punishment by claiming the work is rehabilitative. But often, the jobs on the inside don’t translate to opportunities on the outside. 

“​​We’re talking about full internal labor markets with lots of different jobs: stamping license plates, making street signs, cleaning trails, raking rocks, building prison walls, operating call centers, repairing and maintaining vehicles, janitorial work, and anything and everything in between,” Gibson-Light said. “On the surface, it sounds like ‘Oh, there’s so many opportunities.’ (But) they do not align with the realities of the labor market,” he added. “You can be a barber and make good money, but you get out and you can’t get a barber license if you have a record.”

Groups in Colorado first organized and got a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2016, but it failed by a slim margin, with 50.4 percent of voters choosing to leave the language alone. 

“When we woke up to Donald Trump being president, we also woke up and found out that Colorado voted to keep slavery,” Allen recalled.

In 2018, a coalition of organizations tried again, this time putting a bill in front of lawmakers to get it on the ballot. The bill passed unanimously. Then, in preparation for the question going in front of voters, organizers went door to door and held film screenings in churches across the state showing the 2016 documentary “13th” by Ava DuVernay, which explores the historical connection between slavery and mass incarceration.

The 2018 amendment passed overwhelmingly, with 65 percent of voters approving it. Ray, who worked on both amendment campaigns, says the vote, while decisive, still points to a large number of Coloradans willing to tolerate a form of slavery. “Obviously, that goes to show (that) we’ve got some more work to do,” Ray said. “We haven’t all arrived.”

After they won, the calls started to flood in from organizers across the country looking to make the same change in their own states. 

Like in Colorado, the push has been an uphill battle for other states. After failing to get lawmakers to put the issue on the ballot in 2021, organizers in Louisiana tried again in 2022 and got a bill through both legislative chambers, setting up a fall referendum. But it ultimately failed.

“People were like, ‘No, slavery was abolished in 1865!’ Meanwhile, I’m over here pickin’ cotton,” said Curtis Davis, the executive director for Decarcerate Louisiana who advocated for the measure by talking about his own experiences while he was incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Davis says he thought he had rights and tried to refuse when he was sent to pick cotton within his first week of being locked up in 1990. “The guy just pointed his shotgun at me,” he recalled. “The guy told me, ‘You gave up your rights when you got convicted.”

Later, Davis says he purposely dropped a weight on his foot so he didn’t have to work 12 hours in the scorching Louisiana sun. As punishment, he recalls being sent to solitary confinement and was written up for “damaging state property.” He says removing the slavery exception is about, “Treating people as people, not property.”

Some of the measure’s champions, including the ACLU of Louisiana and Representative Edmond Jordan, a Baton Rouge Democrat who sponsored the amendment, eventually pulled their support during the 2022 campaign. They said the version that had made it before Louisiana voters was too ambiguous after legislative dealmaking diluted the language. Voters at the ballot box were asked, “Do you support an amendment to prohibit the use of involuntary servitude except as it applies to the otherwise lawful administration of criminal justice?” 

In the face of that confusion, the amendment failed by a large margin, 61 to 39 percent.

During the 2023 legislative session, a bill to put the amendment on the ballot again this year passed the House but died in the Senate. “We are just keeping on going,” Davis said to Bolts. “We are like that little energizer bunny.”

Even if voters in more states pass constitutional amendments that end the exception for prison slavery, Gibson-Light says that elected leaders and officials across all levels of government have an incentive to oppose meaningful changes to prison labor. 

“If (incarcerated workers) were regarded and protected and compensated like real workers, which they are, the state would go bankrupt,” he added. “And I think that’s an important part of the underlying story.”

In October 2022, a state district judge hearing the lawsuit over forced labor in Colorado prisons ruled that the threat of isolation or physical punishment could be deemed unconstitutional, but also concluded that CDOC’s practice of taking away privileges such as good time may be allowable, according to 9News. The lawsuit is still pending.

Advocates who pushed to end the slavery exception say they are looking for other ways to improve prison work conditions that go beyond giving incarcerated people the choice of whether to work at all. Ray with Together Colorado says she wants better access to work programs that have connections to employers on the outside; better wages to help incarcerated people support themselves and their families; banning the use of solitary confinement, which has been used to punish people for refusing to work; and giving incarcerated people more worker protections.

“Many of them are up on roofs doing roofing with zero experience,” she added. “We are meeting folks who have lost fingers because they’re working on faulty equipment or equipment that they haven’t even been properly trained on.”

Arrington recently earned his aircraft mechanic license from the Federal Aviation Administration—the same one he was studying for when he was wrongly incarcerated. He’s moving out of state with his wife to pursue his career but plans to continue fighting to abolish prison slavery.

For now, Arrington and other organizers in Colorado have turned their attention to Polis, urging him to use his authority to force CDOC to change their policies. Organizers under the unifying title, End Slavery Colorado, asked to meet with the governor to discuss prison slavery last month, but as of this writing, they haven’t heard back. The governor’s office declined a request for comment for this story, citing the pending legislation. 

“(Polis) could end it tomorrow,” Arrington told the crowd on Juneteenth. “He could stop fighting slavery in court and actually be accountable for the thing that 65 percent of us told him we wanted to do.”

The post Forced Labor Continues in Colorado, Years After Vote to End Prison Slavery  appeared first on Bolts.

Jenny had been locked up for several years by the time Ujevich arrived at West Virginia’s all-women Lakin Correctional Center and Jail. There, Ujevich says, Jenny had complained of a persistent pain in one of her breasts, but struggled to get staff to take that problem seriously. In fact, Ujevich says, the staff hardly paid her any mind until Jenny’s condition sharply and visibly worsened. Only after that point did Jenny learn she had breast cancer. 

Ujevich still fumes over how long it took Jenny to obtain that diagnosis, and over what came next: “She couldn’t get her chemo on time,” Ujevich told Bolts.

Jenny was released in late 2016. She spent Christmas with her family, then died in January.

Ujevich is now free and heading a nonprofit project called West Virginia Family of Convicted People, where she advocates for changes to the state’s prison system, including improvements in health care. She’s nervous that a new state law, passed during a special session last month by West Virginia’s GOP-run legislature and signed by its Republican governor, could lead to more cases like Jenny’s.

Senate Bill 1009 bans the use of state funds for any health care for incarcerated people that isn’t deemed “medically necessary.” The policy leaves it to state Corrections and Rehabilitation Commissioner Billy Marshall—a career law enforcement agent who has said incarcerated people are lying when they allege inhumane treatment by the state—to define “medically necessary” and makes clear that this definition can supersede guidance from health professionals. “A provider of health care prescribing, ordering, recommending, or approving a health care service or product does not, by itself, make that health care service or product medically necessary,” the law reads.

West Virginia already routinely fails to provide basic, essential care in its jails and prisons, several formerly incarcerated people told Bolts. Kenneth Matthews, who was locked up for more than eight years and has been free since 2020, says he lived this firsthand, as a diabetic person with high blood pressure. 

In prison, he said “I didn’t get insulin, and they didn’t give me medication for my high blood pressure either. They said maybe if I lost some weight and worked out more, my blood pressure and diabetes would correct itself.”

And Zoey Hott, a trans woman who was incarcerated for about 18 months and released August 1, said people needing gender-affirming care feel this struggle acutely. She told Bolts she was promptly taken off hormone therapy when she arrived at jail and then denied this treatment as she was transferred to several different jails. The interruption, she said, caused physical discomfort and profound mental health issues. 

“It took me five months to even be evaluated,” Hott added. “They don’t really look at it as something of significant importance for anybody. I feel like they view it as an elective procedure.”

Stories like these abound, JoAnna Vance, an organizer with the West Virginia Economic Justice Project, told Bolts. “Health care in jails and prisons is not good. ‘Mental health services’ is just throwing people in solitary. We just had another death in one of our jails this morning. I know people who’ve been having seizures in jail and the correctional officers ignore them or tell the other inmates to deal with it. Lord, there’s so much.” 

West Virginia contracts with a private company, Wexford Health, for medical care in its jails, prisons, and juvenile detention centers. All over the country, from Arizona to Illinois to West Virginia, incarcerated people and their advocates have complained for years of medical dangers resulting from government partnerships with Wexford. Most recently, a lawsuit filed in July accused the company of denying thousands of incarcerated West Virginans medication for opioid use disorder. 

In the treatment of addiction and so much else, health care in U.S. carceral facilities is typically abysmal—even as the people locked in those facilities are, on average, much more medically vulnerable than the population at large. The situation grows even more dangerous where care is outsourced to private companies, like Wexford, a broad Reuters analysis found.

But even against this national backdrop, West Virginia stands out: it led the nation in prison deaths per capita in 2020, and, that same year, the Reuters analysis found that its jails had the highest death rate between 2009 and 2019, among dozens of regions around the country that the news agency surveyed.

And so it is alarming to those critical of this deadly system that the state has passed a new law that could soon curtail what little public funding the state currently allocates for health care in jails and prisons. Advocates worry now about what SB 1009 will mean for incarcerated people seeking gender-affirming care, contraception, disability accommodations, or anything else the state might try to argue is not “necessary.”

“I think this has the potential to be extremely abused. I really do,” Ujevich said. In West Virginia jails and prisons, she added, “They just do not give a shit about your medical care. Not one shit.”

It’s hard to know how, exactly, SB 1009 will change the status quo. The enrolled bill is less than 500 words long and leaves many blanks to be filled. Notably, it does not specify any forms of health care that are being provided today that might be eliminated under this policy and leaves broad authority to the state Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation to set new rules moving forward. 

And while the law does require the division head to consult with a “medical professional” before deciding whether a given instance of medical care is indeed “necessary,” it neither defines “medical professional” nor compels the division to accept professionals’ advice.

Delegate David Kelly, the Republican chair of West Virginia’s House Jails and Prisons Committee, told Bolts the point of the bill is to make carceral health care rules uniform across the state system—that is, he said, whether or not someone receives a certain type of medical care while locked up should not depend on their facility. But he was unable to say whether there is a lack of uniformity in the system today, and could not identify any particular procedures or benefits the state funds today that he believes should not be covered in the future.

With few specifics written into the law and such broad powers granted to prison officials, a dozen different lawyers, lawmakers, advocates, and formerly incarcerated people interviewed for this story told Bolts the best they can hope for is that the policy change won’t much affect West Virginia’s standard of care in jails and prisons. But, “worst-case scenario, it will prevent even more medical care for incarcerated people,” said state Delegate Mike Pushkin, a Democrat who voted against SB 1009.

Pushkin and several others said they believe this law could open West Virginia to lawsuits. Recent successful litigation accused Corrections officials of inadequate medical and mental health care, and a new suit filed this month in federal court alleges 10,000 people in the state’s custody live in inhumane conditions.

“The United States constitution sets the minimum floor as to what the state has to provide to people who are incarcerated, and there’s no statute that the West Virginia legislature could pass that would somehow remove that obligation,” said Lydia Milnes, deputy director at Mountain State Justice, which has sued the state over health care for incarcerated people. If SB 1009 leads West Virginia officials to deny even more basic health care in jails and prisons, Milnes said, “There can and will be more litigation.”

SB 1009 could also be a cost-saving measure for a state jail and prison system dealing with critical staffing issues—Commissioner Marshall said over 1,000 positions are vacant in West Virginia jails and prisons, twice as many as before the COVID-19 pandemic—that advocates say contribute to the state’s deadly carceral conditions. But the special legislative session last month resulted in much more discussion of pay raises for jail and prison staff than of ways to ensure safety and wellbeing for incarcerated people.

“I think they’ve barely chiseled away at the edges,” said Pushkin, one of just 11 Democrats in the 100-member state House. “You need safe places for people who are incarcerated. And we don’t have that here in West Virginia.”

Republican Governor Jim Justice called the special session, which began on the same afternoon he announced it. SB 1009 was one of the 44 bills that Justice included on his call, directing the legislature to take it up.

He requested for the session to begin at 4 p.m. on a Sunday, and some state lawmakers told Bolts they didn’t get a peek at the legislation being proposed until about 3:30 p.m. The process left many people directly concerned with or affected by the slew of legislation no time to assess it, much less to testify on it. 

“The lack of transparency during the special session was completely appalling, and it’s not the way democracy is supposed to work,” Pushkin said.

Kelly, the Republican delegate, pushed back, telling Bolts that SB 1009 had been brainstormed for “several months.” If so, that’s news to many people who work closely on and are directly affected by the issue of health care in jails and prisons in West Virginia.

This policy change concerning “medically necessary” care received only one public hearing before it became law, in a 35-minute discussion of the House Judiciary Committee. The Republicans backing the bill made little effort to identify the need for this change, and Brad Douglas, the executive officer of the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation, offered little information when he testified under oath. 

In a private meeting the day the special session began, the Republican legislative leadership said this reform was needed “because of nose jobs and knee replacements” for incarcerated people, Democratic state Delegate Evan Hansen told Bolts. “They did not present any backup data or evidence.”

Among the few substantive public remarks any elected West Virginia Republican has made on this policy, state Delegate Brandon Steele voiced support during the committee hearing for state funds being used on voluntary sterilization of incarcerated people.

“If one of these individuals wanted to get a vasectomy or hysterectomy or something like that, I think that it’s good public policy to allow them to do that,” Steele said, in a remark that went unchallenged at the hearing. (Steele isn’t the first to advocate along these lines: GOP state Senator Randy Smith recently suggested West Virginia should shorten jail and prison sentences for anyone who agrees to be sterilized, so that those people “don’t bring any more drug babies into the system.”)

At one point in the hearing, Democratic Delegate Joey Garcia, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, pressed Douglas to identify any procedure or medical benefit that the state is funding today, but may not fund under SB 1009.

“So, you don’t have any examples?” Garcia asked.

“I do not,” responded Douglas.

Only when asked directly about West Virginia’s extreme rate of jail and prison deaths did Douglas even acknowledge them. “It would be accurate to say we’ve had inmates die in jails, yes,” he said. When asked if that is a “problem,” Douglas said only, “It’s never good if any inmate passes away.” 

SB 1009 passed the legislature the following day. It passed the Senate unanimously, including with support from Democratic members. The House passed it on a margin of 86 to 9, with eight Democrats and one Republican opposing. 

“The guy was playing dumb,” Hansen said of Douglas. “But that happens with a lot of bills in the legislature in West Virginia, now that the Republicans have a supermajority. They work things out in their caucus ahead of time, and it’s very rare for someone from the majority party to slow things down by asking questions.”

For the previously incarcerated people who spoke to Bolts, SB 1009 has reaffirmed their feeling of abandonment by the state and renewed their outrage with what they perceive to be indifference by state officials to the lives and livelihoods of those locked up in West Virginia. 

“It’s horrible, to say the least,” Matthews said. “I think they’re putting a lot of men and women’s lives at risk over the sake of potentially saving some money. Somebody’s life shouldn’t have a dollar amount attached to it.”

Soon after he was released, Matthews was hospitalized with diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition. “My endocrinologist told me I should have been on medication for a long time,” he said. “I asked, ‘What’s a long time?’ and he said at least the last five or 10 years. I said, ‘That’s interesting, because I was incarcerated for most of that time.’”

Matthews said that his own experience underscored for him that whether a particular procedure or treatment is considered elective or necessary can depend on the whims of whomever gets to make the call.

“It would have been very easy for them to get me on medication to control this early, but I guess they didn’t feel that it was ‘medically necessary,’” he said. “A lot of guys’ life expectancy is shortened because of this. I could’ve died in my sleep because they didn’t take my issues seriously.”

The post New Law Could Make It Even Harder to Get Health Care in Deadly West Virginia Lockups appeared first on Bolts.

Annalyse Gosselin would like a new coat. Hers is ripped, and its zipper doesn’t work anymore. 

She’d also like a new phone and to eat at a restaurant one of these days—the last time she dined out was in May, on her 20th birthday—but can’t afford those things either. Gosselin works two jobs, at a grocery store and part-time as a nursing assistant, but she says that nets her less than $20,000 a year. That isn’t nearly enough to thrive where she lives in Boston, where the median one-bedroom apartment rents for about $3,000 a month.

Fifteen months ago, she started a relationship with an imprisoned man she’d been corresponding with through a pen pal program that connects incarcerated people with concerned strangers. Now budgeting is even harder: her boyfriend, Syrelle, is held in Norfolk, 30 miles from her home, and keeping in regular touch with him is enormously expensive. It costs about $2.50 to talk with him for 20 minutes on the phone, and twice that if they do a video call. Emails cost 25 cents apiece. The private company the prison system uses to run communications takes a $3 surcharge every time she adds money to her account. 

Gosselin says she’s spent about $5,000 just to talk with Syrelle since the start of their relationship, and roughly the same amount on purchases for him at the prison commissary: an extension cord, a small television, chicken, vegetables, medicated protein shakes.

“I go broke, literally. I make my bank account negative,” Gosselin told Bolts. “I don’t do much for myself; I just do for him. My mom and everybody always tells me, ‘You can’t keep making sacrifices for your relationship.’ But who else is going to do it?”

Massachusetts is now poised to ease that financial burden for Gosselin, as well as for the thousands of people held in the state’s prisons and jails, and their loved ones. Lawmakers just approved reforms on Monday that would eliminate charges for communicating with incarcerated people. It would also limit commissary markups in all jails and prisons to 3 percent above an item’s purchase price.

Gosselin says making communications free would change her life. She’d be able to speak with her boyfriend without watching the clock or her wallet. “It will honestly be the best thing,” Gosselin said. “It just feels like a burden taken off my back once it happens.”

The reform, which is part of the state’s annual budget, now awaits the signature of Governor Maura Healey, a Democrat who has expressed support for the change and is expected to approve it. Her predecessor, Republican former Governor Charlie Baker, denied a similar proposal last year. 

If Healey does approve this change, Massachusetts would be the fifth state to make prison phone calls free. Connecticut in 2021 became the first to do so, followed by California in 2022 and Colorado and Minnesota earlier this year. Several large U.S. cities have also mandated free phone calls for people in jails, starting with New York City in 2018 and followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami, among others. Last year, Congress also passed a law granting the Federal Communications Commission new and greater authority to regulate the high cost of calls to and from incarcerated people.

The Massachusetts reform would be among the most wide-reaching: The state would join only Connecticut in making communications of all kinds free for all incarcerated people—that is, not just phone calls, but also video, email, and messaging. Massachusetts would pay for the communications out of a $20 million state trust fund meant specifically to cover those costs.

The changes were guided in large part by the advocacy of people directly harmed by the exorbitant costs of communicating with loved ones in prison. For instance, many of those people expressed worry that some facilities would respond to free communications by further restricting the amount of time people can spend on phone or video calls—indeed, Healey’s initial budget proposal called for just such a cap, and also excluded jail communications. Advocates told Bolts that incarcerated people helped add a provision to the current budget prohibiting jails and prisons from limiting communication access beyond their existing policies as those services become free.

“We’re feeling extremely happy with the language that came out of the legislature,” Jesse White, policy director at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, told Bolts. “Not only will phone calls be free, but also access should not be reduced.”

Many people now cheering the prospect of free prison phone calls once thought such reforms would never happen. Jarelis Fonseca, whose partner is incarcerated in Norfolk and who says she spends more every month on prison communications than on her car insurance, rent, and groceries combined, told Bolts she long ago accepted that extreme costs come with the territory of having a loved one in prison. 

“It’s something we feel like we just have to deal with, and deal with by ourselves,” she said. By becoming active in advocating for the Massachusetts change, she added, she’s come to understand how common her struggle is. 

“I was like many families: in the dark. I knew what I knew from what I pay and how much it cost for me. Many people are not able to talk about it,” she said. “We’re all deciding what we’re going to go without, putting things off, to add money to continue to speak to our loved one. It’s stressful.”

In recent years, a groundswell of activism has coalesced around cutting the high costs of communicating with people behind bars. Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, an abolitionist organization helping lead a nationwide movement for free prison and jail communications, says organizers wanted to help incarcerated people and their loved ones while also chipping away at the network of private companies that profit off them. 

“Our strategy, when we started this work in 2017, was that we had to start somewhere,” Tylek told Bolts. “If we’re going to dismantle an industry—one that very few people know anything about—we have to start somewhere that feels accessible.”

Worth Rises estimates that prison telecommunications companies make nearly $1.9 billion annually from contracts with jails and prisons. That money goes mostly to a small group of private equity-owned corporations, but those corporations typically send kickbacks to governments who award them exclusive contracts. For instance, before Colorado made prison phone calls free, the state received up to $800,000 per year from the company Global Tel*Link for rights to run the prison system’s phone program.

Tylek says organizers highlighted the exorbitant cost of prison phone calls because they thought it would resonate with others. “I don’t think there’s anything more accessible than a simple phone call,” she said. “A phone call to your mom, to your child, to your partner. That seemed like something we could explain to people: that children deserve to hear ‘I love you’ whether or not their parent can afford a phone call.”

Tylek says there’s legislation planned for next year in Hawaii, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, and that advocates are actively organizing for reforms in a half dozen other states. She says organizers hope to make at least prison phone calls free in every state by 2027.

Free communications may well enable even more advocacy from incarcerated people in Massachusetts, who could participate remotely in policymaking at no cost if prison calls are free. As this reform nears the finish line, organizers are already working on other legislation to loosen restrictions on in-person visitation that the prison system implemented in 2018. 

James Jeter, director of Connecticut’s Full Citizens Coalition, said he’s been able to dramatically expand his advocacy network since his state made calls free in 2021. That reform led to an immediate doubling of both total phone calls by incarcerated people in Connecticut and of average call duration, CT Insider reported. 

“We had this idea that once the phone calls went free, we could actually start in the prisons, educating guys in there on how to be advocates to their families, to run a phone-banking campaign through the incarcerated and their families,” Jeter, who is formerly incarcerated and whose organization is working toward full enfranchisement for all people in Connecticut with felony convictions, told Bolts. He added that his coalition now sends about 400 emails into the state prison system every day.

“We’re having conversations with people that we would otherwise have no access to,” Jeter said.

In this way, Tylek said, the movement to make communications free is already building on itself.

“We plan to get people from talking about prison telecom to talking about how we get into financial services or food or health care or commissary. Talking about telecom has allowed us to talk about exploitation more broadly,” she said.

For now, in Massachusetts, those most closely affected by the big business of calling home are hoping for financial relief and also closer connection to their loved ones behind bars. Research has consistently shown that maintaining close ties with family and friends is critical not only in improving outcomes for people while incarcerated, but also in giving those people a better shot at success once released.

Fonseca says she calls the prison about five times a day to talk with her partner in hopes that he feels connected to home. “For him and for anyone incarcerated, we know that when people feel incorporated still to their family and friends, they’ll do better when they’re in there and they’ll do better when they come out,” she said. “It’s about him knowing he’s supported, that sacrifices are being made for him, because he’s worth that.”

Joanna Levesque has also been stretching her budget to keep in touch with her partner, who is incarcerated in a prison in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. “It’s amazing what the consistency of having someone to talk to does for someone’s mental health,” Levesque said. “Nobody wants to be alone.” 

“It makes little sense to me that the cost of phone calls for inmates is so insanely high when the vast majority of us are indigent,” Levesque’s partner, Christopher O’Connor, told Bolts by email. “I often feel so bad for being a financial burden to my friends and family.”

Levesque says she hopes free calls allow them to remain close and also enable her to live more comfortably, including by eating breakfast and lunch more often. At the moment, she told Bolts, she works multiple jobs and prioritizes communication with her O’Connor over her own wellbeing—which, she says, means long stretches of fasting.

“I am so beyond excited,” she said.

The post Massachusetts Is Making Communications Free for Incarcerated People appeared first on Bolts.

Loretta Pierre’s first five murder trials ended in mistrials. She was just 20 years old when she shot and killed an ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend who had threatened her with a knife. For the sixth trial, Mississippi prosecutors got the judge to change the venue from her hometown of Gulfport to Vicksburg. Pierre felt confident after the series of mistrials, which included several hung juries and one in which the state’s medical examiner failed to appear. She had even assured her son she’d be going home when the latest trial ended. But her heart dropped in February 1989, the day before her son’s third birthday, when a Warren County jury convicted and sentenced her to life in prison. 

Pierre says she was devastated but held on tightly to the possibility of someday getting out on parole—a chance that her sentence might not really condemn her to ultimately die behind bars. 

“I felt like my life was over, but I knew, in the midst of all that, I would go up for parole in 1997,” Pierre told Bolts. “I was hopeful. I had seen so many women make parole their first time.”

More than a dozen rejections from the parole board and nearly two decades of attending perfunctory and fruitless hearings have eroded that confidence. Now 58, Pierre says she allowed herself to start hoping again in recent years, as Mississippi officials worked to expand parole and the state parole board began granting an increasing number of applications for release. 

By October 2019, the parole board was approving roughly four out of every five people who applied for release. In 2021, one of Pierre’s friends at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (CMCF) who was also serving a life sentence was finally granted parole after 30 years in prison and 11 parole denials.   

Then Mississippi parole rates started plummeting last year. The board, entirely revamped by appointments made by Governor Tate Reeves since he entered office in 2020, approved about 40 percent of people who were eligible throughout 2022. The board members have defended those lower release rates, accusing previous members of not reviewing cases thoroughly enough and promising increased scrutiny of applicants. 

It’s unclear what scrutiny the parole board gave Pierre when she appeared before them in January 2022. She recalled that they asked standard questions during her minutes-long hearing—about her crime, the programs and classes she’d taken in prison, and her plans for release. Then, they denied Pierre’s application. It was her fourteenth rejection. 

By effectively cutting the board’s approval rate in half, its new members threatened the most frequent pathway out of prison in Mississippi and helped trigger a rise in the state’s prison population after years of steady declines. While Mississippi’s incarceration rate consistently leads the country, reforms and greater use of parole had reduced its prison population from a height of about 22,500 in September 2013 down to 16,499 by the start of 2022. 

Then last year, prison admissions started to outnumber releases as the board dialed back parole. Mississippi’s prison population grew nine percent between mid-2021 and the fall of 2022, one of only a handful of states that saw substantial growth in incarceration during that time period. As of July 16, 2023, the state imprisoned 19,252 people.

Some GOP lawmakers in Mississippi have joined local advocates in questioning the wisdom of reducing parole as the prison population again starts to rise and adds stress to an already overburdened system. A U.S. Department of Justice investigation last year determined that “gross understaffing” had contributed to deadly conditions. To avoid overcrowding, Mississippi officials scrambled to create hundreds of new prison beds, including re-opening the Delta Correctional Facility, a former men’s prison that the state had shuttered in 2012. 

Pierre and hundreds of other women incarcerated at CMCF, which is just outside Jackson, where many of them have families, were shipped more than 100 miles to the newly-reopened prison in the state’s rural Delta region to make more space. 

“I don’t ever want to give up hope,” Pierre told Bolts. “But sometimes hope can be your worst enemy.” 

Mississippi established its parole board in 1972, composed of five governor-appointed members whose terms last “at the will and pleasure of the governor.” 

Pierre and others convicted in the 1970s and 1980s became eligible for parole after serving at least a quarter of their prison sentences, or, for life sentences, at least ten years. (Pierre had been arrested in 1985, but officials counted her time in pretrial detention towards her prison term.) But then in 1995, the state dramatically restricted parole, requiring those with felony convictions to serve 85 percent of their sentence before becoming eligible. People sentenced to life after that had to spend at least 10 years in prison and also wait until they turned 65 before being allowed to petition a sentencing judge for a parole hearing; judges could then permit or dismiss the request for a hearing at their discretion. (The law was not retroactive and didn’t apply to Pierre.)

Under those new parole restrictions, Mississippi’s prison population nearly doubled from 12,292 in 1995 to more than 23,000 by the end of 2008.

But parole releases started to increase in 2009 after lawmakers allowed it for people convicted of nonviolent offenses and certain drug crimes after serving a quarter of their sentences. In 2014, Mississippi again expanded parole eligibility when then-Governor Phil Bryant signed House Bill 585, which restored the 25 percent time-served threshold for all offenses. 

The 2014 law also created a process called presumptive parole for people with convictions for nonviolent offenses, in order to release them without a formal board hearing once they meet all conditions of their case plan, have no major violations in the past six months, and no objection from law enforcement or their victim. 

Case plans for presumptive parole require the participation of the state prison system, the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC). For anyone who could qualify for presumptive parole entering prison, a prison case manager is supposed to help them start creating a release plan within 90 days of their arrival, and inform the new arrivals of their parole eligibility date. The parole board can suggest changes but ultimately must approve the case plan. 

Case managers are also supposed to meet with incarcerated people to review their progress at least once every eight weeks and send updates to the board every four months. In the months ahead of their first parole hearing, prison officials are also supposed to help people create a discharge plan, notify the board whether the person has completed it, and ultimately submit the plan to the board for approval. The parole board is then allowed to release people who follow that process without a formal hearing. 

The first year the new law that included presumptive parole was enacted, parole releases in Mississippi nearly doubled, from 2,015 in 2013 to 3,906 in 2014. 

By 2019, parole had become the principal way people were released from prison in Mississippi, with parole approvals making up 63.4 percent of all releases from prison. Reeves signed legislation in 2021 aimed at even further expansion. That year, the parole board held a monthly average of 870 hearings and granted parole to nearly three-quarters of applicants.

Some of these releases garnered outrage from both victims and lawmakers. In May, the decision to grant parole may have sparked one member’s resignation (the board remains short one member as of this writing).

Parole releases began a steep decline to a rate of about 40 percent in 2022. Jeffery Belk, a former Chevron manager who was appointed to chair the parole board at the start of the year, faced questions last November in a hearing with state lawmakers who were concerned by the growing prison population.

During his testimony to lawmakers, Belk pointed to a scathing 2021 audit of the board and its operations by a legislative watchdog agency, the Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER). The audit reported spotty attendance by members (auditors who reviewed hearings during one week in 2020 found none where all five members attended), shoddy documentation of parole decisions (the board stopped keeping minutes of hearings in 2009 when a new chairman took over) and unauthorized travel expenses (one was reimbursed more $20,000 in 2020 for commuting to work at the parole board offices in Jackson). 

Belk, who didn’t respond to questions for this story, told the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting last year that the governor had tapped him to reform a board that he claimed was in “disarray.” Reeves has remade the board, replacing all five members since taking office, according to Mississippi Free Press. Julia Norman, who was formerly in charge of government affairs for the city of Meridian and whom Reeves appointed to the parole board last year, told lawmakers during her confirmation hearing this past February that members may deny parole if they feel the sentence approved by the judge on the case was too low.

“If it’s a violent crime and you got a short sentence, this parole board may like to see you finish that sentence off,” Norman said during the hearing. (Norman also didn’t respond to questions for this story.) 

The PEER audit also concluded that “presumptive parole is not being implemented as required by the provisions of H.B. 585,” finding that in 2019 the board conducted at least 274 unnecessary hearings where the applicant already met all the criteria to qualify for release. When questioned by lawmakers last year about changes under the new parole board, Belk said he intended to “dramatically streamline the [presumptive parole] process.” 

Mississippi state public defender André De Gruy told Bolts that MDOC officials never thoroughly implemented case plans for people becoming eligible for presumptive parole, in part because of broader turmoil and turnover in the prison system after then-Commissioner Christopher Epps resigned amid accusations of taking $1.4 million in bribes. (Epps was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.) 

“If they would implement case plans, it would relieve the burden on the number of cases the board has to review. If they’re not bogged down on hearings they don’t need to do, they can spend more time on each case and make better decisions,” De Gruy, who also serves on the state’s Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force created by the 2014 reforms, told Bolts. “This doesn’t require a change in the law. It just requires them to implement the law that was passed nine years ago.”

A follow-up audit on the board that PEER released last month concluded the board still has not adopted an effective process for presumptive parole and continues to hold hearings for people who qualify for it. The board also still does not keep minutes for hearings. 

Linda Ross was hopeful when she saw “presumptive parole” stamped on her paperwork the last time she went before the parole board in May 2022. In 1989, Ross was 27 and had been engaged in sex work when she says a man from whom she demanded payment attacked her. She fought back, strangling him to death. She pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. Her lawyer told her that she would be eligible for parole in 13 years.

In prison, Ross earned her high school equivalency and completed at least 25 educational, vocational, religious and therapeutic programs. She enrolled in college classes and earned 14 credits. But Ross and others with convictions for violent offenses don’t qualify for presumptive parole, regardless of whatever progress she’s made behind bars, even with those words stamped on her parole packet. 

When Ross appeared before the board earlier last year, members rejected her application for release and told her to come back in three years, the maximum amount of time they can set before her case can be reconsidered. It was her seventh denial.

“I don’t see any justice in this system,” Ross told Bolts in a phone call from Delta. “They don’t look at your certification or programs or nothing like that.” Ross knows that her actions caused a man’s death, but also says she cannot undo the past. “I should’ve, would’ve, could’ve, but I can’t now.” 

Overcrowding Mississippi prisons come with a steep cost, not just in terms of the trauma that reverberates from dangerous and understaffed facilities. This year, Mississippi lawmakers budgeted nearly $434 million on prison spending, an 11 percent increase from last year. One estimate predicts the state could spend up to $111 million more each year on prisons than it did in 2020 if the population behind bars continues to rise. 

Overcrowding could eventually force the state’s hand. Under Mississippi’s Prison Overcrowding Emergency Act, officials must act to either reduce the number of people behind bars or expand the state’s carceral footprint if the prison population remains above 95 percent capacity for at least 30 days. The emergency act would also direct the state parole board to review people who are incarcerated for parole revocations and re-evaluating those who had previously been denied parole. 

De Gruy, who has been working in Mississippi’s criminal legal system since the late 1980s, says he can’t remember any time a release has happened under that act, in part because, in previous decades, the state responded by opening new prisons. 

He points to the most recent report by the Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force, which showed that prison releases more than halved since 2019 while prison admissions remained roughly the same. “If the number of people making parole drops, then the prison population goes up. The same number of people are coming in and a lower number of people are going out. It’s that simple,” De Gruy told Bolts. “The dropping releases is what’s driving the prison numbers up and what’s keeping them up.”

The parole board could again be changing course. According to a follow-up report PEER released last month, parole release rates rose in the first three months of 2023 after last year’s nosedive, with an average of 63 percent of applicants approved for release during that period. 

Still, the prison population has continued to rise, from 19,181 in January to 19,306 by July 1, nearing 88 percent of state prison capacity. The women’s prison population–currently hovering around 1,800—is the highest it’s ever been, a fact noted during the November legislative hearings.  

To handle the increase, officials have converted CMCF into a largely men’s prison after re-opening the shuttered prison in the Delta region, where they transferred several hundred women late last year. 

Pierre recalls how guards roused her and other women from sleep early one morning last December, ordering them to pack everything they owned before shackling their wrists and legs and loading them onto buses for transfer. 

Pierre says she managed to pack all her belongings into seven bags, but only three made it to Delta. Instead of sharing an individual cell with one person as she did at CMCF, guards put her in a dorm-style pod with nearly four dozen other women, where she describes now living in “an orchestra of coughs, snorts and sneezes.” She says the previously mothballed prison didn’t seem prepared for the new arrivals, telling Bolts, “They didn’t have any clothes—no panties, no bras, no boxer shorts.”

Educational options were even slimmer at Delta. Pierre took numerous community college classes while at CMCF, earning 36 credits towards an associates degree, but says she has been bumped back to beginner coursework at Delta because it’s the only option. Pierre says incarcerated people help facilitate much of what programming remains available. At one point, according to Pierre, prison staff asked her to help with a parenting class behind bars, but she balked, saying she hasn’t lived with her son since he was a toddler. “How am I going to teach someone to parent from prison?” she said. 

Pierre says she’s changed since in the nearly four decades since the confrontation that led to her imprisonment. She says she wouldn’t handle the situation the same way today and would try to flee instead of engaging with anyone threatening her. But that doesn’t seem to matter to the parole board. “Nobody’s the same person at twenty as they are at 58,” she reflected. 

Pierre says she tries to keep up hope for a life after prison. She is continuing her college education and participates in Study and Struggle, a political education and mutual aid collective supporting incarcerated Mississippians, which will offer her a reentry stipend and a transition to part-time work if the parole board ever lets her out. “It’s hard to plan a future because I’m so uncertain about it,” Pierre said in a recent phone call from her new prison. “Every time I go up for parole, we [my family and I] can’t help but make plans. Then all of our hopes and plans get crushed. Repeatedly.” 

Sometimes it feels like she has no future. “Some days, I lay here in my bed and pray to die because then it would all be over,” Pierre recalled telling her sister during a recent conversation, before hastily adding, “I would never do anything to hurt myself, but sometimes I ask the Lord to just take me in my sleep.”

The post Prisons Grow in Mississippi as State Officials Cut Parole appeared first on Bolts.

By international human rights standards, Jack Morris was tortured by the state of California for almost four decades. 

Morris mostly lived in solitary confinement from the time he went to prison in 1978, the year “Grease” was released, until he got out in 2017—alone 23 hours a day inside a cell the size of a parking space, shut off not just from the outside world, but also from the bonds and makeshift society that develop behind prison walls. He was only allowed phone calls whenever a close family member died. Over time, his sensory perception changed and small sounds made him jump. He stopped caring to watch TV, and eventually shifted from desperately craving human contact to withdrawing into himself and no longer wanting to speak with others. 

“It’s a slow, torturous event that slowly deteriorates you, both physically and mentally, emotionally and spiritually, until you no longer exist,” Morris told Bolts.

In 2013, while still imprisoned, Morris took part in a historic hunger strike protesting the pervasive use of solitary confinement inside the California prison system. “We all understood that if there wasn’t something done, we would all simply die inside those cells,” he said. Pelican Bay State Prison, the supermax facility where Morris spent much of his incarceration, had around 1,100 solitary cells in its “Secure Housing Unit,” or SHU, at the time of the hunger strike, with more than 500 people confined there for over a decade. People accused of belonging to a gang could be held in solitary indefinitely. The 2013 strike, organized by four prominent gang leaders who had been isolated for decades inside the SHU, saw some 30,000 prisoners from around California participate on its first day. Some managed to stretch the protest out for sixty days and ultimately helped push the state to agree to new limits on the use of solitary confinement, like more out-of-cell time and programming. 

Morris still remembers the morning the 2013 hunger strike began. It was early, and he was still lying in bed when a friend yelled through the bars and told him to look at the TV. 

“I look at the ticker tape at the bottom, and right there it said on national news, ‘30,000 California prisoners on hunger strike,’ and it was—it was amazing,” Morris told Bolts. It was their third hunger strike in recent years, but this one felt different, he said, with more coordination between prisoners and allies on the outside. With the whole country watching, change finally felt possible. “We were fortunate to have litigation taking place and family members yelling at the top of their lungs on the street corner and we finally got legislators to listen when the news broadcasted that 30,000 prisoners were not gonna eat no more,” Morris said. 

Last year, the California legislature last year took action to restrict the use of solitary confinement in the state by passing the Mandela Act, legislation that would curtail solitary beyond 15 consecutive days and no more than 45 days in a 180-day period. The bill seeks to codify the United Nations’ Nelson Mandela Rules, adopted last decade to define solitary confinement beyond 15 consecutive days as torture, so named in honor of the South African leader who spent 18 years languishing in isolation while imprisoned.

But California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the Mandela Act last September, arguing in his veto statement that the new restrictions “could risk the safety of both the staff and incarcerated population within these facilities.” Newsom, who acknowledged “the deep need to reform California’s use of segregated confinement,” said that he would also direct the state’s prison system, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), to “develop regulations that would restrict the use of segregated confinement except in limited situations.” 

That still hasn’t happened. CDCR told Bolts that the department merely plans to file a draft of new solitary regulations with the state by the end of 2023.

With no movement since lawmakers passed the solitary reforms last year, advocates for ending the practice—including Morris and other survivors of prolonged solitary confinement—are once again urging Newsom to support the Mandela reforms, which have been filed again for this legislative session under Assembly Bill 280.

Pasadena Assemblymember Chris Holden, who sponsored both bills, said he wants to bring California in line with international standards on imprisonment. His bill, like last year’s version, aims to end prolonged solitary in state prisons as well as local jails, which are run by county sheriffs, and immigrant detention centers, which are often run by private companies. 

Holden told Bolts that he has been discussing the bill’s language with Newsom’s office and that the legislation could still change depending on what the governor supports. As written, the bill would ban the use of solitary entirely for young and very old prisoners, people who meet the state’s criteria for physical or mental disability, and those who are pregnant or recently postpartum. But Holden said that he was willing to budge on some of these categorical exclusions after Newsom’s office communicated that the governor would still not support them. 

While Holden said he’s open to “reasonable” proposals from Newsom or CDCR to tweak the bill, he vowed to persist in making significant changes to solitary confinement as it is presently used. “The current system, as we speak, it meets the definition of torture,” Holden told Bolts. 

Experts who have studied the decade-long movement to end solitary in California prisons say it’s unrealistic to expect CDCR, which resisted full implementation of policy changes wrought by the 2013 hunger strike, to reform the practice on its own. “Day to day, when you look at solitary confinement use, the state is still putting big numbers of people in solitary confinement for long periods of time, under new names, in new places,” said Keramet Reiter, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine who wrote a book about long-term isolation at Pelican Bay. “In practice, these institutions are just incredibly resistant to reform.” 

As solitary confinement grew more controversial in recent years, California prison officials have labeled prolonged isolation “administrative segregation” or a host of other terms that have helped conceal the reality and scope of the practice. The Mandela Act seeks to cut through this obfuscation by clearly defining it: isolation without programming for more than 17 hours a day. 

“What’s really interesting and almost comical if it wasn’t so horrific is the way that [authorities] and law enforcement play this like cat-and-mouse game about solitary confinement and pretend like solitary confinement doesn’t exist because they call it all these different names,” said Hamid Yazdan Panah, an attorney and the advocacy director at Immigrant Defense Advocates, which has been pushing for the Mandela reforms. 

In the years leading up to the 2013 hunger strike, nearly 12,000 people were held in solitary at any given time across the California prison system. Immediately after the strike forced some changes, prisoners at Pelican Bay filed a class action lawsuit trying to end the practice of indefinite isolation for alleged gang members, who were named as such via a shadowy process called “validation” that could take as proof a person’s tattoos, clothing, or someone else’s confidential testimony. While the prison system technically re-evaluated such prisoners every six years, the plaintiffs said that there were only three ways out of isolation—snitch, parole, or die —and one of those routes, becoming an informant for CDCR, could carry fatal consequences.

That lawsuit ended in a settlement with the state prison system, which promised to end the practice of indefinite isolation and release almost all of the people in prolonged solitary confinement back into the general population. But today, though there are many fewer people in prolonged isolation than before, advocates point out that solitary confinement is still widely used in California. As of the end of April 2023, CDCR reports that 3,446 people are in some form of isolation, and that’s not counting the many people in jail or immigration detention who also find themselves in solitary. 

While opponents of the Mandela Act argue that solitary is a necessary tool to protect prisoners and guards from violent individuals, advocates for ending it say isolation is imposed on an array of vulnerable people behind bars. Eric Harris, director of public policy at Disability Rights California, one of the organizations leading the fight for the Mandela Act, says isolation is often a default response to people seen as different or disruptive, including people with mental illness, physical disabilities, and gender-nonconforming people. 

“When you look at folks who are often mistreated in these settings, or misunderstood in these settings, most of them have some form of disability, whether it’s been diagnosed or not,” Harris told Bolts.

It’s not uncommon for prison guards to wield solitary confinement as retaliation against people who agitate for their rights on the inside. “A lot of the folks that I’ve seen that were put in solitary were jailhouse lawyers to silence them,” Mike Saavedra, who was held in long-term isolation for over a decade, told Bolts. “They’d threaten you once you file a 602 [complaint about prison conditions] or any type of lawsuit to throw you in the hole.” Once there, he said, “they can control your litigation because now you have minimal access to the law library…you’re only allowed a small number of books.” 

Saavedra, who is now the co-director of legal support at the Los Angeles-based abolitionist organization Dignity and Power Now, says he was put in isolation after he was elected to an advisory council tasked with communicating fellow prisoners’ concerns to prison leadership. “Those that got that position were typically then labeled as shot callers and sent to solitary,” he said. Undeterred, Saavedra kept filing lawsuits disputing the conditions of his confinement, as well as the validation process that kept him there.

As hard as it is to track isolation practices in CDCR, it’s even more challenging in California’s jails, which are overseen by the state’s 58 county sheriffs rather than one state department, and have no shared guidelines or metrics for the use of solitary confinement. Sacramento and Alameda counties are both under federal consent decrees owing in part to their use of solitary confinement for people in jail with mental health conditions, with the practice emerging as a focal point in last year’s election for Alameda sheriff. 

The Mandela Act would make California the first state to restrict solitary confinement inside immigration detention, where it is also frequently used, and bring the practice into compliance with international standards. “They just put people back there for any reason,” said Salesh “Sal” Prasad, who was turned over to ICE for deportation after being released from CDCR custody, despite having lived in the U.S. since he was six years old. Prasad spent around four of the 15 months he was in immigration detention in solitary confinement, including a time when guards put him there “for his own protection” after his mother got COVID-19 and passed away suddenly. He never got to see her. 

In solitary, Prasad found himself overwhelmed by grief, and unable to suppress a fountain of traumatic memories from his childhood. “The negative thoughts start coming in and it takes over your mind,” he told Bolts. 

Isolation can also be used to quell protests inside immigration detention. Last summer, guards responded to a labor strike by Prasad and other immigrants detained at two facilities in California’s Central Valley by throwing some of them in solitary. And both Prasad and Yazdan Panah say that isolation is often employed to encourage people to give up fighting their immigration cases. “We see that time and time again—people are placed in really inhumane conditions, in part because they want to build pressure to get people to self-deport and to continue to sort of keep the conveyor belt going,” Yazdan Panah told Bolts. 

Last session, Yazdan Panah said, opponents of the Mandela Act were able to sow doubt about the bill by advancing the narrative that the only two options for incarcerated people are solitary confinement or the general population. “The hypothetical that they love to give is that according to our bill, someone can kill their cellmate and the facility can put that person in solitary confinement for 15 days, and then after that, they would have to go back to the general population to ‘kill again,’” he said. In fact, Yazdan Panah said, someone who engaged in violence toward others could still be housed individually; the bill merely stipulates that the prison must increase the person’s amount of meaningful human contact and out-of-cell activities. 

The bill was also hampered by high-cost estimates and the charge from detractors that it would require massive new construction across CDCR. “It’s sort of an interesting and diabolical argument because no one in California wants to expand or build new prison space,” said Yazdan Panah, whose organization has countered that the bill would only require an expansion in programming, and would save the state money in the long term.  

Advocates for reform say that continuing to lean on solitary confinement only perpetuates the harms from which it claims to shield people. Reiter noted that the emotional and psychological damage that isolation engenders, especially the way it has been used in juvenile facilities, contributes to a more dangerous and volatile environment for people in prison. Harris told Bolts that no one makes it out of solitary unscarred. “Every single person that we’ve been working with who’s a solitary survivor, has said that they have some form of mental health disability, whether it’s PTSD, whether it’s anxiety, depression,” he said.

Though Prasad has been out of ICE detention for nearly six months and recently won his asylum case, he’s often brought back to those long months in isolation—the cold, the walls closing in, the smell of human beings living confined in such small spaces. “It weighs on you,” he said. “Those are four months that I can’t get back.” Prasad called his months in solitary confinement “dead time.” 

As the 10th anniversary of the 2013 hunger strike approaches this summer, Newsom’s veto of the Mandela Act last year looms over discussions for how to curb solitary confinement. Advocates maintain the veto doesn’t necessarily mean Newsom won’t budge on the issue this time around, stressing increased attention on curtailing solitary both in Sacramento and around the country. 

“We have over 20 states working on legislation or litigation around the use of solitary confinement, in some states even holding bipartisan support,” said Dolores Canales, the co-founder of California Families Against Solitary Confinement, who is herself a survivor of solitary confinement. Canales’ son was also in the Pelican Bay SHU during the 2013 hunger strikes. 

Newsom’s office didn’t answer questions about how he’s approaching the Mandela reforms this year or whether his position has changed since last year, with a representative for the governor telling Bolts that his veto message “speaks for itself.” CDCR told Bolts that the department “anticipate[s] filing draft regulations with the Office of Administrative Law by the end of the year,” but did not respond to a follow-up question asking for more detail on the content of the regulations. 

To Yazdan Panah, these promises were cold comfort. “The issue of solitary confinement has been front and center in California now for more than a decade,” he said. “CDCR has been unable—or unwilling is maybe a better term—to comply with the terms of the Ashker settlement that they themselves agreed to in 2015.” And the governor, he said, had “completely punted on the issue of jails and private detention facilities.”

Even if the Mandela Act becomes law, enforcing it will present considerable challenges. In 2021, New York’s HALT Solitary Confinement Act outlawed solitary confinement for more than 15 consecutive days, and otherwise greatly limited the practice, but today, over a year after it took effect, the law is far from fully implemented. The same year, voters in Pittsburgh overwhelmingly approved a ballot referendum to ban solitary in the county jail, which has been accused of continuing the practice in violation of the new law. 

“The good that the act is doing is keeping the conversation going and the spotlight shining on them,” said Reiter. “In practice, it’s a sweeping reform that will be hard to implement and track.” 

Enforcing the law in immigration detention, which is technically overseen by the California attorney general but generally operates farther outside the purview of the state, would be particularly challenging. And, as it has done again and again, CDCR could always find new ways to skirt the definitions imposed by the Mandela Act if it passes. But activists for ending solitary take the long view, saying the Mandela Act is a critical next step in their much longer fight against a tortuous and intractable practice. 
“When we first got involved, I remember families used to tell us, ‘Oh, my loved one’s never gonna get out’ or ‘My loved one says nothing’s going to change,’” recalled Canales. “And I thought to myself, it has to change. And as long as we keep thinking that it’s not, that’s how it will be.”

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For four years, Kelly Savage-Rodriguez helped women die in prison. As a volunteer comfort care worker at the Central California Women’s Facility, informally known as Chowchilla, Savage-Rodriguez played a hybrid role: somewhere between a hospice nurse and a proxy for patients’ family members. She brushed their hair, played cards with them, helped them write letters to their loved ones outside prison.

California has a program called compassionate release that allows the courts to grant people who are dying in prison their freedom, but a system of arbitrary delays and denials means that it rarely happens in practice. “The hold-up is so extreme,” recalled Savage-Rodriguez, who was released in 2019 and is now the Drop LWOP coordinator for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP). “We would sit there watching day after day—family members calling, fighting to try to get information and hearing nothing—only to be told that [the request] never even left the institution.”

The California legislature passed a bill on Tuesday that aims to improve the compassionate release process, and it’s now awaiting signature by Governor Gavin Newsom. Assembly Bill 960 would expand eligibility for compassionate release, streamline the approval process, and automatically provide legal counsel. The bill is sponsored by Assemblymember Phil Ting and a broad coalition of organizations, including CCWP, UnCommon Law, and Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). 

“When I think about somebody dying in there, it hurts,” said Savage-Rodriguez. This bill, she said, “could give them just that moment of peace with their family.” 

Some California organizers hope that this new bill clears the way for a broader reconsideration of how the state treats its aging, ill, and medically vulnerable prisoners. In a particularly dark legacy of the harsh sentencing laws of the 1980s and 1990s, the very same people sentenced under mandatory minimum guidelines and handed lengthy enhancements in their teens and twenties are now growing old and sick in prison. Unless something changes, many of them will die there.

There are two standard routes for someone to be released from prison for medical reasons in California: compassionate release and medical parole. The initial version of AB960, introduced by now-state Attorney General Rob Bonta in 2021, focused on improving the latter: Medical parole is decided by the parole board, not the courts, and funnels people into licensed skilled nursing facilities across the state rather than releasing them into the community. But issues with the system kept surfacing. “It’s not only that people on medical parole aren’t really released, they can be sent back to prison for virtually anything,” said Leah Daoud, a policy manager for the legal and policy advocacy organization UnCommon Law. Then, in late 2021, federal health regulators found that California’s medical parole system violated federal standards for patient rights. Rather than change its practices to comply, California started sending almost all of its medical parole patients to a decertified facility where some patients were handcuffed to their own beds or neglected for hours on end. The state also began limiting future eligibility for the program to people on ventilators. 

From the sponsors’ perspective, the desired outcome of medical parole was no longer viable or desirable, so reforming the process seemed futile. They recalibrated their legislative push to focus on compassionate release. “Compassionate release in California has never been seriously studied,” said Daoud. “There really hasn’t been—up until now, with this bill—anyone looking at this process and saying, why is it that this happened or this didn’t happen?” They discovered that the existing process wasn’t working. In 2020, the legislature had amended the penal code to open up compassionate release to anyone who qualified for medical parole because of permanent medical incapacitation, but in practice, Daoud told Bolts, many people in that category still weren’t being considered. 

And those who did manage to register a request faced roadblocks throughout the process. Between January 2015 and April 2021, according to an analysis by FAMM, 304 people sought compassionate release. 290 of them were found medically eligible, but only 53 were released in time to pass away at home. 91 people died in prison, waiting. 

When you’re terminally ill, the importance of each passing second becomes agonizingly heightened. But that critical element—how much time you have—is often impossible to predict. “There’s no science to when somebody’s going to pass,” said Savage-Rodriguez. Rather than trying to attach eligibility to the number of months that someone has left, as the state currently does, AB 960 proposes a broader definition: anyone with an incurable condition or an “end-of-life” trajectory is eligible to apply. 

Moreover, the bill would accelerate the timeline for compassionate release, requiring the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR)to refer a case to the courts no more than 45 days after the patient’s physician triggers the compassionate release process. It would also tweak the standard for the courts in favor of release, unless the patient can be deemed a risk to public safety. (Recidivism among elderly incarcerated people is extremely low. One study found that only 11% of people aged 65 and older reentered prisons after release.) 

Crucially, the new bill would remove the CDCR Secretary, an office that FAMM found to be the most likely source of denials, from the process entirely. Currently, the secretary must sign off on an application before it goes to the courts, an extra step that advocates argue is superfluous and produces inexplicable denials. “It was really clear that the secretary doesn’t play a medical expertise role in the process, they’re obviously not a trained medical professional—but they’re also not a public safety role either, that’s the role the courts play,” said Daoud. “All we’re doing here is giving medical professionals more ownership and power over this process, which is just what they should have had in the beginning.” (CDCR did not respond to a request to clarify the secretary’s role in this process). 

Before his retirement last year, Peter Eisenberg was a longtime medical oncologist at Marin Cancer Care. Eisenberg and his colleagues treated people incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison for cancer and a variety of blood diseases, and he saw firsthand how bureaucratic inefficiency prevented his dying patients from going home to their families. “I was kind of surprised that if I predict that the guy is sick enough to die of his, for instance, metastatic prostate cancer, that it would take so much effort and so long to get the paperwork, for crying out loud, to accommodate his death outside of prison,” he told Bolts. “I’d write in my notes that this person is likely to die within the next six months, and I’d write it over and over again.”

Eisenberg recalled a rare instance where one of his patients was released on parole; later he thanked his former physician for treating him with dignity and respect. “That’s nice to hear, but it’s my job,” Eisenberg said. “And I think it’s the state’s job to do the humane thing for people who have limited time on earth who are incarcerated for one thing or another…Weighing the appropriateness of an early release from prison because of their health issues shouldn’t be a bureaucratic battle. It should be a pretty simple thing to figure out.”

Thus far, AB 960 has encountered little pushback. Only one group—the California District Attorney’s Association, which tends to take issue with any reforms that aim to get people out of prison—has registered its opposition. Daoud said she’s hopeful that Newsom will sign, though the governor has not indicated his final intention. 

Proponents of AB 960 recognize that its adoption would still leave a lot of work. The bill can’t fix the United States’ broken healthcare system, for one. A particularly cruel irony is that some people may have better access to care in jail than on the outside. The lack of a solid post-release plan—strong family support, or a skilled nursing facility that has agreed to take on a patient—is the second most common reason that people who are medically eligible get denied from compassionate release, and AB 960 won’t address that. 

There’s also the issue of carve-outs. People serving a sentence of life without parole have never been eligible for compassionate release, along with those serving a death penalty sentence and anyone convicted of killing a police officer. That group includes women Savage-Rodriguez knew at Chowchilla who require regular care owing to unmanaged diabetes and a medication-induced stroke.

It also includes the woman who started the hospice program at Chowchilla back in 2000, after a spree of deaths in the prison left people stunned and grieving and spurred her to act. Judi, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her family’s privacy, had no reason to believe she was ever getting out of prison. “I wanted to do something for the woman who were dying,” she told Bolts. “And actually for myself, because I didn’t want to die alone.” 

Thanks to Judi’s efforts, comfort care has been operational at Chowchilla for over two decades. She looked after dozens of women in the last days of their lives. “It was like that movie ‘Groundhog Day,’” she told Bolts. “It happened over and over.” For the ones who were eligible for compassionate release, she said, “It was almost universal that they died before they could get out.” 

Against all odds, Judi’s life without parole sentence was commuted several years ago. “Every day I wake up and I go: really?” she said. “I’ve been out three years and I still do that.” But a sentence commutation is like winning the lottery, and there are many more people growing old and sick in prison whom compassionate release doesn’t cover. 

“Statistics show that the recidivism rate [for aging people] is so minute,” said Amber-Rose Howard, the executive director of CURB, a coalition that aims to reduce incarceration and close prisons across California. Howard highlighted the need for elder parole expansion. But she also called for the state of California to change the policies that have people aging while incarcerated in the first place. “We have to think about the 25-to-life sentences. We have to think about these things that give people extra time in prison, and we have to reverse those policies. I think that’s the only way we’re actually going to see real change.” 

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There’s a moment in the middle of Corrections in Ink, a new memoir by Marshall Project staff writer Keri Blakinger, where she describes why solitary confinement still terrifies her. 

It was the spring of 2011 and Blakinger, who had already been jailed for months on drug charges, had just recently been transferred from one county lockup in upstate New York to another because of overcrowding. Guards had isolated Blakinger when she arrived at the new jail, not even as punishment but due to bureaucratic foot-dragging, separating her from others until, on her fourth day in solitary, her old jail finally sent paperwork proving that she’d already been tested for tuberculosis and was cleared for general housing. 

“As soon as the door clunked shut behind me, the weight of seclusion hit me like a wall of dark seawater, knocking me off my feet and leaving me gasping for breath,” Blakinger writes about her time in isolation. Other women in jail tried shouting to communicate with her, but she could only hear muffled and nonsensical voices, “like someone had slipped an opaque filter over reality.” She tried journaling but struggled to finish a thought or couldn’t comprehend the words when she tried reading whatever she wrote. She remembers drifting in a “half-awake fugue state, unmoored and incorporeal—like the brain in a vat we used to talk about in philosophy class.” 

“I quietly lost my mind to a degree that still terrifies me,” Blakinger writes. “To me, it felt like unraveling, but looking back it also feels like a turning point, a moment at which I began to see how broken the system could be, and how much it could break a person.” 

Blakinger’s book, her first, is many things—a vivid page-turner that recounts her descent into addiction, a powerful redemption story, and at times a hilarious and moving portrait of joy and resistance in the face of darkness. 

But what connects Blakinger’s memoir to the larger body of journalism that she’s produced since leaving prison is the raging indictment it makes of the American criminal legal system. She details the escalating callousness she encountered while at her most broken and vulnerable, from arrest to jail to prison, from the media that paraded her mugshot on television and the judges who looked at her with disdain to the corrections officers who seemed to revel in inflicting pain and the prison doctors who berated her for seeking treatment behind bars. 

Incarceration, Blakinger writes, is a constant lesson in humiliation, until eventually identities are erased and replaced with a number—in her case 11G0845, marking her as the 845th female to enter New York prisons in 2011. She describes officers laughing at women who wept on the bus during transfer from jail to state prison; being weighed and measured and interrogated about tattoos and birthmarks “like specimens” when entering state custody; the guards who searched a woman’s cell and tore through her belongings for hours, claiming they got a tip about contraband while the woman sobbed, only to announce “April Fool’s!” when they found nothing and admitted there was no tip; and other women sent to solitary, supposedly for their protection, after being sexually assaulted by guards. 

Later in the book, once she’s locked in state prison, Blakinger describes having another realization, again related to the threat of solitary. She remembers hearing guards chatting about a woman they’d thrown in isolation who, either due to deterioration or defiance or some combination of both, had started defecating on her food tray and sliding it through the slot in her door. In response, the guards had shut off water to the faucet in the woman’s cell, but one of them wondered aloud: What will she drink, won’t she get dehydrated?

“She can drink out of the toilet,” another guard answered. “If it’s good enough for my dog, it’s good enough for her.” 

“My head snapped up in shock,” Blakinger writes, “and that is when I realized: Behind bars, there are no rules. Sure, there is a rulebook and there are things you cannot do. But when it matters, no one is watching.”

—

Prisons and jails in the United States, which claims the highest incarceration rate in the world, are largely black boxes. Unlike most other public institutions, and even private ones like banks and mines and zoos, independent oversight of American lockups is a rarity. Horrific conditions and treatment behind bars remain mostly hidden from public view, leaving most sheriffs and wardens to run jails and prisons like fiefdoms with little accountability. 

Blakinger’s work since leaving prison in 2012 has been an antidote to that darkness. Her reporting reads like a laundry list of reasons to create more independent oversight of American prisons and jails. After getting out of prison, Blakinger wrote for the Ithaca Times and New York Daily News before joining the Houston Chronicle and eventually taking over the paper’s prison beat, which she revitalized. 

I and most other reporters struggling to cover the remarkably closed-off, dysfunctional and combative Texas prison system were awed by her scoops and stories—which largely seemed to stem from intently listening to incarcerated people and their families, taking their concerns seriously and investigating to get to the truth. Her acknowledgements at the end of the book thank “all the prison officials whose lies and insults keep me motivated enough to uncover the truth.”    

If Blakinger has made reporting on prisons better in innumerable ways, her work has also initiated more tangible change. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) started giving out dentures after she reported on the prison system denying them to toothless prisoners. TDCJ tossed hundreds of disciplinary cases against incarcerated people and fired several staffers after she reported on a quota system that pushed guards to make bogus write-ups and even plant contraband in cells. She brought attention to the rise in suicides and atrocious medical care inside Texas prisons. And she helped shame some newsrooms away from wantonly posting people’s mugshots. In late 2019 she became The Marshall Project’s first formerly-incarcerated staff writer, where her reporting continues to break new ground. 

In Corrections in Ink, Blakinger turns that investigative lens inward, interrogating the details not just of her own life but also the dehumanizing conditions and treatment she faced in lockup, an origin story of sorts for one of the most acclaimed journalists writing about American prisons today. 

She acknowledges that she grew up with all the privilege afforded a white, upper middle-class family with two Ivy League-educated parents, unlike most who enter the belly of America’s carceral beast. As a child she excelled in and out of school, eventually becoming a star figure skater with a daunting training schedule and on track to someday compete in the Olympics. She attended Cornell University before her arrest and incarceration, and finished the degree after prison. Anyone who knows Keri-the-Reporter will see flashes of who she eventually became in the book’s early pages—an indefatigable work ethic, over-organized, and on the edge of chaos.

But Blakinger had demons, at first eating disorders and then drug addiction, and in the book she writes in harrowing detail and with heartbreaking honesty about the hard road she traveled because of them. Blakinger chooses to not blame others for the chain of events that led her to encounter the harsh prison system, but Corrections in Ink speaks volumes about larger dynamics of treatment and punishment in this country. “One time when I was eighteen, a drug counselor told me that if I’d been raped more than once, at some point I was asking for it,” Blakinger writes. “That played to my worst fears, or maybe to my deepest desires for self-loathing. On good nights, I told myself she was wrong. But I still wondered—was there a grain of truth?”

Ever the reporter, in her memoir Blakinger blends self-reflection with data and research about prisons and who ends up there. More than half of women in prison are survivors of physical or sexual violence, roughly three quarters of them struggle with mental illness, and a significant amount of prisoners under the age of 30 have spent time in foster care. Studies show that most people who wind up in prison grew up in poverty, most did not graduate high school, and many are illiterate. 

“I knew about the girl who ate glass, the girl who had sex with her sisters, the girl who was so illiterate she could not dial a phone, the girl who grew up in group homes watching her friends get raped,” Blakinger writes. “The whole premise of prison began to seem absurd: Locking hundreds of traumatized and damaged women in together and threatening them constantly with additional punishments is not rehabilitation. It is not corrections. It is not public safety. It is systemic failure.” 

Blakinger also describes flashes of solidarity, love, and even genuine happiness, like the time the women around her broke into spontaneous song when Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” came over the radio. “It was as if some cosmic cog had slipped out of place, a celestial shift I would not have fully appreciated a year earlier,” she writes. “This was not just women singing, this was women learning how to steal joy in a place built to prevent it.” 

—

Blakinger was writing her memoir during a particularly bleak time in American incarceration. Many public officials across the country, including in Texas where Blakinger lives and often still reports, turned a blind eye to the increased suffering and death behind bars as the pandemic ravaged correctional facilities. “The news sounded so dire, and the news I heard from the inside sounded apocalyptic,” she writes in an epilogue. “Even after everything I had survived, and everything I had reported on, and everything you have read in this book, the first year of the pandemic taught me more about the casual cruelty of prisons than the ten years before it had.” 

COVID-19 both exacerbated dangerous and degrading conditions behind bars and also further isolated incarcerated people, in turn making prisons and jails even more opaque. But Blakinger stayed up late into the night, texting with guards, messaging with terrified families of people in prison, and talking to prisoners on contraband phones. She wrote devastating articles about how life in lockup had grown even more miserable—from moldy and inedible food to rivers of sewage and fires that some prisoners began setting to protest the deteriorating conditions. 

The emotional toll of such reporting can be heavy, especially for journalists like Blakinger who have personally experienced the grotesque flourishes of American criminal punishment. Early in the pandemic, when reporting on increasing unrest inside Texas prisons due to extended lockdowns, Blakinger wrote about footage she obtained from a contraband cell phone documenting something that prison officials claimed had not happened. In reaction, TDCJ’s communications director, who has since left the agency, threatened to investigate her for “participation in a felony.” 

Blakinger told me that the threat made her panic, thinking again of solitary confinement. “I’m always thinking if I get arrested or end up in jail that for some reason I could still end up in solitary.” 

I’ve seen prison officials try to undermine Blakinger’s work in other ways. When Texas froze over last February and the power grid collapsed, people locked in prison defecated in paper bags and overflowing toilets while guards passed out half-rations of unidentifiable food. A reporter at the magazine where I worked at the time had obtained video showing snow falling through a broken window in a cell and piling up on the windowsill. Before we published a story with the video, the same prison system spokesman called me and demanded I tell him where it came from, claiming Blakinger had given him such information when reporting on other stories with contraband footage, which I knew was a lie. (The new communications director declined to comment when I asked about the agency’s treatment of Blakinger, saying in an email, “the previous communications director no longer works for the agency”). 

Some Texas lawmakers have in recent years cited Blakinger’s reporting to propose independent oversight of the state prison system, but legislation that would do so continues to languish. As people in power in the state largely ignore the compounding crises that Blakinger has helped document behind bars, she likely remains the most effective source of oversight for the Texas prison system. In her book, Blakinger reflects on second chances, and how she was lucky and privileged enough to get one when so many others don’t. Reading Corrections in Ink made me think about how much less we’d know if Blakinger hadn’t been given one. 

In the months before she published her book, Blakinger started crowdfunding to send copies to hundreds of people behind bars who wanted to read it. She told me that she had hoped to write the kind of book she was searching for when imprisoned—someone who left prison to become a successful writer. And for people who haven’t experienced the criminal legal system, she hopes that the book humanizes incarcerated people and helps explain why so many do not succeed after release. “The people who don’t succeed after prison, it does not mean they’re bad people,” Blakinger told me. “It means the prison system put a lot of obstacles in their way.” 

In the memoir, Blakinger writes about a new prisoner asking her for pointers on surviving just as she was about to leave lockup. Blakinger told the woman she survived “in spite of this place, not because of it.” Her advice captures the false promise of rehabilitation in American prisons.

“It’s like some of the tools you need to survive time in here are the tools you needed to survive life out there,” she recalls telling the new prisoner. “And if you had them, you probably wouldn’t be here in the first place. But now that you’re here, it’s just harder to find them.”

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As Houston officials prepped their annual budget two years ago, a staffer for city council member Abbie Kamin was taken aback while examining a contract the city was on the verge of approving. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) had submitted a $4.2 million bid for a contract to repair tire treading on city trucks, a price some $750,000 below the competing bid. Kamin says her staffer broke down just how exactly TDCJ could float such a low price: with unpaid labor from incarcerated people forced to work inside a prison that also happened to be named after a slaveholder. 

Kamin, who was then in her first year in office, was alarmed enough to pull in another freshman council member, Carolyn Evans-Shabazz. The two met with TDCJ representatives to learn more about work programs inside Texas’ sprawling prison system before deciding on the contract. Kamin says the conversation inflamed rather than eased their concerns. She was appalled after realizing that Texas prisoners can face harsh punishment for refusing work assignments and that, along with being unpaid, many of them live and labor inside facilities without air conditioning in a state that regularly experiences triple-digit heat.

After their meeting, the council members quietly convinced Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner to post a new request for bids for tire retreading, this time with added language requiring worker compensation in line with industry standards. The state’s prison system didn’t even reapply and the contract went to a private company, albeit at a higher price. 

“We were not comfortable with these practices,” Kamin told Bolts. “Bottom line, the conditions are awful, the practice is terrible, and we’re one of only a handful of states left that even continue this practice. It’s just flat out wrong.”

Texas is one of seven states, all in the South, that force people in prison to work but pay them nothing for almost all jobs. (The others are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina.) Most other states only pay out pennies compared to what that labor would cost on the outside, according to a report published this week by the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School and the American Civil Liberties Union that catalogs prison work practices and profits across the country. 

The report estimates that around 800,000 people confined to U.S. prisons perform labor during incarceration, and that most say they are forced to work or else face additional punishment, such as solitary confinement or loss of family visits. Citing prison records, court documents and surveys with incarcerated workers, the report found that even prisoners who receive some pay for their work still mostly cannot afford basic necessities like soap thanks to exorbitant commissary prices and court costs, restitution and even “room and board” fees that garnish their meager wages. 

Jennifer Turner, a human rights researcher for the ACLU and lead author of the new report, says that incarcerated labor is inherently exploitative and dangerous, with people not only forced and coerced into prison jobs but also largely excluded from workplace safety protections. 

“Most of this labor is happening in a sort of black box where there’s no outside oversight, and basic protections for safety and training simply don’t apply,” Turner told Bolts, pointing to instances of people maimed or killed on the job—incarcerated workers in North Carolina who received only diaper rash cream after suffering chemical burns, a kitchen worker in a Georgia prison who had his leg amputated due to improper medical care for a wound he suffered from slipping and falling at work, a prison sawmill operator in Colorado who was nearly decapitated after a supervisor ordered her to dislodge a piece of wood blocking a conveyor belt. According to written surveys that Turner and other researchers conducted for the report, most prisoners cite hazardous job conditions and little to no formal training, even when tasked with work involving heavy machinery. 

“People are not given personal protective equipment and other types of standard safety equipment, like machine-guarding mechanisms when you’re dealing with sharp objects,” Turner said. “It’s very different from workplaces outside of prisons, because on the outside, people supervising you usually have some experience, they’re more likely to give proper job training on dangerous equipment or have some kind of oversight. That’s just not the case in prison.”

The beneficiaries of all this coerced and dangerous labor are primarily state governments. Prisons are propped up by incarcerated people forced to help operate and maintain their own systems of confinement—the most common prison jobs, according to Turner’s report, range from laundry and grounds maintenance to kitchen and building repairs. 

And as the Houston example indicates, prison systems also rake in profits by monetizing the products and work produced by the people they detain. 

Texas Corrections Industries (TCI), a division of the state prison agency, sold nearly $77 million prisoner-made goods and services in 2019 to a broad range of government agencies as well as “public schools, public and private institutions of higher education, public hospitals and political subdivisions.” According to the new report, commodities and services sold outside prisons make up a significant share of prison labor and have risen in tandem with mass incarceration, from around $650 million in sales in the early 20th century to more than $2 billion in 2021.

And other government agencies can and often do benefit from this captive labor pool to secure far cheaper contracts than they otherwise could. Data obtained from TCI show an array of municipalities, counties, local school districts, universities and medical systems across the state buying everything from cheap chairs and desks and other office equipment to aprons, lab coats, and even ornamental plaques for awards produced with forced and unpaid prison labor. 

TCI also publishes the prison iteration of an IKEA catalog to advertise its goods and services, and it operates showrooms in south Austin and Huntsville, about an hour’s drive north of Houston where the state prison system is headquartered. Lawmakers in Texas, who are permitted to benefit from low-cost prison-made goods, have in the past purchased furniture and other trinkets adorned with the state seal and flag to adorn their homes or gift to top campaign donors. 

“What really made an impression was to see how just the vast majority of work performed by people who are incarcerated is for the benefit of the prisons and state and local governments,” Turner said. “I think sometimes there’s a real misunderstanding that it’s largely for the benefit of private corporations.”

Prison agencies justify their reliance on forced and unpaid, or underpaid, labor by claiming they’re providing benefits beyond money, like keeping people busy in lockup or teaching them job skills to help them succeed after release. The cover of TCI’s products and services catalog declares, “Rehabilitation through real world job skills and training.” TDCJ responded to the recent report and claims that unpaid prison labor is inherently exploitative with a statement saying, “While inmates are not paid, they can acquire marketable job skills which could lead to meaningful employment upon their release.” However most incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated workers, and advocates for people in prison vehemently dispute such claims. 

“They force you to work, you’re guaranteed to have a shitty job and it’s guaranteed to be work that is tortuous,” David Johnson, an activist and organizer in Texas who did time in the state’s prisons, including stints where he was forced to work on a prison farm, told Bolts. “You are guaranteed to have a job that comes with no privileges and all downside, you are forced to work in the fields in the sweltering heat and deep cold. …It is tortuous, physically and emotionally and psychologically.” 

Low to non-existent wages for imprisoned workers also mean that their loved ones on the outside, who may already be struggling because of their incarceration and loss of earnings, must bear the full weight of supporting their survival in prison. The families of incarcerated people shell out billions every year on exorbitant commissary costs and phone calls, often forced into debt just to keep in contact with a family member or help them with basic necessities not provided by the prison system. 

“Incarceration puts an incredible monetary strain on family members,” said Savannah Eldrige, who has family inside Texas prisons and advocates for better conditions and treatment for incarcerated people. “The experience of supporting a loved one behind bars can be financially overwhelming because of all the expenses they have inside, from hygiene to health care, and the fact that they are no longer wage earners—I mean, where’s the money gonna come from? It’s gonna come from family.” 

Eldridge and Johnson are part of a growing national movement that seeks to abolish forced labor and servitude behind bars. They stress that much of the country’s modern prison archipeligo evolved from slavery, with convict-leasing and prison farms and laws that criminalized newly emancipated people replacing slave plantations after the Civil War. Johnson, who is Black, says he often thought of that history when he was forced to work the fields while incarcerated.

“It was always clear that there was a parallel between working in those fields and slavery,” Johnson said. “We had open conversations out there about how those conditions, how those armed men on horses guarding us evoked that history.” 

Johnson and Elridge are part of Abolish Slavery National Network, a coalition pushing for state and federal legislation to close a loophole in the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which was passed during Reconstruction and banned slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime.

Advocates in many states are pushing for anti-slavery language in their state constitutions. Voters in Nebraska, Utah and Colorado have all passed anti-slavery amendments in recent years, and similar measures will go to voters this year in Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont. According to the coalition, there are also active efforts in Florida and South Carolina. Citing the new ban on involuntary servitude, people incarcerated in Colorado have sued the state seeking better wages and treatment and alleging the state is ignoring the will of voters by continuing to coerce prison work under the threat of punishment. 

Texas lawmakers have largely ignored the issue, in keeping with how they’ve ignored other crises inside state lockups. But discussions of prisoner pay and forced labor have started to circulate inside the state capitol. The state House held a hearing in 2019 on a bill to pay people incarcerated in Texas prisons $1 a day for their work. “The penal system today is slavery,” Alma Allen, a state representative from Houston, said during the hearing. “It is a legal way to enslave people.” The committee never voted on the bill. Legislative proposals to pay incarcerated people somewhat higher wages has stalled in other states like New York, too.

Even with the lack of movement on the state level in Texas, Kamin, the Houston council member, says that local government officials have a role to play in ending exploitative prison labor. She says the awareness of a city staffer and their willingness to research what looked like a routine contract for truck repairs became a wakeup call about local government’s role in a system that many equate to modern day slave labor. “This could have totally flown under the radar,” Kamin told Bolts.

Kamin says her office got a flood of messages from incarcerated people after Houston turned away from TDCJ’s bid. “I cannot tell you the number of letters that I received from inmates thanking us for the stand we took,” she said. “So many people reached out to say how they feel about the work programs in prison and how bad they are. It was mostly just a plea for help.”

The post “They Force You to Work” appeared first on Bolts.

On Monday, more than 6,000 people incarcerated in New York prisons lost their right to regularly receive care packages by mail or in person from family and friends.

The state prison agency is piloting the new restrictions at eight prisons, with plans to expand them to the rest. Under the policy, family and friends are no longer allowed to bring their loved ones packages of food when they come to visit or to send them through the mail, and can’t send more than two non-food packages each year. Everything else must be purchased and sent through private companies willing to ship to prisons.

Incarcerated people say the new restrictions will cut off a lifeline. “Am I going to be prevented from getting winter clothes if I get a book from my mom in the summer?” asked Jeremy Zielinski, currently incarcerated at Attica, in a phone call with New York Focus and Bolts.

An April 25 memo to the incarcerated population from acting Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Commissioner Anthony Annucci, obtained by Bolts and New York Focus, says the new policy is a response to “an increase in violence and overdoses due to the introduction of contraband through the package room, specifically, illicit drugs and weapons.”

Whether or not mailrooms are a major entrypoint for contraband is the subject of much debate. There is ample evidence nationwide of corrections officers bringing drugs, weapons, and other contraband into prisons and jails; in the last two years, multiple New York City corrections officers faced charges for allegedly smuggling contraband into jails in exchange for cash. In 2020, Texas corrections officials limited mail to curb the contraband problem. One year later, an investigation revealed no impact on the amount of drugs circulating in state prisons. 

A prison agency spokesperson declined to provide data on how often the security staff that screen packages in New York have identified contraband, or how that rate has changed over time. The new package policy is based on a recommendation from the agency’s Prison Violence Task Force, composed of prison staff, administrators, and representatives of the correction officers union.

Annucci, who leads the prison agency, has been acting commissioner since 2013. Governor Kathy Hochul appointed him as commissioner, but he has yet to be confirmed as lawmakers from both parties raised concerns over high death rates and other issues in prisons under his watch. Hochul did not respond to a request for comment.

A Revived Program

The new restrictions are a revived version of a stalled 2018 initiative, the “Secure Vendor Package Program,” which would have required all packages to be sent from six approved private companies. Those prison-specific vendors offered limited selections at steep markups, with prices as much as 130 percent higher than on the outside. After immense pushback, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo directed the agency to halt the program after just 10 days.

“I did 12 years in prison. My whole time in prison, I’ve never received a package from a vendor,” says Michael Capers, who was incarcerated at Upstate, Franklin, and Fishkill Correctional Facilities. “And the reason being is because it’s too expensive. So my family, I told them I’d rather have nothing than to make them pay extra money.”

New York is one of the few states that still permits non-vendor packages to be sent to incarcerated people at all. The majority of state correctional departments have entered contracts with private package companies, including New York. “Reintroducing the secure vendor program is an unfortunate and avoidable step in the direction that so many other corrections agencies across the country have gone,” says Jennifer Scaife, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, the state’s legally designated prison monitor.

While the 2018 program only allowed certain approved vendors, the new program doesn’t force people to choose from a limited list. Instead, it doesn’t define “vendor” at all. But Wilfredo Laracuente, who was released from Sing Sing Correctional Facility in July, predicted that the new policy will offer little more choice than its predecessor.

“A lot of the families, they use Walmart, they use Target, they use Western Beef, they use Shoprite, they use Tops, they use Wegmans. The majority of these places don’t ship directly to correctional facilities,” Laracuente said. “If we can’t really get the items that we need to go ahead and shop for our family members, then we have to use the six vendors that were originally introduced to use.”

Mainstream retailers sometimes send shipments in multiple packages, which can violate limitations on the weight and number of packages incarcerated people are allowed to receive. These logistical factors can compel loved ones of incarcerated people to use prison-specific vendors, in spite of high costs and extremely limited inventory. 

Families and friends will also have to shoulder costs associated with vendor packages beyond the markups: they won’t be able to use food stamps, coupons, donated food, or to avoid shipping costs by bringing packages during visits.

“I don’t get why they’re treating this population of people differently than the rest of the New Yorkers, like we don’t need every cent that we earn, every cent that we bring into our household,” says Indira Bowen, whose husband is incarcerated at Sing Sing. “Most of us can’t handle this extra expense out of nowhere.”

Food Shortages

The new restrictions will also make it harder for incarcerated people to access fresh and healthy food. “Food packages from family members, friends, and community groups are the primary way for incarcerated people to maintain a healthy diet while incarcerated,” the members of a group of farmers and family members that provides fresh food to incarcerated people wrote in an open letter about the new directive.

Food packages supplement the limited offerings in prison, which Zielinski describes as “meeting the constitutional minimum, just barely.” A 2021 survey by the Correctional Association found that more than 90 percent of incarcerated New Yorkers report that the food they’re offered is bland and tasteless, that they sometimes skip meals as a result, and that they prefer food received in packages or purchased through the commissary.

Even among commissary options, the pickings are slim. “The fresh vegetables currently offered in the commissary at Green Haven and Fishkill are limited to two: onions and garlic (we hear that these items are often rotten),” advocates wrote in the open letter. “The ‘fruit’ available is limited to one item: a fruit cup. Currently that fruit cup is on the ‘out of stock’ list at Fishkill.” 

In a statement to New York Focus, DOCCS officials said they plan to expand fresh produce offerings in all prisons as they roll out the new package restrictions. They also highlighted the prices for prison commissary: at Attica, bananas are 16 cents each, heads of lettuce are $2.63, a bag of onions costs $1.20, tomatoes are 42 cents, a two-pack of garlic is 45 cents, and green peppers are $1.12.

But incarcerated workers only earn between 16 cents and 65 cents an hour, making even seemingly reasonable prices out of reach for many incarcerated people unless family or friends deposit money into their commissary accounts — a financial burden that many are unable to shoulder. In the survey, more than 85 percent of incarcerated people said that the quality of food they can access is limited by their family’s finances.

“There are so many people whose families live on paycheck to paycheck and are on food stamps,” wrote a woman currently incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in a letter forwarded to Bolts and New York Focus. Jennifer Fecu, who was formerly incarcerated at Bedford Hills, agreed: “It’s already hard to send things in when we’re not making any money. We’re just drawing from people that are already struggling.”

Jalal Sabur is a founder of Sweet Freedom Farm in Germantown, a group that grows and distributes produce to people in prisons. Sweet Freedom sets up farm stands outside prisons, where they hand out packages of fresh food for visitors to bring into the facilities. (The new policy includes an exception for licensed charities, but Sabur’s group is not a registered non-profit.)

“Now, no one can actually bring those packages in,” Sabur said. “So that whole program that we’ve been doing, we can’t do anymore.” 

An Officer Backlash?

Before the memo hit prison cells, notice of the updated package directive appeared in the April 20 New York State Register, which provides weekly updates on rulemaking changes by state agencies. The new package restrictions were included in a series of amendments with the stated purpose “to revise regulations to be in compliance with the new HALT legislation and applicable laws,” referring to the enactment of the HALT Solitary Confinement Act, a law that ended long-term solitary confinement and took effect on April 1 of this year.

The correction officer’s union, which fiercely opposed HALT and is suing to overturn it in court, has argued that the new restrictions on solitary confinement are leading to an increase in violence against officers. In recent months, it has urged the state to revive the package ban as one way to protect officers against that violence — and participated on the task force that recommended the new policy.

“Despite the best efforts by security staff, contraband still filters into the hands of inmates at facilities, whether it be through drug-soaked papers or creatively hidden inside of candy wrappers and other packaged foods,” a union spokesperson told New York Focus and Bolts. “Through [the union’s] participation in the recently formed Prison Violence Task Force, we are working with DOCCS to pilot a new vendor program aimed specifically at curtailing drugs from entering facilities through the prison mail system.”

That has raised the suspicion among incarcerated people and advocates that the package policy may be a way for the state to placate a disgruntled union.

“I do wonder if there’s a way in which the department is attempting to roll out this secure vendor program as a way of quelling some of the concerns that they’re hearing from the union around the implications of, for example, the HALT solitary act,” Scaife said. “If [corrections officers] are expressing concerns about HALT and DOCCS can’t do anything about it because it’s the law, packages are something that’s within their control.”

“HALT stopped the Department of Corrections from weaponizing solitary confinement and weaponizing long term confinement,” said Joseph Wilson, who’s currently incarcerated at Sing Sing. “So now the officers inside are upset that they no longer can use these particular things as a deterrent for certain types of behavior. This package ban indicates that they’re trying to regain control.”

Packages have long been a thorn in the side of corrections officers. Sorting through each package is time-consuming, and package rooms are an additional role to fill in a prison system that officers say is understaffed. The process is subject to lengthy delays: Scaife said she often hears stories of incarcerated people receiving home-baked cookies or other perishable items weeks after they were sent, spoiled by the time they’re received. 

When the secure vendor program was shut down in 2018, Zielinski said he often heard corrections staff express frustration. “For weeks you heard them saying stuff like, ‘I can’t believe they’re treating these guys like this, giving them all this stuff.’ It’s almost like they’re incensed or offended that we’re being treated like human beings,” he said.

In the absence of data on how much contraband is getting in through packages, measuring the policy’s impact will be difficult. Scaife is skeptical that it will meaningfully reduce the amount of contraband or violence in prisons.

“Are we going to see the same amount of contraband after the policy is introduced? I fear that we might,” she said. “Prisons are porous, and if you’re going to keep taking away privileges and pieces of people’s humanity, you’re still going to have the same problems of violence and unpredictable reactions to drugs inside, because these are a function of people being incarcerated.”

Zielinksi suggested that restricting people’s access to packages could heighten the frustrations and tensions that lead to violence in the first place. “It would be an understatement to say that people are very upset about this,” he said. “It seems like a really dumb idea considering the history of this place. I don’t think they want Attica [uprising] 2.0.”

“I think DOCCS is grossly underestimating how important packages are to people,” he continued. “They’re going to cause more problems than they’re trying to solve. And the problems that they’re trying to solve aren’t going to be solved by eliminating packages from home, because anybody who wants to get stuff in is going to get it in anyway. All it’s going to do is make quality of life lower for everybody else.”

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