Cell Division
How 500 Connecticut prisoners were sent to Virginia
By Jessica Bulman

 

Dazenia Henry's son was awakened in the middle of a cold December night last year, shackled, hog-tied, and put on a bus heading south. Twenty-two hours later, he arrived at Wallens Ridge State Prison, a super-maximum ("supermax") security facility in Virginia, and was placed in a cell where he would spend 23 hours of each day for the next six months. Neither Marcus Henry, a 23-year-old New Haven man who is serving the sixth year of a 45-year prison sentence, nor his family was warned that he would be moved out of state. Only when one of Marcus's friends called Ms. Henry did she learn that her son was in Virginia. "I liken it to slavery," she told me. "They sold our families 200 years ago, and they're doing it again now, selling black men to the lowest bidder. They used to sell to the highest bidder; now it's the lowest."
I made plans to meet Ms. Henry at her home one day in late September. Walking along Tilton Street in New Haven's Dixwell neighborhood, I passed children riding bikes and neighbors sitting on their porches, enjoying the weather and each other's company. Ms. Henry had not yet returned from work when I arrived, so I waited on the cement steps in front of her home, a grey and maroon Victorian split into six apartments. Soon, a cream-colored car pulled up, and Ms. Henry, a plump 42-year-old black woman, got out and approached me. Her face wore a smile and no makeup, and a loose plaid shirt covered the top of her blue spandex pants. Her home was a mess, she told me apologetically. Did I mind if we went for coffee or sat outside? She joined me on the top ledge of the steps and told me the story of her son's transfer to Virginia.
Marcus Henry was one of 484 Connecticut inmates sent to Wallens Ridge last year. The Connecticut Department of Correction (DOC) has described the transfer, which took place in three installments, as "an immediate response to prison overcrowding in the state of Connecticut." The proposal to send prisoners out of state, however, was made before overcrowding was a pressing concern. In 1995, the Connecticut Legislature unanimously passed Public Act Number 95-229, which authorized the "commissioner of correction . . . to improve the operation of the state's correctional facilities by entering into contracts with any governmental or private vendor for supervision of not more than five hundred inmates outside the state." The Act sat silently on the books until last fall, when the prison population swelled to dangerous levels. In October 1999, Connecticut signed a one-year contract with the state of Virginia to house up to 500 of its inmates, and the transfer began.
Governor John G. Rowland and DOC Commissioner John J. Armstrong assured the public that only the "worst of the worst" criminals-those with the highest security levels, longest sentences, and disciplinary problems-were being sent, a fitting group for a supermax prison. But a brief look at the list of transferred inmates belies the use of these criteria. Many have sentences of between one and three years, and over 40 are serving time for non-violent drug offenses. It's difficult to call even Marcus Henry, who is serving 45 years, the "worst of the worst." When Marcus was 17, he and some friends got high and went to an after-hours club to steal drug money, his mother told me. During the robbery, a man inside the club shot at them, and they fired back, killing him. Marcus was charged with felony murder and robbery, and his court-appointed attorney encouraged him to accept a plea bargain, a typical recommendation of over-burdened public defenders. Marcus pled guilty to manslaughter and two counts of robbery. "I love my child dearly," Ms. Henry told me. "The last place I expected him to end up was in jail. He's not the monster the Department of Correction is making him out to be."
Marcus is no longer incarcerated at Wallens Ridge. This past July, he and 156 other transferred Connecticut inmates were moved to Greensville Correctional Center in Jaratt, Virginia. Greensville is intended to house prisoners with mid-level security classifications, and it offers educational, religious, and rehabilitative programs, which Wallens Ridge does not. Ostensibly, inmates were transferred as a reward for good behavior, but their transfer raises an important question: If these inmates can be safely housed in a mid-level security prison, why were they ever locked up in a harsh supermax?
The answer has a lot to do with the booming $40 billion-a-year corrections business, which many opponents brand the "prison-industrial complex." These critics argue that prisons are being built, regardless of need, because prison-building serves bureaucratic, political, and economic interests in post-Cold War America. Most complaints about the prison-industrial complex have been launched at the privatization of prisons, but private companies are not the only ones turning a profit. State governments are also players in the industry-customers and "vendors," as Connecticut's 1995 Act labels them. Connecticut sees its $11 million-a-year contract with Virginia as a money-saver, because it pays $64 a day for each prisoner instead of the $92 it would spend to house these "high security risks" in Connecticut. When I asked Ms. Henry why she believes Marcus was sent to Virginia, she answered with surprising readiness: "It's less expensive for them to farm our children out."
If the contract is a money-saver for Connecticut, it's a money-maker for Virginia, a proud entrepreneur in today's corrections business. Some six years ago, Republican George Allen's get-tough-on-crime rhetoric won him Virginia's gubernatorial election. Although crime had been on the decline in the state since 1993, Governor Allen introduced harsher sentencing laws and massive prison construction. Prison spending grew twice as fast as spending on higher education, totaling over $1 billion in less than a decade. Today, Virginia incarcerates roughly 30,000 of its citizens, and nearly 40 percent of this prison population is classified as maximum-security, the second-highest percentage in the United States. Nonetheless, Allen's prison-building spree over-projected the number of beds the state would need by about 4,500. At an average construction cost of $50,000 per bed, that meant Virginia had wasted $225 million. So, beginning in 1998, the Old Dominion State opened its doors and began importing human beings to fill its empty beds and replenish the state treasury. Today, Virginia has contracted not only with Connecticut, but also Michigan, Vermont, Delaware, New Mexico, Iowa, and the District of Columbia, and has filled approximately 3,500 of those wasted beds with out-of-state inmates.
The prison industry has stuffed not only Virginia's coffers, but the pockets of several towns and their residents. Prisons mean jobs for depressed regions. They offer year-round employment and are recession-proof, even recession-friendly, because prison populations tend to grow during hard times. A few years ago, Big Stone Gap, va, was urgently in need of a new industry. Nestled in the heart of Appalachia, the town is home to fewer than 4,800 people. Its web-page offers the mayor's greeting, information about the town government and churches, and area football schedules. But the site doesn't mention the layoffs at Westmoreland Coal Company in the early 1990s or the devastation these layoffs caused. Once dependent on the dying coal-mining industry, the people of Big Stone Gap were desperate for jobs, and a prison offered them just that. In April 1999, Wallens Ridge-Virginia's second supermax prison-was completed. The razor-wire-enclosed complex, which sits atop a 2,900 foot rocky ridge noted by locals for its rattlesnakes, gave the people of Big Stone Gap steady jobs with benefits and high salaries.
The new industry also gave people inexperienced as guards badges, guns, and authority over more than 1,000 prisoners, half of whom were not from Virginia. Critics, including politicians, prison issues groups, and the NAACP, have called the mix of these guards and prisoners a disaster waiting to happen. Nearly all of the guards are white, while roughly 80 percent of the prisoners transferred from Connecticut are black or Latino. Prisoners claim they have been taunted with racial slurs, and Confederate flags and memorabilia decorate guards' cars and the warden's office. But racism is only part of the reason inmates have had difficulty adapting to Virginia's prison system. Wallens Ridge does not provide any educational, religious, or rehabilitative programs, on which the Connecticut prison system prides itself. Inmates who were only classes away from receiving geds were whisked off to Virginia and lost their chance at the degree. Reading materials, including Bibles, are frequently confiscated, and inmates are locked in solitary confinement for all but one hour a day-and that only if they behave well. Wallens Ridge also violates privacy and attorney-client privilege, monitoring and taping phone conversations between inmates and their attorneys. Prisoners at Wallens Ridge tell disturbing stories about their conditions. Almost all allege improper hygiene and medical attention. Some say that female guards watch them shower and that guards have pretended to sodomize inmates with metal pipes. Others talk of being tied to beds, spread-eagled and naked, for up to 72 hours.
According to prisoners, however, even these abuses pale in comparison to the guards' use of guns with rubber bullets and electric shocks, which are illegal in many states. Connecticut Prison Watch reports that, during Wallens Ridge's first year of operation, guards fired 80 rubber bullets and used stun guns 112 times, allegedly shocking inmates for such minor infractions as refusing to return a paper cup and verbal insolence. The shocks are far from harmless. Lawrence James Frazier, a Bridgeport man serving a sentence for rape, died on July 4 after guards shocked him repeatedly with a stun gun and he lapsed into a coma. When Amnesty International asked to investigate conditions at Wallens Ridge following his death, Virginia prison officials barred the international human rights group from visiting the facility. Frazier's death was not the first at Wallens Ridge. Two months earlier, David Tracy, a 20-year-old Bridgeport resident sentenced to 30 months on a cocaine charge, died at Wallens Ridge four months before his release. His death was ruled a suicide, but his family and Connecticut newspapers have alleged that he was killed.
One abuse undeniably suffered by all of the transferred inmates is the distance they have been taken from their families. Big Stone Gap is roughly 720 miles from New Haven, which makes visiting difficult or impossible for prisoners' families. Ms. Henry has only been able to visit Marcus once since he was moved to Virginia, and the trip cost her about $200. The cost of phone calls is another burden. Phone companies know a profit-maker when they see it, and prisoners are perfect customers: Phone calls are one of their few links to family and friends, and they must make most of their calls collect using whatever carrier the prison chooses. So, entering into mutually-profitable contracts with docs across the nation, phone companies charge inmates up to six times the normal rate for a call. Ms. Henry and Marcus spoke daily when he was incarcerated in Connecticut, but since he was moved to Virginia, they have only been able to speak once every two weeks. Still, Ms. Henry has been spending thousands of dollars to maintain this minimal contact.
The transfer of inmates from Connecticut to Virginia has generated vocal opposition, not only from inmates' families and prison issues groups, but also from the Prison Guards' Union, which fears losing jobs. But despite concerns on all sides, there are no plans to bring inmates home; according to the doc, there's just no space in Connecticut. The state recently renewed its contract with Virginia for another year, as government officials claimed their hands were tied. Earlier this year, public opposition quashed plans to convert New Haven's Goffe Street Armory into a new jail. At the same time, the public clamored to have the prisoners returned from Virginia. But, said officials, you can't have it both ways: If you don't want a prison in your backyard, then you have to accept prisoners being sent out of state.
For the most part, state legislators' opinions about the transfer of prisoners to Virginia correspond to their feelings about the prison industry in general. Those who advocate a get-tough-on-crime stance argue that prisoners should have considered consequences before they broke the law, while those who challenge the prison system oppose the transfer. State Representative William Dyson, however, understands the issue differently. He supports sending prisoners to Virginia out of necessity, but he finds fault with the entire prison system. To him, the transfer is the lesser of two evils. "First and foremost to me is that we don't build more prisons," he says. "Building prisons doesn't work. No matter how many beds we create, we fill them up." Dyson also points out that Connecticut has spent twice as much on corrections as on higher education since 1991. "What's in better shape, our schools or our prisons?" he asks me rhetorically. "And we deem ourselves a civilized society. We sacrifice our young to demonstrate that we're tough on crime." According to Dyson, sending prisoners to Virginia allows state funds to be given to education that would otherwise be swallowed up by prison construction.
But as Dyson acknowledges, framing the debate as only two-sided glosses over an important question: Why has Connecticut's prison population surged to a dangerous level of overcrowding? Between 1960 and 1980, the state's prison population was relatively stable, hovering around 4,000. Today, it is approximately 18,000, and projections for the year 2005 are as high as 22,000. Curiously, violent crime in Connecticut decreased by roughly 20 percent in the past decade, but the inmate population keeps growing.
The paradox is easily explained. Prisons are flooded largely due to the War on Drugs. Today, over two-thirds of Connecticut's inmates are serving time for non-violent, mostly drug-related, offenses; more than 1,000 are incarcerated solely for drug possession. Also contributing to the soaring prison population are the mentally ill, who found themselves forced out of closing mental hospitals in the 1980s and 1990s only to be re-institutionalized-this time in jail. Estimates of the number of mentally ill inmates range from five to 14 percent of the prison population. Connecticut's Prison and Jail Overcrowding Commission also attributes the growth to the "admission of 14 and 15 year olds due to [a] shift in the Juvenile Justice System."
As more and more drug offenders are thrown in prison, Connecticut's drug rehabilitation facilities become increasingly insufficient. Today, there are only 262 beds available in residential treatment centers and over 12,000 inmates eligible for those beds. So instead of being rehabilitated, drug offenders are sent to prison and discharged without treatment. This makes communities less safe, argues Sally Joughin, who co-founded People Against Injustice in 1996 to respond to rampant abuses of the criminal justice system. The group, which Dalzenia Henry joined after her son was moved, has organized around a variety of issues including, most recently, the transfer of prisoners to Virginia. Joughin believes that instead of transferring prisoners out of state, Connecticut should focus on finding better solutions at home. Much of her emphasis is on Alternative to Incarceration Programs (AIPS). If non-violent drug offenders and the mentally ill were sent to rehabilitation centers rather than prisons, she told me, there would be no need to send prisoners out of state, and everyone would be better off. "Prison should be a system of correction, not only punishment," she said. "Or they should at least stop calling it the Department of Correction."
It comes as a surprise to many that aips, like drug rehabilitation centers and mental hospitals, are cheaper than prisons. Substance abuse programs, for example, run about $5,000 per person per year, while it costs over $25,000 to keep a person in prison. According to recent polls, the people of Connecticut support treatment programs, at least in theory. Why, then, isn't the state filled with AIPS rather than prisons? The answer is money and politics. Legislators don't want to be labeled "soft on crime" for supporting treatment rather than incarceration, especially in an election year. Furthermore, just as no one wants to live next door to a prison, no one wants to live next to a treatment center, and there are more factors stacked against aips. Connecticut pays towns to host prisons, which do not pay property taxes. For prisons, this PILOT (Payment In Lieu Of Taxes) is 100 percent of the assessed property value, but the state pays less for facilities like treatment centers. Towns can also negotiate for certain benefits when they agree to build a prison. For example, Cheshire, which is home to five of Connecticut's prisons, has its sewer system managed and paid for by the state. "The town can make out like a bandit," Dyson told me. Four more Connecticut towns are now poised to rake in profits. In September, East Lyme, Montville, Somers, and Suffield submitted applications to the state for yet another planned prison expansion. One East Lyme selectman said that enlarging the town's prison would be like bringing in ten new businesses.
The inmate population is expected to swell by 4,000 over the next five years, and Connecticut has no plans to check this growth by funding rehabilitative programs. Twenty-five million dollars of this year's budget are already earmarked for incarceration. As long as prison building remains both politically expedient and a source of profit for localities, few of those in power will have a reason to take the long view-and we will all pay the price.

 

Jessica Bulman, a junior in Berkeley College, is a managing editor for TNJ.