You recently wrote: “It has long been said that a society’s worth can be judged by taking stock of its prisons. That is all the truer in this pandemic, where inmates everywhere have been rendered vulnerable and often powerless to protect themselves from harm.”
As an inmate in a compound now being overrun with the coronavirus, I take small consolation from your words. For inmates in low-security compounds and camps, the Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) reticence to avail itself of the compassionate release option amounts, at best, to nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment: at worst, of outright negligent murder. Has this society come to the point of elevating the need for public safety to such extremes as to require the deaths of low-level offenders?
The BOP has instituted a multi-phased program it claims will slow and stop the spread of COVID-19. What I’ve seen here is a series of missteps, poor judgment, irresponsible and inadequate adherence to CDC recommendations, and sheer, downright punitiveness. As the invasion of the virus began, sick inmates were shuttled into non-air-conditioned units, while outside temperatures rose into the upper nineties. Since inmates were no longer being employed in food preparation, management decided to rely on pre-packaged junk foods, low in quality and deficient in nutrition. These measures only facilitate and precipitate the advance of the potentially deadly virus.
Here at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Seagoville in Texas, we have endured not just the anxiety and torment of waiting for three months in lockdown for the virus to arrive – the sense of utter helplessness to protect ourselves – but suffered also the whims of our jailers as we watched them do everything wrong. Now, we endure the anxiety of wondering who among us will be next to fall ill, what cell were the sick taken from, who were their friends, what bathroom did they use, what phone or computer did they handle. This, Your Honor, is cruel suffering and can be defined as nothing less than psychological torture.
Some will say that COVID-19 is everywhere and that those not in prisons are also threatened. Except that for most free citizens there is choice, there are options. Out in the world, free citizens can quarantine themselves from others to a degree that is impossible here in prison.
Many of us are trapped here because, for the past three decades, Congress has continued to ramp up harsher and lengthier sentences. Crime and violence have been gradually redefined in our society. Misdemeanors have been transformed into felonies. Courts and prisons are forced to justify their existence by pronouncing too many of us as dangerous and incorrigible criminals. Which is why they now find themselves in this untenable situation. If they release hundreds of offenders, and it turns out the released inmates were not as violent or dangerous as the courts and prisons had maintained all along, the house of cards would topple and fall. It’s more self-serving for the preservation of the status quo to let some of us get terribly sick, and a few of us die, than to change the system, to make it more compassionate.
I urge you and the courts to weigh these issues we now face with more concern for the intention of the values inherent in our Constitution. Our laws and legal systems have become far too punitive, needlessly so. Rehabilitation is a myth. Those of us in here see only punishment, cruelty and dehumanization. One frustrated inmate here said the other day: “To them, we’re just ants. They move us around from one pile to another, kill a few, and think nothing of it.”
I hope his assessment is not substantiated by the way prison management and the courts continue to respond to this pandemic, with crude ineptness and indifference.
We are not insects, Your Honor.
We are human beings.
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