By
ROSELYN TANTRAPHOL And DIANE STRUZZI Courant Staff Writers
March 8
2005
On a summer afternoon nearly seven years ago, inmate Duane W. Ziemba
ripped the intercom panel off the inside of his 7-by-12 cell at Northern
Correctional Institution in Somers. He wrapped a towel around the metal plate
and smashed it against the sprinkler to protest his transfer to the
prison.
He refused to be cuffed and taken out of his cell, and for the
outburst, Ziemba was placed face down on a bed frame, his arms and legs tied
down. "Why did you punch me in my face?" he can be heard yelling in a videotape
of the incident.
The Middletown man was left in his urine-soaked
underwear, and his requests for medical attention were largely ignored over the
ensuing 22 hours of restraint, according to his federal lawsuit - and
corroborated by a Department of Correction security division
investigation.
No one disputes that Ziemba broke a rule. But the lawsuit
contends that prison staff denied the mentally ill inmate medication that would
have prevented him from acting out. It also alleges that Ziemba suffered from a
prison culture that tolerated indifference to the medical needs of inmates, in
violation of his constitutional rights.
The case of the 1998 incident,
now before the U.S. Court of Appeals, comes at a pivotal period in the history
of Northern, Connecticut's only super-maximum-security prison.
"Supermax"
prisons are not simply fortresses with extra security; they isolate inmates,
severely restricting their movements and interactions with others. Proponents of
these facilities, which were built in more than 30 states beginning in the late
1980s, say they create a safer prison environment.
Northern, which opened
10 years ago this month amid much fanfare, has largely accomplished what it was
designed to do: deter escapes, gang activity and assaults on staff that had
plagued Connecticut's prison system more than a decade ago.
As Northern
enters its second decade, however, critics question whether supermaxes are
outdated - or worse.
They are expensive to operate and designed to
punish, not rehabilitate. As alternative sentencing options become more popular
nationwide, supermaxes have begun looking like anachronisms whose bleakness
fuels potentially costly lawsuits, places where inmates may grow more
violent.
And, in some cases - such as the death row appeal on behalf of
serial killer Michael Ross - lawyers and psychiatrists argue that supermaxes
work far too well, turning a prison into a place so intolerable that inmates
might prefer death over a life buried in a sensory-depriving tomb.
The
U.S. Supreme Court is poised to hear arguments that the process for transferring
a prisoner into Ohio's supermax violates the inmate's constitutional rights.
Another state, Maryland, has decided to abandon the supermax model altogether,
concluding that it is inhumane.
Northern Is Born
With its
stark gray exterior and bunker-like interior, the $44 million male-inmate
facility with 304 cells was the capstone of the largest prison expansion project
in state history when it opened.
"The whole intent of Northern is a place
you want to have empty," said Peter Matos, a former deputy commissioner of the
Department of Correction. Northern's presence, he said, ensures that other
prisons become a carrot for good behavior.
Stays at Northern are
temporary; in the core program, inmates work through a three-phase program
before they can leave. The only permanent residents are those on death row, who
live separate from other inmates, in Unit 1 East, and aren't considered part of
Northern's general population.
Correction Commissioner Theresa C. Lantz
denied requests for a tour of Northern for this article, even though reporters
were routinely allowed in just a few years ago. She decided early in her tenure
as commissioner - she was appointed in 2003 - that public tours of Northern and
of death row were not appropriate, given their security level.
More and
more, states are barring journalists from entering supermaxes, so the most
detailed descriptions come from lawsuits by jailhouse lawyers and from former
inmates.
"When you got out of the van, the first thing you see is ...
this long hallway. There's no movement in the hallway, this long hallway; it's
like a dream, surreal," said Anthony Oliphant, who entered the prison system on
a first-degree larceny conviction.
Oliphant, 46, served two stints at
Northern, a total of more than three years. Some, like Oliphant, whose sentence
ended in 2002 while he was still incarcerated at Northern, end up being released
directly from the prison. In an interview at his New Haven home, he described
how difficult it was going from the nothingness of a Northern cell to the
constant stimulation of life on the outside.
"They cut you off from
everything," he said. "You're pretty much a prisoner in your own
body."
"All you've got," he said, "is your own mind."
The Gray
Mile
Northern was built at a time of high-profile prisoner riots,
escapes and record assaults on correction officers. It was a time when John
Rowland took prison insecurity to the gubernatorial campaign trail, saying
inmates enjoyed the comfort and freedom of a Club Med getaway.
Reagan-era
drug policies had boosted the prison population nationwide. In Connecticut,
gangs and changes in sentencing laws made even the maximum-security Somers state
prison - built in 1962, and now called the Osborn Correctional Institution -
seem ill-equipped to control the men crammed into its 1,600
beds.
Northern would be different.
Inmates would know that it
would take months of nearly 23-hour-a-day solitary life inside claustrophobic
cells, a push to the edge of human tolerance for some, to even begin earning an
exit visa. Doing well in Phase 1 graduated a prisoner to phases 2 and 3, each
with a little more freedom and time spent out of cell. But one slip up would set
him back.
Every detail, down to the decision to not paint over the
concrete, was calculated to send a message.
"You ever see the movie `The
Green Mile?'" asked Anthony Hollins, an East Hartford man whose incarceration
history stretches to the late 1980s, as he sketched Northern's layout. "You can
call that the gray mile."
Hollins, who once eluded police for weeks, and
whose charges have included thefts, has been incarcerated several times at
Northern. He sat in his mother's house, where he has been living since being
released from Garner Correctional Institution last month for his 2004 arrest,
and recalled the sounds - metal clashing, inmates yelling.
At one point
in relating his experiences, Hollins, 37, stood up, put his hands together and
shuffled to show how inmates walk when escorted to an outdoor patch of concrete
for an hour of solitary recreation. "You leave one cage to another cage," he
said.
A Drop In Assaults
Lantz said Northern deserves some
of the credit for the state's 51 percent drop in inmate-on-inmate assaults
between 1994 and 2004, and the nearly 50 percent reduction in inmate-on-staff
assaults.
Lantz won't call Northern a supermax, which she defines as a
facility whose sole mission is segregation and incapacitation. Instead, she
insists on referring to Northern as a maximum-security facility.
"When
you get into Northern, there's a program and structure that allows the inmate to
get through it so he can demonstrate acceptable behavior and demonstrate
acceptable compliance so he can get back out," she said.
The first
prisoners transferred to Northern, on March 3, 1995, were identified as prison
gang leaders who led a work stoppage protest in an Enfield
prison.
"Northern was built for a different era," said Leo Arnone, a
regional director for the correction department when the supermax opened. "It
was a time when gangs were running rampant in large dormitories that were hard
to control."
Over the years, transfers to the supermax have included
inmates such as John Barletta, who strangled his cellmate at Garner, in Newtown,
in March 1999. The two men had been cellmates for just a day when Barletta
decided that he had been disrespected. Northern was built for guys like
that.
David May, Northern's first warden, said the philosophy of
correction officials, especially that of Larry Meachum, who was commissioner
while Northern was being built, was to send people there "as punishment, but not
for punishment."
"They weren't there so that we could do some sort of a
sadistic ritual," May said during a lunch interview. "It was done because they
needed to be managed. Lock them up, limit their mobility - but, Jesus, you don't
throw scalding water on them."
A year before Northern opened, Vaughn
Dortch, a former inmate at California's Pelican Bay State Prison, which gained
national notoriety in the '90s for its prisoner abuse stories, settled with that
state's correction department for nearly $1 million. Dortch was forced to take a
bath in near-boiling water.
"What Meachum didn't want," May said at the
lunch, "was for us to [become] Pelican Bay..."
"Which was a disaster,"
interrupted Arnone, sitting across the table.
"If we were going to be on
`60 Minutes,'" May said, "it'd be for something positive."
Would Northern
be built today?
"My guess is no," Arnone said. "It would probably cost
$100 million today. Who would invest that kind of money without a driving force?
The driving force was the turmoil in the prisons."
Inside The
Walls
In July 1995, just months after Northern opened, Duane Ziemba
landed in the prison system - again. His incarceration history, including an
escape from a community release program, dates to the mid-1980s, according to
the correction department.
This time, Ziemba was convicted for a string
of thefts that included stealing a truck from a Kenny Rogers Roasters
construction site in Cromwell.
In 1997, he was transferred for what would
be the first of a few stints at Northern. Ziemba returned in August 1998, when
he broke the sprinkler. On the videotape of the "cell extraction" - correction's
term for removing an unwilling inmate - he eggs on the correction officers
escorting him, making combative comments about their job
performance.
Ziemba was in need of medication prescribed by doctors at
Garner, where he had been moved from, but those meds were not administered after
his transfer, according to the lawsuit.
State Attorney General Richard
Blumenthal declined to discuss the case because it is on appeal, heading for
trial.
Ziemba is currently at Garner.
In 2004, the state's Office
of Protection and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities settled with the
correction department to improve treatment for inmates with serious mental
illness. Provisions included moving severely mentally ill inmates from Northern
to Garner.
Signing Up For Northern
Jon Pepe, a former Navy
man, was in the first group of correction officers to sign up to work at
Northern.
Pepe said staff members have met the challenges of the
facility, in part by being flexible despite working with the toughest population
in the system. An officer working two shifts might have to shuttle between a
unit with violent inmates to one with nonviolent inmates who have problems with
rules.
But too often, said Pepe, president of AFSCME Local 391 of the
Connecticut State Prison Employees, correction officers feel they are made
scapegoats by the administration. Reporters may no longer be allowed into a
facility such as Northern, but video cameras constantly roll. "The videotape can
be interpreted millions of ways," he said.
Pepe mentioned cell
extractions, which are always ugly. What's left out is context, that the
protocol was crafted to keep correction officers safe.
"We're being
accused," Pepe said, of excessive force allegations. "We're asking you, the
press, or whoever, come in and observe us, look at these abusive conditions -
there are none," said Pepe, who noted that in 15 years as a correction officer,
he has never been assaulted or accused of excessive force.
But Pepe sees
the supermax as a necessity. "Northern really is and can be a deterrent," he
said.
Lantz, too, said it continues to serve its purpose.
"I
believe it's a humane environment, structured and secure - and it also provides
and allows offenders to exercise positive behavior," she said.
Patrick
Hynes, the agency's director of offender programs and victim services, said, in
fact, that he hears complaints from inmates that they are being bothered by too
much interaction.
"We have staff going by their door, checking on them -
mental health staff, clergy, unit managers," he said. "Many, many times at
Northern, you hear inmates saying, `Stop bothering me, I'm okay, I'm all
set.'"
But around the country, challenges to supermaxes
continue.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear an Ohio case at the end of
this month examining the constitutionality of how the state sends inmates to its
supermax facility.
Maryland is in the process of moving about 100 inmates
from its supermax facility to a new one in western Maryland because the state's
head of correction doesn't find the concept humane.
"Our supermax is a
facility that has no program space at all," said Secretary of Public Safety and
Correctional Services Mary Ann Saar. "The inmates are in their cells 23 out of
24 hours. That, in my opinion, is not humane."
Supermax critics say there
are also financial reasons to phase out these prisons. The average cost of
housing an inmate at Northern, for example, is nearly double the systemwide cost
in Connecticut.
David C. Fathi, senior staff counsel of the American
Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project in Washington. D.C., also noted
the "de-supermaxing" of what had been supermax facilities in Virginia and
Michigan.
ACLU attorneys have argued on behalf of lawsuits in several
states, including the one that resulted in Connecticut's settlement over
mentally ill inmates last year. Most recently, in February, Indiana's ACLU
chapter filed a lawsuit saying that placing mentally ill prisoners in supermax
units amounts to psychological torture.
"I hope this fad - this extremely
expensive fad - is losing steam," Fathi said.
"Torture isn't just the
rack and the thumbscrew - torture is also deprivation of all human contact,"
Fathi said.
A Plea To Legislature
Room 2C of the
Legislative Office Building in Hartford was packed Feb. 23 for the judiciary
committee's meeting on a bill allowing same-sex civil unions.
Anthony
Hollins, the ex-inmate from East Hartford, didn't know at first what everyone
had shown up for, but he knew it wasn't to hear him.
During the public
hearing segment of the meeting, Hollins explained why he felt that on March 26,
2001, he shouldn't have been placed in a cell with a man who at the time had 503
disciplinary reports.
The attack sent Hollins to the hospital, and
Hollins took his case to the state claims commission, which dismissed it last
year. But he is asking the legislature to override the commission's
decision.
Hollins - and inmates who have filed lawsuits over
double-celling at supermax facilities in Connecticut and elsewhere - say the
practice puts them in danger.
"I'm not any angel," Hollins said
afterward. "But what happened to me shouldn't have happened. This is not Iraq.
This is not Russia."
