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WAITING TO DIE | PAGE 1, 2 Pennsylvania's death row inmates spend 23 hours a day alone in cells not much larger than their bunks. They are limited to three showers a week and to strictly noncontact visits from those on their approved visiting lists. Most aren't allowed to work and, due to a recent decision, none can participate in the education programs available (to an ever-decreasing extent) to general-population prisoners. Taxpayers don't like to finance such programs, especially for those on death row they'd rather see executed than educated. Last March, death row inmates at the State Correctional Institution at Greene -- Pennsylvania's shiny new supermax prison and home to the largest death row facility in America -- staged a two-week hunger strike when the Department of Corrections reduced the amount of legal and educational material they could keep in their cells. In a similar move, across the state at the women's prison, Muncy, Pennsylvania's four female death row inmates were barred from keeping hardcover books in their cells. The ostensible reason? To eliminate law books. In the last half-year, officials from Amnesty International have filed complaints about conditions at both facilities, noting a battery of human rights violations. The organization's head visited Greene last fall and denounced conditions there as "deplorable." Last fall, when inmates at Muncy complained of guards wielding cattle prods, Amnesty investigated and sent a formal letter listing this and other claimed infractions to the prison's superintendent. After several weeks, the secretary of corrections responded, dismissing most of the allegations and ignoring others. His letter identified the "cattle prod" as a "shield" and said its use "conformed to Department policy." Whatever that is. And just this spring at Greene, where Mumia Abu-Jamal now resides, instances of violence against inmates surfaced on Department of Corrections videotapes, resulting in the investigation of 40 prison employees and the punishment of 25. The prison's superintendent was promptly transferred to another state facility, a move that was considered a demotion. The censured guards, most of whom resumed their jobs after brief suspensions, claimed they'd been scapegoated by the Department of Corrections, whose policies they were executing to the letter when the crackdown happened. But with the public largely unconcerned about the fate of death row inmates -- and through their votes indirectly sanctioning degenerate prison policies -- no one bothered to trace the episodes of violence back to those who'd ordered them. Despite all this, though, life on death row isn't all angst and anger. There's also a fair amount of thoughtfulness -- inmates helping one another with legal questions, or passing their unfinished dinners around the cell block -- and an inexhaustible supply of gallows humor. As one jocular man who's spent the last 17 years on death row explained in a recent letter: "You mix a group comprised of varying forms of mental defects, add pressure and confinement, and you can have some riotously funny incidents." Humor, of course, is relative. And as most good comics will admit, it's also a close relative to pain. Mental illness, too, is always lurking just beneath the surface. And no one's immune to it in this business. Referring to a mentally ill prisoner with whom she once shared a cell block, one Muncy inmate wrote recently:
[She] was stripped down and she would run from the back of her cell head-first into the door until she knocked herself unconscious. When she came to, she resumed the same behavior. Nobody did anything for her. She ... hung herself from the door on approximately February 25 or 26th, 1998, at 2:30 PM. But inmates aren't the only ones affected by the inherent insanity of death row. "Sometimes I feel like I'm losing my mind," says a particularly dedicated man who's traded a lucrative future in criminal law for the often thankless task of saving impoverished Pennsylvanians from death. Unfortunately for him, in this business, minds often go without their owners' knowing it. We're sitting across from each other, one prisoner and I, separated by an inch of glass. My right arm's numb from holding the receiver I talk into; my left arm's numb from pressing my index finger into my ear, blocking the noise from the visiting room behind me. The prisoner's eyes dart beyond my shoulders at regular intervals, keeping track of everything that's happening in the closest place to the real world he's seen for a decade save CNN. I resist the urge to also turn around and watch my back. The next day the local paper will report that a woman in this same room was rushed to the hospital after her inmate son cut the back of her neck with the blade from a pencil sharpener. But for now, the prisoner and I are discussing another kind of blade -- the one from a utility knife used in the murder that sent him and a relative to death row. And as we sit nonchalantly discussing the victim's particulars, I realize to my horror that he's become a sort of cartoon character in even my mind. He was kind of wussy, he says about the man he killed. But neither perpetrator, he tells me, knew the victim was gay till their prosecutor made theirs a test case for new legislation aimed at curbing hate crimes. There's no way that guy stayed alive for five minutes, he gripes about media coverage of the murder. It was more like 30 seconds. Tops. He might as well be quoting sports scores. The prisoner says the other guy did it, and that he didn't realize what was happening at first. When asked if he'd been surprised to find a mostly severed head lying on the ground before him, he shrugs his shoulders and says he's seen a lot of crazy shit in his day. In another minute, the conversation shifts toward the sublime -- food allergies and children. He explains his restricted diet, then his correspondence with a preteen niece. He says he recently ordered the girl a collector's photo of Leonardo DiCaprio. But when she sent him a picture of herself all dolled up, he called his brother to censure him for letting his kid dress so precociously. Ironically enough, this prisoner -- like the Pennsylvanians whose tax dollars stashed him here -- is a staunch defender of family values. He speaks of childhood in reverential tones, likely because he never had much of one himself, landing on death row at age 20. Though the lawyer who's now handling his appeal claims he suffered brain damage from his father's beatings when he was a boy, the prisoner steadfastly denies it. And with good reason -- at least for him. When you're in prison, he explains, self-respect is essential. If you carry yourself proudly and never back down, others -- both guards and other inmates -- will leave you alone. Otherwise, watch your back. Those things you hear about prison are true, he says, responding to a question about one infamous jail-house practice, the taking of vulnerable new inmates as sex slaves. "Have I been anyone's bitch?" he asks back. "No way. But you take someone like Urkel ..." Urkel? "Steve Urkel. You know, that guy from TV?" Oh, that Urkel. "He'd be someone's bitch." I lose my mind enough to smile. Petite and beautiful, with fresh makeup, high cheekbones and an Afro pulled back, a female prisoner is dignified in a bright pink work shirt. A well-spoken former nurse in her 30s, she fights for proper treatment of her fellow prisoners, all while staying safely beneath the radar screens of difficult guards. She is the crusading leader of Muncy's death row. In a recent letter ending with a plea for help and a call for protest against worsening prison conditions, she details some of what she's seen in her four years here:
Food would come cold in a Styrofoam container with hair most of the time. And it was served by the officer after they opened it with a wicket with feces on it ... I witnessed a number of people eating feces and relieving themselves on the floor. There were some rooms that got so bad that when the officers finally removed the inmate from the cell, the feces and maggots were swept in the hallway ...She says this place is enough to drive a person crazy -- that is, if she wasn't insane to begin with. And if someone had problems before coming here, she can only expect them to get worse within these walls. She used to be anorexic, she adds, but now suffers from bulimia. She takes antidepressants, which she has the prison psychiatrist prescribe. Since the doctor doesn't seem interested in her plight, she says she researches medications on her own and orders them from the infirmary, hoping that whoever's charged with dispensing medication gets the order right. She had to intervene once when a cellmate started getting medication at bedtime that kept her up all night. She soon found out the pills were meant to be administered in the morning. She told a sympathetic guard and got the woman's doses switched. The staff psychiatrist, she complains, is elderly and generally unmoved by the complaints of death row inmates. Whenever the topic turns to the psychological problems that come with living on death row, he starts in with his own horrific tales of life in a concentration camp during World War II. It's hard to argue for the rights of people who've committed crimes -- especially egregious ones like murder. There is, after all, an endless supply of seemingly more worthwhile causes. And it's particularly hard to argue for the rights of death row inmates in a place like Pennsylvania, where tolerance for urban scourges is particularly low and even life sentences offer no hope for parole. As America's death row population increases, access to it is decreasing. And as capital punishment becomes an ever larger house of mirrors, those of us on the outside who stand the best chance of changing the way the justice system works will have to push even harder to find out exactly how it works. Many of us will eventually run short of the time and resources needed to cover capital punishment and turn our attention instead to issues more easily managed -- and infinitely more sympathetic.
This, of course, will only help the voting public in its ongoing efforts to ignore the unpleasant realities of its tough-on-crime predilections. It's much easier, they know, to allow the state's machinery of death to labor on unseen, killing people quietly and without much public discussion. It's no surprise that Americans don't like to talk about capital punishment, preferring instead to leave such messy matters safely behind prison doors. And it's no small irony that the very means they've chosen to control their free-form fear of crime is itself too frightening to ponder.
Sara Kelly is the editor of the weekly newspaper In Pittsburgh. She is writing a book about death row culture in Pennsylvania. |
