WHEN THEY GET OUT

How prisons, established to fight crime, produce crime-a sequel to our
December cover story, "The Prison-Industrial Complex"

by Sasha Abramsky

P0PULAR perceptions about crime have blurred the boundaries between fact
and politically expedient myth. The myth is that the United States is
besieged on a scale never before encountered, by a pathologically criminal
underclass. The fact is that we're not. After spiraling upward during the
drug wars, murder rates began falling in the mid-1990s; they are lower
today than they were more than twenty years ago. In some cities the murder
rate in the late twentieth century is actually lower than it was in the
nineteenth century. Nonviolent property-crime rates are in general lower in
the United States today than in Great Britain, and are comparable to those
in many European countries.

Nevertheless, horror stories have led to calls for longer prison sentences,
for the abolition of parole, and for the increasingly punitive treatment of
prisoners. The politics of opinion-poll populism has encouraged elected and
corrections officials to build isolation units, put more prisons on
"lockdown" status (in which prisoners are kept in their cells about
twenty-three hours a day), abolish grants that allowed prisoners to study
toward diplomas and degrees, and generally make life inside as miserable as
possible. Marc Mauer, the assistant director of the Sentencing Project, an
advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.. says, "Fifty years ago
rehabilitation was a primary goal of the system." Nowadays it's not. "The
situation we're in now is completely unprecedented," Mauer says. "The
number going through the system dwarfs that in any other period in U.S.
history and virtually in any other country as well." In 1986, according to
figures published in the Survey of State Prison Inmates (1991), 175,662
people were serving sentences of more than ten years; five years later
306,006 were serving such sentences. People haven't become more antisocial;
their infractions and bad habits are just being punished more ruthlessly.
Crime, however, is a complex issue, and responses to it that might
instinctively seem sensible, or simply satisfying, may prove deeply
counterproductive. Locking ever more people away will in the long run
increase the number of Robert Scullys in our midst.

Robert Scully grew up near San Diego. in the affluent town of Ocean Beach.
From a very early age he used drugs, and before he was a teenager, he had
been on the streets and then in juvenile facilities run by the California
Youth Authority. From heroin use and dealing he moved to robbery; by the
time he was twenty-two, in the early 1980s, he was in San Quentin. In
prison Scully degenerated, eventually using a contraband hacksaw blade to
escape from his cell, and attacking another other inmate with a homemade
knife.

At about the same time, California began opening what it called maximum
security facilities-dumping grounds for troublesome inmates. Scully wound
up in solitary confinement in a prison named Corcoran. The guards there, as
recently reported in the Los Angeles Times, are alleged to have taken it
upon themselves to organize gladiatorial combat among prisoners in the
exercise yard; they would sometimes break up the battles by shooting into
crowds of prisoners. Scully was shot twice. He was placed in a "security
housing unit" cell, where for close to twenty-three hours a day he was
deprived of all human interaction. In 1990, soon after the "supermax"
prison at Pelican Bay had opened in the redwood forests northeast of the
old Victorian timber town of Crescent City, Scully was moved again, into a
tiny bare cell with a perforated sheet-metal door and a hatch through which
his food was served. In the supermax even exercise was solitary. He stayed
there four years. At the time of his release, in 1994, he had spent the
previous nine years in isolation. A month later he was arrested for
violating parole by consorting with an armed acquaintance, and went
straight back to Pelican Bay.

Scully re-emerged on March 24, 1995, by now a human time bomb. He was
picked up by Brenda Moore, the girl friend of a fellow inmate, and they
began driving south, along Highway 101, toward San Diego, where Scully was
supposed to check in with his parole officer. They never made it. Five days
later they arrived in Sebastopol, a town an hour north of San Francisco.
There, late at night, they loitered around a restaurant until the owner,
fearing a robbery, called the police. The pair drove off to a nearby
parking lot. Soon after, as they sat in their truck, Deputy Sheriff Frank
Trejo, a middle-aged grandfather looking forward to his retirement, pulled
into the lot.

Trejo asked to see the woman's license, and as she fumbled for it,
according to investigators, he suddenly found a sawed-off shotgun pointing
at his face. He was made to back up until he was between the two vehicles
and get on his knees, and Scully shot him in the forehead. Scully and Moore
ran across a field, broke into a house, and took a family hostage. The next
afternoon, with police surrounding the area, Scully negotiated his surrender.

Robert Scully evolved into a murderer while housed in Pelican Bay. There he
experienced some of the harshest confinement conditions known in the
democratic world. Highly disturbed to start with, he was kept in a sensory
- -deprivation box for years on end. Psychologists and psychiatrists called
in by his defense team believe that he simply lost the ability to think
through the consequences of his actions. He became a creature of brutal and
obsessive impulse. At Scully's trial Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist who
has spent much of his career studying the effects of isolation on
prisoners, and who has testified in class-action lawsuits against
departments of corrections across the country, argued that sensory
deprivation and social isolation had caused Scully to regress until he was
a violent animal capable only of acting on instinct, with no ability to
plan beyond the moment. His incarceration had created what Grassian termed
"a tremendous tunnel vision." Pelican Bay Chief Deputy Warden Joe McGrath
estimates that every month thirty-five inmates are, like Scully, released
from isolation directly back into the community.

Since 1985 America's prison population, not counting the more than half a
million people in jails at any one time, has increased by about six or
seven percent yearly. Truth-in-sentencing laws mandate that many prisoners
serve 85 percent of their sentences before being eligible for parole; all
the same, figures over the past decade indicate that on average more than
40 percent of prison inmates are released in any given year. Assuming that
these statistical relationships remain constant, we can make certain
predictions. In 1995 a total of 463,284 inmates were released. To use a
worst-case scenario, some 660,000 will be released in 2000, some 887,000 in
2005, and about 1.2 million in 2010. Even factoring in lower release rates
because of three-strikes laws and truth in sentencing and even taking into
account estimates that 60 pet-cent of prisoners have been in prison before,
there will still be somewhere around 3.5 million first-time releases
between now and 2010, and America by then will still he releasing from half
a million to a million people front its prisons each year (not to mention
hundreds of thousands more from short stints in Jail). That is an awful lot
of potential rage coming out of prison to haunt out future.

0N a gray morning in September, with the tropical storm Frances hovering
over the Gulf Coast, I rode With Larry Fitzgerald, the sixty-vear-old
public relations officer for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, to a
parking lot deep inside the Estelle Unit of the Huntsville Complex, seventy
miles north of Houston. Surrounding the car was a landscape of rolled
razor-wire fences, surveillance cameras, bleak watchtowers, and gray
concrete buildings. Fitzgerald told me that he was tired; the previous
evening lie had attended an execution, his sixtieth in the five years he
had been with the department. We Lot out of the car and flashed our IDs at
the camera. A series of heavy electronically operated doors clicked open,
one after another. We went through one, and it closed behind us before a
second opened. We entered a sterile hallway lit by fluorescent ceiling
lights, the air smelling the way one would expect it to smell in a place
where the outside had been utterly banished. There the warden and several
hefty corrections officers met us and we proceeded into the bowels of the
prison, away from outdoor light, away from outdoor sounds, deep into tile
computer-controlled hidden hell at the heart of America's burgeoning
incarceration establishment.

There are up to 660 men living in isolation behind the metallic-blue and

Plexi-glas doors of the Estelle Unit's ad-admininistrative segregation
cells, the high-security facility at Huntsville that opened in August Of
1997. (Texas is Currently developing five "Supermax" units that will
eventually hold more than 3,000 people.) Depending on their Status-there
are three levels-men get front three to seven hours of exercise a week, and
from two to eight hours of visits a month.The rest of the time they remain
in their cells. "The scurity here," Fitzgerald told

me with satisfaction. "is better than Alcatraz. Alcatraz didn't have the
electronic things we have now. The art of incarceration has definitely
improved." The inmates, disciplinary cases from the broader prison system
are men removed not just from the outside society but from the rest of
Texas's 140,000-plus prisoners, as close to being vanished spirits as any
resident of a medieval dungeon. On them is being performed one of the most
astounding social experiments in America's history: isolated for about
twenty-three hours a day in bathroom-sized quarters, fed through hatches in
their doors, provided with virtually no sensory stimuli for months or years
on end, deprived of full meals as punishment for breaking rules, made to
dress in paper -gowns if they dare to rip up their uniforms, many quite
simply seem to go insane. While I was touring the unit, a desperate
prisoner "self-mutilated," slashing at the veins in his hands until his
blood spurted over the walls, the floor, and the steel seat of the cell he
was in, like a peculiarly vivid Jackson Pollock painting

The inmates are often tormented by headaches. Many quite clearly can no
longer focus their thoughts on anything. Some weep, others obsess; the more
resilient, like David Prater, a twenty-six year-old lifer who has a degree
in finance from the University of Texas, read as much and as often as
possible to while away the days. But they are a minority. The average IQ of
Texas prison inmate is 92, and many do not even know how to read. From what
I could tell, many of those guarding them aren't much smarter. As prisoners
from the nearby low-security unit mopped tip the blood front the cutting,
guards made jokes about the "mutiIator." An officer with the rank of
captain assured me that all the inmates were pschologically assessed when
they came into Estelle, that if they were mad they would be at the
psychiatric unit upstate, and that since they were here, ipso facto, they
weren't mad. As he completed this logical circle, the entire *'Level 3"
unit behind us was rent by the howls and screams of the close-to-naked
inmates. It was a hideous sound that would have been familiar in the
lunatic asylums Of bygone Centuries. For the French philosopher Michel
Foucault. who explored the histories and social functions of both the
asylum and the prison in Western culture, tile similarity Would probably
have iluminated his notion that both institution,; function at least in
part to reassure the outside population of its "normality" in contrast to
the horror caged within.

WILLIAM Sabol, a researcher at the Urban Institute, in Washington. D.C.,
think tank, has recently begun studying imprisonment and release statistics
for ninety metropolitan areas. Over the next few years he will focus on
releases in Baltimore, a city with a very high incarceration rate,
exploring the effects of release on different communities. For Sabol, the
biggest concern is not that already devastated inner cities will be further
damaged but that certain strugging blue-collar areas and middle-class black
districts, of whose young men large numbers have been imprisoned during the
war on drugs, wiII be unable to reabsorb the ex-cons while retaining their
civic character. "When these men return," Sabol explains, "they're less
likely to get jobs and there's a higher likelihood of disruption of the
family. What we're interested in is will it tip the scales against those
neighborhoods that are marginal?" Faced with a growing population of
ex-felons. people with resources, will probably flee these communities,
therebv expanding the areas of devastation

Since fewer than 10 percent of prisoners are sentenced to life, we can
expect that more than 90 percent of prisoners will be released. Releasing,
over several decades, millions of people who either never acquired Job
skills or lost their skills in prison, and all will face employers'
uspicion, is almost guaranteed to produce localized but considerable
economic problems. Currently, among black men aged twenty-five to
thirty-four with less than a high school education, the jobless rate is
around 50 percent. If those in prison and jail are included, the figure
rises above 60 percent. If incarceration rates ever start to drop, and
fewer people are entering prison than are being released, then according to
the most basic principles of supply and demand, wage levels in areas
already suffering chronically high levels of unemployment will plummet as
the competition for scarce jobs increases.

The sociologists Bruce Western, of Princeton University, and Katherine
Beckett, of Indiana University, are convinced that the economic problems of
mass release actually run much deeper. In January of this year they
published a paper titled "How Unregulated Is the U. S. Labor Market'? The
Penal System as a Labor Market Institution," in which they argued that one
of the reasons America's unemployment statistics look so good in comparison
with those of other industrial democracies is that 1.6 million mainly
low-skilled workers-precisely the group least likely to find work in a
high-tech economy-have been incarcerated, and are thus not considered part
of the labor force. Rendering such a large group of people invisible, the
authors claimed, creates a numerical mirage in which unemployment
statistics are as much as two percent below the real unemployment level.
and which has been made possible only by what Beckett terms an American
"intervention in the economy [the growth of the prison system comparable
financially to Western Europe's unemployment benefit and welfare programs."
If mass imprisonment is what the urban scholar Mike Davis. in his book
Ecology of Fear, terms "carceral Keynesianism--using prison building and
maintenance as an enormous public-works program to shore up an economy in
which blue-collar jobs have been exported to the Third World-then mass
release may well prove its undoing

Eddie Ellis, a onetime Black Panther who was recently released after
serving out a twenty-five-year sentence for murder, believes that the
cities are sitting on volcanoes. Now a full-time organizer in the
Harlem-based Cominunity Justice Center. Ellis told me when we met that
starting around the year 2005, New York is going to see the release of wave
after wave of inmates, at the rate of about 30,000 a year. who were
incarcerated after 1990. "That's when they began phasing out the programs
(education in prison, vocational training, and the like). By 1994 to 1995
they no longer existed. These are the people we're talking about coming out
in such a horrendous condition. The next wave that comes out, we're looking
at a serious influx of people into a few communities that not only will
devastate these communities but will have a larger consequence for the
whole city." The welfare reforms of 1996 drastically curtailed felons'
access to welfare money, and specifically barred addicts from access to
Medicaid and many drug-rehabilitation programs. Ellis predicts rising
epidemics, as ex-prisoners without work or Medicaid spread TB, HIV, and
hepatitis.

To complete a grim picture, wholesale incarceration decimates voter rolls.
In all but four states prisoners convicted of felonies lose the right to
vote. In more than thirty states they can reapply only when they're off
parole. Those who find work while on parole will-like much of the black
population of the pre-civil rights South-be paying taxes into a political
system stern in which they have no say. In California alone, close to a
quarter of a million people are disenfranchised by such laws.

The situation is even worse in twelve states-almost half of them southern-
where a felony can result in disenfranchisement for life. The history of
these disenfranchisement laws can he traced straight back to the post-Civil
War South: because of the dispropoitionate number of black men in prison
today. the laws continue to affect not just individuals but the aspirations
and political influence of entire communities. In a study released last
October. the Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch. an advocacy group
based in New York, reported that theoughout the country two percent of
adults, or approximately four million people. are disenfranchised: within
the black nmale community the figure is 13 percent. or 1.4 million men. In
seven states-Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, Virginia, and
Wyoming-fully a quarter of all black men are permanently, ineligible to
vote. In Florida alone 204,600 black men, and in Texas 156,600 black men,
have lost the vote.

The political implications for the next century are troubling. Already the
inner cities, where on an average more than a quarter of aII, black men are
disenfranchised. have seen their power as voting blocs shrivel. And since
today's young are tornorrow's old, the problem can only get worse. 1n 1997
the Justice Department estimated that 29 percent of black males born in
1991 would spend some time in prison. Only four percent of white males
would do so. In some cities in the states in which convicted felons are
pemanently disenfranchised. as older, pre prison-born blacks die out, the
proportion of black men of all ages who lack the right to vote will rise to
about one third by 2020. 1n certain parts of sonic Southern cities-Houston,
Memphis, Miami and New Orleans, for example-it may be as many as half.
Conceivably, an overwhelmingly black town could have an electoral register
dominated by a white minority.

Quite simply, mass incarceration fol]owed by mass release into
subcitizenship will undermine the great democratic achievements of the past
half Century. In effect, even if not in intent, after the brief interregnum
of the civil rights years, the South, with the rest of the country in tow,
is once again moving toward excluding huge numbers of African-Americans
from the political process. Marc Mauer, of the Sentencing Project, says,
"It's a wonder there's any black representation at all,given the numbers."

RECENTLY I met several ex-prisoners in New York Citv who were putting their
lives back together under the auspices of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit
organization that runs one of the country's most successful and intensive
post-release programs. Some of the people I met had done terrible things:
others had rnerely taken foolish wrong turns. Regardless, talkin-with them
gave each one a human face. It helped me to understand that most ofthese
ex-cons are damaged people with hopes and fears and dreams that perhaps can
be coaxed out of them in a nurturing environment like Fortune's.

The most extraordinary of the people I met was a thirty-nine-year-old named
Edmond Taylor, who had served a total of eighteen years in a variety of New
York's toughest prisons for crimes ranging from drug dealing to violent
assault. Out of prison for the past couple of years, Taylor has dedicated
himself to change; he works full time as a counselor, helping other
prisoners to adjust to life on the Outside, and he is regarded by Fortune's
executive director, JoAnne Page, as one of her great success stories.
Taylor came to meet me straight from counselina a distrauaht woman who'd
been told at a job interview that the company wouldn't hire her because she
had a felony conviction. He said, "If I can save just one person a year,
I'm happy."

A highly articulate man, more capable than most of understanding what led
him into violence and helped to destroy half his life, Taylor explained
that he had spent nearly four years in "the box" some of that time in
Clinton Dannemora prison, near the Canadian border, for being what he
described as "a vocal critic" of conditions within the prison. Describing
his reaction to being released from isolation back into the general prison
population, he said. "First there's fear, then there's anger, and the anger
takes over. It's violent anger. Very quick. No thought of the magnitude of
the consequence of the violence. An individual bumped me. Rushing to get to
the gym, and I rushed up behind him and hit him with a pipe. He went into a
coma." Taylor went straight back into the box. I asked how lomg it had
taken him to recover from isolation. He looked surprised by the question,
and said,"Honestly,I've still not recovered. I've been out of isolation
five and a half years. Ms. Page is my boss. If she was to confront me when
I had a lot on my mind, anger would come up before rational thought. Anger.
Strike back. Now it's not so much physical as verbal. In another situation
it would cause me to lose my job." Then Taylor told me a shameful secret.
Shortly after he got out of prison. he was living with his brother. His
brother criticized him for some of the attitudes he'd brought out of prison
with him. "I felt fed up, and I attacked him." Taylor said. "I grabbed him,
choked him, lifted him off his feet, threw him to the ground. I pummeled
him, Causing him to get several stitches above the eye. I grabbed a kitchen
knife-I don't remember any of this: he told me afterward -and put it to his
neck and said, 'I should kill you. I hate you.' The realization that I put
my hands on my baby brother, the only person at that time who'd ever been
in my corner . . ."

Edmond Taylor sees a future of violent chaos, with a large, uneducated army
of enraged ex-cons flooding the streets of the inner cities. JoAnne Page
adds, "There's an issue of critical mass. As you lock up a higher
percentage of young men in a community, what happens when these guys come
out, in terms of role models, crime, the safety of the community?" Prisons
breed global rage. People come out loaded with so much anger that they're
ready to blow up at a touch. She worries that many of them, lacking jobs
upon release and having no access to state support, will resort to stealing
just to eat. Many will also end up homeless. with their best chance of'
finding shelter being to commit crimes and return to jail Or prison. The
Correctional Association of' New York estimates that on any given day 3,800
homeless people are in prison at Rikers Island and in other New York City
jails.

Without making contingency plans for it-without even realizing it-we are
creating a disaster that instead of dissipating over time will accumulate
with the years.