Thomas Silverstein, Killer and Most Isolated Inmate, Dies at 67
May 22, 2019 7:00 AM   Subscribe

A violent white supremacist who was believed to have been held in isolation longer than any other inmate, he personified a campaign against solitary as cruel and unusual punishment. Silverstein had been in solitary for 36 years, and was serving three consecutive life terms for the killing of two fellow prisoners and a guard while behind bars. He had been incarcerated continuously since 1975, originally on an armed robbery conviction. He was said to have joined the Aryan Brotherhood, the white nationalist prison gang, while serving time at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. The ACLU cited his case in its campaign against solitary.

More on the Supermax where he was held here. The same article previously discussed on the blue here, and more discussion of the Florence supermax here.

Previous MeFi discussion of solitary here.
posted by stillmoving (48 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
A human is dead, and that is always worth recognizing.

But still, what a situation. What do you do with a man who is a threat to the life of anyone around him?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:16 AM on May 22, 2019 [10 favorites]


This does not seem to me to be the case where you want to make your stand against solitary confinement. He was killing people while in jail. You can't have that. There are likely people in supermax who don't belong there. I don't see how he can be said to be one of them.

What appears to be the case is that he was one of the people who prison makes crazy. He went in as a three-time loser for armed robbery, but not as a killer. It looks as if prison made him a killer. It seems to me that it should be possible to manage prisons so that you don't get violent gangs selling drugs in them, and so that people who have are incapable of resolving conflicts without either avoidance or violence aren't driven mad by being unable to get away from each other. You would likely have to put fewer people in prison to do so, but other nations find this possible.
posted by ckridge at 7:19 AM on May 22, 2019 [28 favorites]


I've been shouted down here on the blue for being in favor of the death penalty in certain extreme situations (and also with extreme punitive measures for law enforcement, prosecutors and judges for those convicts later exonerated). This is an example, and one of the places where I part ways with the ACLU.

What does one to with a murderer who continues to kill people when in custody, and remains a threat to other inmates and to prison staff? Chain them up in the presence of others? Keep them in solitary? Medicate them involuntarily until they are unable to physically harm someone? Leave them in a cell for decades while they are in effect slowly tortured to insanity? Permanently end the threat they pose to themselves and others by executing them? Permanently end the threat they pose by dismembering them, amputating their hands and/or feet? What recourse is there when no amount of counseling, positive reinforcement, or negative reinforcement works to rehabilitate someone?

This is not an abstract question.
posted by tclark at 7:29 AM on May 22, 2019 [20 favorites]


ckridge: "You would likely have to put fewer people in prison to do so, but other nations find this possible."

Yeah, but something that rhymes about time and crime and like stuff.
posted by signal at 7:30 AM on May 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


I mean...I can see how separating people so they don't kill one another may be necessary, but it definitely appears that a robber went in, and a murderer came out, and the main factor in that is the treatment he received while imprisoned by our society.

"Unable to kill others" and "Absolutely no human contact every day forever" are two very different scenarios, and I don't accept the idea that it's impossible to have the former without using the latter.
posted by xingcat at 7:31 AM on May 22, 2019 [45 favorites]


Yeah if this is the test case against solitary confinement, I'm not really feeling it.

If we're not going to execute people like him, locking him up in a box and waiting for him to expire naturally seems like the next-best solution. Personally I'd have advocated giving him a revolver with one bullet, because it seems less cruel, but that's literally the only compromise I'd support.

He chose his path in life; it led to living his remaining days in a small room, alone. It also led to several other people not being able to live out their own lives as they might have wished. I'd rather remember those lives if we're going to be taking a moment of silence.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:34 AM on May 22, 2019 [7 favorites]


Reading the article, there may be more nuance to this than is presented and he may be less the kill-crazed inmate that he's painted as. Or not, I don't know.

Were I wrongly convicted and 100% innocent, I might still prefer a swift death to a long lingering decline in solitary. I'm still unsure that our government can be trusted with the death penalty, even though I'm quite certain there are people who "deserve" it. As other folks have said - at a certain point you have very limited options with how to handle dangerous, unrepentant individuals.

I like to think there's a third path that we could take that isn't "kill them" or "let them rot," but I confess I am apparently not wise/intelligent enough to think of it.
posted by jzb at 7:56 AM on May 22, 2019 [3 favorites]


Silverstein's murder of prison guard Merle Clutts is mentioned in the Southern Poverty Law Center's background article on the Aryan Brotherhood.

One startling statistic from that article:

The AB is a notoriously deadly organization. Some years ago, authorities calculated that while the group’s members made up less than one tenth of 1% of the U.S. prison inmate population, they were responsible for 18% of all prison murders.
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:06 AM on May 22, 2019 [8 favorites]


>He chose his path in life<

He became a heroin addict before 18. I've known some teenagers and some addicts. There are moments of lucidity and free will in their lives, but they don't last long, and they permit only small changes. It takes putting a few together under favorable circumstances to get significant results.

Once he is in jail, isn't his ability to make bad choices supposed to be sharply restricted? Isn't that the point of jail?
posted by ckridge at 8:08 AM on May 22, 2019 [6 favorites]


Once he is in jail, isn't his ability to make bad choices supposed to be sharply restricted? Isn't that the point of jail?
Maybe it just presents a different menu of bad choices to choose from :(
posted by milnews.ca at 8:13 AM on May 22, 2019 [8 favorites]


If the best reason you can have for killing an inmate and a guard (Not that there's great reasons, though there may be justifications) is 'He wouldn't keister some dope & he smudged my art' then yeah, maybe you deserve some alone time (Personally, there was a time when I think I could probably swing constant isolation, but 1) I was not a healthy person and 2) I would have needed a lot of books).

Always-on lighting is actual, literal torture, though.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:16 AM on May 22, 2019 [3 favorites]




If you're in the US, you can watch Frontline's documentary on solitary confinement, which for me was the first time I I had seen what it's really like.
posted by baptismal at 8:28 AM on May 22, 2019 [4 favorites]


What does one to with a murderer who continues to kill people when in custody, and remains a threat to other inmates and to prison staff? Chain them up in the presence of others? ...

A sheet of 3/4" plexiglass with regular perforated sections and accompanying baffles to prevent any physical object from passing through. You can socialize with other people without being able to physically harm them.

We just solved the "solitary confinement vs judicial amputation" dilemma using technology found in movie theater ticket windows and federal passport offices.
posted by 0xFCAF at 8:43 AM on May 22, 2019 [32 favorites]


I'm not about to second-guess the ACLU. The fact that he was a bad person doesn't negate his civil rights. That's pretty much the whole point. If you're willing to take it for granted on the word of the incarcerators that there's no other way to deal with a human being than to put them in solitary confinement for 40+ years, more power to you. Anyway, here's more information:

"In court documents appealing for his release from solitary confinement, Mr. Silverstein apologized in 2011 to the family of the slain prison guard and to his own children “because,” he said, “their father was not there for them.”

He said that being incarcerated most of his life had changed him. “I didn’t come in here a killer, but in here you learn to hate,” he told Mr. Earley in 1992. “The insanity in here is cultivated by the guards. They feed the beast that lingers within all of us.”

He said he had been a model prisoner since 1983, when he was first denied human contact, and by 2007 he had become an advocate for the mentally ill on a blog that his family and friends maintained in his name. All the while, his own mental state improved, he said."
posted by schwinggg! at 8:50 AM on May 22, 2019 [21 favorites]


This does not seem to me to be the case where you want to make your stand against solitary confinement. He was killing people while in jail.

I disagree. I actually think we have to look at the worst cases and how we have to be humane even in the face of awfulness. If you point to people “wrongly” put in solitary confinement, then the argument becomes fix the things that got the wrong people in solitary. I’d rather we stand up and say “this is inhumane, and something we don’t do to even the worst in our society.”

I wonder if that is what the aclu is doing here.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 9:00 AM on May 22, 2019 [38 favorites]


No cruel and unusual punishment. That's part of the whole deal. Solitary is cruel and unusual, full stop.
posted by agregoli at 9:06 AM on May 22, 2019 [20 favorites]


I don't care one way or another about this guy... but there have been really horrific abuses of solitary confinement, like the Angola 3 who spent *40 years* in solitary for organizing a chapter of the Black Panthers at Louisiana State Penitentiary.

The ACLU makes a point of not caring about the particulars when they are advocating a broader point and they previously advocated for the Angola 3 and won the case.

Https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/16/how-albert-woodfox-survived-solitary/amp

The point is that if the law allowing solitary confinement is a bad law then it is a bad law period, for anyone. The ACLU probably chose to represent this guy *because* he's unsympathetic to make this point.
posted by subdee at 9:19 AM on May 22, 2019 [12 favorites]


This does not seem to me to be the case where you want to make your stand against solitary confinement.

It's very simple: just replace the phrase "solitary confinement" with "torture". Doing this to another human being, even terrible ones, is torture.

You are using the same logic as "we must torture this terrorist in order to save lives." The means don't justify the ends.
posted by bradbane at 9:39 AM on May 22, 2019 [22 favorites]


It's a little weird to me that the incurably "Most Violent Prisoner in America" is someone who's only been accused of 4 murders, one of which got overturned and one of which appears to be a pretty clear-cut case of self-defense (and likely encouraged by the prison staff by the look of it), and hadn't done anything of note for more than 30 years. Of course even murdering two people is serious, but I'd be shocked if a handful of incidents from the 80s is actually the worst record of violence in our prison system.
posted by Copronymus at 9:54 AM on May 22, 2019 [12 favorites]


It's a little weird to me that the incurably "Most Violent Prisoner in America" is someone who's only been accused of 4 murders,

It's because someone who continues to break the law while already subject to maximum state punishment is a severe existential threat to state power.
posted by schwinggg! at 9:58 AM on May 22, 2019 [7 favorites]


Mod note: One deleted. Please don't make this about other people here, telling people what they must be thinking, making it a characterization of other people in the conversation like "you people think torture is ok", etc. Just make your points about the facts in the world, about solitary being wrong/torture/etc period, not centered on other people in the thread.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:02 AM on May 22, 2019 [4 favorites]


It's very simple: just replace the phrase "solitary confinement" with "torture". Doing this to another human being, even terrible ones, is torture.

Torture is inflicting severe pain for punishment, to make someone do or say something, or for pleasure. Motive is part of the definition. In this case, the motive was to keep Silverstein from killing people.

A sheet of 3/4" plexiglass with regular perforated sections and accompanying baffles to prevent any physical object from passing through. You can socialize with other people without being able to physically harm them.

This might work. Something like this might well work. It would be expensive, but we could make up the cost by cutting back on the number of people we imprison.
posted by ckridge at 10:10 AM on May 22, 2019 [3 favorites]


Solitary is torture. Locking someone away from everyone else is not the same as locking them in a box. They don't get a studio apartment.

It's used as a punishment because it is cruel and unusual treatment. If the idea is to lock them away until they either away, it's a sentence of death by torture.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 10:18 AM on May 22, 2019 [8 favorites]


Solitary is torture. This has been as scientifically proven as can be. We don't torture people, or we're not supposed to, at least. There's no other position that is logical under the U.S. legal system.
posted by agregoli at 10:26 AM on May 22, 2019 [15 favorites]


ckridge "Torture is inflicting severe pain for punishment, to make someone do or say something, or for pleasure. Motive is part of the definition. In this case, the motive was to keep Silverstein from killing people."

Dude killed a guard, I'd say there was definitely an element of "inflicting severe pain for punishment" involved in him spending decades in solitary.

I spent a week in solitary confinement. I could feel my brain coming unglued. Anybody who says they think they could handle it, or would be fine with it has no idea what they're talking about. It is torture.

Side note: Aryan Brotherhood (Ace Deuce to anybody who's ever gone through the system) is by FAR the most feared prison gang. I am white, have a buzzcut, am covered in tattoos, and am physically very muscular - straight out of the AB playbook. Every jail and prison (something like 7 or 8 in total) I went through, people asked me if I was affiliated and I ALWAYS made sure to make it VERY clear that I was not (It could have been very bad for me if somebody who was actually affiliated thought I was being ambiguous, whereas nobody would have cared if I was just a standard unaffiliated nazi). Even though I explicitly denied membership, I think the reason that nobody REALLY tested me in 5 years was because they were wary that I did have an affiliation and that was enough to send all the predators to go looking for softer targets.
posted by youthenrage at 11:18 AM on May 22, 2019 [35 favorites]


I disagree. I actually think we have to look at the worst cases and how we have to be humane even in the face of awfulness. If you point to people “wrongly” put in solitary confinement, then the argument becomes fix the things that got the wrong people in solitary. I’d rather we stand up and say “this is inhumane, and something we don’t do to even the worst in our society.”

Quoting this because I can only give it one favorite. The United States is an incredibly cruel and violent society compared to other developed nations, and this is in large part because too many citizens view the ideas of a social safety net and the social contract as foreign, or even abhorrent. Invariably the stories of “the worst/most violent/most unrepentant criminal in America comprise an endless cascade of failures to intervene in someone’s life in a positive way with some form of incarceration the preferred alternative. For example, see the story of Willie Bosket, whose heritage of violence was traced all the way to antebellum Edgefield County, South Carolina by Fox Butterfield in his book All God’s Children. (Booknotes interview, transcript). And of course the availability of firearms doesn’t help, as it turns many otherwise minor confrontations lethal, thereby bringing the full force of the judicial system down on people who never got a fair deal to begin with.
posted by TedW at 11:28 AM on May 22, 2019 [17 favorites]


Dude killed a guard, I'd say there was definitely an element of "inflicting severe pain for punishment" involved in him spending decades in solitary.

Sure, but there was also no other actually existing way of keeping him from killing more people. People working in the criminal justice system are permitted to defend themselves and obligated to defend inmates. Even if his suffering was great, and even if they took satisfaction in his suffering, it was self-defense and defending other inmates, not torture. If one is allowed to kill in self-defense, one is a fortiori allowed to cause suffering in self-defense.

So far, we have one sketchy outline of a proposed alternative to leaving Silverstein in solitary till he died. I will propose another, more limited alternative. We know that rates of violent crime are very low among 50-year-olds. We know that Silverstein had heart trouble. There must have been some point at which releasing him from solitary would have presented a risk more acceptable than continuing to cause him suffering.
posted by ckridge at 12:03 PM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


Doesn't matter if the prison felt it was self defense. Their solution was to torture him. Which is against the law and morally abhorrent. There is no legal or moral justification that makes sense. They are obligated to find a solution that is not torture.
posted by agregoli at 12:20 PM on May 22, 2019 [8 favorites]


You said it yourself! The prison is obligated to defend, which means protect, its inmates. That includes mental health. So since we know solitary is mental torture, they are harming an inmate in their care. Illegal, and morally wrong.
posted by agregoli at 12:24 PM on May 22, 2019 [4 favorites]


They are obligated to find a solution that is not torture.

No, the prison officials are obligated to operate according to the laws and regulations binding them, which require supermax solitary confinement in cases like this. It would have been wholly unacceptable to let Silverstein kill another guard or inmate because putting him in solitary would make him suffer.

We as a society are obligated to come up with a solution that causes less suffering. So far we have confining him is a pyrex box from which he can speak with other prisoners, but which he cannot leave; and letting him out when he gets past some given age.
posted by ckridge at 12:34 PM on May 22, 2019


If one is allowed to kill in self-defense, one is a fortiori allowed to cause suffering in self-defense.

Logical fallacy, regularly rejected in legal argument.

I've actually long wondered how much our racial issues have been aggravated by certain state prison systems' effectively abandoning control to race-segregated gangs once mass incarceration began eroding their previous control mechanisms (California prisons openly admit to segregating housing by race due to gangs; you can see it on Lockup), so that even those going in without particular racial animus tend to get pressured into participating in a racial form of conflict. Most of those white boys get out eventually, and the effect generally seems to be to turn an already-shaky lot into complete garbage characters.
posted by praemunire at 12:47 PM on May 22, 2019 [12 favorites]


I think an important distinction here is between being physically isolated and the kinds of conditions found in "solitary confinement" in the US. He was allowed access to an exercise area for an hour a day, another otherwise held in a small room with the lights always on. Are people really arguing that the only conceivable options are that, replacing the small room with a clear version of the small room, or death?

In calling the current system cruel and unnecessary, it's not required that we have a fully-formed replacement. The fully-formed replacement is that we break the cycle of violence and prevent people from becoming so broken that something like this becomes appealing. In the meantime, there are many available reforms that are conceivable: lights that turn off, more space to exercise in and more access to it, fewer limits on visits and phone calls, the ability to talk to other prisoners even if they can't interact directly, etc, etc, etc. We can do many things differently, but we are choosing not to do so. It's punitive and unnecessary, and it's torture.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:53 PM on May 22, 2019 [21 favorites]


damn, praemunire, that is a terrifying thought when coupled with mass incarceration, and I am certain you're right.
posted by schwinggg! at 1:02 PM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


If one is allowed to kill in self-defense, one is a fortiori allowed to cause suffering in self-defense.

Logical fallacy, regularly rejected in legal argument.


Could you please say where the fallacy lies and give an example of a legal case where the argument was rejected?
posted by ckridge at 1:03 PM on May 22, 2019


No, the prison officials are obligated to operate according to the laws and regulations binding them

Which includes them not torturing their inmates - because it's against the law. Inmates have rights, same as you and me. They have the right to not be tortured.

Vibratory manner of working has it right. Maybe there's a way to have confinement so they cannot harm someone else (in my opinion, that includes actual PROGRAMS and EDUCATION and ANGER MANAGEMENT and MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT and REGULAR HEALTH CARE, which many inmates who AREN'T violent don't get either), but the current system is torture.
posted by agregoli at 1:03 PM on May 22, 2019 [5 favorites]


We as a society are obligated to come up with a solution that causes less suffering. So far we have confining him is a pyrex box from which he can speak with other prisoners, but which he cannot leave; and letting him out when he gets past some given age.
posted by ckridge at 12:34 PM on May 22 [+] [!]


You know, criminal justice policies actually shouldn't be crowdsourced on the internet. It's not something you can logic through "we as a society." These are things people need to study and understand better as experts .
posted by schwinggg! at 1:04 PM on May 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


He chose his path in life; it led to living his remaining days in a small room, alone.

There is not a person on the planet who has chosen their path in life.
posted by aedison at 1:47 PM on May 22, 2019 [15 favorites]


Interesting timing as I just finished reading Inside: The Hot House about Leavenworth which features Silverstein in some scenes. It doesn't seem like much changed with his status since that book was written until his death, which is amazing considering it is more than 25 years old. Far from being a valued member of society as he may be, it's hard to see the long term of his isolation as anything other than retribution in the context of the book's perspective.
posted by feloniousmonk at 3:28 PM on May 22, 2019


No, the prison officials are obligated to operate according to the laws and regulations binding them, which require supermax solitary confinement in cases like this.

I can't tell you how horrifying it is to read this and to see someone say that national law is the basis of what actions are legal. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an obligation on all governments, whether they accept it or not. Separating out the source of human rights from the organisations most likely to impinge on them is fundamental to them being respected.

Solitary confinement is inhumane, and I cannot believe how many people here are wringing their hands and saying "well, what can we do?". Every other country has some level of prison violence too, and they make systems that fix that. And other developed countries have lower prison murder rates than the US.

It's not OK, and it needs to be fixed.
posted by ambrosen at 4:38 PM on May 22, 2019 [16 favorites]


Sure, but there was also no other actually existing way of keeping him from killing more people.

It's ludicrous to say that the only way to keep someone in a highly secure, surveilled environment from killing someone is to torture them. You can allow verbal and visual contact without physical contact. You can turn off the lights. You can use your complete authority over the physical space to make sure they aren't armed. Prison violence is accepted in America (see e.g. prison rape jokes). It's only necessary to torture Silverstein in a system where violence and torture are normalized.
posted by Mavri at 7:08 PM on May 22, 2019 [9 favorites]


Could you please say where the fallacy lies and give an example of a legal case where the argument was rejected?

Here is an exceptionally simple case, modelled on the current example. Most people concede morally the right to hunt and kill animals as a pleasure occupation, and even more for the ultimate pleasure it yields of allowing one to dine upon animal flesh. Many people would nonetheless reject morally the torture of animals for the inherent pleasure the torturer took in it, and a smaller, but still significant, group accepts the killing of animals for the ultimate end of the pleasure of eating animal flesh while considering torturing the animal to attain that end morally unacceptable.

A more legal example is that Congress may by statute create inferior (i.e., not the Supreme) courts and establish legal standards for them to apply--but cannot dictate the result in an individual case. See the discussion in Bank Markazi v. Peterson, 578 U.S. 1 (2016).

The doctrine of unconstitutional conditions is also founded on a rejection of the principle.

It's not always wrong, but it is very obviously limited in its applicability.
posted by praemunire at 7:28 PM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


You know, criminal justice policies actually shouldn't be crowdsourced on the internet. It's not something you can logic through "we as a society." These are things people need to study and understand better as experts .
So you want the government to decide? They already did. They decided solitary was the solution.

So, maybe we, the people maybe should ... talk about it a bit, see if we can change each others’ minds, reach some consensus, whatever? In spite of the dizzying display of fallacies in this thread, talking about it is supposed to be how people decide what they think in a democracy, especially when it is something that affects the public welfare.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 7:38 PM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


Reminds me of one of the reasons I chose to return home from the US.
posted by signal at 8:18 PM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


Agree with others above that the treatment is horrifying, no matter the crimes. And also noted, as above, that he only killed on the inside. He entered for armed robbery to support a heroin habit as a teen, and from the limited information given in the article, sounds like he didn’t have the easiest start in life, either—mom in jail when pregnant with him, mom also involved in crime, etc.

But I’m really stuck on the idea that he deserved this because the law said so. Maybe I’m misreading here, but it seems no court or judge sentenced him to 26 years of solitary. Instead, it was the nominated Bureau of Prisons Director, who felt that because there was no death penalty available for the crime of killing a warden, Silverstein should instead spend his life without human contact. (Yes, the courts later upheld that this did not constitute unusual punishment, but if the original “sentence” is arbitrary, how can that be?) I don’t understand how this is reasonable or just, or how or why a nominated official can and does have the power to make this decision. Yes, the crimes inside were heinous, but—again as above—this is torture, which goes against international human rights law.
posted by stillmoving at 11:43 PM on May 22, 2019 [3 favorites]


Y'know, it's worth mentioning that Silverstein was put in jail at 23, for armed robbery committed with his dad and his cousin, and sentenced to 15 years at Leavenworth for stealing less than $11,000. It was three years into that sentence that the Aryan Brotherhood ties and he was accused of two murders.

You're wondering "What should the system have done?" It shouldn't have fucked up that bad in the first place, over those three years, to let it get to that point. It shouldn't have driven him to the gang, and let him be made into a murderer. It should have done better from the start. This didn't just happen, this was done to him.
posted by kafziel at 2:33 AM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


Could you please say where the fallacy lies and give an example of a legal case where the argument was rejected?

Here is an exceptionally simple case, modelled on the current example. Most people concede morally the right to hunt and kill animals as a pleasure occupation, and even more for the ultimate pleasure it yields of allowing one to dine upon animal flesh. Many people would nonetheless reject morally the torture of animals for the inherent pleasure the torturer took in it, and a smaller, but still significant, group accepts the killing of animals for the ultimate end of the pleasure of eating animal flesh while considering torturing the animal to attain that end morally unacceptable.


This case is not modeled on the current case. What is rejected in the case of hunters torturing animals in order to eat them is first making animals suffer and then killing them, which is clearly worse than just killing them. What is done in the case of prisoners who kill repeatedly in prison is to make them suffer solitary confinement rather than killing them, which the prisoners themselves would likely agree is better than killing them.
posted by ckridge at 7:25 AM on May 23, 2019


This is so sad.

It sounds like all of this could have been completely prevented if he'd been able to get appropriate care for substance abuse and had some opportunity and stability in his life, like what if we had a real actual social safety net that was about helping each other instead of kicking people when they're down.

This seems to be a theme for him, as described in the article:

In 1981, Mr. Silverstein and another inmate, Clayton Fountain, were convicted of murdering Robert Chappelle, a member of the D.C. Blacks prison gang. During the trial, the gang’s national leader, Raymond (Cadillac) Smith, was transferred to Marion, apparently intent on killing Mr. Silverstein in revenge. (Prison officials, Mr. Silverstein said later, were aware of the threats but “didn’t take any action to make me safe.”)

This sounds absolutely typical of prison staff, who are often pretty into holding power over inmates and not interested in going out of their way on anything, a "who cares if these assholes kill each other?" attitude. Or, in his words,

He said that being incarcerated most of his life had changed him. “I didn’t come in here a killer, but in here you learn to hate,” he told Mr. Earley in 1992. “The insanity in here is cultivated by the guards. They feed the beast that lingers within all of us.”

and again, the anemic response:

“I don’t know what else could have been done to prevent further violence by a man who had nothing to lose.”

Yeah, wow, maybe not torturing him? Not using torture as a regular part of prison? Over my career I've worked with a lot of people who have had DOC involvement, almost all of whom have been utterly terrified of being sent to the hole. The exception: sex offenders in administrative protection, who are typically more afraid of being beaten to death in genpop, but it's the kind of obvious exception that makes clear how unsafe prison is for inmates and how much the prison system just dismisses humane treatment as even a goal.

We need social safety nets. This is not an acceptable outcome for us as a society.
posted by bile and syntax at 8:44 AM on May 23, 2019 [9 favorites]


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