by Sid Holt
His relationship with Pearcy, whom he met in a bar in Kansas, was elemental. “We smoked dope together,” Dailey said simply. He insisted that he had nothing to do with Boggio’s murder and that he believed Pearcy was driving Boggio home when Pearcy left the house with the teenager, and he went to sleep.
Dailey understood that any chance of proving his innocence was lost when Skalnik took the stand. “I never talked to Paul Skalnik in my life,” he told me, his voice rising. “We all knew he was an infamous snitch and an ex-police officer. We knew everything about him. We knew how many guys he had snitched on. There wasn’t any hiding the fact. The officers would tell us! The officers that worked in the dang jail, they’d say, ‘Don’t talk to him.’
“It was impossible for him to get my confession the way he said he got it,” he continued. Even if Skalnik—under protective custody, and a stranger to Dailey, no less—had somehow managed to strike up a conversation, the distance between the two men would have prohibited any sort of meaningful or intimate discussion. “He would’ve had to holler at me,” Dailey said. “And I would have had to speak loudly to confess to him.”
Dailey told me something that he’d thought back to many times over the years: He had been moved from one cell to another shortly before his trial was slated to begin. Jail logs, in which inmates’ cell assignments are recorded, confirm that on May 1, 1987—just eighteen days before Dailey’s scheduled trial—Dailey was moved from the lower G wing of the jail to the upper G wing, where Skalnik was held. “Right away, I told the sergeant, I said, ‘Get me out of here,’ ” Dailey told me. “ ‘This is a damn setup.’ ” Skalnik claimed to have elicited Dailey’s confession just two days later. Five days after that, he was talking to the state attorney’s office. It was one of many troubling facts that the jury in Dailey’s trial never heard.
Dailey’s stay of execution will remain in place through December 30. After that, Governor DeSantis can set a new execution date for as soon as January. When that day comes, Dailey will be asked to walk from his cell to the execution chamber, where he will lie down on the gurney. Leather restraining straps will be fastened across his body, and an IV line will be inserted into his arm. Finally, the signal will be given to the executioner to begin the flow of lethal drugs. At that moment, the State of Florida will be asking its citizens to trust that Dailey killed Shelly Boggio that night beside the dark water and that he received a fair trial and that justice has finally been served. It will be asking them, as it has time and time again, to believe the word of Paul Skalnik.
Piper Kerman
We’ve Normalized Prison
Washington Post Magazine
WINNER—SINGLE-TOPIC ISSUE
“A nation that locks up so many people and creates an expansive apparatus that relies on violence and confinement is a nation in which democracy, over the long term, cannot thrive,” writes Piper Kerman in this short article, which served as the introduction to a special issue of the Washington Post Magazine simply titled “Prison.” Kerman is, of course, the author of Orange Is the New Black, and like every other writer, illustrator and photographer who contributed to this issue, she has seen prison from the inside—in her case, thirteen months in a federal penitentiary for money laundering and drug trafficking (the artist who illustrated Kerman’s story, Thomas Bartlett Whitaker, was minutes away from being executed for the murder of his mother and brother when his sentence was commuted; he is now serving life without parole). “Prison” earned the Washington Post Magazine the 2020 National Magazine Award for Single-Topic Issue—the magazine’s first nomination and first award in any category.
When I was twenty-two, in the early 1990s, I committed a crime. More than a decade later, I was sent to federal prison for thirteen months for that crime—a first-time drug offense. In 2010, I published a book about my experience, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. The title is not only a sarcastic joke about orange jumpsuits but also a reference to the fact that the population of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people in the United States has exploded: we lock up more of our own people than any other nation in history, and beyond the 2.3 million people confined on any given day, more than 73 million American adults have some sort of criminal record.
The reach of the American criminal punishment systems stretches to clutch far more people than many imagine. I know this not only from being incarcerated but also from teaching nonfiction writing classes in state prisons. My students’ stories bravely reveal difficult personal truths and bring to light much wider realities in a way that only lived experience really can. What incarcerated writers’ voices illustrate is that the American criminal justice system does not solve the problems—violence, mental illness, addiction—that it claims to address.
If prison curbed drug addiction or the ills that surround it, we would not be in the grip of an overdose crisis, having locked up unprecedented millions of people for drugs for more than four decades. If the threat of criminal punishment were effective against violence, then we would not see persistent and unequal rates of harm concentrated in some communities or against women or LGBTQ people. If we considered our failure to help children who witness or are targeted by violence alongside our unique willingness to sentence children to die in prison, perhaps more people would see our criminal punishment system for the vicious ouroboros that it is.
Indeed, far from solving our problems, the carceral state is causing a massive one: A nation that locks up so many people and creates an expansive apparatus that relies on violence and confinement is a nation in which democracy, over the long term, cannot thrive. For centuries, the U.S. political economy has relied on millions being sidelined from democratic participation, most notably African Americans and, before 1920, women. Violence, in the form of lynching, was always important to limit democracy in this country (and agents of law enforcement were often complicit). As we near 2020, civic exclusion is still a critical tool for those invested in preserving an inequitable status quo, and the policies surrounding mass incarceration are invaluable for continuing to deny participation to millions of Americans.
Last year, the citizens of Florida voted to amend the state constitution to allow people like me, with felony convictions, to regain the right to vote after returning home. Quickly and shamelessly, the Florida legislature and governor responded by passing a poll tax to prevent those voters—disproportionately people of color and poor people—from having a voice. Many other states also restrict voting rights of prisoners or ex-prisoners, especially states with large African American populations—not a coincidence, as they remain overly targeted and punished by the criminal justice system. As a result, we have not only normalized prison but normalized the exclusion of large groups of people from participating in our democracy.
It’s important to remember that law is made and administered by those in power—and the less democratic we are, the less just the legal system will be. That’s why police officers or Stanford athletes who rape get sentences of six months or probation while some of my students have served two decades for similar crimes and are still in prison. Prisons and jails do not serve feminist goals—few institutions are more hierarchical, more dominance-oriented, more patriarchal, and totally reliant on the threat and promise of violence. Being subject to violence does not make you less likely to enact it. We are at a moment in time when state violence—whether it’s violence perpetrated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents against children and families, police violence documented on smartphones, or a woman paralyzed in a beating by prison workers—is coming into sharper relief for all Americans, even those who have not been targets of the state. If you’re outraged by what you see the government doing with federal courts and detention facilities, look closely at what your local sheriff, prosecutors, and judges are doing, too.
Recent news stories about young children and families who are separated at the U.S.-Mexico border and held in desperate conditions in private prisons and public jails nationwide bewild
er and disgust many Americans. But, in fact, the U.S. government has been separating families and punishing children throughout history, most notably African American and Native American families and children. Native American girls have the highest incarceration rate in our juvenile prisons, and that’s not because they are perpetrating a crime wave. The most marginalized girls in the United States are often jailed for truancy, for homelessness due to abuse, for things that are not actually crimes, because as a community we have no substantive response to their lack of safety, other than a cage. Better approaches are well-understood but don’t have political currency because the people who need them are considered expendable or even threatening by those in power.
At this watershed moment, it’s critical for each of us to pause and ask: Why is all this happening? Am I okay with it? Whom am I listening to? What should I do? If the only people we listen to on questions of law and public safety are the people who hold the power to make or impose laws, ask yourself why, and whether they are actually trustworthy. We have to be especially wary of granting authority figures—many of whom have a deep stake in maintaining the status quo—exclusive control over what should count as “normal.”
Freedom and safety are too often imagined as being in opposition, but nothing could be further from the truth. Americans who have the most freedom—freedom to learn, freedom from illness, freedom of movement, freedom from violence—are invariably the safest, and the whitest, and the richest. We did this to ourselves: mass incarceration is a result of policies that have grown out of a history of slavery, colonialism, and punishment of the poor. Until we reconcile with these hard truths, by listening to the people most affected by the loss of freedom, we will fall far short of equity. We have a choice: We can permit injustice to remain a growth industry or we can elect to have a more fair, restorative, and effective system. And this isn’t an abstract choice—it is one you will make today, and tomorrow, and next week. Ending mass incarceration is imperative for democracy, safety, and freedom. Do you see what is happening in your own community? And are you ready to do your part?
Keri Blakinger
Can We Build a Better Women’s Prison?
Washington Post Magazine
WINNER—SINGLE-TOPIC ISSUE
In their prefatory note to “Prison,” the editors of the Washington Post Magazine said that “at a time when the subject of prison reform is receiving more attention than it has in decades, this special issue seeks to inform the conversation by focusing on American prisons and the lives of the people inside.” It is this purpose—and a sense of shared experience—that suffuses Keri Blakinger’s “Building a Better Women’s Prison.” Now a reporter for the Marshall Project, Blakinger still remembers the humiliation she experienced when she was a prisoner, as “male guards saunter[ed] around our dorms, sometimes peering into cells and cubicles as we changed clothes.” The judges who awarded the Washington Post Magazine the National Magazine Award for Single-Topic Issue commended the editors not only for the comprehensiveness of the “Prison” issue but also for “overcoming the significant logistical barriers to commissioning and editing work by incarcerated writers and artists.”
Lauren Johnson walked into the aging Travis County jail just outside Austin on a sunny Friday in July 2018 and steeled herself. Every time she passed through the door and the smell hit her, it all came rushing back: the humiliation of being shackled while nine months pregnant. The pang of seeing her children from behind a glass barrier. How she’d had to improvise with what little she had, crafting makeshift bras out of the disposable mesh underwear the jail provided. Between 2001 and 2010, she’d been in and out of the facility six times. Altogether, she’d spent about three and a half years of her life incarcerated.
Now she was returning to the jail, eight years after the last time she’d been released. But this time, it was to ask the incarcerated women questions that would’ve been unfathomable to her during her time there: What did they want? How could their experience be improved?
Johnson wore bold prints and her best jewelry that morning, and purposefully doused herself in perfume. She remembered how deprived she’d felt when she was inside; she wanted the women to see and smell the vibrancy of life beyond the razor wire. She sat in a dank jail classroom, surrounded by a dozen or so women wearing dingy uniforms. She told them about her past, then asked about their futures, and the future of the jail that housed them.
“Could we work for deodorant?” one woman asked. Like shampoo, conditioner, and other basic hygiene supplies, deodorant cost money at the commissary, and the women had no income. There were other problems: They weren’t given bras or tampons (a possible security concern, according to the facility’s medical director). They wanted access to education and to fresh vegetables. They wanted to see the sunlight more. “Basic f_____ing needs,” Johnson told me.
As a criminal justice outreach coordinator with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, Johnson is part of a committee of six women formed by the Travis County Sheriff’s Office in early 2018 to plan a new building, one that aims to set a higher standard for a women’s jail. The current structure is made up of twelve rundown housing units at the correctional complex in Del Valle, a suburb just over seven miles southeast of the pink capitol dome. The buildings on the suburban campus date to the 1980s and are starting to show signs of age, with peeling paint and recurring electrical and plumbing problems. Officials want better space for programs, and the facility isn’t set up to house all the women together. Instead, they’re spread out across five buildings, making it harder to foster a sense of community.
These were all problems Johnson remembered well, and she walked out the door feeling relieved that she could leave. But she was also brooding about what she’d heard, and how to incorporate the women’s wishes into the sheriff’s office’s reform effort. What would a state-of-the-art women’s jail—one focused on rehabilitation and second chances instead of punishment and retribution, with an eye to women’s specific needs—look like?
* * *
The American prison system was built with men in mind. The uniforms are made to fit male bodies. About 70 percent of the guards are men. The rules are made to control male social structures and male violence. It’s an outgrowth of necessity: even though the female prison population has grown twice as fast as the male prison population over the past thirty-five years, about 90 percent of incarcerated adults are men. Pop culture reflected this invisibility, too, until 2013, when the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black brought the struggles of women in prison to millions of viewers.
Men and women have similarly abysmal recidivism rates—five out of six prisoners released from state lockups are arrested again within nine years, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics—but women are incarcerated for different reasons and bring with them different histories. They’re more likely to commit nonviolent crimes, involving theft, fraud, and drugs. They have slightly higher rates of substance abuse than men, are more likely to be the primary caregiver of a young child, and typically earn less money than their male counterparts before getting locked up.
The system does little to account for such differences. Women tend to pose a lower risk of violence, but they’re still subject to the same classifications as men—so they’re often ranked at a higher security level than necessary, and, as a result, can be blocked from educational and treatment programs. And when violations do happen, they’re often nonviolent offenses, like talking back to a guard. Whereas men might alter their clothes to show gang affiliation, women might do the same for style or fit, yet both could result in disciplinary action. On top of that, women often have fewer programming options, such as education, job training and twelve-step programs. This is, in part, a matter of economy of scale. Because there are fewer women in prison, there are fewer rehabilitative and training programs for them.
These are all things I’ve experienced firsthand. Before I became a reporter, I did time. After nearly a decade addicted to drugs, I got
arrested in late 2010 with a Tupperware container full of heroin. When I set foot in a county jail in upstate New York for the first time, I noted the basic inequalities there. Women were offered one volunteer-led twelve-step class per week, while men had four. There wasn’t a low-security housing area for women, while there were four for the men. Women couldn’t be “trusties,” meaning the inmates who served as porters and janitors and got extra privileges; men could.
The cellblock toilets were visible from the hallway, allowing passing male inmates and guards to see as you sat down to use the bathroom or change a pad. After I was transferred to a state prison, I watched male guards saunter around our dorms, sometimes peering into cells and cubicles as we changed clothes. It was a level of gender-specific shame and humiliation I did not know to expect, and at the time, I had no idea how widespread these sorts of problems were. Now, as a journalist focused on criminal justice, it’s my job to know and to see the data and patterns behind what I lived. But nine years later, I can still feel a rising blush of embarrassment in my cheeks as I write this.