As I bolted from the floor, leaving behind the heat, the stench, and the anguished cries, I felt like I was departing the gates of hell. As I hurried through the halls, all my carefully crafted rationale about solitary confinement being okay because it was legally sanctioned went right out the window. This punishment was absolutely cruel! And anyone who said otherwise had obviously never set foot inside one of these horrific units.
Back at the clinic, I prepared to do battle with MHAUII. The removal of a Bing inmate came in two parts: our decision that he should come out, and MHAUII’s agreement to accept him into one of their specialized cells. Since their small unit wasn’t only for Bing inmates but also for high-profile and otherwise odd cases, their eight cells were never empty. The arrival of a Bing inmate meant that an occupant of one of these cells needed to be relocated. For the MHAUII staff, these bumps were disruptive and time-consuming.
Sure enough, when I reached the MHAUII chief, he had a different take on things. “Smearing feces is the oldest trick in the book. You can’t let him manipulate you.”
“Listen,” I countered, “it’s over 100 degrees in there, he’s naked, and he’s covered in shit. He needs to come out.”
“This isn’t life and death. If you give in every time these Bing monsters act out, then you’re going to wind up with five hundred empty cells.”
Bing monsters! There it was again, and from our own staff! Though I heard these dehumanizing terms every day, I never got used to them. It seemed to me that when you can call someone a monster, or a skel, or a body, then it suddenly becomes okay to do whatever you want to them because they’re not really human beings. Yet the inmates I met with were not bodies. They were people. And when I stepped into these cells, what I saw was real blood, real thudding skulls, and actual human torment.
I didn’t care what the MHAUII chief said. Not having seen this man, not having felt his desperation, it was so easy to peg him as a malingerer. In some ways, the MHAUII staff was as removed as the public, who learn about solitary confinement in the newspapers by reading how some convict is “locked down twenty-three hours a day” and then turn the page. People have no clue what solitary means. But one prominent American knows exactly what it means. Senator John McCain was famously held as a POW during the Vietnam War. During his five-and-a-half-year captivity, he was beaten regularly, sustaining broken arms and broken legs. Two of those years were spent in solitary. Despite the trauma of his limbs being deliberately broken, what McCain found even worse was solitary confinement. He said, “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” Worse than beatings and broken bones! We’re horrified by what happened to McCain, yet somehow we don’t equate it with the treatment that we mete out every day right here in the United States!
The MHAUII chief and I had reached an uncomfortable impasse. But I wasn’t going to back down on this one. Even if they didn’t keep him for long, I was determined to get him out, even if it was for nothing more than the lousy bus ride to the other side of the island—“bus therapy,” as we called it.
“Fine, fine!” he said abruptly. “I’ll start the paperwork to bump somebody.”
“Thank you.”
When these conversations ended and my wishes prevailed, I always felt like a villain who’d just gotten away with something, and I resented being made to feel that way. Nonetheless, I was glad the call was over and the matter settled. Yet I knew my peace was short-lived and that within a day or two we’d rush to the cell of another desperate human being.
35
As the dog days of summer wore on, the suffering in the Bing weighed heavily on me, but I still needed to address practical concerns. Vacations had begun, and I had to scramble to maintain coverage by borrowing staff from other jails. But mostly I was worried about the audit. Ten days before the targeted audit date, I received a fax advising me to have thirty charts ready for review. Preparing for an audit involved a massive amount of detailed paperwork, and I called Hugh to see if it could be postponed until Kelly returned or at least until we had our clinical supervisor.
“Gee, Mary,” he said, “I’m sorry, but requesting a postponement sends the wrong message.”
“I’ll do the best I can,” I sighed.
“The best you can? Mary—it has to be good . . . it has to be perfect.”
I knew Hugh felt bad that Kelly wasn’t back, and although he offered to send an administrator from another jail to help me out, nothing came of it, and I was on my own in identifying thirty charts that could stand up to the scrutiny. For the next couple of weeks I stayed late into the night, studying charts, checking dates, reading written entries, looking for necessary signatures and required forms. The work was painstaking, but finally I had the files I needed.
On the appointed day, four hot and grumpy auditors showed up. Things immediately got off to a bad start when there was no place for them to sit. I never expected four of them, and I had grabbed only two spots in the clinic. Since clinic space was scarce, I was lucky to get that. The head auditor, Leslie, solved the problem by plopping down at Kelly’s desk and instructing her colleague to sit at the clinical supervisor’s desk. I was uncomfortable with this arrangement, but there were no other options, and I began my day while they worked a few feet away.
For a few moments, all was quiet, save for the whirring of fans. Suddenly, Leslie began flipping rapidly through the charts, one after another. Something was wrong. She turned to me and said, “What we want are charts on inmates who’ve been here six months, so we can gauge continuity of care. Can you please get us a batch of charts that reflect six months of treatment?”
“No, I can’t,” I said, surprised by my own abruptness. “No one said anything to me about this.”
“Well, we’re telling you now,” Leslie said assertively.
“It’s too late,” I said, just as assertively. Enough was enough.
Just then the phone rang. It was the Bing. Always the Bing. “You’re needed up here—second floor.”
While I was relieved to be getting away from Leslie, the Bing was not an appealing alternative. I hurried to the bathroom and lit up a cigarette. I took a couple of hard drags, my muscles slackened, and I slumped against the wall where the cold cinderblock felt good on my warm cheek. I looked up at the mirror, caught my reflection, and for a moment searched for the traces of the idealistic intern I’d once been. So much had changed. But there was little time to think about that now. Another crisis awaited. I flushed the butt, splashed cold water on my face, and headed up.
A wild scene awaited outside the second floor elevator. Officers in riot gear, led by Dep Mancuso, were converging on a cell. “Pull him out!” Mancuso shouted. No longer looking confident and composed, the dep was bedraggled. “Get him out, and onto the goddammed bus!”
Later on, I would learn that the occupant of the cell was refusing to come out because the bus would take him to court, where he was to receive a sentence of life in prison.
I sidestepped the commotion and started down the hall to see Dr. Christian, who was talking through the crack in the cell door to the distraught person inside. Although Mancuso had kept his word with the daily escort, considering the hundreds of inmates needing medication, a single escort could only ensure that a small number of inmates could be met with privately. Of necessity, we fell back on the cell-to-cell method.
“It’s going to be okay,” Christian shouted through the crack. “You’re going to be all right, my friend.”
“I’m gonna die in here, I’m gonna die!” came the muffled sobs from within.
“No, you’re not. We’re starting you on medication right now and it’ll calm you down. You’ll see. We’re just waiting for the nurse.”
“I’m going to take the cop-out! It’ll get me off Rikers Island and out of here.”
“Don’t make any
big decisions. You’ve only got ten days in here—some people are in here for years—you’re going to be fine. You’re going to be fine.”
“I didn’t even do anything to get a ticket! I swear, I didn’t! I didn’t do a thing.”
Christian stepped to the side of the cell and said, “It’s okay, Mary, false alarm—I’ve got this one.”
A reprieve. But my mind was already racing. This inmate’s protest, I didn’t do a thing! made me wonder. Several days earlier, a friendly officer nicknamed Smitty had stopped by my office for a cup of water and a quick break. As he was leaving, he pulled out his infraction pad and revealed something stunning. “I’ve got to go write up tickets. The way they’re loading up this island, they’re scrambling for beds. With five hundred beds in the Bing, they can’t afford to let one of them sit empty. Every time somebody goes into the hole, a GP bed opens up. We have our orders: ‘Write ’em up! Write ’em up!’ Let me go find some poor schmo. See you later, Miss B!”
Now, I wondered if the person in this cell was one of those “poor schmos.”
Although we’re led to believe that inmates in solitary confinement are the baddest of the bad, I found that claim to be highly exaggerated. In the beginning, I had actually hoped it was true as a means of helping me to justify this brutal punishment. But in the short time I’d been working in the Bing, I’d discovered that many of these cells’ occupants suffered from impulse control disorders. It’s not so much that they won’t behave, it’s that they can’t. I wondered if someday we wouldn’t look back at this primitive punishment and shake our heads. And then there are those in solitary like poor Keith Bargeman, who acted out in the hallway because his court suit had been stolen. Hardly the worst of the worst! And in terms of the most serious jailhouse infraction, “Assault on Staff,” after speaking with these offenders, I learned that the infraction usually came about when correctional personnel struck first and the inmate hit back. An unprovoked assault is rare, if for no other reason than there’s no escaping the most violent retribution for such an act, and every inmate knows it.
And even in cases of the very worst sociopath held in solitary, the question still remained: How could it be that a punishment that drives any human being—criminal or otherwise—to attempt suicide to escape it not be considered cruel and unusual?
Years later, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture would state that solitary confinement beyond fifteen days should be absolutely prohibited. Yet instead of reducing or seeking alternatives to solitary confinement, the nation has been on a chilling march to build more. Supermax prisons, made up solely of isolation cells for supposedly high-risk prisoners, house human beings inside these cells—not for thirty, sixty, or ninety days, but indefinitely, as a matter of routine. In supermaxes, things have been designed very carefully. For instance, the cells are padded, so that an inmate in desperate need of relief could bang his head continuously without risk of injury. In these more sophisticated, sinister units, the “problem of head-banging” has been overcome. For twenty years, these specialized prisons have been cropping up across the United States, the morality of their use unquestioned, unchallenged.
I headed back down to the clinic, more confused and despondent than ever.
When I arrived, the auditors were packing up, the audit complete. With the Bing still fresh in my mind, the audit now seemed trivial. Leslie curtly informed me that Central Office would be getting the results in two weeks. I mumbled polite good-byes as they left. Two weeks came and went, and true to form, Central Office never disclosed the results. But operating under the old adage that no news is good news, I presumed we had done well.
36
With the audit behind me, I breathed a little easier, but not for long. The termination of the limited license doctors was beginning, and our first casualty was a shocked Dr. Christian. As I had suspected, our doctors never knew they were being terminated. Dr. Diaz vowed to start calling in sick. “Let Central Office come over here and handle the Bing!”
I felt terrible for our doctors, but I didn’t want them to do anything rash. “Hold on,” I said. “You have every right to be angry, but right now they’re looking for reasons to fire people. Let’s not give them any. Let’s see if we can ride this out.”
Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe by the end of the summer they would all be axed anyway. But there was a little hope. Even though Central Office had procured a cadre of fully licensed doctors, whether they would actually stay on remained to be seen. All over the island, there were growing reports of newly arrived doctors quitting just as soon as they comprehended the bleak reality of their new workplace.
Although Drs. Grant and Ketchum had acclimated surprisingly well, jail had been a disaster for our other new additions, Fernando Dayrit and Vivian Tierney. Tierney didn’t last a week. After finishing one of her shifts, she waited outside for the route bus to take her to Control. Although a Gate One pass was part of her hiring package, it was still being processed. After an hour went by, Tierney began the forbidden walk to Control. She actually made it pretty far along the road before a security detail spotted her and ordered her into their jeep. Whisked into nearby AMKC, she was interrogated by a security captain. She quit the next day.
With similar incidents occurring, the installation of fully licensed doctors was falling apart fast. In my view—contract or not—we would of necessity be falling back on the services of the limited license doctors. In the meantime, my plan was to lie low and keep our remaining limited license doctors out of the firing line until the whole thing blew over.
As if this wasn’t enough, the doctor crisis coincided with yet another, more mundane one: a shortage of parking space. Due to an increased allotment of Gate One passes, cars with the privileged pass had exceeded OBCC’s parking lot capacity. Spillover vehicles were parking in a fire lane, and DOC’s security unit was issuing tickets.
“I’m not paying these!” Dr. Grant yelled. “I don’t think it’s asking too much to have a place to park my car!”
When the clinic manager told her to tone it down, reminding her of our status as “guests in their house,” Grant only became louder. “I’m sick of this ‘guests in their house’ crap! This isn’t their house! These jails are owned by the taxpayers! I’m not paying for these, and Central Office needs to do something about it!”
I liked Tarra Grant. And she was a good doctor. When she and Dr. Ketchum had learned of the physician replacement plan, they’d been extremely upset. Grant’s patience with Central Office was wearing thin.
I reported the parking problem to Hugh, who sighed heavily.
In protest, the entire clinic staff took to driving around the parking lot each morning in a procession, waiting for spots to open up. Inside, a nervous Captain Ryan was on his radio with the warden. “I’ve got fifty inmates signed up for sick call, another one having seizures in the Bing—and our doctors are driving around the parking lot.”
After a week of this, a beleaguered Captain Ryan gathered the clinic staff. “Look, folks—I think you need to write a petition to the warden.” Although directly approaching DOC was strictly taboo, everyone was too disgusted to care, and a petition was circulated. But when word of it got back to Central Office, our superiors were livid. Suzanne Harris informed us that Central Office had been working on a deal with DOC to resolve the parking problem, but because of this “highly inappropriate” action, the deal was off.
Of course, no one believed any deal was in the works to begin with, and our best hope was still the petition. But in the end, it was ignored, and we were simply left to duck out of the jail and try to move our cars in advance of the despised ticket writers.
* * *
By the end of July, I was exhausted. Since Kelly’s departure six weeks earlier, I hadn’t taken a day off, many evenings were spent in the office, and I was becoming concerned about a stubborn ache in my side that wasn’t going
away. Weekends brought little relief, as I was contacted about various crises. At night, I barely slept. By now I was chain-smoking. Furtive trips to the bathroom were over: a big ashtray sat right on my desk. But I was determined to make it to Kelly’s return. If I had been a conscientious therapist, I was an equally conscientious employee, doing my best on all fronts. But it was the Bing that continued to be my biggest worry. Each day, I entered a cell with our team and faced a human being unhinged by the rigors of solitary. Some babbled incoherently, others cowered in a corner. One man was trying to tear off an ear. We talked to them, evaluated their injuries, examined makeshift nooses, and then stepped out for the huddle, asking ourselves: Is he malingering? How far will he go? Could he lose the arm? Will he make it to tomorrow? Will he be dead tomorrow? As we looked into each other’s eyes, trying to make the right decision, I had an awareness that I was now a monitor of human suffering, and that all of us were making decisions that no person should ever be asked to make.
Just a couple more weeks, I told myself, just a couple more weeks. Kelly would return, and then I knew not what. But somehow Kelly’s return was the finish line.
In the meantime I had to hold it all together, and I was especially concerned about keeping medication for the Bing inmates from expiring, which was a disaster. The meds needed to be renewed in face-to-face encounters every two weeks, and with most of our regular psychiatrists out on vacation, I reluctantly turned to Fernando Dayrit, our newest staff member. Although he was starting to acclimate to the punitive unit, earlier in the week, the timing in a staged suicide was off; although the inmate survived, he’d broken his neck. When Dayrit learned about it, was understandably skittish about going back into the tower, but I was desperate to have the meds renewed. With clipboard in hand and an attached list of notes, I pleaded with him to go back in. I handed the clipboard to him and said, “Listen, it wasn’t that bad.”
Lockdown on Rikers Page 26