Six by Ten

by Mateo Hoke

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  29. McAllen, Texas, is a city of 140,000 that is part of the Reynosa-McAllen metropolitan area of 1.5 million on the Texas-Mexico border at Texas’s southern tip.

  30. Lew Sterrett Justice Center is one of five detention facilities within the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office. The facility houses more than 3,200 maximum-security inmates.

  31. Because gay, lesbian, and transgender people may face specific challenges while incarcerated, some facilities house these populations separately.

  32. “Miss Nell” is Nell Gaither, director of the Trans Pride Initiative, a Dallas nonprofit that works to empower the trans community.

  TRAVIS TRANI

  age: 46

  born in: Pueblo, Colorado

  interviewed in: Colorado Springs, Colorado

  Travis Trani grew up in a family of corrections officers—his dad and his uncle both worked in prisons in Colorado. When he was in high school, Travis had already made up his mind that he would join them. Travis started working in Colorado’s prisons at the age of twenty-one and has been working in them ever since.

  Travis first saw solitary confinement up close as a new corrections officer working in a medium-security prison. In the mid-1990s, the maximum time in solitary confinement for prisoners was sixty days. By the late 2000s, the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) had more than 1,500 people being held in long-term administrative segregation, many of whom had been there for years with no hope of release. In 2011, then executive director Tom Clements initiated a top-to-bottom review of Colorado’s solitary confinement practices.

  In 2012, Travis was put in charge of Colorado’s harshest prison, the Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP), and tasked with implementing what would eventually be among the most high-profile and successful efforts to reduce solitary confinement in the United States. In October 2017, CDOC announced that it had eliminated long-term solitary confinement: confinement in a cell for twenty-three hours a day is limited to no more than fifteen days (consistent with recommendations from the United Nations). Anyone confined longer than fifteen days will receive a minimum of four “out of cell” hours each day to interact with others and cannot be held in those conditions longer than twelve months.

  Travis now works at the CDOC headquarters. We interviewed him from a tidy office with large windows offering views of the Rocky Mountains. Travis’s suit and tie, along with his youthful features and quiet—almost deferential—manner of speaking, seems incongruous with the authority he wields within CDOC. During our conversations he explains why, after these reforms, he does not believe that Colorado can ever return to the old ways of solitary confinement.

  I WANTED TO DO SOME TYPE OF PUBLIC SERVICE

  I was born in 1972 in Pueblo, Colorado, and grew up east of Pueblo.33 My dad was a Vietnam veteran. He kinda bounced around jobs when I was younger. But when I was in middle school, he started working in corrections. I think his military background drew him to it. And my uncle also worked in corrections, so there was that connection. My father was hired on at Fremont Correctional Facility, at Cañon City, and then the CDOC opened Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility, and he actually went there.34 He liked what he did, the challenges that he faced every day. It seems like there’s something new always coming up. And then there’s the camaraderie with the staff. Yeah, he enjoyed what he did.

  I would hear my dad talk about work—how prisons operated and things that he saw. You know how intriguing that can be, especially when you’re a child, to hear what it’s like inside a prison. So that really sparked my interest. Growing up, I always knew I wanted to do some type of public service, and law enforcement kind of interested me. It seemed like it could be a challenge—to give to your community, I guess, and do something bigger than you.

  My mom was pretty much a stay-at-home mom until around the time I was in high school, and then she started working in daycare and then had home daycare for a while. I have an older sister who’s a teacher at South High in Pueblo. I don’t know her exact title, but she’s something like the chair of special education for the high school. So she also had a calling to public service.

  I was very quiet, very shy as a kid. I remember as a young child, I’d get in trouble with my parents because I was so shy I wouldn’t want to say hi to people—just manners, you know, to acknowledge someone and say hi. I’m pretty introverted.

  Pueblo was fairly middle class. They had the steel mill there. I can’t remember what year the steel mill went down, but a lot of people were laid off. There was a lot of unemployment in Pueblo when I was younger, but it was fairly middle class and it was fairly safe. I grew up east of Pueblo, which was more of a farming community. Immigrants would come in to work on the farms. They would come in the summertime and then be gone, and I don’t remember a lot of them going to school with us. In the summers, I mowed lawns for people. I worked at the Pueblo Trap and Skeet Club setting skeet machines. I worked at the supermarket. I worked at Little Caesar’s Pizza. I worked at a service station, a gas station.

  Growing up, I had one experience with crime. My cousin, who lived on the north side of Pueblo, had a paper route. I was helping him with his route one morning, and I remember we were talking, and I said, “Okay, I’ll go get this house,” and I rolled up the newspaper. I heard somebody say, “You’re not going to get any house,” and this guy came out of his house and actually shot a shotgun above us. I was scared to death. Yeah! So basically, we got the police involved. There was a whole criminal investigation. The man thought we were breaking into cars, and he was defending his property. That’s what he claimed. I still don’t know why he did it. We were in the middle of the road, not even near a car, on our bikes, with bags full of newspapers on us. Who knows why he did what he did.

  By high school, I pretty much knew I wanted to get into corrections or maybe on the federal side, like the marshals. I graduated from high school in ’91, and right away after high school, I went to get an associate’s degree in criminal justice because you had to have an associate’s degree to work corrections.

  I think my first impression during my internship was how confining that would be, to be an offender, to lose your rights and then be told when you eat, when you shower, when you can go recreate. I think that was kind of an eye-opener for me, to see that these are adults, older than me, and the staff are telling them what they can do. And the other thing I remember from that internship is some inmates were playing games with me because I was so young, trying to intimidate me.

  I turned twenty-one in November 1993, and then I was hired on in April 1994 and went into the academy. You had to be twenty-one. There were, I’d say, between thirty and forty in our class. I think everybody made it through.

  I WAS PRETTY GREEN

  I started work in Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City. Territorial is medium custody. They have close to nine hundred inmates, right around there.

  My first day on the job, I remember the staff didn’t know we were coming that night, and there were quite a few of us who went to Territorial from that academy. They weren’t really prepared for us all to be there. But I remember being assigned to the infirmary. They gave me a group of offenders to take down to the basement and supervise while they cleaned. And I didn’t know what I was doing; I was pretty green. So I remember the offenders, they pretty much wore me out that night, trying to get over on me, asking to go in different areas. And I wouldn’t let ’em go. I said no a lot that night. I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I just said no.

  I started on night shift. It was a sort of training shift. People wanted to get off the night shift as quickly as they could. I remember thinking there was a lot to learn. But it was difficult to learn things on night shift because there wasn’t a lot going on. So that was kind of a challenge, depending on where you worked. They had a lot of towers at that facility—they still do—and tower d
uty is boring. You just sit in the tower eight hours a night and watch. That was torture for me.

  At Territorial they had a punitive segregation unit, and I remember working that unit, feeding ’em in the mornings. Punitive seg’s different from administrative seg. It was an old cell house, and there was just the old jail steel, where the offenders could reach out and grab you, just the bars. And I remember feeding ’em in the morning. You’d line up a cart with trays on it, and they’d just open the door. And they’d come out and you’d get the trays. It was old school.

  We’d move around quite a bit on night shifts, so I don’t remember how long they would stay in punitive seg in those days. I want to say the maximum time in punitive segregation was sixty days for a murder. I don’t remember anybody being there for murder, but a lot would just go back to the general population at Territorial. They’d do their punitive seg time and go back.

  I was probably at Territorial a little over a year, and then San Carlos Correctional Facility was opening, and I put in a transfer to go there for two reasons: one, to come off night shifts; two, to experience something different. It was a new facility. I thought it was a good opportunity to go and experience opening the facility, just to see something different.

  PRISONS WEREN’T BUILT TO HOUSE MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE

  San Carlos was a mental health facility, so there was learning that balance between the clinical side and the security side. We didn’t have anything like it in the state, really. There were some units that were focused on mental health, but at San Carlos, the whole facility was dedicated to dealing with mentally ill offenders, so there was a strong presence of nursing staff in the units. There were nurses who actually worked in the units with the officers. It was blending that treatment side with the security side to make sure everybody stayed safe. There were some clinical staff who had never worked in a prison. They came from a therapeutic environment to an environment where you have offenders who are dangerous—some very dangerous there, some not so much. Trying to strike that balance and make sure everybody stays safe while we’re still meeting the needs of the offenders—that was always kind of a fine line.

  In the academy, I remember some training in mental health issues. And when I went to San Carlos, there was an orientation phase, and there was mental health training as part of that forty-hour orientation. The training prepares you; it gives you a good idea. But until you’re face to face with it? I mean, there’s nothing like the experience. And there were some sick people there, very sick people.

  San Carlos is situated on the state hospital grounds in Pueblo. So we would take a lot of offenders to the hospital there, the state hospital, or have ’em in the forensic unit, have to send them over there for treatment. And through school I knew about deinstitutionalization of the mental health hospitals. Yeah, there were a lot of times you would look at some of the offenders who were seriously mentally ill and wonder why they were here. Obviously, they committed a very heinous crime—that’s why they’re in prison—but is there another alternative? Because prisons weren’t built to house mentally ill people. There were the state hospitals, and then you had the prisons. But there was that shift over time. People were moved out of the state hospitals and were on the streets and committed crimes—they had to go somewhere, so they were sent to prisons.

  HE CUSSED ME UP ONE SIDE, DOWN THE OTHER

  I was at San Carlos about a year and a half, I would say. From San Carlos, I went to the state penitentiary as a sergeant, first on night shift and then on swing shift. Then I’d been an officer for about three years when I went to CSP, which was a 100 percent ad-seg facility.35 I was probably twenty-four, twenty-five years old. It was an eye-opener for me because I was used to communicating with offenders face to face and resolving issues.

  I remember, probably the first night on the job, an inmate just started banging on his door. Now, this is the graveyard shift. And I remember walking up to the cell just to talk to him, like I’d approach any other offender, and saying, “Hey, man, what’s going on?” And he cussed me up one side, down the other, and threatened me. I thought, Wow, what’s going on here? So it was definitely a different culture, to the point where it was very difficult to communicate through a door. At CSP, there were up to sixteen offenders in a day hall, so anytime you talked to somebody, you had an audience. They’re standing at the door watching you, listening. It’s very difficult to communicate with somebody and gain compliance through a door with an audience watching—next to impossible.

  At that point, I don’t know what the average length of stay in there was, but that was back in the heyday of administrative segregation. CSP was kind of at the forefront. We had lots of states coming in on tours to see ad seg and how it was run in Colorado. Colorado was seen as a model for how to do it.

  When you walk in a unit, there are eight pods, what we call “day halls,” so there are eight day halls, 126 offenders total, all single cell. Day halls 1 and 8 hold fifteen offenders, day halls 2 through 6 hold sixteen. And there’s an upper tier where you can walk around, with a small exercise room and a shower on each tier. The cells each had a stainless steel toilet/seat combination unit, a shelf, a light, and there was an outlet. Offenders could earn the privilege of having a TV at that time. And the TV was a management tool for the staff. If the offender acted out, staff could take the television away from the offender, have an immediate consequence for behavior, so that was a big tool back then.

  At that time, it was kind of a level system at ad seg. The offenders would come in at level 1, and they wouldn’t get a TV. They would have to go thirty days without any incidents, and then they could go to level 2 and get their television. That was kind of a long stretch for some of them to go, locked up twenty-three hours a day, to not get in trouble and get that TV. Laundry, mail—everything was delivered to the cells.

  The way the offenders communicated with the staff—that made an impression on me. Staff didn’t do a lot of communicating with the offenders because it didn’t get them anywhere. Once in a while, as the sergeant, I would see a staff member start to argue with an offender, and I’d intervene because that would set the offender off. Then the offender would cover the window, and you’d have to suit up a team to go get him or create unnecessary conflict. If I’m the corrections officer and you’re the offender, and I make you mad, maybe you assault the next person who comes through, throw feces on ’em. That was a huge problem back there, offenders throwing feces on staff. So what I saw was we tried to treat ’em with respect and not engage with them verbally, not spar with them, not threaten them, not send ’em off, not give ’em a reason, because they would assault the staff.

  It could be hard. I once had urine thrown in my face. I was upset. I was definitely upset. I walked away. Yeah, there’s nothing you can do. The offender got a write-up for that, of course. It set him back in his levels.

  I thought the door between officers and offenders with every interaction was a big contributor to that type of behavior. I’d worked general population and been able to talk to some of these guys, communicate face to face, gain their compliance. So from day one, I always thought that that door was a huge contributor. And you’d see it on the staff side too; some of the staff who would posture or talk down to the offenders. A lot of them were new staff and had never worked in a general population setting, so that was all they knew. Because that door’s between you the whole time, you really don’t learn how to communicate in an environment like that. There were some bad people there—don’t get me wrong, some very dangerous people—but you would see guys get caught in a cycle; they would act out and lose something, and then they had nothing to lose, so they would just continue to act out and spiral.

  Lengths of stay in the seg units at CSP could be years at that point. And looking back on it now, we expected the offenders to be angelic, to move up the levels and then move out to other facilities. They’d have one bad day and cuss someone out, and they’d com
pletely regress to a level where there was no realistic hope of getting out of solitary anytime soon. I mean, hindsight is always 20/20, but that was the way it was set up. You’re dealing with felons you’re putting in the cell twenty-three hours a day, and you expect them not to have a bad day, not to cuss and get frustrated. It is not realistic. And if they did, then they were regressed for that type of behavior.

  After two years of being sergeant at CSP, I was promoted to lieutenant and stayed there for two more years. I made captain at the Cañon Facility for Women. I was ready for a change, to go experience something different. The women’s facility was different. The women communicate a lot more. They’re more animated, I would say. So it’s just totally different. You go from an ad seg where they’re locked up to a facility where there are all these women offenders who want to talk. And that’s what they did. So it was completely different. And it was mixed classification—we had minimum custody up to close custody. I went to Women’s in 2001, and then I left there in 2004 and went to Fremont Correctional Facility as a programs manager. I was there for probably just over two years. Fremont’s population is around 1,700. As programs manager, I was responsible for education—academic, vocational education, library—recreation, food service, laundry, and volunteer programs.

  That was the first time I had significant responsibility outside of being a custody officer. So it was the first time I really saw the complexity of a prison. It broadened my perspective about how you can effect change through education. It really opened my eyes. Everything I’d known before, that was just from a custody side, controlling people and punishment. This was the first time I’d seen offenders engaged with positive efforts for their betterment.