Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  “NOWHERE TO GO”

  There were, of course, other ways that Florida could have lowered health expenditures in its prisons, most notably by reducing the number of mentally ill people entering them in the first place. Back in 2008, a special task force convened by a group of advocates and judges issued a report concluding that jails and prisons had become “the unfortunate and undeserving safety nets” for a vast pool of mentally ill people who shuffled back and forth between the correctional system and the streets. Every year, the task force found, “as many as 125,000 people with mental illnesses requiring immediate treatment are arrested and booked into Florida’s jails. The vast majority of these individuals are charged with minor misdemeanor and low-level felony offenses that are a direct result of their psychiatric illnesses.”

  According to the task force, this was not only inhumane, causing “homelessness, increased police injuries, increased police shootings of people with mental illnesses.” It was also expensive, with money wasted on costly “back-end” services—overburdened courts, overcrowded prisons—that might have been saved if fewer people fell through the cracks of the state’s patchwork mental health system. Florida spent a quarter-billion dollars annually to restore mentally ill people to competency simply so they could stand trial, for example. Meanwhile, half of all adults and one-third of all children with serious mental illnesses had “no access” to psychiatric care in the community.

  The chair of the task force that published these findings was Judge Steve Leifman of Florida’s Eleventh Judicial Circuit, which spanned Miami-Dade County. When Leifman was seventeen, he interned for a Florida politician who received a letter about a teenager languishing at a state psychiatric hospital. Leifman decided to visit the hospital, where he found the teenager shackled to a bed. Before leaving, he saw naked men hosed down by a guard as though they were zoo animals. Decades later, people with severe mental illnesses were spared such indignities. They were showing up in Leifman’s courtroom instead, where they faced the grim prospect of either going to jail or returning to the streets. Dismayed by these bleak alternatives, Leifman pressed local officials to launch a project that would divert mentally ill people who posed no threat to public safety into treatment instead. It took him six years to secure funding for the program, which was soon hailed as a success, boasting a recidivism rate of just 6 percent for individuals who completed it. Over the course of a decade, several thousand people in Miami-Dade County were diverted out of the criminal justice system. Leifman launched another program to train police officers to respond more appropriately to people in psychiatric crises.

  Similar reforms have been adopted in other cities, among them San Antonio, where, in 2008, a mental health crisis center founded by a group of local judges and police officers began diverting mentally ill people out of the criminal justice system. Within a decade, it had treated fifty thousand people and saved taxpayers an estimated fifty million dollars. But as admirable as these efforts were, their reach was limited in a society that chose to allow so many people with severe mental illnesses to go without care, a problem that had grown only more severe over time. After the 2008 financial crisis, states slashed five billion dollars in mental health services from their budgets, noted a report in USA Today, leaving vast numbers of poor mentally ill people with “nowhere to go.” Where many eventually did go was onto the caseloads of people like James Fisher, an assistant public defender I met one day in Orlando. Every day, Fisher told me, he watched mentally ill people arrested for “quality of life” offenses cycle through a system that was woefully ill-equipped to deal with them. Nearly all of the offenders came from poor neighborhoods where affordable mental health services did not exist. “The population we deal with doesn’t have resources to call on anyone but the police,” he said.

  Some members of this population avoided jail by sleeping on the streets. Others wound up in places like the Lowell Correctional Institution, a prison in central Florida where, on August 21, 2019, a bipolar woman named Cheryl Weimar complained that she was in too much pain to bend down and clean toilets during a work-duty shift because of a hip injury. A group of guards dragged her outside, to an area without security cameras, and beat her so severely that some witnesses thought they were whacking a dead body. Though Weimar survived, the assault left her paralyzed, and showed how little had changed in Florida’s prisons since the abuses at Dade had made headlines. In the seven years since Darren Rainey’s death, the system remained chronically underfunded, and use-of-force incidents had risen more than 50 percent.

  In some other states, the situation was less dire, thanks to advocates who had succeeded in pushing reforms—less reliance on solitary confinement, more independent oversight—to improve conditions in prisons. Yet in the view of Steve J. Martin, a federal monitor who had spent decades investigating the use of force in prisons for various government agencies, Florida was not an anomaly. In America’s prisons, “institutional brutality is deeply ingrained and persistent,” wrote Martin in July 2020, a few weeks after the asphyxiation of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests against racism and police brutality. The violence in prisons was more hidden, Martin noted, not least because most correctional systems did not gather or publish data on it, but his experience had led him to believe that the victims looked a lot like the people who were disproportionately subjected to excessive force by the police. In the cases that Martin had investigated, “the prisoners who died were disproportionately black,” he wrote. “Many also had mental impairments.”

  * * *

  In our last face-to-face conversation, at a café not far from her home, Harriet Krzykowski told me that since she’d stopped working at Dade, she’d done a lot of reading about solitary confinement and the forces that had turned jails and prisons into America’s largest mental health institutions. The reading had helped her put her experience in context. She now understood that the abuses she’d witnessed were part of a much bigger story, she said, in a society that treated the mentally ill as “throwaway people.” Knowing this alleviated some of the guilt she felt about what had happened to Darren Rainey.

  Before we parted ways, I mentioned that on my next visit to Florida, I was planning to reach out to Rainey’s family. Was there anything she wanted me to tell them? I asked her. She fell silent.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally, her eyes brimming with tears. “It should never have happened. The conditions that allowed that to happen should never have been in place, ever, for anybody.”

  Some time later, I pulled up to a one-story brick bungalow on West La Salle Street, in downtown Tampa. The house had metal bars on the windows and a moldering gray facade. It sat at the end of a narrow block lined with row houses, in one of Tampa’s poorest neighborhoods. Waiting by the entrance was its owner, Andre Chapman, who directed me into a small living room dominated by a large couch.

  Andre Chapman was Darren Rainey’s brother. He was in his mid-fifties, a tall, barrel-chested man with gentle brown eyes and an air of quiet forbearance. He’d agreed to meet me after I had called him on the phone and told him that I wanted to know more about his brother’s life. After welcoming me inside, Andre started filling in the details, beginning with their childhood, when the members of his family used to fill the pews of the Baptist church across the street on Sundays. Often, he and Darren would be flanking their father, Grady, who was originally from Georgia and had moved to Tampa to be closer to his mother. At the time, the neighborhood was home to a mix of working-class and professional Black families, Andre said. It had since grown more run-down, with an outsize number of vagrants and mentally disturbed people roaming some of the seedier blocks. “I’m talking about some serious mental people,” Andre said.

  Nothing in Darren’s childhood marked him as destined for such a fate, Andre told me. To the contrary, his brother was an honors student who breezed through grammar school and later, under the tutelage of an uncle named Bo, became one of the neighborhood’s m
ore proficient checkers players and gamblers. “Oh, he whupped everybody on the street,” Andre recalled with a smile. Handsome and outgoing, Darren was also a “ladies’ man” who rarely lacked for female company, Andre said, which turned out to be a mixed blessing. In Andre’s view, the turning point in his brother’s life came in his early twenties, when he fell in love with a woman who was in the military. One night, after they’d been drinking, she pulled out a gun and fired it at Darren’s chest. The bullet pierced a lung, but the woman pleaded with Darren not to press charges and he agreed, thinking it would prove his devotion and consummate their love. Soon thereafter, she disappeared from his life.

  “That was his downfall,” Andre said. “I think it just shook his world a little bit.” Yet if being shot in the chest by his lover shook Darren, it did not rob him of his decency, Andre maintained. To give me a sense of his brother’s character, Andre invited a neighbor to join us, an elderly woman who rented out the back unit of the gray house. Darren used to come by her place to rake the leaves and do other odd jobs, she said after taking a seat on the couch. In exchange, she would pay him a modest sum or fix him something to eat—cabbage, corn bread, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, for which he had a particular fondness. “We just ended up getting close,” she said, to the point that she considered Darren family, part of a close-knit circle she called “the La Salle Street posse.” In recent years, the posse’s ranks had thinned as older friends of hers had begun passing away, which made her miss his presence all the more. “Darren was my handyman,” she said. “Darren came to see me every day. I don’t care where I was, when I got off of work Darren be sitting on the porch.”

  In the period before he was arrested and sent to Dade, Andre told me that Darren had been living with him in the same house we were sitting in. The arrest was for cocaine possession. Yet Andre insisted that although Darren smoked cigarettes, he was not doing coke at the time—or, for that matter, at any time. “He ain’t ever do no cocaine, no weed, nothing like that,” he said. Andre was even more emphatic about another point, which is that his brother was not schizophrenic, as had been reported in the Miami Herald. “That was a label that they put on Darren when he went to prison,” he said.

  I heard a different view from Peter Sleasman, an attorney with Disability Rights Florida, the organization that sued the Florida DOC for subjecting mentally ill incarcerated people at Dade to systemic abuse. While nothing in Darren’s records indicated he had ever committed a violent crime, he had numerous convictions for drug offenses, Sleasman told me. The files also contained evidence of persistent mental health problems. “There were a significant number of cases where he was found incompetent to stand trial and was sent to a state hospital for long durations,” he said. In Sleasman’s view, the records only underscored why prison was “the last place Mr. Rainey belonged.” Like so many mentally ill Floridians, he said, Darren would have been far better off getting “drug treatment or community mental health treatment.”

  In addition to learning more about Darren, I wanted to know how his family found out about what happened at Dade and whom they held responsible. When Darren died, Andre told me, a prison chaplain called him to express his condolences but made no mention of abuse. Andre also spoke to a detective who was no more forthcoming. “I thought he just collapsed in the shower,” Andre said. “I’m thinking he had a heart attack.” No one from the Miami-Dade County medical examiner’s office bothered to send the family Darren’s autopsy photos, Andre said. No one from Corizon reached out. Because he suspected no wrongdoing, Andre agreed to have Darren cremated without going to Miami to examine his body beforehand. A few months later, he got a call from Peter Sleasman, who told him that his agency suspected his brother had been scalded to death. Andre was stunned. A soft-spoken man with a calm bearing, he was not given to indignation or sweeping judgments. Yet as he recounted how little he’d been told, he could not disguise his rage. “Y’all took him like some type of rat to be experimented on, and you didn’t have the heart to tell me how he died—what really happened?” he said, shaking his head. The autopsy leaked to the press, which described the death as an accident, “was a slap in the face,” he added.

  The fact that no one was held accountable compounded the insult. “They did the crime; they need to do the time,” Andre said. Did “they” include the mental health staff at Dade? I asked him. Andre paused. Then he shook his head. The counselors were just earning a paycheck to support their families, he said. He didn’t blame them. He was less forgiving of the guards directly involved, and of other, more powerful actors. After consulting a lawyer, Andre and his family filed a civil rights lawsuit against Florida, Corizon, and some of the guards and prison officials who had worked at Dade. The suit eventually led to a settlement, in which the defendants agreed to pay $4.5 million in damages. The agreement was not exactly an admission of responsibility. To the contrary, Martha Harbin, director of external relations for Corizon, cited it as proof of her company’s generosity and blamelessness, telling the Miami Herald, “Although every defense lawyer in the case knew Corizon had no liability for Mr. Rainey’s death, Corizon contributed $100,000 to the settlement in order to bring the case to a conclusion.” Even so, for the Rainey family, the settlement offered a measure of closure—those members of the family who were still around, that is. Andre had since moved to South Carolina. He’d come to Tampa to visit his oldest daughter, Lekesia, who was living in the gray house on West La Salle Street with her young daughter. Returning to the neighborhood brought back “a lot of memories,” he said. Among them was a conversation he’d had with his father, Grady, shortly before he passed away, in 2007. Grady’s death had devastated Darren, who was extremely close to their father. “That was his backbone,” Andre said. Before he died, Andre told me, his father pulled him aside and asked him to look after Darren. “My dad’s words were to take care of him, watch out for him,” he recalled.

  Before I left, Andre reached into a closet and pulled out a shoebox filled with family photographs. He reached into the pile of photos, fished one out, and smiled. It was a picture of his father in a white T-shirt and denim overalls, his usual attire, marking him as a transplant from rural Georgia (“Georgia boy” was his nickname, Andre said). Andre pulled out another photo, a framed portrait of a handsome young man with a stylish Afro and a winsome smile. He was standing next to an attractive woman in a strapless blouse. It was a picture of Darren and his ex-wife, Andre said. The woman in the picture was also the mother of Darren’s daughter, he told me, a daughter who was no longer alive. She died of a heart attack at the age of sixteen, not long after learning the news about her father, the last in a string of deaths in the family that had begun with Grady’s.

  Andre didn’t tell me much about Darren’s relationship with his daughter. He did say that they were now together, after he had arranged to have Darren’s cremated remains placed inside the casket in which she was buried. Andre stared at the picture for a while. “I’ve been trying to”—his voice caught—“just come to grips.” Then he put the picture down, rubbed his reddened eyes, and walked me to my car outside.

  PART II

  BEHIND THE SCREENS

  4

  Joystick Warriors

  In the spring of 2006, Christopher Aaron started working twelve-hour shifts in a windowless room at the Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center in Langley, Virginia. He sat before a wall of flat-screen monitors that beamed live, classified video feeds from drones hovering over distant war zones. On some days, Chris discovered, little of interest appeared on the screens, either because a blanket of clouds obscured visibility or because what was visible—goats grazing on an Afghan hillside, families preparing meals—was mundane, even serene. Other times, what unspooled before his eyes was jarringly intimate: coffins being carried through the streets after drone strikes; a man squatting in a field to defecate after a meal (the excrement generated a heat signature that glowed on infrared); an imam speaking to a group of fifteen young
boys in the courtyard of his madrassa. If a Hellfire missile killed the target, it occurred to Chris as he stared at the screen, everything the imam might have told his pupils about America’s war with their faith would be confirmed.

  The infrared sensors and high-resolution cameras affixed to drones made it possible to pick up such details from an office in Virginia. But as Chris learned, identifying who was in the crosshairs of a potential drone strike wasn’t always so easy. The feed on the monitors could be grainy and pixelated, making it easy to mistake a civilian trudging down a road with a walking stick for an insurgent carrying a weapon. The figures on-screen often looked less like people than like faceless gray blobs. How certain could Chris be of who they were? “On good days, when a host of environmental, human, and technological factors came together, we had a strong sense that who we were looking at was the person we were looking for,” he said. “On bad days, we were literally guessing.”

  Initially, the good days outnumbered the bad ones for Chris. He wasn’t bothered by the long shifts, the high-pressure decisions, or the strangeness of being able to stalk—and potentially kill—targets from thousands of miles away. Although Chris and his peers spent more time doing surveillance and reconnaissance than coordinating strikes, sometimes they would relay information to a commander about what they saw on-screen, and “sixty seconds later, depending on what we would report, you would either see a missile fired or not,” he said. Other times, they would trail targets for months. The first few times he saw a Predator drone unleash its lethal payload—the camera zooming in, the laser locking on, a plume of smoke rising above the scorched terrain where the missile struck—he found it surreal, he told me. But he also found it awe inspiring, experiencing a surge of adrenaline and exchanging congratulatory high fives with the other analysts in the room.