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Prison Reform: A Non-Partisan Issue
I got an up close and unsettling look into the need for prison reform when a tragedy and a scandal rocked the little community in which I live. Keaton Farris, a young, mentally troubled man, died of dehydration in solitary confinement in our local county jail. His mental issues were not a surprise. When he was arrested, he clearly informed the officers he was off his medication. During the course of his incarceration, he mentioned he needed medical help.
The official investigation report reads as an increasingly tragic account wherein procedures in place for officer and inmate safety devolved into a formula for death when coupled with negligence and neglect. The peripheral officers in this tragedy seemed to have too much trust in the competence and compassion of their negligent peers.
To suggest the size of this community: I sold Girl Scout cookies with the deceased’s young sisters. I sold Girl Scout cookies to the corrections officer who found the deceased. Keaton Farris’s parents held a protest today. I went to early service and joined them as they walked quietly, carrying signs and handing out water bottles. Down Front Street, up Main Street, to the county jail and courthouse.
As I walked, I exchanged a few words with the family, but mostly I listened to snippets of the conversations around me. I heard anger at the police, anger at the system, and “back when I was protesting the GOP convention…” Some of the people walking were old hands at a protest. I do not cast aspersions on the convictions of the protest walkers — the cause is just. Perhaps some of the walkers just have a dramatic bent (certainly the ones wearing black face masks did).
Prison reform, from county jails to huge prisons, should be in the national eye. The cause should be non-partisan. In fact, it should be something that conservatives of all stripes should be involved in. A law-and-order conservative should be just as concerned with the safety and accountability within the corrections system as outside of it.
I agree, completely. And if a sense of human decency isn’t enough to motivate conservatives to push for reform, remember this: If current trends continue and you are a conservative with any social value whatsoever, you yourself will spend time in our prison system. Leftwingers want you there.
This certainly sounds like a tragedy. I’d like to hear from people with law enforcement or incarceration experience. I’ve heard repeatedly that many, perhaps most, criminals are pathological liars. I wonder whether officers come to expect that virtually everything that they are told by a person in custody is false, and thus will sometimes ignore truthful complaints.
I think the need for prison reform is coupled with the problem of mental health care. I envision three categories of people behind bars: ordinary decent criminals, dangerously violent criminals, and people who are criminals because they’re mentally ill.
I’d like to hear from someone who has more than my superficial understanding of the problem. I’m sure that confining (and perhaps treating) the seriously mentally ill separately would benefit them, and would probably reduce the crime and other harm they do to the rest of us. Would that also take some of the pressure off prisons and let them better focus on the first two categories?
I read the entire report. If by “prison reform” you mean there should be mechanisms in place to ensure that prison workers follow established procedures, then I am with you.
What sort of discipline procedures are in place to ensure compliance with policy?
At the Kansas City meetup, we had a moving talk from the Kansas Secretary for Corrections, Ray Roberts, and he invited us to visit a prison next time round. Kansas’ success in reducing recidivism rates under Brownback/ Roberts has been astonishing. Would you be interested in coming in February to hear more about how one of America’s most conservative governors has been making this issue a key focus for his administration? We’re pretty likely to get the Governor himself next time round.
If the state takes a person into its custody for some reason, the state is responsible for that person’s welfare during the duration of his/her incarceration. That means caring for medical needs, whether mental or physical, and protecting him/her from abuse by fellow inmates or corrections officers. This is minimal stuff here, and unfortunately, I think our prison system is failing at this way too often.
Conservatives need to take the lead on this issue. Part of being devoted to the rule of law is making sure that justice is served with an eye towards restoring prisoners to society once their terms have been served. If they have been abused and neglected, they are likely more of a danger when they are released than when they went in, which serves no good whatsoever.
And what of those who are incarcerated awaiting trial? Sometimes people are locked up in prison for years awaiting trial because they can’t afford bail. So now you have someone presumed innocent under the law being mistreated by a system treating them as though they are guilty. I recently read of a teenager who has spent seven years in Rikers awaiting trial. How is this okay?
I started following The Marshall Project on Facebook. Much of their stuff is pretty liberal, but they explore some important issues, ask some very important questions, and report on situations such as this to draw attention to the need for reform.
I would be interested. I don’t know how feasible it would be, but I am very interested in the information. I am not as active at Ricochet as I would like to be, life has a way of getting in the way. I wouldn’t call myself politically active, rather (hopefully) intelligently informed on the issues (hence Ricochet membership). If this topic has been covered extensively at Ricochet before can you point me in the right direction?
The topic hasn’t been covered much on the site. I appreciate your writing this.
I quite admire the work of the late Chuck Colson and his “Prison Fellowship.”
Barfly has a nice division above.
There are some crimes so heinous that the criminals must be either executed or incarcerated forever.
For everyone else, we must reform them to send them back into society.
If the prison system merely makes better criminals, it’s not working.
TheKingPrawn has an article or two about his experiences as a normal person getting sucked in by the jail system.
Prison reform is a partisan issue, in that both sides have very different ideas on how to reform prison.
I believe that when the state takes away 100% of a person’s freedom it is required to guarantee 100% of that person’s safety.
In and of itself, most on the Left and the Right could agree.
The difference is in the policy prescriptions that come from either side. Far too often, the Left promotes measures that increase prisoners’ freedom, rather than increasing prisoners’ safety.
A fine example is Sheriff Arpaio’s jails. Never mind that violence in his jails may be less than in others, the Left simply cannot abide that prisoners live in tents, wear pink underwear, and aren’t allowed to read Playboy. Prisoner safety isn’t even on their radar.
Kevin Williamson wrote about a similar case on Riker’s Island.
Our Jails Are a Scandal
The conditions in many of our county jails are appaling.
Criminal justice and prison reform are both desperately needed. This could be a winning issue for the right. Let’s get on it.
That’s a good taxonomy.
I got a disturbingly long way into this story before I realized that it took place in my old backyard (San Juan Island boy, here).
I agree with you wholeheartedly on this. If a person is in your (collective “your”) custody and the person may not care for himself, then you are responsible for that person. If it is too much of a burden to care for those in your custody, then some other model needs to be created.
yeah… on the one hand, I can be sympathetic – I didn’t read the article because of time constraints this morning, but I’m somewhat prejudiced against human-interest pieces regarding criminal law, as they always leave out something important, and they virtually never make an attempt to get the perspectives of all involved (I’ve read about my own clients without ever having gotten even a call from the author). On the other hand, let us consider the problem of mental health. I’m representing a guy right now who has been sitting in jail for a long time waiting a MH eval. He refuses to speak with me, he has refused to speak with the counselor, but he cannot go to trial or enter a plea. In short, it is an extremely difficult situation. But I think it is really easy to talk about the need for reform, and quite another thing to actually posit legitimate ideas for reform. If most of us had even the slightest idea of a dollar amount our society spends on criminals, we would be appalled. All ideas only involve spending more and more and more, and it is, quite frankly, ridiculous. This client of mine has gained nearly 30 pounds since being incarcerated. He was threatening me last time we spoke, and I was half inclined to point out that he went from being homeless to being well-fed and looked after.
So yeah, I agree that there are big flaws in the system. I’m not going to use the word “tragic,” because I don’t think it is. We will not ever create a perfect society, and it should not surprise us that those portions that deal with crime and human imperfection would be the most imperfect of all.
If you read through the case report, you can see there were many, MANY factors that played into the untimely death of this man. I am not involved in criminal justice, the I hear stories from cop friends are about the extent of my experience. But the neglect and negligence uncovered by the investigation is the kind of thing that breaks trust. It is wrong. It corrodes the reputation of good public servants and sabotages societal bonds.
When I mention reform, I guess what I mean is accountability. We need to hold all levels of criminal justice accountable for wrong doing. If we want to invest trust in law enforcement and give them the benefit of the doubt to exercise latitude in dicey situations, we must hold those who do wrong accountable.
In this particular case, falsified logs indicate to a reasonable person that this was more than just a case of confusion and error.
Sure… and allowing people to communicate is something that goes a long way, but when you talk about accountability, I think that cuts both ways. People make mistakes, and it sucks if that results in a person staying in jail too long (worse, obviously, if it results in a death), but over-accountability will result in people being too afraid to do their own jobs. If I’m in a profession where I am dealing with uncooperative, often combative, almost always untruthful, criminals, and I can be personally sued or lose my livelihood… Well, I’m not going to want a job like that. Or I’ll demand a pretty high pay. The fact is, this isn’t a market system, so the cost is on society. Quite literally, my property taxes (etc…) pay for these things. And it’s people who are in jail. Much like public defense, I don’t want the city to spend my tax money on getting a personal Johnny Cochrane for each burglar and I don’t want jails turned into resort hotels. These are the people we want off the streets, and I think there is some argument that the worse it is, the less people will want to go there. The system is just as broken when people are happy to go to jail.
Obviously, there is a middle ground, and I’m not going to say that improvements couldn’t be made… but the long and short of it is, there are a lot of systems in the US that suffer from being poorly run. Every one of them effects people. Overregulation shuts down businesses and impacts families just as much. The list goes on and on. And way, way down at the very bottom of that list, for me, is prison reform. Then again, I’ve argued that we shouldn’t provide free attorneys to people, so I know my position is not very popular at Ricochet.
I should do this! Please let me know if and when it happens!
I don’t understand why all jails and prisons lack 100%, 24/7 cameras and audio monitoring, to keep everyone honest by constant surveillance (at least archival if not real-time monitoring). Prisoners should not have to fear rape or beatings from fellow inmates nor mistreatment by guards.
I had a conversation late last week that was interesting on whether inmates should be deprived of TV and other mindless entertainment. One one side, of the discussion, prison should not be like a vacation. On the other side, it keeps prisoners out of mischief when mindlessly watching , say, “Game of Thrones.”
Does our society need to save every doomed individual? Bearing in mind I have only read the timeline offered by the law which was attached and so am in possession of few facts. Isn’t it plain that this guy tried to flood his cell twice, the second time after the water had been turned off as a consequence? Isn’t this guy a threat to others?
I cannot defend the indefensible, and it seems beyond the pale that he died of thirst, but all of this accommodation comes at a tremendous cost. It is often said that you can send someone to Harvard for what it cost to incarcerate them.
Lastly I do not wish anyone dead, but it seems a biological imperative that we spend our society’s resources wisely or another society will show us how it is done.
because someone would have to watch those cameras. That’s easier said than done.
On the other hand, how many prisoners have been shanked because they didn’t want to change the channel?
Not necessarily. Simply having an archival record can at least increase the risk of shenanigans. The benefit of the panopticon is that one never knows when one is being watched.
Say what you will about the cramped quarters of the old (now closed) Kingston Penitentiary, but nobody was getting shanked/raped by their cell-mate in those conditions.
Of course, that’s not to say that inmates didn’t find ways to create mayhem:
This is a small, rural county jail. They had cameras to the hallways, prisoner check logs were falsified, they were not trained in new procedures, and everyone knew this guy needed medication. I am not saying that the job wasn’t difficult, or that he wasn’t uncooperative. I am saying when a corrections officer or police officer can’t be bothered to do their job they should be held accountable like you or I.
I do not fault the officers for taking the steps they took to ensure safety (dry cell, solitary); I fault them for then neglecting their duty to ensure that their prisoner got what he needed for basic survival. Then they lied about it.
If mental health assessment and treatment is not part of a corrections officer’s duties, we ought to be talking about how we want it to handled and how it is handled. If you believe it ought to be part of their duties, then they ought to be trained in it.
I read somewhere that when we closed state mental hospitals there was never an understanding of, or real solution found for, how to handle those with mental health issues whose mental health issues ran them afoul of the law. (Yes, that statement is clear as mud, but I can’t find a better clarity of phrasing.) For those of you in law enforcement, corrections, mental health, and the like – how would you address these issues?
I know I sound terrible and my heart goes out to all those affected in this. It seems likely that punishment is warranted because I cannot understand how this inmate was not given any water in 4 days especially after being examined.
As a matter of policy, prisoners should have access to water. I suspect that this is already the policy.
In the end, our penchant to restrain wrongdoers and when they react to the restraint, to respond with ever tighter restraint has its issues of which this may well be one.
I read the report. They lied by falsifying the documentation of inspections in the course of being neglectful, but I did not see where they lied after the incident.
The comment I quote seems to be claiming both neglect and cover up, while the report I read is sufficient evidence to me that there was no cover up.
Emphasis added.
Taleena’s comment was clear, it stated they neglected their duty and lied to cover their neglect. The man is dead, the staff ignored their responsibility, and the staff lied. It is of no consequence that they lied before he died.
It is this tendency to pick nits, to find an excuse to excuse, Instugator, that many of us see as exactly one half of the problem with law enforcement in America. Yes, these problems are isolated cases in a system that broadly works. That fact too is of little consequence – it is that we excuse these cases rather than calling for the heads of the few malefactors in the system that feeds the broader negative perception of law enforcement in general.
That’s the larger problem, in that every single case affects all of us.
Speaking to this particular case, that’s true. The neglect occurred when the guard put his feet up and watched the TV, or did his paperwork so he could leave on time for once, whatever he did, rather than doing the job we paid him for and trusted him to do. Falsifying the log wasn’t neglect, it was a lie, and we should demand his punishment. Falsifying the log was an act against all of us, that makes the guard a criminal.
Yo BF – kindly show me where I excused their behavior – because you cannot.
What I don’t see is why the case requires the sort of civil disobedience as depicted in the OP as opposed to, gee – I dunno – maybe some sort of effort toward real reform. Tell you the one thing that any objective reading of the report does point out, this statement is untrue:
The investigating officer seems to have done a stand-up job, straightforward without pulling punches. He doesn’t deserve the charges leveled at him by the sentence I just quoted.