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Last Saturday night, my friends convinced me to actually go out, notwithstanding my money woes (they have a great way of offering to buy rounds and then never giving me a chance to buy the next one). And our destination was the hottest new spot in Boston, where all the pro athletes and townie celebrities hang out - jail. Well, sort of. In reality, it is the “Liberty Hotel,” a luxury four-star hotel on Charles St. But it is the renovated site of the infamous Charles Street Jail. The jail was built in the mid-nineteenth century and served as the one-time “home” for the likes of Sacco and Venzetti and John Michael Curley. Perhaps most famously, in 1973, inmates sued the sheriff and others, claiming that pretrial detainees were being held in unconstitutional conditions. And the federal court agreed, holding:

“As a facility for the pretrial detention of presumptively innocent citizens, Charles Street Jail unnecessarily and unreasonably infringes upon their most basic liberties, among them the rights to reasonable freedom of motion, personal cleanliness, and personal privacy. The court finds and rules that the quality of incarceration at Charles Street is ‘punishment’ of such a nature and degree that it cannot be justified by the state’s interest in holding defendants for trial, and therefore it violates the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The court ordered that a new jail be built by 1976, but (after a lot more litigation), the Charles St Jail didn’t actually close until 1990, after seventeen more years worth of suffering for its inmates. And now, perversely, it’s the city’s hottest night spot and most luxurious hotel.

The weirdest part about it is that it isn’t just a hotel with trendy bars. The restaurant is called “Clink” and the bar is “Alibi.” And remnants of the building’s past remain:

These are the ghosts, the half-perceived evidence of the old cells, which you can make out as puzzling patterns on the floor or the walls. There are teasing traces of old brick and metal, handsome exposed wood truss work that holds up the dome, a few remaining cell bars….Too often they yell at you that you’re, hey, in what used to be a jail. Restaurant tables cuddle up to bricks and bars. Interiors are blatant and often hideous. (Interior furnishings and finishes were designed by Champalimaud & Associates, of New York.) Knock-your-eye-out, boldly patterned murals, carpets, and furnishings leap at you from otherwise gloomy surfaces. Huge murals of silhouetted trees are supposed to make you think of freedom outdoors. A floor mosaic by artist Coral Bourgeois might seem delightful somewhere else, but because it consists entirely of cartoony icons of prison life, it strikes you as yet another in-your-face commercial for the jailness of the Liberty.

The drink menu is even filled with cocktails named after “people who tend to get you in trouble.”

I guarantee you that the Saturday night line to get in would not be over an hour at 11:30pm if this was just a new hotel. The intrigue lies in this “Ooh, I’m going to jail!” kitsch. And I find it both fascinating and somewhat repulsive, as I obviously spend a lot of time in real jails and know not only how unpleasant they are, but also that such a gimmick is rather disrespectful to all those people who were locked up there under horrible conditions and how many people continue to be so in facilities elsewhere.

Whether I will be able to appreciate the place in actuality remains to be seen - we refused to wait in line for so long on a cold night. So perhaps on an evening when it is not so in-demand, I will be able to report back on drinking in a luxury jail.

The Worcester County House of Correction in Massachusetts is facing a crisis - it is designed to hold 822 inmates, but the current population is more than 1500, “who are packed two to a single cell, and in the infirmary and the gymnasium.” One of those inmates, with the help of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, filed a civil rights lawsuit against the jail because of the overcrowding. And US District Court Judge Rya Zobel issued a decree that no more than 1251 individuals be held there at any time. The sheriff sued to vacate the decree, but lost. Then he tried to get more money from the state to expand the jail, but didn’t. So now (in what honestly seems like a move to spark community outcry), he has announced that he will release two inmates for every one that comes in, and will place a number of pre-trial individuals on GPS monitoring systems in lieu of holding them.

“The purpose of the consent decree is to address overcrowding at the Worcester County House of Correction, which is beyond critical,” said Peter J. Costanza, a staff lawyer for the prisoners’ rights group who has worked on the consent decree with the sheriff’s chief legal adviser, Deputy Superintendent Jeffrey R. Turco. “It’s going to be several years before they can get more space at Worcester. In the meantime, something has to be done.”

The district attorney said he is deeply concerned about the release of pretrial detainees and the “one-in, two-out” provision, though he sees no problem in off-loading inmates to other county jails.

Obviously, I am all for letting people out of jail, particularly because there are so damn many of them that are held for ridiculous reasons (like a 19-year-old held for 30 days on a charge of driving after a suspended license - which carries a max 10 days - because he couldn’t post $250 bail). And I am theoretically against the “build more jails” line of thought because it is generally espoused as part of the “lock ‘em all up” cry. But even with a cap of 1251, that’s 400+ above the jail’s capacity. So if building an expansion means that anyone held there would be able to sleep a little better, I am in favor of that too.

I think there just needs to be a fundamental re-evaluation that includes the sheriff, the inmates, and the judges who are setting bail and deciding sentences. It needs to go beyond the DA issuing the trite required press statement and the public just hearing “criminals on the streets!”

God bless the Boston Globe. Sunday’s front-page headline is about the investigation into the death of Kelly Jo Griffen, who died in the throes of heroin withdrawal while held in prison four years ago. And the Sunday magazine has a great critical look into residency restrictions for sex offenders. I’m going to focus on the prison death, as Gideon over at a public defender has already covered it wonderfully.

As I have focused on here before, the Massachusetts prison system has come under a lot of scrutiny lately, both for a high suicide rate among inmates and for keeping prisoners locked up beyond their release dates. And now there’s a renewed focus on the death of a 24-year-old mother, who died in 2003 while being held at the Framingham women’s prison for arraignment on a minor drug possession charge. The reports of her death at the time said that her decline was so swift that medical personnel could not do anything to save her; but records brought to light recently as discovery in a wrongful death suit have revealed that the young Ms. Griffin had no detectable blood pressure or pulse a full two hours before her death. Yet she was still cleared to be sent into court that same day and no doctor ever even came to check on her.

Throughout the day, according to the records, she reported feeling “so sick.” At 1 a.m., less than seven hours before she died, she told [nurse Magdalena] Grodzki she was having a seizure. The nurse reported seeing her vomit. There is no sign in the medical records that a doctor saw Griffen at any time that night.

An inmate in the room with her said Griffen was “sick from the second she got there” and got worse fast.

“She was very, very pale and had to keep getting up to vomit,” said Diane Solari, who was also detoxing from heroin. “They were giving her medication for vomiting and diarrhea but whatever she took she threw up immediately five minutes later. Soon she couldn’t get up to go to the bathroom and was throwing up in a bucket. I’d empty it and she’d throw up again.”

“She was so sick,” said Solari, who shared a room with Griffen and two other inmates. “She was begging for an I.V. She must have said it 30 times.”Before sunrise, Solari said, Griffen became too weak to walk and fell on her face trying to get to the toilet. “She was drawn pale, gray. She couldn’t stand up,” Solari said.” She could talk but her mouth was dry. I never saw anybody that sick.”

Only when Ms. Solari screamed upon seeing her roommate turn blue did the medical staff come running. But the young Ms. Griffen was dead within minutes.

To the prison’s credit, medical care has apparently improved significantly since this tragic incident, particularly in the area of detox. This is enormously important, as it is rare for me to see a female recently arrested who is NOT in the midst of coming down off something. There’s a widely held misperception that a couple of days in jail, away from access to drugs, is going to do an addict good. But the process of detox, particularly for heavy users, is brutal and horrific. A person who is merely left with nothing is going to get severely sick - to dismiss this process as helpful for a system-clearing is to ignore the risk of death. So to know that the situation is at least being recognized (and I have heard good things about Framingham’s current detox system) is a good sign. But the story of Ms. Griffen, which just reeks of apathy and a perception of the inhumanity of inmates, still breaks my heart.

There are times when I absolutely adore being from and in Massachusetts - like the moment I found out (while sitting in 1L Contracts class) that the Supreme Judicial Court had legalized gay marriage, and the few minutes last night sitting in the bleachers at Fenway Park and watching my beloved Red Sox hit FOUR home runs in a row against the Yankees. And then there are times when I am saddened - no, ashamed - to see what goes on in this state, such as this tale about Rommel Jones, a man held in prison for FOUR years after his release date.

Mr. Jones was a victim of the complicated rules of parole and good time in the Massachusetts correctional system, specifically the rule stating that consecutive sentences (such as Mr. Jones’s 20 years plus 10 years on-and-after) automatically convert to concurrent sentences once the inmate is placed on parole. This is not something that is easy understood or even widely known, which explains why Mr. Jones didn’t know (despite asking several times) when he was supposed to be released. But you would think that the people in charge of knowing these things would know it. They didn’t. And Mr. Jones, who admits that he has been a “hoodlum” and knows that he suffers from significant mental illnesses, was robbed of four years of his freedom.

On top of that, the Department of Corrections (when they realized their mistake) told him they had only miscalculated by one week. And then they rationalized the lie by saying the release would have had “little or no practical effect on his quality of life” and that telling would even have been cruel because “we could be criticized for explaining this to someone . . . with the history of mental illness that this individual has.”

Pardon my language, but are you EFFING KIDDING ME?

In the four years he was mistakenly detained, Jones missed his mother’s wake, lost contact with his teenage daughter, and endured the daily perils of life behind bars. where his mental illness meant a ping-pong existence between life in a prison cell and the psychiatric wards of Bridgewater State Hospital.

“She doesn’t know me,” Jones said softly over a recent lunch at the Prudential Center, referring to [outgoing DoC commissioner Kathleen] Dennehy. “She’s saying they made a decision not even to say anything because they didn’t think that I would be intelligent enough to understand. That’s horrible. That’s one of the saddest excuses that I’ve ever heard. All she had to do is just try me. I’m more intelligent than they know.”

Mr. Jones didn’t even know about the extent of his over-incarceration until reporters at the Boston Globe contacted him while researching this issue. The research prompted the DoC to actually examine what was going on behind their bars and claimed that they found 25 inmates with miscalculated release dates, none of which had been reached yet. But then they had to admit the full (?) truth, revealing that 13 more people in the last four years had been held from a low of one to a high of 515 days past their release dates.

James R. Pingeon of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services called this “stunning incompetence.” I’m not even sure that covers it.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is looking to “fundamentally change the philosophy” of the state’s criminal justice system by scrutinizing the mandatory minimum sentencing laws. The proposal is sheathed in concerns over money and public safety, but it also inherently addresses the chances prisoners have to re-integrate into society and the identical treatment of first offenders verses repeat offenders in some cases.

Administration officials say that the mandatory minimum sentences, which eliminate judges’ discretion in certain cases, drive up the cost of corrections and make it less likely that prisoners will participate in programs that could help them reenter society when they are released.

Because those prisoners cannot get out early for good behavior, critics say, they have little incentive to participate in programs while in prison. And they are barred by law from enrolling in work release, rehabilitation, or furlough programs outside their institution, according to Mary Elizabeth Heffernan, an undersecretary for public safety. Once they wrap up their sentence, she added, they are sent back into society unsupervised.

The mandatory minimum that I see most often in my district court practice is the two years attached to selling drugs within 1000 feet of a school or park. In any urban area, this pretty much covers every single square foot of the city. So someone charged with possession with intent to distribute in a city has this additional charge slapped on every time, whereas someone in the suburbs would not. And where do most of the poor live? In cities of course. This translates into prosecutors often having enormous leverage in dealing with these cases, because they will agree to dismiss the school zone charge only if the defendant pleas to the underlying charge. The risk of facing a mandatory minimum if convicted at trial is usually enough to make anyone too scared to fight, even if there’s a good case to make that the drugs were for personal use (and thus straight possession) and not possessed with any intent to distribute.

[Attorney General Martha] Coakley estimates that a third to 40 percent of the state’s prisoners are serving mandatory minimum sentences.

If a judge issues a sentence greater than the minimum, the prisoner becomes eligible for programs once the minimum has been served. But many judges, bristling at their loss of discretion, have responded to the restrictions by imposing only the minimum, prosecutors and judges say, and criminals are freed as soon as their mandatory sentence is up.

Of course, the administration is “talking to the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association to come up with something that would be acceptable to prosecutors,” without any mention of input from the defense bar, but I am optimistic about this re-examination.

But I am wary of the idea of ensuring that every released prisoner have supervision after release - in theory, it sounds fine. But I am not at all confident in the actual ability of the probation and parole departments to help prisoners once they are released. From what I have seen (with a few notable exceptions), they have little to no concern with helping people find sober housing, medical care, employment, education, or family re-integration. Instead, their only concerns seem to be scrutinizing every little misstep so that they can violate everyone based on not being a perfect person. And this is only going to send people back to jail over and over again if it also isn’t fundamentally re-examined.

This week, there have been two inmate deaths at two different correctional facilities in Massachusetts - one was the third suicide of the year, as compared to four in all of 2005 and one in 2004. There were seven in 2006. The suicide occurred at Bridgewater State Hospital, the facility that specifically houses those inmates with severe mental health issues (though it’s very clear in my experience that a hell of a lot more inmates have mental health issues than end up at Bridgewater AND that Bridgewater is such a miserable place to be that many resist going there at all costs).

Last month, the Disability Law Center sued the Massachusetts Department of Correction in federal court, alleging that inmates with severe mental health issues were being treated inhumanely (including being on lock-down 23 hours per day) and asking that the remedy be more specialized housing and treatment for them.

Putting such prisoners in segregation units, the advocates say, violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and should be banned. The Disability Law Center also said the segregation of mentally ill inmates violates federal statutes, including the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Department of Correction said in a statement that it does not comment on pending litigation. However, the department said it was “well aware of the national trend of the increasing number of prisoners with mental illness” and that it had begun taking steps to reduce the risk of suicide for the state’s nearly 11,000 inmates.

In February, the Department of Correction issued its own independent report on inmate suicides, recognizing that facility procedures and policies were contributing to a suicide rate that was almost double the national average (27 per 100,000 v. 14 per 100,000):

Guards and other staff members do not have enough training in suicide prevention.

Guards fail to check frequently enough on some inmates at risk of suicide.

Some cells used to house suicidal inmates have not been stripped of features they could use to harm themselves.

Inmates under suicide watch become even more isolated because they are denied visits, showers, phone calls, and time outside their cells.

[…]

The report also includes unsettling details about recent suicides, the vast majority from inmates hanging themselves. In two recent cases, inmates were hanging for more than 30 minutes before they were discovered, though prisoners on suicide watch are supposed to be checked at least every 30 minutes. In the report, [author Lindsay Hayes of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives] urges the department to do away with 30-minute checks for suicidal patients, which he concludes are too infrequent, and instead check at least every 15 minutes and have constant observation for the most troubled inmates.

It’s frustrating to be on the cusp of seeing this first hand - I hear complaints from my clients held in custody all the time, and it is not just those who are classified as having mental health issues. The local county facility that I spend the most time in regularly keeps inmates locked down for 23 hours and I hear stories all the time about social workers who deride inmates, correctional officers who spit on them, and nurses who treat every ailment with an ibuprofen. I hear about cells designed for two people housing four or five and makeshift beds shoved into the cafeteria. But these things all happen literally locked away from the public eye. And it’s not like the general public has much sympathy for those people locked away for criminal activity, nor do they place much stock in their credibility. It’s tragic that suicides have to be the catalyst for any sort of scrutiny, but I hope that, with the help of organizations like the Disability Law Center and Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, something may be done soon.

I am gearing up for my vacation to Las Vegas starting on Thursday, so I decided to see what was going on in the world of crime and defense in my favorite city of Elvis, roulette, and open containers. And I came across as issue that, shockingly, I have not yet figured out an opinion on - whether a verdict of “guilty but mentally ill” should be an option in criminal cases.

Apparently, the state of Nevada scrapped the “not guilty by reason of insanity” verdict back in 1995 and replaced it with “guilty but mentally ill.” The Nevada Supreme Court slapped the legislature down, however, ruling in 2001 that getting rid of the insanity defense was unconstitutional and eliminating the “guilty but mentally ill” option. But now State Assemblyman William Horne - a Democrat and a criminal defense attorney - has proposed re-introducing the “guilty but mentally ill” verdict in addition to the constitutionally-mandated insanity defense. The public defenders in the state, though, have expressed concerns that such a verdict would actually deprive the mentally ill of proper treatment.

“The defense bar does raise some legitimate concerns, but I don’t think it’s bad that a jury can say, ‘You didn’t meet the standard for insanity, but you did have some mental health issues,’” Horne said.

Horne added that offenders should still have an obligation to society to pay for crimes they commit.

[…]

Lisa Rasmussen testified for Nevada Attorneys for Criminal Justice, saying the proposed standard should not be used to erode the “not guilty by reason of insanity” standard. She said it should only be allowed if the defendants propose it themselves, and not by prosecutors as a bargaining tool against the insanity plea.

She also pushed for excluding death penalty and life-without-parole sentences for those found guilty but mentally ill.

As the actual text of proposed AB193 makes clear, a defendant would have to prove mental illness by the (relatively low) preponderance of the evidence standard and would also “generally” be subjected to the same penalties as any other defendant pleading guilty.

Regardless of whether a defendant is mentally ill at the time of sentencing, the court is required to impose any sentence available to the court for a defendant who pleads or is found guilty of the same offense. However, if the defendant is mentally ill at the time of sentencing, the court is also required, under certain circumstances, to direct the Department of Corrections to provide to the defendant such treatment as is available for his mental illness during his confinement or probation.

Specifically in regards to treatment:

[A court shall] include in that sentence an order that the defendant,
during the period of his confinement or probation, be given such treatment as is available for his mental illness if the court determines that the relative risks and benefits of the available treatment are such that a reasonable person would consent to such treatment.
The Department of Corrections shall provide any treatment ordered by a court [.]

So, while the verdict could be incredibly helpful in some circumstances, the public defender faction seems to be quite correct (not that I am biased or anything) in their concerns about what actual treatment these defendants may receive. Now, I do not know any details about the mental health resources available in the Nevada Correctional system, but “whatever treatment is available” seems awfully vague. It appears that individual judges would be responsible for mandating specific treatment (hopefully with the input of defense attorneys), but that the DoC would be responsible for carrying it out. It’s sort of like adding a condition of probation to a jail sentence and I’m not sure how practical or helpful that really is to a defendant with mental health issues.