Crooked Courts and Cruel Incarceration

Newspapers and magazines are quick to carry stories of prison inmates suing in federal court. The stories infer that all prisoner lawsuits are frivolous and without merit. They point out that state offices are wasting too much of the taxpayers’ money to defend the prison officials sued by those inmates.

A good example is the September 11, 1995 transcript of the National Public Radio show, All Things Considered. It starts out with this statement: "Lawsuits by inmates have reached such crisis levels that it’s costing taxpayers millions of dollars. Some call them recreational litigators, but the most popular term for them is ‘Frequent Filers.’ "

Unless the major media exposes cruel treatment in our prisons, Americans are all too busy doing their jobs, raising their kids, keeping their bodies in shape, and being entertained to find out what is going on behind the wall.

When a major network does cover wrongs inflicted on inmates by prison employees, outrage pours forth and usually results in "someone" doing "something" about it. What about the wrongs they miss or choose not to uncover? It is up to relatives and friends of inmates to write letters to the local news editor, their Congressman and Senators, and even their state legislators to make an effort to expose the situation.

Most law-abiding citizens may not have much sympathy for those imprisoned by the various states or the federal government. The problem is with overzealous prosecutors and the judges who work with them week in and week out. Most judges tend to favor the government, making it easier for innocent people to get convicted of crimes that never happened or that they simply did not commit.

The State of Illinois is a good example. In the past year several inmates on death row have been exonerated and set free. Those men lost years of their lives for crimes they did not commit. The truth came out only because some university students took on projects to search for the truth. Their work was lengthy and tedious but finally rewarded with the satisfaction that they did the right thing—freeing an innocent man. Numerous reporters have criticized the Illinois legal system.

No fewer than 12 people who were on death row [in Illinois] have been found innocent of the crimes they supposedly committed, some just days before they were to be put to death. Some of them wound up being sentenced to death because witnesses in their trials testified falsely for a myriad of reasons. Others were there because, in an overzealous effort to "solve" highly visible crimes, cops fabricated evidence. Whatever the reasons, innocent people were about to be killed by their own government, and who knows how many others actually were?

Dave Zweifel, Illinois Reason Enough To Ban Death Penalty, Capital Times (Madison, WI), June 25, 1999, page 12A.

What about all those in prison who aren’t in a project to search for the truth? They are just out of luck. No one cares as long as it isn’t their father, their brother, their mother, their sister, or even themselves.

In the fifties and sixties an elderly high school English teacher, Miss Elizabeth Little, always taught her students that, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." She told them to remember that phrase if they saw someone in a situation in which they certainly would not want to be. For example, homeless, diseased, impaired, or imprisoned.

How would you like to be a woman incarcerated in the Topeka Correctional Facility in Topeka, Kansas? A law-abiding citizen probably cannot imagine what it would be like. He can rationalize that if those women had obeyed the law, they wouldn’t be there. They are serving the time for which they were sentenced by a court of law. This is punishment in a civilized society—if you do the crime, you do the time.

Exactly how civilized are we? The following is a small sample of what the women in the Topeka Correctional Facility undergo.

Female inmates have complained repeatedly about the overcrowding, lack of sanitation, inadequate ventilation, and other problems in the Topeka Correctional Facility. They have had to endure these conditions for several years. The Kansas "grievance" procedure appears to be an exercise in futility for them.

The complaints are reasonable, not frivolous as the State of Kansas would have the public believe. A few examples: The cells were built for one occupant, but some have been used to house two inmates. Bright lights are left on all night in each cell. The inmates who don’t smoke are subjected to second-hand cigarette smoke. The shower facilities expose female inmates to a variety of males.

Inmate Pam Livingston commented on the lighting in the cells. "We are exposed to night lights in our cells twenty-four hours a day. These night lights are strong enough to read my Bible with no assistance from any other source of light. It is quite disturbing when trying to sleep. We have no means to turn the night lights off."

Inmate Debora Green described the situation involving cigarette smoke as follows: "Secondhand smoke is a real problem at I Cell House. The ventilation system of the majority of the rooms is such that four rooms share a vent. If anyone in one of these rooms smokes in the room, the smoke disseminates throughout all four rooms. (On numerous occasions the officers have threatened to write up everyone in all four rooms when the smoke detectors are set off ‘because there is no way to tell which room it is coming from.’)."

The kitchen workers have scooped various kinds of insects out of pans of food, then fed it to the inmates. One time the kitchen supervisor told the kitchen workers to fish out a large cockroach, feed the contaminated food to the other inmates, and not say anything. Feeding insect-infested food, spoiled milk, food spilled on the floor and the like to the inmates is a common practice.

The prison is sometimes infested with mice. "Sticky traps" to catch and torture mice to death are all over the place. One inmate killed several mice in one day by stomping on them while working in the dog kennel. An officer made her stop killing them that way.

Inmate Vickie Lumley had an experience which to her was terrifying. "I have seen many mice in my work area at I-Cell. I have had mice in my cell. Recently I screamed because a mouse ran over my foot while I was in my nightgown in my cell. It was very scary!"

Inmate Sunshine Goodwin has had similar experiences. "I’ve had mice, spiders, and ants in my room more than once."

Inmate Angela Barnes also has unwanted visitors over which she has no control. "I have seen mice in my room. I had an officer come and step on one about 2 o’clock in the morning. They chewed on a lot of my food and I had to get rid of it."

There are no bathroom facilities available when the inmates are out on the yard or working in the dog kennels, and some of the correctional officers will not permit inmates to go back in early to use the facilities.

New inmates (first 120 days) are not allowed to spend enough money for their personal hygiene items and are not issued deodorant or shampoo, although the dogs in the kennels get untangling shampoo.

Inmate Gail Daws described the lack of supplies for a simple act of cleanliness that civilized people take for granted such as washing hands after using the toilet facilities or a simple shower. "We are not provided with any type of soap in our cells or in the showers."

The shower curtains are too small and short for the shower stalls. Because the shower curtains are inadequate, when women use the shower, they are exposed to other inmates and to staff personnel, some of whom are male.

Inmate Gail Daws commented on the shower situation. "While taking showers, the shower curtains are clear plastic up to our knee area. When or if we drop something and bend over to pick it up our private parts (such as our breasts) are exposed to the rest of the dayroom area. Most times there are male guards, other inmates, male maintenance workers, and male inmates who are in our dayroom while we are in the showers."

Female inmates’ private parts are routinely exposed to the guards, including one woman who was "written up" because she had trouble urinating while naked in front of two guards.

The water is turned off at different times for unknown reasons. Water leaks in at various places even when there is no rain. Water leaked into an inmate’s cell through the ceiling. When she got out of bed, not knowing there was water all over the floor, she slipped and sprained her ankle and injured her knee.

There are cracks in various areas, especially at the top of the center stairs, going all the way across the top tier floor in some places and all the way through. Ceilings sometimes cave in from too much water.

A nurse witnessed the ceiling in the clinic falling on inmate Rachelle Shannon. Maintenance men repaired and painted Room A118 after the ceiling caved in for the second time. This particular ceiling still leaks.

The Topeka Correctional Facility did not want to pay for a sewer grinder, so there is a basket on a cable that the sewage flows through. The basket catches the solid waste. A red alarm light is connected to the basket. When it lights up, it indicates that the lift basket is full. It is common knowledge that the sewer will be backing up into the building if something is not done quickly. An inmate has to scoop out feces along with other waste material and put it in a trash can. It then goes out with the regular garbage.

Inmate Angela Barnes said she had to "squeegee raw sewage that included pieces of bloody toilet paper."

Inmate Pam Livingston who was assigned to cleaning the sewer pit said, "It contains raw sewage which is placed in a doubled plastic bag, put in a trash container and left with the regular trash, which is taken out daily by the compound trash inmates."

Inmate Melony Reed, assigned to cleaning the sewer pit, said, "It appears to me that the things in the basket are not ground up and there are most definitely feces and bloody sanitary napkins."

Inmate Sunshine Goodwin said, "When we do the sewage it’s not put in hazard bags. It’s put with the rest of the garbage."

When the sewer backs up, water comes up the drains, including in the kitchen. Raw sewage goes back and forth between the toilets (when one inmate flushes the toilet, it comes up the neighboring toilet). Sewer water with toilet paper comes up in the halls of the laundry and the kitchen. The resulting mess is cleaned up with blankets that afterwards are sent out and given no special cleaning at the laundry. After being laundered those blankets still smell of sewage and then are re-issued to the inmates for bedding.

The dirty clothing and bedding of the inmates are sent out to be washed. Inmates are ordered not to wash out any clothing, including bloody or otherwise dirty underwear. Inmates are supposed to put them in a mesh bag and hang them from a hook in their cell for up to 3 days (until laundry turn-in time). When these "cleaned" clothes are returned, they stink. When rinsed, brown water comes out of the clothes.

Seventy-six women are given one or two spray bottles of bleach diluted with water each day. That is supposed to be enough to clean all of the rooms, plus the day room and showers.

The above information on the conditions in the Topeka Correctional Facility can be found in a lawsuit that an inmate filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas (Topeka): Shannon v. Graves, 98-CV-3395. Shannon is inmate Rachelle Shannon (incarcerated for shooting Dr. George Tiller, an abortionist, in Wichita). Graves is Bill Graves, the Governor of Kansas.

The State of Kansas has done everything possible to keep the costs of the Topeka Correctional Facility to a minimum. (Even the dogs at the facility are treated more humanely than the female inmates are.)