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The ‘lack of respect for human life’ in South Carolina’s prisons
An article last week in the Post and Courier describes a “silent epidemic of suicides” in South Carolina prisons. Prison officials put the number of confirmed deaths by suicide in 2018 at 10, with two more awaiting confirmation by local coroners, double that of any time in the past decade. In one instance, the case of 19-year-old Jamarcus Dawkins, his mother believes that the prison system, in declaring his death a suicide, is actually covering up what was a murder. He had been in prison for 45 days when he died. [Steve Bailey / Post and Courier]
It was the deadliest year in the history of South Carolina prisons. The death rate has gone up every year for the past five years even as the number of people in prison has gone down, making the state’s prisons among the deadliest in the country. In addition to the reported suicides there were at least nine homicides. And this does not include deaths in jails, where the suicide rate is far higher. [Steve Bailey / Post and Courier]
South Carolina prisons made national news last year for deadly violence in April that left seven dead. The conditions that allowed the violence at Lee Correctional Institution were clear from text messages sent that night from those inside, describing bodies piling up while guards waited hours to intervene. That indifference to the humanity of the people locked up was consistent with an environment where, as the historian Heather Ann Thompson wrote immediately after, family visits are rare, people are underfed, and “daily degradations grind away at men’s souls.” [Heather Ann Thompson / New York Times]
The Department of Corrections response to events at Lee was markedly punitive. Forty-eight people alleged to have been involved in organizing the riot were transferred to prisons in Mississippi. Corrections officials called for the jamming of contraband cell phones, arguing that they allowed for the riot to unfold. Prisons across the state were put on lockdown, punishing the few people who had any role in the violence at Lee and the many who did not. As of December, eight months later, more than 35 percent of people in prison across the state were on lockdown. A federal lawsuit alleges people were denied regular showers, access to programming, and even access to sunlight. [Emily Bohatch / The State]
And the effect of chronic lockdown on people in need of regular mental health treatment can be fatal. Bailey of the Post and Courier writes, “Lock up mentally ill people—and the prisons are packed with them—in tiny cells for long enough, make treatment more inaccessible and bad things happen.” A long-running lawsuit for mental health care resulted in a 2016 settlement. But even before the violence at Lee, staffing shortages and regular lockdowns made adequate care impossible. [Steve Bailey / Post and Courier]
A few months after the violence at Lee, incarcerated people launched a coordinated national prison strike spanning three weeks in August and September. Jailhouse Lawyers Speak and other strike organizers, who had been planning the strike for some time, moved the timeline up. A statement issued by the group said, “Seven comrades lost their lives during a senseless uprising that could have been avoided had the prison not been so overcrowded from the greed wrought by mass incarceration, and a lack of respect for human life that is embedded in our nation’s penal ideology.” [Natasha Lennard / The Intercept]
On the night that violence exploded at Lee, there were between two and four guards for a block of 250 people. Reforms in 2010 led to substantial reductions in the number of people in South Carolina’s prisons but staffing cuts went further. While the response from many quarters has been to call for increased staffing, law professor John Pfaff stressed the need to consider the kinds of staffing needed. Specifically, he called for increases in staff that would make it possible to offer rehabilitative and therapeutic programming, pointing to prison systems like Germany’s, where correctional staff undergo intensive training for years to be able to serve a rehabilitative function. [John Pfaff / NBC News]
And increased staffing cannot fix a problem that stems from the senseless incarceration of too many people. One in every 10 people in South Carolina prisons is serving a life sentence. In the immediate aftermath of the violence at Lee, state lawmakers proposed parole and sentencing reforms that would give more people, including elderly people, a chance of release earlier.
Reforms must also address a broken parole process. Writing in The State, two attorneys pointed to the state’s 7 percent rate of parole release, among the lowest in the nation. They said: “Experts agree that in addition to providing rehabilitative programs, the best way to improve safety is to reduce prison populations as correctional staff is reduced. The most effective way to do this in a safe and rational manner is by accelerating the rate of parole.” [Stuart Andrews and Shirene Hansotia / The State]
South Carolina’s prisons warehouse tens of thousands of people, disproportionately Black; there is next to no medical or mental health care even for those in serious need; people work without payment, in the most literal extension of slavery; and the state failed to even evacuate incarcerated people from danger zones in the lead-up to Hurricane Florence. The prison strike, an organizer told Democracy Now last summer, was “really a declaration of humanity. One participant in South Carolina told the Greenville News: “Prisons in America are a warzone. Every day prisoners are harmed due to conditions of confinement. For some of us it’s as if we are already dead. So what do we have to lose?”
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