AMERICA:Amnesty International this week described one US prison as cruel and inhuman but prisoner issues are invisible in the presidential election, writes LARA MARLOWE
TINO AGUILAR kept a pet frog called Stripe. “He found her in the exercise yard. I don’t know how he knew she was female. She had a pink stripe down her back,” Aguilar’s wife Patricia recounts by telephone from California.
“He made a makeshift house and a little pool for her out of a milk carton. He looked for worms and bugs for her. I used to kid around saying I was jealous because she stayed in the cell with him. One of the COs (corrections officers) brought food pellets for her.”
Around the time Aguilar participated in two hunger strikes last year, his pet frog was confiscated.
“It may sound bizarre, but when that’s all you have it’s very upsetting,” Mrs Aguilar continues.
Her husband spends 22½ hours a day in a small, windowless concrete cell. He passes the other hour and a half alone in a bare concrete yard with a wire mesh and plexiglass roof 20 feet above his head.
Without sunlight for years on end, Tino’s dark complexion has faded to “the colour of buttermilk”, his wife says.
She quotes him: “I can’t remember what grass feels like. I can’t remember what a bed feels like. I can’t remember hot water.”
Mr Aguilar has spent 18 of his 43 years in solitary confinement in California’s security housing units or SHUs, pronounced “shoes”.
Under California’s “three strikes” law he was condemned to 25 years to life after three convictions.
As a young man he made a “beer run” – stealing a six-pack from an off-licence – participated in a brawl in Texas, and purchased stolen goods.
Pelican Bay, where Aguilar is imprisoned, was singled out by Amnesty International in its report this week, The Edge of Endurance: Conditions in California’s Security Housing Units. Its “severe environmental deprivation . . . amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, in violation of international law,” Amnesty said.
More than 3,000 of the state’s 136,000 inmates are housed in SHUs. Charles Carbone, a prisoner rights lawyer, says 4,500 is a more accurate number, since an additional 1,500 languish in equally deplorable administrative segregation units – known as “the hole” – while they await transfer.
Pelican Bay is designed to minimise human contact. Guards watch cells on CCTV. They slip food through slots in doors that are opened electronically to allow prisoners to go to the exercise yard or shower. Aside from rare family visits, prisoners see no one, not even guards or other prisoners.
The minimum stay in solitary confinement is six years. More than 500 California prisoners have spent 10 years or more, 78 more than 20 years.
The Centre for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit this year on behalf of prisoners who have spent between 10 and 28 years in solitary, on the grounds it violates the US constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the right to due process.
Two-thirds of SHU prisoners are there because they have been “validated” as gang members, a murky process that can count tattoos – or in Tino Aguilar’s case, a Mexican flag on his personal documents folder – as evidence.
Validation is mostly based on the “debriefing” of other prisoners by the corrections department, which rewards informers with medical care, hot food, blankets in winter and even parole.
On November 6th, Californians will vote on two propositions involving the state’s disastrous prison system.
Proposition 34 would repeal the death penalty. In the eyes of voters, the most powerful argument in favour of “Prop 34” is not moral but rather the fact that it would save the bankrupt state money.
The appeals process has cost the state $4 billion since the law took effect in 1978: $4 billion for 13 executions.
Tino and Patricia Aguilar are directly concerned by “Prop 36”, which would revise the “three strikes” law that dictated such a heavy sentence for Tino.
Mrs Aguilar is campaigning actively for the referendum’s passage, lecturing university students to encourage them to vote. If it passes, her husband would be re-sentenced within 90 days.
By all standards, California has the worst prison system in the US, understaffed, underfunded and overcrowded.
“Eighty-five per cent of all people coming out of California prisons go back in,” says Carbone. “We spend $8 billion a year on corrections facilities. It costs more to send a man to prison than Stanford [University]. We get nothing meaningful in return.”
Carbone attributes what he calls the “horribly failed” system to the power of the prison guards’ union, “politicians who pandered to fear” for decades, and racism.
“We are dealing with a population that is predominantly Latino, black or poor white. The issue is off people’s radar screen.”
The US has the largest prison population in the world, he says. There is a plethora of solutions. But in this presidential election year, “Guess how many times the candidates have mentioned prisons? Zero.”