The 95-percent stat itself isn’t accurate; it’s from the early 2000s, and hasn’t been true for a long time. Today it’d be around 84 percent, and that’s with the extremely conservative assumption that the only people who won’t come home are the ones serving 50 years or longer. The United States Sentencing Commission considers a de facto life sentence to be anything over 39 years and two months. Which is about the average sentence length for prisoners in Georgia right now. Lifers aren’t the outliers that they used to be.

Mandatory minimums, “three strikes” or “repeat offender” laws, truth-in-sentencing laws, sentence stacking and the formal or informal elimination of parole were all already underway by the turn of the century, and even as the size of the United States prison population has changed trajectories a few times since then the proportion of people serving life has continued to grow. (This refers to people sentenced to life with parole, life without parole, de facto life, and the death penalty.)

Since 2020 when corrections officers across the country quit in droves amid the COVID-19 pandemic, lifers—specifically the long-timers who’ve already been in prison a while—have been the ones keeping the peace at their facilities, relatively speaking. But as their role becomes more critical, corrections departments are simultaneously treating them as more expendable. Moving the older and vulnerable folks into gang-controlled units to see if that diffuses the violence; skipping over them for basic resources and programming because they don’t factor into recidivism statistics.

For example, lifers are generally ineligible for medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD), just by virtue of being lifers; if a prison has a Suboxone program at all, it’s likely considered a re-entry service and only made available to people with release dates in the next few weeks or months. Even the more traditional, non-MOUD treatment programs, which mostly consist of group meetings with limited capacity, will prioritize the people whose counselors wrote it into their re-entry plan, or who were steered toward it by the parole board.

As the only people who have to stay in the system, lifers the only ones with any real reason to make it better. Or who know how anything works.

Jobs are also considered re-entry preparation. Meaning that on wait lists—rarely do prisons have enough jobs to go around—people are in some cases bumped up or down by release date. Lifers are already ineligible for many if not most of the best-paying jobs, because they can’t go to work-release camps. Even in states that don’t pay prisoners at all, lifers who are barred from those jobs can still find themselves cut off from basic resources that went with them.

Work assignments, educational or vocational programming, pretty much any meaningful way to pass the time—these things only exist in the context of re-entry, family reunification, public safety and reducing recidivism.

The few officers who do show up, to work 16-hour shifts while they bring in contraband to offset the low pay, are rookies who will quit in a few months. The private kitchen contractors, whose job is to spend less on food than the state would have, will continue to shrink the portions of the meal-replacement powders they serve instead of food because future health care costs aren’t their problem. The private health care contractors can deny necessary surgeries and stop ordering everyone’s blood-pressure medication so they can pass the savings to their shareholders, because they’re not sticking around either. So there is an obvious need to invest in lifers. As the only people who have to stay in the system, they’re the only ones with any real reason to make it better, and the long-timers are the only ones who’ve been around long enough to know how anything works.

Though lifers build up so much expertise about the prison system they live in, they’re rarely able to compare notes with lifers in other systems, or see how the forces affecting them fit in with what’s happening in the rest of the country. The following is a discussion between three lifers who’ve each been incarcerated for around 30 years, each in a different state and different type of prison environment. It was not conducted in real time but in stages, as each contributor’s responses were relayed back and forth. As such, certain responses have been organized for readability rather than reproduced in strict chronological order.

Tony Vick, in Tennessee Department of Correction custody since 1997, serving life without parole: In Tennessee the biggest way lifers are hurt is, we can’t get into any of the good prisons. All the good prisons are short term-only prisons, 10 years or less. So we can’t get to a prison that has good [programming], and less violence, because they’re all short-time prisons. They call a prison like this one a time-building prison, and they’re the worst prisons. Might as well call it a death-waiting facility.

Jonathan Kirkpatrick, in Washington State Department of Corrections custody since 1995, serving a 60-year sentence: In this state I think custody plays a bigger role than length of time. [But] length of time is factored into your custody, so for example I reached Minimum but they have a special designation, Long-Term Minimum and this is the lowest security level I can get. So we can be classified as Minimum, but we can only go to Medium-capable facilities. So we have to have two fences between us and freedom, is what that means. Some Minimum facilities, like [work-release] camps, don’t have any fences, some have one fence, but nobody Long-Term Minimum can go to those facilities.

Jimmy Iakovos (pseudonym), in Georgia Department of Corrections custody since the early 1990s, serving life with parole: Politicians with no experience with prisons make policy calls totally contrary to all that is known to work. That pressure recently caused [a mass transfer of lifers from Medium-security Calhoun State Prison] to make room for short-timers. Consider that the lifers there had earned Medium security and were accepting of the terrible heat and insects of Deep South Georgia, because they were left alone to live as comfortable as they could make it with phones and whatnot. 

Now [Calhoun] is full of short-timers who know they are leaving in X amount of months. They are tearing the place apart because they have no reason not to.

Vick: I would dare say that the most change the younger inmates passing through, the most education and positive change they get are from the old-timers taking them under their wing and trying to help. That’s more than what the state will do for you. I say that without any hesitation. That’s why you have to invest in lifers, too. They are your constant support, constant teachers, constant moral police, constant peacemakers … lifers are the Ted Talks of the prison system.

The current ideology of what Americans think about prisons, it’s going more and more toward retaliation and less toward rehabilitation. They’re giving such long sentences, they want to just forget about you. They want you to go off to prison and they don’t have to think about you anymore. So the only reason they have to think about you is if you’re gonna come out, so they’re trying harder and harder to not let that happen. Get you sent in there once and for all, and then we don’t have to worry about you no more; we just have to build more prisons. 

Iakovos: When I first began we had Pell grants for four-year degrees available. The education director at the prison then turned me down saying, You have a fresh life sentence. You have plenty of time to get that degree. I got one year in before the Pell grant was cancelled. It’s back now, but none of the colleges are jumping at the chance to get involved. 

Kirkpatrick: That’s really similar here. In the first few months of my sentence we had Pell grants, before the feds took it. Now they’re back but there’s this real emphasis on [younger folks] with this FAFSA thing. I don’t know what it stands for, but I was starting my associate degree and got a few classes in and then the college said they needed me to fill out the FAFSA grant stuff and I got denied. It’s really common, here at least, to not get anything … this quarter the Black Prisoners’ Caucus is gonna give me a couple of classes, that’s really the main way that guys are doing it. If you’re doing any amount of time here you’re not getting classes through government grants.

Vick: If there are new computer coding programs or things like that, they don’t want anybody not getting out in there. They don’t bother putting you in a program for a good-paying job, or any self-improvement type of programming, or in any class with a certificate—what do you need that class for if you don’t need the certificate to show the parole board?

Iakovos: Lifers [in GDC] are not outright denied programs, classes, vocational training etc, but we are out at the back of the line … Our superpower is waiting lists. We naturally stick around long enough to make an issue if we have been waiting patiently. Educational aide jobs do not require long-timers, but those are the ones who have been on the waiting list the longest, so 90 percent of the time are the ones that get the job.

GDC only issues raincoats, thermal underwear and knit skull caps (AKA toboggans) to people assigned to work outside details. [Lifers are no longer assigned to those details, so that change] denied us [winter] clothes. Outside of very picky shakedowns or transfers, once I’m issued an item it’s mine until I choose to get rid of it. I had a thermal top that was 16 years old before it developed a hole in it. Because I needed it for two months a year. But without it, those two months are a misery. 

Now granted, I am able to buy my own clothes. But there are lifers older than I, who have served longer than I, who have [no money] coming in. Of course we—other lifers—look out for these men as we can, but that should not be required for survival.

Vick: [Correctional industries here] no longer hires anybody .. who doesn’t have a possibility of getting out in the next 25 years. Because of all their re-entry programs that they have now. They want people to be able to count toward their statistics. And here’s the problem, some people spend years learning those big six-color [printing press] machines that cost $1 million. You can’t learn those in a year or two. I can understand them wanting a mixture of people there. And we [lifers] even advocated for that, saying, Listen, you should at least have like 20 people who have long sentences so you can have some continuity. But …

Iakovos: The Braille transcribing program here specifically requires at least five years [served], and five remaining to serve in order to be considered … most short-timers never get in. Sometimes one will be foisted upon the group through connections to administration. Worthless for the business.

A lot of people who come in with marketable job skills are reluctant to give their skills away for free. At first. Over time they get bored and or decide to keep skills sharp and gravitate to the job near their field.

Kirkpatrick: Here you can go to correctional industries for seven years. But [these days] a regular job you can only spend two years, and have to get extensions approved by an associate superintendent or above. Reason is the same, don’t want prisoners to get comfortable. But that logic doesn’t stand … it’s the officers who get comfortable in their positions and let people do things they shouldn’t. And that’s the problem. It’s not because I live here and I’m gonna be exposed to the same thing every day, day in and day out for the rest of my life. How am I supposed to not get familiar with things? This is where I live. The officers are the ones who need to get moved around so they don’t get complacent and comfortable. My opinion at least.

Vick: Yes, that’s a good point. Because if the officers are following policy, it shouldn’t matter what the inmates are doing. It’s the officers being corrupted.

Kirkpatrick: Back when I was at Stafford Creek, where they have a lot of jobs, there was a short minute where they didn’t care who worked there. Then all of a sudden everybody doing more than 20 years got fired. Took us four or five years but then it was brought to everybody’s attention that they were supposed to have 10 percent of the population that works there be lifers, it’s supposed to reflect the population of prisoners. But they hated having lifers because their whole gig is, We’re building people for getting out. They like it when people doing a really long time come in at the end of their sentence, and then what they do is, Look, we reformed this person!

Vick: About 10 years ago they started a policy of rotating certain jobs every year, out of fear that inmate and staff would get too close. It seemed ridiculous, because you got all this skill associated with jobs you have to learn. Usually lifers or long-timers were the ones that had those jobs, because they had the most knowledge. You wait your whole life to get a job like that in prison, then all of a sudden you can’t have it no more. They diminish your skill, make you feel like it doesn’t matter if you know anything or not. You’re just a number. We’ll just move you around on a spreadsheet. We’ll just put another cow in the field.

The staff here stopped following that policy to tell you the truth. Maybe sometimes, depending on the warden or job coordinator, but they haven’t really been doing it here. I think they saw that they were supposed to take people with all this experience and [replace them] and just realized, My goodness, we can’t do that or we will never pass an audit.

Kirkpatrick: Maybe it’s different in other states, but here almost all the guys who have been around for a long time—we just want to chill. Most of the time, 90 percent of us just want to chill. And if they put us in the same place it’s going to be a real mellow institution, right? And they never do that, just let us all chill out. And I sort of understand why. In a way, the old-timers are also the most dangerous, right? They have the most experience and know-how. So I understand. But there are a lot of us that, given the opportunity to go to a lower custody level, it’d be nothing but good for [DOC] and it’d be less money spent on keeping us incarcerated.

Vick: If they put all of us [lifers] in one pod they would never even have to have an officer come in. All we want is to have peace and get along. But they know if they did that the rest of the prison would be so much more violent and chaotic, they gotta disperse us. Just using us old folks to mellow it out, keep the peace. While causing us more harm, putting us in danger, denying us programming.

Lifers are often the stability in the unit. They try to keep it clean, keep it maintained. The newcomers don’t really give a flip. They don’t regard it as any sort of home, they’re just passing through. And when I first come to prison you’d see guards here 20 years, 30 years, who retired in this industry. Now very seldom do you see guards who’ve been here more than five years, and the new ones coming in, of course, they don’t have any respect for where they are. They’re just trying to collect a paycheck and clock out, and I don’t blame them.

Iakovos: The difference is, this is a lifer’s home. We are not just visitors. Lifers are invested in prisons being comfortable, and in being left alone by the guards. 

Meanwhile, the Close security prisons that those [Calhoun] lifers were sent to have become chill, because of the overwhelming chill attitude of a bunch of lifers just trying to do the time unfucked with. We know that the police have to respond to the trouble areas. So the Close security prisons are becoming the least staffed. Completely contradictory of any planned best use of resources excusing the higher cost of higher-security prisons. Lol.

Top and first inset image (cropped) via Washington Office of the Corrections Ombuds. Second inset image via They Have No Voice. Third inset image via Tennessee Department of Correction/YouTube.

The post Three Lifers on Why Prisons Need Re-Entry Support for the Prisoners Who Aren’t Coming Home appeared first on Filter.

“OSP was built so long ago that it was not built for the prison population we have now,” she told Filter. “No one, back when OSP was constructed, could have envisioned that we would double our incarceration rate.”

In 1994, Oregon voters approved a dramatic expansion of mandatory minimum sentencing with Ballot Measure 11. Over the next two decades the Oregon Department of Corrections population grew from around 6,700 people to more than 14,000. Since its peak in 2013 the population has decreased to around 12,000. Kaplan said this still puts enormous strain on the entire system but especially on OSP, which is home to about one-third of the nearly 1,000 ODOC prisoners serving life sentences. Oregon is also among the 17 states that have effectively abolished parole. ODOC data show that more than 1,300 people in ODOC custody are 61 or older.

Though most of the facility’s housing units were built in the 1950s, ODOC has acknowledged that “Oregon State Penitentiary is well beyond its useful life and doesn’t support the level of care needed” for the aging population, estimating a cost of $200 million to bring the facility into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act—a figure that “will continue to grow exponentially.” A $3 million feasibility study is underway to begin designs for construction of a centralized health care facility as well as a new facility to replace OSP.

Shannon Wight, executive director of Portland based Partnership for Safety and Justice, is disappointed that the plan to build new prisons is moving forward, when those funds would have been better spent on re-entry support and culturally specific services. She was part of the movement that changed the trajectory of the ODOC population with sentencing reform legislation in 2013, when Oregon was instead preparing to open another prison. In 2017, advocates again held off plans to open a new prisons, this time for the women’s system. Between 2000 and 2007 ODOC opened four new facilities, but has not opened any since then. 

Wight was struck by how ODOC framed the feasibility study not as a matter of public safety or the best use of taxpayer dollars, but simply as a study to find the best plot of land for new construction.

“It felt so much like the cart before the horse,” she told Filter. 

In an Oregon Secretary of State audit released in late July, the proposed centralized health care facility is referred to explicitly as a “centralized geriatric medical facility.” That audit revealed an ODOC maintenance backlog of nearly $861 million, noting that OSP in particular “continues to pose serious safety, health, and accessibility risks to adults in custody” due to “regular emergency failures, including sewer line breaks, boiler outages, and inaccessible critical services.” It recommended that the department “develop and implement a plan” for emptying “unsafe facilities, such as the Oregon State Penitentiary.” The audit references the feasibility study, though without explicitly linking it to the recommendations.

“We’re dealing with the infrastructure issue,” ODOC Communication Manager & Legislative Director Harvey Mathews told Filter.

He said that the department doesn’t want to “expand the carceral footprint or expand on the number of beds,” but is under-resourced. ODOC originally requested $5 million for the feasibility study, which Mathews considers a modest ask. 

“They should have about $70-$80 million [in] this first phase of stakeholder outreach and architectural designs and site studies,” he said, explaining that that would be about 10 percent of the estimated cost to replace just OSP, not including the separate health care facility. “But we’re doing this on a shoestring budget for now.”

Wanda Bertram of Prison Policy Initiative has studied the various ways states across the nation pitch new prison construction. She said that even when it’s not a mega-prison that’s explicitly intended to increase bedspace, opening any new facility without examining the sentencing laws that created this strain seems like a very costly, short-sighted and irresponsible approach. 

“The criminal-legal system has shown it is completely capable of filling all of the prison space that’s available,” Bertram told Filter. “The very circumstances that apparently caused [ODOC] to want to build a new prison—the aging prison population—still exist.” 

Kaplan is participating in an OSP workshop teaching incarcerated peer mentors how to work with prisoners who have Alzheimer’s or dementia, since that portion of the population is increasing both at OSP and across the state. She doesn’t see the slow and costly process of new construction as the right solution. She said the situation cries out for at least an exploration of reforms that would release people with advanced medical needs, rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a geriatric-focused facility. Between that facility and the OSP replacement, the total cost would likely be more than $1 billion.

“There’s people now who can’t walk, who can’t see, who have dementia,” she said. “It seems to me that there might be a better approach.”  

Despite the common misconception that prisons are meant to inflict punishment, being in prison is in fact the punishment in and of itself. But Kaplan said this isn’t meant to leave people with Alzheimer’s and dementia “suffering into their old age”; that goes beyond the pale of state-sanctioned punishment.

For her, this is what the feasibility study and plans for new construction don’t address.

“We have an aging prison population that needs attention right now.”

Top image (cropped) via Oregon Department of Corrections. Inset images (cropped) via Oregon Secretary of State.

The post Oregon Will Close Its Oldest Prison by Building Two, One for “Geriatric” Care appeared first on Filter.

“Y’all know how to write,” he said. “So can you help me write to my daughter?”

It turned out that Dave, incarcerated for the past 40-plus years, had never learned to read or write. Decades ago he had tried to send his daughter a letter, but it got sent back, and without knowing how to contact her he’d given up.

The writing club helped him compose a letter. A few weeks later, he got one back:

Dad,
I wrote you a long letter years ago, and when you did not respond I thought you didn’t want to talk anymore. I never knew you could not read or write. I hope it’s not too late to get to know each other.

Dave’s daughter now visits him often. He’s gotten to meet his three grandkids. This sparked the writing club to begin helping others in Dave’s position write similar letters (always checking first that the courts have not restricted contact with the recipient). As a result, more than a dozen men have reconnected with their families. If it’s not possible for someone to physically write the letter then a writing club member will put pen to paper for them and add a disclosure that the handwriting is not the author’s, but for the most part we’ve been able to support people in writing out their letters themselves. 

A lot of pain has been healed at the crochet club table.

When people saw Travis and Jeremy crocheting hats and scarves to send to family members on the outside, they asked to commission a few items to send to their own families. Travis and Jeremy always asked if they’d like to learn the skill themselves, and soon there was a full circle of big burly men crocheting and talking about their lives.

A lot of pain has been healed at that table. More recently the group crocheted enough hats and scarves to send to a homeless shelter in Nashville. They’re currently working on crocheted animals that will go to kids in the foster care system over the holidays. 

Each night Corey and Matt, both military veterans, can be seen working out together around the unit. They do burpees in the dayroom. They climb over the railing in front of the upper tier of cells and use the ledge as a pull-up bar. They have fashioned a barbell out of a broom handle and two water bags. A sign they posted in the unit reads:

THE MAN DOESN’T
CARE IF YOU
LIVE OR DIE
IT’S UP TO YOU
SEE COREY OR MATT
FOR DETAILS

Soon they were leading a group of trainees through military-style exercises. Many of those who joined were taking medication for high blood pressure or Type 2 diabetes. After eight weeks, the eight guys who’d stuck with Corey and Matt’s workouts had lost an average of 20 lbs each and in some cases no longer needed their medications. Corey and Matt’s boot camp has a waiting list now.

Many of the men in my living unit, including myself, are over 60. A couple are in their 90s. They use wheelchairs and walkers, and have mostly outlived the friends and family they had on the outside. They are unable to earn even a few cents an hour through prison jobs, and have no one else to support them, yet they still need money for basics like food and toiletries, and batteries for hearing aids. Denture cream is one of the most expensive hygiene items sold at commissary, at around $9.

Prisoners with a balance of zero on their account are eligible to receive a free hygiene pack once a month. This pack includes a small container of body wash, a small razor, a small toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste. Not enough for a month for anyone, young or old.

A few years back I began ordering whatever essentials I could afford for the older men in my living unit, and soon formed a mutual aid collective with others who were moved to do the same. We try to be present in their lives, ensure that they’ve been able to bathe or that their bedding gets changed and cleaned, or sometimes read to those who never learned how or can no longer see well. But the financial need was much greater than we could meet with our own funds, and so we began writing letters and making calls to friends on the street. Over time we’ve managed to pair up many of the older folks in need with a “sponsor” in the free world, someone willing to help them with their basic needs and perhaps be a pen pal. 

Something remarkable is that all of these services are being offered for free.

Sponsors don’t always last, and so there’s a never-ending campaign of letters and calls. But we remember our own fathers and grandfathers, and can’t imagine them being mistreated or forgotten. 

After three decades of incarceration I’m becoming one of these old men myself, my body debilitated by heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure. These days my fingers can barely feel the pen in my hand. Building community in prison can be a source of purpose, and even joy, but for me at least it’s never been a completely selfless endeavor; I’ve always quietly hoped that the eldercare collective would still be there when the day comes that I need someone to read to me or make sure I have denture cream, too.

Something remarkable is that all of these services are being offered for free. Everyone in prison needs to hustle to survive, and on the outside it would be customary to charge for many of these things anyway. But these communities all began with someone just trying to make prison bearable, or to grow as a person, and finding that others around them were trying to do the same. The impulse to lend a helping hand, even in a place of such deprivation, reminds us all that we’re human.

My mamma was a great cook. The vegetables we grew on our small plot of land kept us fed, but without much to spare. A pot of vegetable soup with some cornbread was a great prize at the end of the day of farm labor. One day she accidentally over-salted the soup. We couldn’t afford to throw it out, and so as I watched, puzzled, she peeled two potatoes and dropped them into the pot to simmer. An hour later she fished them back out, tasted the broth, and declared it perfect. I learned her lesson—that there are ways of working with what we have, and that some things are too valuable to throw away.

Image (cropped) via Oregon Department of Corrections

The post The Communities We’ve Built in Prison appeared first on Filter.

Lockdown status is confirmed when kitchen workers arrived to deliver meals, escorted by an officer who opens the main door just enough for us to file past one at a time and receive an off-brand Styrofoam tray.

Cell phones come out. We learn the reason—another fight between rival gangs.

No one is surprised. Since he first took office in 2019, Governor Brian Kemp (R) has launched the state’s first “gang prosecution unit” and implemented five-year mandatory minimums for all gang-related convictions. Prisoners tagged by GDC as gang-affiliated have rather dim prospects with the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles, the members of which all have law enforcement backgrounds.

At any given GDC facility more than half the officer posts might be empty, so a minor brawl can produce more armed combatants than there are staff members in the entire prison. Coordinated use of pepper spray and Tasers can still disperse a crowd, but it leaves administrators shaken and results in a lockdown of that facility until the relevant cameras and gang leaders can be reviewed for assessment. That could be done in an hour. Or, if the fight is on a Thursday, it could take until Monday.

No visitation, no religious services, no behavioral improvement groups that are mandatory for the parole-eligible. No library access, including the law library. No yard call. No ball games in the gym. Commissary cut by half. Group counseling, education and vocational tech classes—all cancelled.

Industry workers may still sent out though, under escort, to their unpaid full-time chemical or textile factory jobs. Georgia Correctional Industries is going to get theirs unless the plant burns down.

When multiple prisons have gang fights in the same week, it can look like a system-wide war. “Organized crime” is not that organized, though.

Lockdowns are being presented as the new normal, but the state does not have the resources to make that work, at least not in a constitutionally acceptable manner. Yet they continue.

When multiple prisons have gang fights in the same week, all of GDC goes on lockdown. It can give the appearance of a system-wide gang war. “Organized crime” is not that organized, though; it’s not as if members in different prisons are contributing to a national pot. These are just fights between the same gangs at different locations.

The next day, wardens will meet with leaders of the groups involved to check whether this was anything more than a local beef. Over time they’ve learned to call leading members of all gangs to such meetings; if any are left out, their paranoia becomes everyone’s problem. Paranoid is the norm in prison; dots connect at great distances in here.

Gang leadership tends to be those with cool heads who have learned how to talk to The Man, and say whatever’s needed to get their facility’s lockdown status reduced to “modified movement.” You might be surprised how many young hotheads will answer officers with the truth (“We want to kill all the __!”), which does not have the same effect.

Modified movement status means that at least visits and classes resume. Still no yard or gym time.

Corrections departments may tout their zero-tolerance approach to gangs, but the understaffing crisis ensures that wardens and gang leaders have never been closer. Without any experienced officers around, talking to gang leaders is the only way staff get anything to report up the food chain.

Everyone cuts their eyes toward any prisoner seen talking privately to administration, but it’s common now. Used to be that no one would even address a floor-walking guard without at least one witness in tow; if a guard is involved in a bust later that day, it is potentially unhealthy to have been the last one seen speaking to them beforehand.

Contraband cell phones aren’t the cause of gang violence.

In January, one medium-security facility had such a clash between rival gangs that it actually spilled from the walkways outside the living units into the open visitation area, filled with women and children on a Sunday. Three prisoners were killed during the fight, one of whom was days away from being released, and a fourth died later following injuries. All prisons were duly locked down while GDC began an investigation, which eventually resulted in 12 prisoners charged with murder.

Contraband cell phones aren’t the cause of gang violence. Has someone’s outside family ever been extorted through the medium of a contraband cell phone? Sure. But phones also play a huge role in violence reduction. They’re used to verify whether new arrivals are who they claim to be, which immediately shuts the door on a lot of sketchy behavior that leads to violence. They’re used to generate and transfer income. Violence breaks out because the state continuously prices edible food further and further out of reach, and people are hungry.

Violence also breaks out after crackdowns on drones. A single drone delivery can easily represent tens of thousands of dollars invested. When one gang has the drone connection, a peace treaty will allow rival gangs to handle distribution; everyone eats. But when a drone is intercepted, hunger inspires confrontation among those who want their money back. It’s telling that, alongside more traditional contraband like drugs and cell phones, drones are also bringing in food.

Allow local and online businesses to hire prisoners and pay them a living wage. Require parole boards to base their release decisions on time served, and their denials only on disciplinary infractions. Sell vapes at commissary. Or, if that’s just too sensible, then at least turn a blind eye to the contraband tobacco market.

Image via Matthew Ansley/Unsplash

The post Lockdowns Are a Dangerous Way for Prisons to Respond to Gang Violence appeared first on Filter.

Three of the facilities set to close are in Texas: Beaumont FCI Low, Big Spring FCI and its adjacent satellite camp, and La Tuna FCI and its adjacent satellite camp. The other facilities are Lexington FMC and its satellite camp in Kentucky, and Petersburg FCI Low in Virginia. Taft FCI in California, which had already been emptied but still retained minimal staff operations, will also close, as will a non-operational facility at the La Tuna complex.

Approximately 5,416 people in custody and 500 BOP staff will be directly affected. The First Step Act requires that federal prisoners be housed at facilities within 500 miles of their primary residence, but only “to the extent practicable.”

In 2025, the BOP received $5 billion to address staffing and infrastructure specifically.

“BOP is currently confronting a deferred maintenance backlog exceeding $4 billion,” the agency stated in a July 1 announcement. “While funding provided through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will help address some of these needs, it is not sufficient to fully resolve the operational and infrastructure challenges that have accumulated over decades.”

At publication there were 138,941 people housed in BOP facilities across the country, and another 14,851 people in BOP custody being housed in local facilities.

BOP currently operates approximately 118 facilities

Immediately upon taking office in January 2025, Trump reversed the Biden-era order phasing out federal contracts with private detention facilities. Simultaneously, Collete Peters was forced out as BOP director, leaving the agency with either acting directors or no one in charge until Director William Marshall III was appointed in April 2025.

By that time, retention-based incentives for BOP staff had been cut in half. Already in the midst of an understaffing crisis, over the course of 2025 agency saw more than 1,400 corrections officers and other staff leave their positions. Many went to work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In September 2025, the BOP canceled its collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees, which was set to last until May 2029. In a statement announcing the termination, effective immediately, Marshall told BOP staff that “CPL-33 didn’t give you your protections, the law did,” and that the “whole purpose of ending this contract is to make your lives better.” The AFGE Council of Prisons Locals 33 has since filed a lawsuit challenging the contract termination. The union was not notified of the plan to close six BOP facilities.

No timeline was announced for the closures. A union representative told the New York Times that BOP employees affected by the layoffs would be getting 60 days’ notice. Previously, the contract had guaranteed a notice period of nine months.

On July 2, AFGE National President Everett Kelley urged Congress to suspend the closures.

“The Bureau cites staffing shortages and deteriorating infrastructure as the reasons for these closures,” Kelley wrote in an open letter. “Yet Congress has already provided approximately $3 billion for personnel and $2 billion for infrastructure through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to address those exact challenges. Those investments should be used to strengthen the federal prison system, not dismantle it. Closing these facilities will make communities less safe, place greater strain on already overworked correctional staff, reduce the Bureau’s operational capacity, and eliminate federal jobs that support families and local economies.”

Rep. Veronica Escobar (D), who represents Texas’ 16th Congressional District, told El Paso Matters that she had not been notified of the closures and believed they represent the latest step in a plan to privatize the federal prison system.

In late May, the BOP began seeking commissary vendors that could serve facilities across the entire system—implying a shift toward privatization, as only a small number of for-profit contractors would be able to serve facilities spread across the country. Current BOP policy requires each facility to handle its commissary operations independently, which in many cases has been an economic boost for local businesses.

Top image of Taft FCI in 2023 via Department of Justice. Inset graphic via Bureau of Prisons.

The post BOP to Close Six Prisons, as Trump Pushes Agency Deeper Into Chaos appeared first on Filter.

In 2021 Cicero produced a model bill, which legislators across the country have copy-pasted to become law, that calls for expanding the criminalization, surveillance and incarceration of people who live on public land. Cicero is the brainchild of Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, who has written at length about his entrepreneurial interest in the “successful, beneficial prison.” In the lead-up to the summit, Housing Not Handcuffs published a memo highlighting the institute’s financial ties to industries that profit from its carceral agenda.

Cicero’s model bill criminalizes public camping as a misdemeanor, punishable by up to one month in jail and a $5,000 fine. It coerces unhoused people into so-called structured camping facilities, state-run sites that could include forced psychiatric and/or substance use treatment as well as mandatory drug testing, with carceral or financial penalties for “failing.” Cicero has also been a loud opponent of Housing First, the permanent supportive housing approach without preconditions like abstinence. The model bill proposes to redirect funding from Housing First to “treatment first” models and unhoused detention camps. Cicero-inspired legislation has been enacted in 10 states.

The summit also follows the Louisiana Senate’s passage of HB 211, arguably one of the harshest such bills in the country. This Cicero bill would force unhoused people to “choose” between incarceration in jail or involuntary treatment. If they can’t afford the cost of that treatment, they may be forced to perform unpaid labor.

Housing First had a 20-year run and $4 billion a year. The federal government just killed it.

This will change homelessness in every city in America – including yours.

Housing First activists sued over the last attempt at major reform. But this time, they’ll have an uphill… pic.twitter.com/ACRYTq1iMm

— Cicero Institute (@InstituteCicero) June 3, 2026

The new research brief from Housing Now Handcuffs highlights Lonsdale’s ties to an organization called Social Purpose Corrections. While SPC is billed as a nonprofit, Lonsdale’s vision includes profitability.

“Believe it or not, not everyone involved in prison policy thinks profit is dishonorable,” the tech billionaire and Trump campaign donor wrote in a 2024 blog post, “certainly not myself.” 

The brief also details how Lonsdale’s venture capital firm, 8VC, invests in various companies that profit from tech surveillance, prisons and policing, including from Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Through 8VC, Lonsdale also backs Citizen, an app that turns neighbors into vigilantes to report suspected crimes—often falsely. The brief shows Lonsdale’s connection to Gothams LLC, a company profiting from immigration detention facilities in Texas and Florida.

“That’s really what this is always about: the money,” Antonia Fasanelli, executive director at the National Homelessness Law Center, told the crowd at the June 5 protest. “This is not a policy debate about how to end homelessness. This is someone who plans or intends or maybe stands to get rich off of the lives of unhoused people.”

Lonsdale’s dystopian vision is gaining ever-deeper traction within the Trump regime. On June 4, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee released their 2027 funding priorities, which will almost certainly exacerbate the affordable housing crisis. Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) said that the GOP bill, which slashes funding for public housing by $1.3 billion, will “put hundreds of thousands of low-income households at risk of eviction.” 

NEW REPORT Research has found that the Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank pushing anti-homeless laws, has deep connections to the prison and surveillance industries, and may stand to profit from the same anti-homeless laws they advocate for. https://t.co/Eo5iMGdV1e

— National Homelessness Law Center (@homeless_law) June 3, 2026

Cicero’s influence in that bill is apparent. The think tank’s fingerprints are also all over Trump’s 2025 anti-unhoused executive order. In 2024 as SCOTUS considered Johnson v. Grants Pass, Cicero submitted an amicus brief in support of cities criminalizing people sleeping outside. 

After a Cicero-inspired law was enacted in Kentucky, 178 people were charged with unlawful camping in just one county alone.

“In Kentucky, we’ve seen the dangerous legislation of the Cicero Institute incarcerate our people every day,” VOCAL-KY executive director Shameka Parrish-Wright told the protesters gathered June 5. “We know that generations … will be impacted by bad legislation and the things that groups like Cicero Institute are pushing.”

Donald Whitehead, representing the National Coalition for the Homeless, told the crowd that Cicero’s policy platform was an “old American pattern,” recalling how Jim Crow-era vagrancy laws targeted Black people “for being poor, unemployed or simply unhoused,” so that they could be “funneled into convict leasing and forced labor” that “powered local and state economies.”

“We can’t ignore that today’s policymakers once again are trying to make human survival a crime and call it public policy,” Whitehead said.

Image (cropped) via Arizona Judicial Branch

Correction, June 8: A previous version of this article misstated Donald Whitehead’s last name.

The post Protests as Cicero Institute Launches Homelessness Policy Summit appeared first on Filter.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a speedy trial and to an effective public defender for those who can’t afford a private one. In Georgia, those rights have evaporated.

About 85 percent of the state’s criminal cases are handled by the Georgia Public Defender Council (GPDC), the agency created by the Indigent Defense Act of 2003. Nationally, the percentage of defendants in state and federal cases who can’t afford a private attorney is generally in the same ballpark.

Georgia is the eighth most populous state in the country, but GPDC has only around 400 attorneys. It’s routine for public defenders to be juggling 500 active cases at once. Thus being provided with counsel rarely means being provided with effective counsel, as that kind of caseload doesn’t leave attorneys time to learn too many details.

In most states, chief public defenders are elected or otherwise appointed independently. The executive director of GPDC, however, is appointed by the governor. So there’s little incentive to rock the boat.

This is not a system capable of ensuring justice to everyone facing loss of liberty.

Often cases remained stalled even after a conflict attorney was found, because that attorney would subsequently resign.

The first harms come to those who are detained and cannot afford bail, and are therefore sitting in jail watching the slow turning of the judicial machine’s gears. In 2024 Filter reported on a Georgia county jail where people routinely waited over two years for their first hearing, and without talking to their public defender more than once. The man at the center of that story had been waiting for more than three years, while his repeated requests to meet with his assigned public defender all went unanswered. In 2024, Dougherty County released a man who’d been languishing in jail for the longest known pretrial detention in Georgia history, and one of the longest in the nation’s history—nearly 11 years.

But then there are the harms from ineffective counsel. Bad plea deals. Wrongful convictions. Unnecessarily long sentences, though one could argue almost all United States sentences are unnecessarily long.

One big problem stems from the fact that many cases have multiple defendants, but the public defender’s office in the circuit where they’re being tried can only represent one of them; obviously there would be some ethical concerns if two people testifying against each other were represented by the same legal counsel. So for the remaining defendants GPDC must provide “conflict attorneys.” But a 2023 Southern Center for Human Rights investigation found that people routinely waited months just to be assigned one. Often cases remained stalled even after a conflict attorney was found, because that attorney would subsequently resign due to lousy pay and resource support.

In 2022, Georgia passed legislation establishing state funding parity between the district attorneys and public defenders. Has this resulted in actual parity? Of course not, because prosecutors get all kinds of additional support from external victim-advocate grants, county budgets, local law enforcement agencies and the heavily funded Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

In 2025 GPDC got a small budget boost for “conflict cases,” bringing its state funding to a little under $100 million. But this mainly covers its attorneys’ salaries, so the costs of testing evidence or anything else that goes into preparing an adequate defense still falls to the counties. Funding for conflict attorneys and other resources has been coming from federal American Rescue Plan Act funding—a well that will run dry at the end of September.

Similar to how Georgia’s prison overcrowding and understaffing could be resolved through the simple and cost-effective option of parole, there is one obvious way to address the problem of too many indigent defendants and not enough public defenders. In February, Oregon dismissed more than 1,400 cases due to its shortage of public defenders. Georgia has yet to consider this option.

Image via Superior Court of Fulton County, Georgia

The post Ignoring Georgia’s Public Defender Crisis, and the Obvious Way to Fix It appeared first on Filter.

Two companies, Aventiv Technologies and ViaPath, hold about 80 percent of the correctional telecommunications market. If you use these services and know your provider by the name Securus and/or JPay, then that’s Aventiv. If you know your provider by the name Global Tel Link, GTL, GettingOut, ConnectNetwork or Telmate, then that’s ViaPath.

The report includes data from the six prison systems that have implemented free phone calls—California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and the federal Bureau of Prisons—and 17 local jails that have done the same. These represent about 330,000 out of the approximately 2 million people currently incarcerated in the US.

Among incarcerated people and their families interviewed about the effects of free phone call policies, common themes included stronger parent-child connections, increased financial stability and more successful reentry-planning.

While corrections departments that balk at the prospect of transitioning to free phone calls aren’t likely to put much stock in these outcomes, they might note that all of the corrections staff interviewed for the report recommended that other prison systems adopt free phone call policies.

“Since implementing the free phone call policy last August, we have seen a significant increase in call activity,” New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Commissioner (NYSDOCCS) Daniel F. Martuscello III stated in the report. “These strengthened connections provide critical support and contribute to reduced conflict inside facilities.”

To date, New York is the only state to have made prison phone calls free through administrative action; the other four were compelled by legislation. In 2020, the federal system made phone calls free to everyone in custody as a COVID-19 pandemic measure, but capped them at 500 minutes per person per month. In January 2025 this was reduced to 300 minutes and restricted to people participating in First Step Act programs, rather than to everyone in federal custody.

Prison staff cited the policies as making their jobs easier.

Where possible, Worth Rises collected data from the two years before and two years after implementation. On average, the number of phone minutes per person per day roughly doubled in both prisons and jails, though in many facilities this also owed to the arrival of tablets during the same time period. Notably, the data show that the increases in call volume have stabilized, meaning that people have continued to make more phone calls rather than just exhibiting a brief surge of interest when the new policy kicked in.

Five of the report’s in-depth interviews were conducted with state prison staff, all of whom cited the policies as making their jobs easier, and making their facilities less tense in general.

“The free phone calls have reduced the stressors greatly,” Justin Oles, a deputy warden with the Connecticut Department of Correction, stated in the report. “It’s brought a calming effect to the [incarcerated] population.”

A NYS DOCCS sergeant called it a “win-win” for both the incarcerated population and from a security and public safety perspective. A NYS DOCCS counselor stated that they were initially against the policy because it’s taxpayer-funded, but have since changed their views because of the positive impact on both prisoners and staff.

In 2025, the Federal Communications Commission systematically dismantled the landmark 2024 regulations that capped the prices of phone calls and video visits. Because the limited number of prison jobs generally pay a few cents an hour, if they pay at all, most of the cost burden of phone calls falls on friends and family. Worth Rises found that 70 percent of the savings from prison and 82 percent from jails benefited non-white families.

“I understand that there has been some frustration [among] taxpayers, who [don’t want to bear] the burden of phone calls,” stated Oles, the deputy warden in Connecticut. “But as somebody who works inside the walls, I can say that it is working.” 

Image via Minnesota Department of Corrections

The post First Analysis of Free Prison Phone Calls Shows They Reduce Violence appeared first on Filter.

Anyone whose conviction is designated “violent” is automatically classified Close security, by the court clerks in the county where they were sentenced. The idea is that through careful compliance with the rules, one can work one’s way down from Close to Medium, and from Medium to Minimum, which generally means moving from the more dangerous facilities to ones that are slightly more livable. But in reality, this applies to fewer and fewer people.

People sentenced to death, or to life without parole, can never drop below Close custody. Neither can anyone GDC has designated a “sexual predator.”

No one serving time for a sex-related conviction can go below Medium, even those who upon release would be considered the lowest risk for recidivism by the Georgia Sexual Offender Risk Review Board.

No one with an active ICE detainer can go below Medium. No one serving a sentence longer than 15 years can go below Medium. An override can be requested to get there faster, but that’s all.

So for a significant portion of the GDC prison population, it’s not a question of whether they’ve earned a lower security level. It’s a question of whether the rules allow it. 

People with nothing to hope for do not have much reason to follow rules.

In the early 1990s when I began my sentence, before the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 changed political attitudes about the prison system, the system offered us something more. Back then a person serving life with parole could work their classification all the way down to Trustee, if they maintained a favorable disciplinary record. Trustees could apply for furloughs—passes to visit home for the holidays, or attend the birth of a grandchild. People were motivated to work for that.

In 1996, when lifers were pulled from county prisons and their assignment to outside work details stopped, the Trustee passes grew scarce. In 2007 they stopped entirely, with no memo or formal announcement, or any mechanism for the people affected to contest the change. One day they existed, and the next they didn’t.

People with nothing to hope for do not have much reason to follow rules. The concept of hope as a behavioral incentive is the foundation the classification system is built on.

Initial classification happens upon arrival at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson for prisoners in the men’s system, and the McRae Women’s facility for those in the women’s system. The process used to rely on staff judgment. Now it relies on an algorithm.

Lifers are getting transferred back to Close security prisons they’d left behind decades ago.

GDC describes the Next Generation Assessment (NGA) as a “reliable predictor” of what classification is most appropriate, but probably no one else does. Even the Department of Justice directed GDC to audit and generally improve the NGA, in its 2024 report summarizing a years-long investigation that changed nothing.

“GDC personnel claimed that the NGA tool has been validated, although GDC did not provide us with a specific date or year that any such validation took place,” the DOJ wrote in its report. “It appears the last validation was at least a few years ago, and it is unclear whether GDC plans to re-validate the system, and if so when. Despite our repeated requests, GDC did not provide documentation to confirm such validation or re-validation testing or to explain the criteria, formulas, and other scoring mechanisms the system uses to determine custody levels.”

A year-and-a-half later, short-timers are still dying in Close security prisons they arguably should never have been assigned to, and more recently this has spawned a new problem.

Lifers who have spent their lives dutifully navigating the classification system are getting transferred back to Close security prisons they’d left behind decades ago. Their behavior hasn’t changed. There just isn’t enough bedspace at Medium security facilities, and it’s being given to the short-timers who can still work their way down to Minimum. GDC did not respond to Filter‘s request for comment.

This is justified through “exception reviews,” which per GDC policy can be “performed to determine if new circumstances warrant the submission of an immediate security review and Override to justify changing the offender’s Security Classification.” There is no mechanism for a prisoner to contest such a change.

Image via Georgia Department of Corrections

The post Lifers Fall Through the Cracks of the Prison Security Classification System appeared first on Filter.

Up until 2019, monitoring the people in the suicide watch cells at South Central Correctional Facility in Tennessee was a job for staff. This meant for each shift watching each prisoner under observation, an officer making somewhere around $20 per hour had to be pulled from their post elsewhere in the facility. So it saves quite a bit of money to decide that prisoners can do it for less than $1 an hour instead—especially these days, when there are usually about five times as many people on suicide watch as there were back then.

I was in South Central’s inaugural class of “inmate observers.” We were told that the federal Bureau of Prisons had already been doing this for years, but that Tennessee would be among the first state prison systems to try it. There were 20 of us at first, enough to monitor three people. South Central usually only had one or two people on suicide watch at a time, so it seemed like we would be enough. 

My job involved sitting in a chair outside one of the four suicide watch cells and looking inside through a large window in the electronically operated door. From the chair we were required to make an entry in our log book every 15 minutes. For example:

9:00 am—Inmate sleeping, breathing
9:15 am—Inmate sitting up, later back down
9:30 am—Inmate walked around room

The situations that require informing staff are when the person under observation makes requests for items, like toilet paper, or engages in self-harm.

In 2019 the job paid $0.84 per hour, and today pays $0.94 per hour. That’s around double that of most jobs here, other than the jobs in the correctional industries program. But at first the observer slots were hard to fill. It seemed weird for prisoners to be given responsibility over our peers. Staff said we’d be helping our fellow prisoners get home safely, and that we’d do the job more efficiently than they might.

Today, the job has changed quite a lot. South Central now has 54 observers. This is because it’s normal now to have at least eight people on suicide watch at a time, and often up to 14. Observers are supposed to work four-hour shifts, but the six observers reached by Filter said that with so many people to watch, they often have to work double shifts. It’s intense work, constantly watching what someone else is doing, and you’re not allowed to leave your chair until the next observer relieves you. So four hours is long enough already.

Medical staff are required to check on the suicide watch prisoners every 30 minutes. That simply means walking by and checking that each person on suicide watch has an observer outside the door. But this was easier when it was just the four suicide watch cells, which are on the other side of a secured door from the rest of the medical building. 

Those four cells are no longer enough, so makeshift ones are popping up anywhere there’s room. Some of these makeshift cells are in other parts of the prison outside the medical department. Observers told Filter it can be very difficult to concentrate in some of these areas. Especially for eight hours at a time. They also reported that medical staff rarely check in with them there.

Suicide observation here might cost well over $7,000 per day if officers still did the job, but under $320 per day to have prisoners do it. Though in recent years many officer duties have been delegated to prisoners, this may be the only instance of one being formally outsourced as an hourly paying job. The Tennessee Department of Correction did not respond to Filter’s request for comment.

From what staff members reached by Filter remember, there’s been little to no increase in the number of people at risk for suicide since 2019. Most of the people going on suicide watch are there because the protective custody (PC) cells are full. PC is for those who have people waiting to hurt them in general population, so they need to be housed somewhere physically separate.

The mental health policy states that suicide watch is not supposed to be used as a means of segregation or isolation. Officers asked by Filter about this policy were not familiar with it.

“I just do what’s necessary to keep the place running,” one said with a shrug.

Security staff mainly suggested sending violent prisoners to a different facility with the resources to handle them.

There are several reasons why there is so much more demand for PC, and thus suicide watch, than there used to be. Like in many prisons across the United States, understaffing that worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic allowed South Central to descend into out-of-control gang violence, which means more people need to be housed in PC. But there is no more room in PC, so those prisoners are being sent to suicide watch even though most have not tried to harm themselves.

The PC situation has also become worse because of changes to how the facility punishes violence. It used to be that when a prisoner stabbed someone, they would be taken to maximum security and we wouldn’t see them again for years. Now they might be released back onto the compound within a few days, or even the same day. 

In 2023, shortly after the arrival of new TDOC Commissioner Frank Strada, we learned that there would be no more “incentive transfers”—meaning no one’s request to be sent to a particular facility would be considered, whether it was to be closer to family or simply out of desperation to go somewhere less violent. Now you’re just stuck where you are, which is particularly hopeless for those who’d landed at South Central or one of the other facilities privately operated by CoreCivic. So for many people here, there is not much reason to change their behavior.

The situation has recently gotten worse as South Central has received more and more transfers from Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, the CoreCivic facility under investigation by the Department of Justice.

Prisoners do make better observers than staff.

In addition to federal BOP facilities, many county jails have long used incarcerated observers. More than a dozen state prison systems also have some version of “inmate observers” described in their policies, but that does not include those like TDOC whose policies do not appear to mention them.

Staff at the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction, which also began to use observers in 2019, have said that this wasn’t intended to address understaffing but was particularly helpful because it freed up staff resources.

It did turn out to be true that prisoners at South Central make better observers than staff. One member of the mental health staff who began working here prior to 2019 told Filter that though they don’t have hard numbers, incidents of self-harm by those on suicide watch decreased after the job was handed to prisoners.

“Observers provide more consistent and considerate watch than officers,” they said. “And [are] quicker to bring problems to the attention of medical staff.”

Image (cropped) via Nebraska Unicameral Legislature

The post Prison Suicide Watch Was Once a Staff Job. “Inmate Observers” Are Cheaper. appeared first on Filter.