The Hardest Time
At the Toughest Prison in Va........ Tight Controls
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 1999
WISE COUNTY, Va.—Slug a cellmate, grab a guard at a
Virginia prison, and you'll end up here, locked down
for 23 hours a day in the solitary confinement wing
of Red Onion State Prison, where they have taken the
"corrections" out of the Virginia Corrections Department.
Forget classes, a job in the laundry, lifting weights,
playing ball. Even the occasional friendly visit from
a grandmother or wife is almost always off limits.
And that one hour a day of freedom? Get used to wearing
handcuffs and leg shackles while a guard wielding a
50,000-volt stun gun walks you to the shower -- with
bars of its own -- or the small concrete courtyard
for exercise.
And even if you get out of solitary and your day is
broken up by trips to the dining hall or a few hours
in the day room, there will be a shotgun, loaded with
hard rubber pellets, trained on your every move.
"You step out of line, you're going to get shot," says
Joseph M. Giarratano, a 41-year-old convicted murderer,
clad in a bright orange prison uniform and black canvas
shoes without laces. "And that works. . . . In the short
term, that works."
Virginia prison officials say such severe restrictions
are needed to control "the worst of the worst," inmates
so dangerous that it's better to forget about
rehabilitation and simply warehouse them.
Red Onion, which opened here in August, and Wallens
Ridge State Prison, an identical twin that will open
in nearby Big Stone Gap this month, are "super-max"
prisons, part of a massive prison-building program
launched by then-Gov. George Allen (R). His tough-on-crime
agenda lengthened sentences, abolished parole and swelled
prison populations.
The two super-maxes are designed to hold a combined 2,400
inmates, with about 700 of those in 23-hour-a-day solitary
confinement cells. Those not in solitary can spend several
hours a day outside their cells and hold jobs in the
kitchen or laundry to earn money. There is no law
library, little job training and only one classroom.
While human rights advocates and criminologists blast
the lack of rehabilitation efforts, state prison officials
say there is little they can do to force rehabilitation
on prisoners who have no interest in bettering themselves.
Ronald J. Angelone, Virginia's tough-talking corrections
director, is an advocate of super-max. "It's not a nice
place," he says. "And I designed it not to be a nice place."
Many of the inmates are in prison for life, but not all.
Corrections Department records show that about
200 -- one of every five in Red Onion -- are scheduled
for release in the next 10 years. Sixty-six will be
30 or younger; 184 will be 40 or younger.
Giarratano, who was on Virginia's death row until
then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder (D) spared his life, says
he has found peace through Zen meditation. But he sees
the effects of extreme security measures on others,
including those who someday will be released.
"They start cracking up. They start acting out," he says,
making tiny constricted gestures with his handcuffed
hands. "What are they going to do when they get out
on the streets?"
The New York-based group Human Rights Watch, a leader
in investigating prisons, has been denied tours of Red
Onion because of the state's safety concerns. Based on
interviews with prisoners, the group alleges that
racism, excessive violence and inhumane conditions
reign inside. State prison officials deny those charges.
Human Rights Watch also contends -- and prison officials
also deny -- that Virginia and many other states in the
super-max building boom are rushing to fill those
cells to justify the expense, pulling many less-dangerous
inmates such as Giarratano into unnecessarily extreme
conditions.
Most super-maxes take only those who have misbehaved at
other prisons, but Virginia also sends inmates with life
sentences to Red Onion. Jamie Fellner, of Human Rights
Watch, says the policy "is clearly just an effort to fill
the prison."
Criminologists are alarmed by the prospect of super-max
graduates returning to society.
The only education efforts are literacy and high school
equivalency courses offered over closed-circuit television.
Job training is limited to skills useful behind bars such
as wall painting or picking up trash.
"What no one is talking about," says James Alan Fox, a
criminologist at Northeastern University, "is what happens
down the road when more ex-cons come out with bad attitudes
and little skills to wreak havoc on our streets."
Red Onion and Wallens Ridge sit atop mountains in Southwest
Virginia coal country, hundreds of miles from Richmond,
Northern Virginia and the other urban areas most
super-max inmates once called home.
The remoteness -- visitors sometimes must drive seven or
eight hours to get there -- can fray family ties. But the
new prisons have brought an economic spark to this
depressed region. Each one cost more than $70 million
to build. Between them, they will employ nearly 800 and
have combined payrolls of $27 million a year.
For all the complaints about Virginia's new super-max
prisons, they seem well equipped to control very dangerous
prisoners who might otherwise attack guards or other
prisoners or try to escape.
Angelone says it is cheaper and safer to house "the worst
in the
state's other prisons, which are usually called
of the worst" in Red Onion or Wallens Ridge than
"correctional facilities."
Those other prisons, once rid of their troublemakers,
run better and make rehabilitation there easier,
Angelone says. Even the threat of a super-max, he adds,
makes inmates elsewhere behave better. Since super-max
inmates can return to lower-security prisons in as
little as two years given good behavior, Angelone hopes
prisoners throughout the system will be scared straight
by stories of the prisons' severity.
"You touch an officer, and you're going to Red Onion," he
says.
Escape from Red Onion, many prisoners concede, is almost
impossible to imagine. Prisoners live in 11-by-8-foot cells
with five-inch-wide slits for windows and slots in the 1
1/2-inch-thick steel doors for delivering meals or mail.
Inside the prisons, the cells are Spartan. The toilet and
sink, with no knobs or handles that could be fashioned into
weapons, are a single stainless-steel unit. The desk,
beds and a small shelf are mere slabs of steel bolted
to the wall. Mattresses and small pillows are thin and
plastic.
Guards in a control room open and close all doors with the
whoosh and crash that are the unmistakable soundtrack of
prison life. And the common areas, also locked from the
outside, are watched constantly by guards holding shotguns,
trained to fire non-lethal rounds at prisoners who
misbehave.
The same is true of the yard, where prisoners who are not
in solitary confinement can exercise and chat with other
inmates. The only recreation facility is a single
basketball court, where crossing one of several red-painted
lines draws immediate fire from the gun port above.
Virginia is one of three prison systems in the country to
use firearms behind bars, and they are used at the
super-maxes -- designed to offer clean sight lines for
guns -- far more often than at other prisons. In Red
Onion's first nine months, shots have been fired 63
times. Most were warning shots, but 15 involved the
pellets called "stinger rounds," which sometimes
penetrate the skin.
Federal prisons and most state ones shy away from trying
to control inmates with firearms, both because the practice
is seen by many as inhumane and because of fears that the
guns could fall into the hands of inmates. But Red Onion
warden George Deeds says that possibility is remote
because the weapons, while aimed through bars into
common areas, stay in locked control rooms.
"There's no possible way inmates can get their hands on
these weapons," Deeds says, "unless there's a serious
mistake."
The perimeters of both prisons are protected by coils
of razor wire and double fences with sensors. Guards
in two towers, armed with live rounds, watch for escape
attempts. A patrol car constantly circles each prison.
"I'm never getting out of prison," says 53-year-old inmate
Billy R. Kelly, gaunt, bearded and shackled in three
different ways as he speaks with a visitor; he is serving
a 72-year sentence for murder. "You have to keep inventing
a reason to live every day."
For many others, the thought of leaving prison is not so
abstract. Inmate Reginald Yelverton, 30, grew up in
Southeast Washington but has been in prison for 12 years
on a second-degree murder charge. The D.C. Department of
Corrections pays to house 69 prisoners such as Yelverton
at Red Onion. He expects to make his first visit to a
parole board next year.
"Red Onion," he says, "is very terrible, very
racist" -- a common complaint from African American
prisoners such as Yelverton. Though prison officials
say they work to fight racism, most of the guards, like
most of the population of Southwest Virginia, are white.
Another inmate who can imagine freedom is Robert L.
Smith Jr., 29, who also grew up in Washington but was
sent to Red Onion for a kidnapping and weapons charge in
Fairfax County. Smith says he received his high school
diploma while in another prison and was on his way to
early release for good behavior when he threw a punch at
an aggressive fellow inmate while on a work detail.
Prison officials, who do not reveal disciplinary
histories of inmates, sent Smith to Red Onion.
The incident set back his possible release date, but even
without parole, his 12-year sentence ends in December
2003, when Smith will be 34.
There is little research to predict what Yelverton, Smith
or other prisoners will do once they leave Red Onion.
There are at least 30 super-max prisons in the country
now, according to a new federal study by Chase Riveland,
a former correctional director in Washington state and
Colorado. Data on their effectiveness, however, is scant.
"Over the long term," Riveland says, "the jury is
really out."
But Craig Haney, a psychologist at the University of
California at Santa Cruz who studies solitary confinement,
says super-max prisons may breed more violence as inmates
become both emotionally detached and enraged.
"There are some people who react to that deprivation with
anger and resentment, and sometimes uncontrollable anger
and resentment," Haney says. "You don't necessarily have
to care -- unless you let them out."
Michael Bonhom, a 36-year-old murderer from Anacostia,
echoes the thought. "You're going to have rage in you,"
says Bonhom, who is seeking a new trial in hopes of getting
free. "And all it takes is a second" -- he snaps his
fingers -- "and you're going to explode."
