As the dog days of summer wore on, the suffering in the Bing weighed heavily on me, but I still needed to address practical concerns. Vacations had begun, and I had to scramble to maintain coverage by borrowing staff from other jails. But mostly I was worried about the audit. Ten days before the targeted audit date, I received a fax advising me to have thirty charts ready for review. Preparing for an audit involved a massive amount of detailed paperwork, and I called Hugh to see if it could be postponed until Kelly returned or at least until we had our clinical supervisor.
“Gee, Mary,” he said, “I’m sorry, but requesting a postponement sends the wrong message.”
“I’ll do the best I can,” I sighed.
“The best you can? Mary—it has to be good . . . it has to be perfect.”
I knew Hugh felt bad that Kelly wasn’t back, and although he offered to send an administrator from another jail to help me out, nothing came of it, and I was on my own in identifying thirty charts that could stand up to the scrutiny. For the next couple of weeks I stayed late into the night, studying charts, checking dates, reading written entries, looking for necessary signatures and required forms. The work was painstaking, but finally I had the files I needed.
On the appointed day, four hot and grumpy auditors showed up. Things immediately got off to a bad start when there was no place for them to sit. I never expected four of them, and I had grabbed only two spots in the clinic. Since clinic space was scarce, I was lucky to get that. The head auditor, Leslie, solved the problem by plopping down at Kelly’s desk and instructing her colleague to sit at the clinical supervisor’s desk. I was uncomfortable with this arrangement, but there were no other options, and I began my day while they worked a few feet away.
For a few moments, all was quiet, save for the whirring of fans. Suddenly, Leslie began flipping rapidly through the charts, one after another. Something was wrong. She turned to me and said, “What we want are charts on inmates who’ve been here six months, so we can gauge continuity of care. Can you please get us a batch of charts that reflect six months of treatment?”
“No, I can’t,” I said, surprised by my own abruptness. “No one said anything to me about this.”
“Well, we’re telling you now,” Leslie said assertively.
“It’s too late,” I said, just as assertively. Enough was enough.
Just then the phone rang. It was the Bing. Always the Bing. “You’re needed up here—second floor.”
While I was relieved to be getting away from Leslie, the Bing was not an appealing alternative. I hurried to the bathroom and lit up a cigarette. I took a couple of hard drags, my muscles slackened, and I slumped against the wall where the cold cinderblock felt good on my warm cheek. I looked up at the mirror, caught my reflection, and for a moment searched for the traces of the idealistic intern I’d once been. So much had changed. But there was little time to think about that now. Another crisis awaited. I flushed the butt, splashed cold water on my face, and headed up.
A wild scene awaited outside the second floor elevator. Officers in riot gear, led by Dep Mancuso, were converging on a cell. “Pull him out!” Mancuso shouted. No longer looking confident and composed, the dep was bedraggled. “Get him out, and onto the goddammed bus!”
Later on, I would learn that the occupant of the cell was refusing to come out because the bus would take him to court, where he was to receive a sentence of life in prison.
I sidestepped the commotion and started down the hall to see Dr. Christian, who was talking through the crack in the cell door to the distraught person inside. Although Mancuso had kept his word with the daily escort, considering the hundreds of inmates needing medication, a single escort could only ensure that a small number of inmates could be met with privately. Of necessity, we fell back on the cell-to-cell method.
“It’s going to be okay,” Christian shouted through the crack. “You’re going to be all right, my friend.”
“I’m gonna die in here, I’m gonna die!” came the muffled sobs from within.
“No, you’re not. We’re starting you on medication right now and it’ll calm you down. You’ll see. We’re just waiting for the nurse.”
“I’m going to take the cop-out! It’ll get me off Rikers Island and out of here.”
“Don’t make any big decisions. You’ve only got ten days in here—some people are in here for years—you’re going to be fine. You’re going to be fine.”
“I didn’t even do anything to get a ticket! I swear, I didn’t! I didn’t do a thing.”
Christian stepped to the side of the cell and said, “It’s okay, Mary, false alarm—I’ve got this one.”
A reprieve. But my mind was already racing. This inmate’s protest, I didn’t do a thing! made me wonder. Several days earlier, a friendly officer nicknamed Smitty had stopped by my office for a cup of water and a quick break. As he was leaving, he pulled out his infraction pad and revealed something stunning. “I’ve got to go write up tickets. The way they’re loading up this island, they’re scrambling for beds. With five hundred beds in the Bing, they can’t afford to let one of them sit empty. Every time somebody goes into the hole, a GP bed opens up. We have our orders: ‘Write ’em up! Write ’em up!’ Let me go find some poor schmo. See you later, Miss B!”
Now, I wondered if the person in this cell was one of those “poor schmos.”
Although we’re led to believe that inmates in solitary confinement are the baddest of the bad, I found that claim to be highly exaggerated. In the beginning, I had actually hoped it was true as a means of helping me to justify this brutal punishment. But in the short time I’d been working in the Bing, I’d discovered that many of these cells’ occupants suffered from impulse control disorders. It’s not so much that they won’t behave, it’s that they can’t. I wondered if someday we wouldn’t look back at this primitive punishment and shake our heads. And then there are those in solitary like poor Keith Bargeman, who acted out in the hallway because his court suit had been stolen. Hardly the worst of the worst! And in terms of the most serious jailhouse infraction, “Assault on Staff,” after speaking with these offenders, I learned that the infraction usually came about when correctional personnel struck first and the inmate hit back. An unprovoked assault is rare, if for no other reason than there’s no escaping the most violent retribution for such an act, and every inmate knows it.
And even in cases of the very worst sociopath held in solitary, the question still remained: How could it be that a punishment that drives any human being—criminal or otherwise—to attempt suicide to escape it not be considered cruel and unusual?
Years later, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture would state that solitary confinement beyond fifteen days should be absolutely prohibited. Yet instead of reducing or seeking alternatives to solitary confinement, the nation has been on a chilling march to build more. Supermax prisons, made up solely of isolation cells for supposedly high-risk prisoners, house human beings inside these cells—not for thirty, sixty, or ninety days, but indefinitely, as a matter of routine. In supermaxes, things have been designed very carefully. For instance, the cells are padded, so that an inmate in desperate need of relief could bang his head continuously without risk of injury. In these more sophisticated, sinister units, the “problem of head-banging” has been overcome. For twenty years, these specialized prisons have been cropping up across the United States, the morality of their use unquestioned, unchallenged.
I headed back down to the clinic, more confused and despondent than ever.
When I arrived, the auditors were packing up, the audit complete. With the Bing still fresh in my mind, the audit now seemed trivial. Leslie curtly informed me that Central Office would be getting the results in two weeks. I mumbled polite good-byes as they left. Two weeks came and went, and true to form, Central Office never disclosed the results. But operating under the old adage that no news is good news, I presumed we had done well.