madcorgi

Long story. Sue me.

You may all recall that in 1980, Fidel Castro took a bunch of folks seeking asylum, together with some culled from his prisons and mental institutions, loaded them onto a collection of boats and rafts, and sent them off toward the USA. They started arriving on the shores of Florida, and Castro promised that if we sent them back, he would machine gun them on the beach. We let them stay in makeshift camps. Once he saw that we would accept them, Casto sent more over, until we had a whopping 125,000 of them. That, gentlemen, was an invasion. They were slowly assimilated into society, and most settled into the Miami area and other communities.

Since Castro had unloaded a lot of "bad hombres" from his jails, many ended up getting in more trouble here. Once arrested, they could not be deported, so they were sent instead to the U.S. Penitentiary, Atlanta, which was hastily recommissioned for the task. Thus began a steady flow of recently arrested and convicted detainees into this creepy old (built in 1902) fortress that was designed to hold 3000 prisoners. It got so overcrowded that the ACLU sued the U.S., claiming the conditions were inhumane, and ordering that the least bad folks be released back into society to keep the number below 3500 or something. Each detainee's case had to be reviewed every six months, and a decision had to be made who to release and who to keep. This was to be done by panels of DOJ lawyers and INS agents on a more or less continuous basis.

I was a FNG puppy lawyer to DOJ when I got a call one Friday afternoon from a director in the Criminal Division, asking if I would volunteer to replace a guy on the panel who had gotten sick. Details were sketchy, and my new boss was out of town, but I said "sure" before giving it much thought. It was an emergency and sounded interesting and I wanted to make a good impression. I got a hint of things to come when I was told to check into my motel under an assumed name. Monday morning I was walking across the parking lot toward the prison, listening to the prisoners chant "martar el panel!" A warm welcome indeed. We went in, got photo'd and fingerprinted, and signed a directive on who to contact if we were killed or taken hostage by the prisoners, who seemed not to appreciate the due process we were there to deliver.

The cell block was 5 stories high, and we walked through the heart of it with just a couple of guards, who were unarmed. There were no weapons inside--at least the good guys didn't have any. It was dark inside because the prisoners had recently rioted, burned mattresses and broken the outer windows, so the BoP had installed sheet metal over the window openings. Prisoner flow was controlled by man-traps and gates, but you could see the place was ready to go up again.

That was the start of a week spent reviewing the files of prisoners (including a psych evaluation) while they sat in front of my INS partner Murray and I, wearing shackles and straining to show us various knife wounds, bullet holes and such, and explain the reason for their current predicament. They had interpreters but most spoke English. Their crimes were generally pretty serious--murder, rape, assault--and they came from violent pasts. Their stories were by tuens entertaining, horrifying, and grotesque. They worked us like politicians during interviews, smiling and shaking hands, but they screamed at us every night from up in their cages. I learned the hard way not to walk too close to the wall of the cages when somebody from up above let loose a perfectly timed pee stream. It was not a happy place, but it was a really fascinating experience. The panels would have to decide whether or not to let folks out, and were up against a hard limit of how many could be kept there, which guaranteed that we'd be releasing some bad folks onto the street. It had our full attention, and I still wonder about some of the guys we took a chance on. It gave me a real appreciation for the civil servants on whom we bestow society's most intractable problems.

After I got back, and over my wife's objections, I asked to be assigned full time to the rotation, but my boss was unenthusiastic and said no. Then in 1987 the prisoners rioted and took 100 hostages, but no panel members, which is good, because it would not have ended well for them. Everybody got released after a lot of negotiations, but it was tense. The panels went on for some time after.

If you've read this far, you may be asking "Does this train of thought have a caboose?" Well, yes, here are a few thoughts:

1. As I discovered memorably during my stint in ATL, there are some folks who really just belong in cages.
2.. Prisons suck. Even though ATL was an outlier in terms of crowding and violence, it's hard to imagine anything good coming out of putting violent people in cages, other than to protect society.
3. Since prisons suck, we should make damn sure that we only send really bad people there, because they will only grow worse once inside. Rehabilitation is rare, though it does happen.
4. Our prisons are overcrowded in part because we over-criminalize trivial offenses and make the wrong things illegal. Decriminalize pot and release all non-violent drug offenders.
5. Harsh sentences don't send messages to the types of folks who make up the vast majority of prisoners. By and large, criminals are not given to introspection and careful consideration of consequences. Even the smart ones tend to think they are invincible (see, e.g., Paul Manafort) and won't get caught.
6. So, if rehabilitation is a pipe dream and deterrence doesn't work, what then? I think we need to look at root causes and try to figure out what turns normal people into criminals. We know a lot of them--poverty, lack of education, racism. Work on those problems and I think we'll see the crime rate go down. It won't be fast, but it's already been headed that way for some time as we as a society have attacked those root causes.
7. In the meantime, I agree that left lane bandits should be put to death.