Archives for June 2010

It was a bright, sunny day at San Quentin for the June 3 ceremony formally celebrating the new $136 million Central Health Services Building – a milestone in California’s court-mandated effort to improve unconstitutionally poor healthcare in its prisons. Perhaps the true jewel in the crown of this special day was the unexpected, unheralded appearance of the man whose tenacity and commitment to this cause made the building possible: U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson.
Well noted at the ceremony was the role played by Federal Receiver J. Clark Kelso, who was also on hand to christen the first step in the Herculean construction efforts to bring California’s inmate healthcare up to acceptable standards. It was Judge Henderson who hired Kelso to lead this unprecedented, multi-million dollar effort. However, prior to the ceremony Judge Henderson insisted that his role be down played. And thus, while one involved person after another – from Kelso to the building’s locksmith – stepped forward to receive accolades, Judge Henderson sat quietly in the front row, observing with a serene smile.
Kelso acknowledged Judge Henderson’s role in making this project possible. But Judge Henderson’s aide had asked that no picture be taken of him receiving a plaque or a certificate. Such is the quiet nature of a man in the twilight days of an enduring and remarkable career. Judge Henderson’s life, from his collegiate years at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall to his meteoric rise as a young civil rights attorney in the South during the turbulent Sixties repeatedly calls forth a description as “the first.”
In his early years growing up in South Central Los Angeles near Watts, Henderson’s mother convinced him that he was going to be somebody in the world, ideally a doctor or a lawyer. He went to UC Berkeley on a football scholarship but a knee injury benched his football career and focused his energies on academics. One of only two African-American students in the Boalt Hall class of 1962, Henderson started his legal career when John Doar recruited him as the first black attorney at the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
He was assigned to the South to investigate voting rights abuses by local law enforcement. He soon confronted the challenge of being a black man in authority within the largely white world of the American legal system. His role included investigating in 1963 the Sixteenth Street Baptist church bombing that killed four girls. He grew to know Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the civil rights movement, after first winning over their initial skepticism of a government attorney.
Henderson became a bridge between the Kennedy Justice Department and the leaders of the civil rights movement that he came to know when they were all forced to lodge in the same segregated motels throughout the South. One decision Henderson made seemed reasonable at the time but blew up in his face, costing him his job. He loaned his car to Dr. King.
“When they asked I quickly agreed because King told me that one of their cars had a bad tire. And it would not be good for their car to break down in that neighborhood, ” he said in the documentary film Soul of Justice. Foes of civil rights seized on the act as evidence of the government’s bias. “When the controversy hit the fan I didn’t understand what was going on,” said Henderson. “I didn’t understand what the big deal was… I was momentarily confused and conflicted behind the whole ordeal…”
After his resignation Henderson did a stint in a private practice. Then he served as director of the East Palo Alto office of the San Mateo County Legal Aid Society, the first legal aid attorney in that city. In 1969, he became assistant dean at neighboring Stanford Law School where he established the minority-recruiting program, helped diversify the student body and assisted in creating Stanford’s clinical program.
Henderson had been distressed to learn that Stanford had graduated its first black lawyer only in 1968. When he left Stanford in 1976 to practice law, 20 percent of the entering class consisted of students of color. Henderson’s program became a nationwide model and of his recruits, Charles Ogletree, became a noted professor of law at Harvard.
During this time Henderson also served as consultant to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Office of Economic Opportunities, Carnegie Corporation and Ford Foundation. In 1977 he left Stanford to form a law firm that specialized in civil rights, civil liberties and other issues of constitutional law, and was a law professor at Golden Gate University. While at Golden Gate and in private practice with Sandy Rosen and Joe Remcho, Henderson was appointed to the
Judge Henderson’s name is synonymous with the highest principles of the law – civility, compassion and recognition of human dignity.”
Mary Lou Frampton, Director, Henderson Center of Social Justice
federal bench. He was selected by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 to sit in the Northern District of California, becoming the only African-American judge on that court for 10 years. He was selected as its first black chief justice in 1990 and served in that post until 1997.
Throughout his distinguished career on the federal bench Judge Henderson has ruled on many of the critical issues of our time. In the late 1980s, Judge Henderson presided over a long-running case concerning the fishing industries’ practice of snaring dolphins in its tuna nets. Judge Henderson ruled in favor of environmental groups’ charges that millions of dolphins were drowned because of the industries’ refusal to follow existing safety regulations. He also rejected attempts by the Clinton and Bush administrations to relax legal standards on fishing practices and loosen dolphin-safety labeling on tuna. And Judge Henderson’s decision placing California’s prison health care system under federal receivership followed a lengthy battle.
Judge Henderson says he acts from a conviction that the U.S. Constitution belongs to everyone… ”I’m determined to see better health in prisons… Even those at the bottom of the social heap nonetheless have human dignity,” said Henderson in Soul of Justice. In a landmark 1995 civil case, Madrid v. Gomez, Henderson ruled that the use of force and level of medical care at the notorious Pelican Bay State Prison was unconstitutional. During a subsequent oversight federal process, Henderson visited the prison personally. “Prisoners are human beings, too, and the guards decided not to honor that anymore…” he said in Soul of Justice.
On one visit Henderson believed that a prison riot had been staged for his benefit to further the guards’ point that prisoners are animals. In 1999 the UC Berkeley Law School established in his honor the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice with its prestigious Henderson Social Justice Prize.
In 2005, Judge Henderson found that substandard medical care in the California prison system had violated prisoners’ rights under the Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment and had led to unnecessary deaths. In 2006, Henderson appointed Robert Sillen as receiver to take over the health care systems of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations and replaced Sillen with Kelso in 2008.
One of Judge Henderson’s decisions had its ups and downs. In 1997 he ruled as unconstitutional Proposition 209, the state’s anti-affirmative action initiative. The ruling drew howls from Republican leaders ranging from Tom DeLay to Pete Wilson. The next year a court of appeal reversed Judge Henderson’s ruling.
Then, in 2003, his reasoning was vindicated when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action was indeed constitutional. However, in the year following the appeals court ruling the enrollment of people of color in the UC system plummeted by 60 percent. Said Judge Henderson: “There was only one African-American to graduate from Boalt Law School that year.“
David Marsh was a Contributing Writer to this story.

A federal panel has refused to eliminate the receiver overseeing California prison health care.
The ruling clears the way for federal Receiver J. Clark Kelso to proceed with his $1.9 billion construction plan to add medical beds to the state’s 32 prisons.
The decision was announced by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on April 30.
Kelso was appointed by U.S. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson of San Francisco under authority of the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act. The move came as a result of a decades-long class action lawsuit filed by inmates challenging poor health care in the state’s adult prisons.
Kelso’s job was to bring prison health care up to acceptable constitutional standards. Initially the state did not object to the appointment of a receiver in 2006, and admitted that it was unable to remedy the problem within its prisons. Only when the state’s economy collapsed did legal efforts begin to rid California of the receiver.
California faces a projected budget shortfall of $19 billion through June of 2011.
Prisons chief Matthew Cate claimed Henderson had no authority to appoint Kelso, and that Kelso then had no authority to order the construction of 10,000 additional beds, at a cost of approximately $6 billion.
With the onset of the state’s financial crisis, Kelso responded with his current, more modest proposal for two new hospitals and 3,400 beds intended for acute and long-term care.
“The problem has not been with a lack of plans, but with the state’s ability to execute them,” the appellate panel said in its ruling. The court ruled that the appointment of the receiver was the least intrusive way to ensure inmates’ rights.
“The state to this day has not pointed to any evidence that it could remedy its constitutional violations in the absence of the receivership,” the judges declared.

Incarceration renders some people so dependent on others that they gradually lose the capacity to rely on themselves to guide their actions and restrain their conduct, according to Craig Haney of the University of California-Santa Cruz.
The emphasis on the punitive and stigmatizing aspects of incarceration has furthered the psychological isolation of prison from society, compromised prison visitation programs and curtailed scarce resources used to maintain ties between prisoners, their families and the rest of society, according to a report written by for a conference funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in January of 2002.
The report examines the unique set of psychological alterations that many prisoners are forced to undergo in order to survive the penitentiary experience and the psychological impact of incarceration and its implications for post-prison adjustment back into society.
The rapid influx of new prisoners, serious shortages in staffing and other resources, and embracing of an openly punitive approach to corrections led to the “de-skilling” of many correctional staff members who often resorted to extreme forms of prison discipline (such as punitive isolation or “supermax” confinement) that had especially destructive effects on prisoners, repressing conflict rather than resolving it. Increased tensions and higher levels of fear and danger resulted, according to the report.
Since the 1970s, a combination of forces has transformed the nation’s criminal justice system and modified the nature of imprisonment. The combination of overcrowding and rapid expansion of prison systems nationally adversely affects living conditions in many prisons, jeopardizes prisoner safety, compromises prison management and limits prisoner access to programming.
In the mid-1970s incarceration shifted from putting people in prison, believing it would rehabilitate them for re-entry into society as productive citizens, to one that used imprisonment to inflict pain on wrongdoers (“just deserts”), disable criminal offenders (“incapacitation”), or to isolate deviants from society (“containment”).
Thus, in the first decade of the 21st century, more people have been subjected to the ill effects of imprisonment, for longer periods, under conditions that threaten greater psychological distress and potential long-term dysfunction. Many will return to communities that have already been disadvantaged by a lack of social services and resources.
Penal institutions require inmates to relinquish their individuality and freedom to make their own choices and decisions. This process requires what is a painful adjustment for most people.
The adaptation to imprisonment, at times, creates habits of thinking and acting that can be dysfunctional in periods of post-prison adjustment.
Subtle psychological alterations occur in the routine course of adapting to prison life. The term “institutionalization” is used to describe the process by which inmates are shaped and transformed by the institutional environments in which they live.
Institutionalization has taught most people to cover their feelings and not to openly or easily reveal intimate feelings or reactions. Prisoners struggle to control and suppress their own internal emotional reactions to events around them.
Prison culture preys on both mental and physical weakness and vulnerability and discourages the expression of candid emotions or intimacy.
It is important to emphasize that these are the natural and normal adaptations made by prisoners in response to the unnatural and abnormal conditions of penitentiary life, according to Haney’s study.
Because many institutions are dangerous places, prisoners learn quickly to become hyper vigilant and ever-alert for signs of threat or personal risk.
To be continued…
Prisoners who struggle with their emotions and behavior create obscure as well as camouflaging personas. They risk alienation from others and are subject to chronic emotional flatness and debilitating social interaction…finding that they’ve created a permanent and unbridgeable distance between themselves and other people.
Some prisoners find safety in social invisibility by becoming as inconspicuous and unobtrusively disconnected from others as possible. In extreme cases, especially when combined with prisoner apathy and loss of the capacity to initiate behavior on one’s own, the pattern closely resembles that of clinical depression. Long-term prisoners are particularly vulnerable to this form of psychological adaptation.
In addition to obeying the formal rules of the institution, there are also informal rules and norms that are part of the unwritten institutional and prisoner culture code that must be followed.
In many institutions, the lack of meaningful programs has deprived most inmates of pro-social or positive activities in which to engage while incarcerated. Prisoners are denied basic privacy rights and lose control over mundane aspects of their existence that most citizens take for granted.
They are housed in extremely cramped spaces (a 60 square foot cell is roughly the size of a king-sized bed), have little or no control over who they share that space with and the intimate contact it requires. Some feel they are treated like infants, and the degraded conditions under which they live are a repeated reminder of a compromised social status and stigmatized social role as prisoners. A diminished sense of self-worth and personal value may result, Haney’s reports states. Prisoners may come to think of themselves as “the kind of person” who deserves the subjection of degradation and stigma while incarcerated.
For some prisoners, incarceration is so stark and psychologically painful that it represents a form of traumatic stress severe enough to produce post-traumatic stress reactions once released.
The fact that a high percentage of persons presently incarcerated have experienced childhood trauma means, among other things, that the harsh punitive and uncaring nature of prison life may represent a kind of “re-traumatization” experience for many.
Mental illness and developmental disability represent the largest number of disabilities among prisoners. Upwards of as many of 20% of the current prisoner population nationally suffers from either some sort of significant mental or psychological disorder or developmental disability, Haney says, yet both groups are too often left to their own devices to somehow survive in prison and leave without having had any of their unique needs addressed.
Supermax facilities, where prisoners are kept under conditions of unprecedented levels of social deprivation for long periods of time. This kind of confinement creates its own set of psychological pressures that, in some instances, disable prisoners for integration into the outside world.
Several basic propositions; prisons have become difficult places to adjust and survive over the last several decades; adaptation to prisons exact psychological costs to prisoners; some prisoners are more vulnerable to the ill effects of imprisonment than others; the psychological cost and ill effects of imprisonment can severely impede post-prison adjustment; and multiple things should be done, in and out of prison to minimize these impediments.
The abandonment of rehabilitation, Haney believes, has resulted in an erosion of modestly protective norms against cruelty toward prisoners.

When Virginia instituted its long-planned smoking ban in prisons in February, it brought half the number of the 50 states which have outlawed the use of tobacco products by staff and inmates on prison grounds.
A number of the other 25 states that still permit tobacco products on prison grounds have some sort of partial ban in place, with some sort of exception such as staff smoking areas. Georgia will become the next state with smokeless prisons when its ban takes effect in December.
Most states have relied on a phased-in approach in order to achieve a total ban, rather than a much harsher “cold-turkey” approach.
By banning the use of tobacco products in prisons, states hope to realize huge savings in health care-related costs for inmates, as well as an eventual reduction in insurance premiums for healthier staff.
Attempts by Arizona lawmakers to outlaw smoking in prisons were defeated last year. But state Representative Bill Konopnicki, the bill’s sponsor, said plans were underway to re-introduce the legislation this year.
The American Civil Liberties Union supports some bans through its National Prison Project, citing an inmate’s right to breathe non-contaminated air.
For some reason, states along the country’s southern border from New Mexico to Florida still allow some form of tobacco in prisons.