compiled by Patrick H. Moore
Tamms Correctional Center inmate Joseph Dole is serving a life sentence for murder for a crime he says he did not commit.
Situated amid rolling hills and farms in the southern tip of Illinois, Tamms Correctional Center, the state’s only “super-max” prison, was built during the get-tough-on-crime wave that swept the nation in the 1990s. It was designed to house the state’s most dangerous inmates.
Conditions are harsh. For at least 23 hours a day, prisoners sit in solitary confinement in 7-by-12-foot cells. There is no mess hall. Meals are shoved through a chuckhole in cell doors. Contact with the outside world is sharply restricted. For a rare visit from relatives or friends, inmates are strip-searched, chained to a concrete stool and separated from visitors by a thick glass wall. There are no jobs and limited educational opportunities.
Liebman, Fagan, and West (2000), in a comprehensive review of all death penalty appeals in the United States from 1973 to 1995, found that more than two out of three death sentences (68%) were tainted by errors serious enough to warrant reversal. The most common problems were incompetent defense attorneys and the suppression of evidence by police and prosecutors.Now take into consideration the fact that the majority of capital cases in Illinois don’t result in a death penalty sentence, but rather the mandatory minimum of Life without Parole (LWOP). You can see the alarming possibility that two-thirds of lifers in Illinois also had errors serious enough to warrant a reversal, but lacked the procedural safeguards, proper legal representation, etc. that come with a death sentence, and therefore the errors went undetected, thus exacerbating the chance that many innocent people are serving a life sentence.
The purpose of this post is not to try and determine whether or not Joseph Dole is actually guilty of the crime that put him behind bars. Rather, herein, we are providing a window into Mr. Dole’s world by re-posting parts of his immensely powerful prison diaries for which he was awarded second place in Essay in the 2013 Pen Prison Writing Contest on the strength on his Prison Diaries. All Things Crime Blog will be re-posting his dairies in sections over the next few weeks.
Here is Part One of Mr. Dole’s Essay:
How can I communicate what it is like to get arrested when you have one four month old daughter and a second daughter on the way, and then be sentenced to a term of life without the possibility of parole after your first felony conviction, by way of a theory of accountability, for a crime you didn’t commit? How can I depict what it feels like now to have two daughters who are twelve and thirteen years old whom I haven’t held in over nine years because I’m confined in a supermax prison for my sole legitimate disciplinary infraction? A prison which Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Tamms Year Ten all condemn because they consider the conditions here as amounting to torture. The English language lacks adequate terminology for such an endeavor.
The first time I ever wrote anything really was shortly after I arrived at Tamms (the supermax prison where I’m currently confined). I wrote an essay. I had never written an essay before, not even in school as far as I can remember. Yet desperate for money, I tried my hand at it. There was an essay contest being put on by a death row inmate and a good Samaritan. The theme was Who Am I?” I learned of the contest from another prisoner who yelled out the details from down the gaNery. I had to send it in that night in order to make the deadline. I simply wrote down the first thing that came to mind. Surprisingly I won first place and fifty bucks, even more than the ten dollars promised to every entrant. More than anything though, it inspired me to learn how to write better. In prison good writing skills are essential for just about everything — keeping in contact with your family (especially here in Tamms where they still won’t allow us to make phone calls); presenting your appeals in concise, coherent arguments to the courts; advocating for change; filing grievances; etc.
In that first essay I briefly touched upon what it is like in prison. I wrote:
“Most people’s conceptions of being locked up are completely wrong. It’s not the physical things that you’re without that make it so hard to be incarcerated for life. It’s the fact that you’re helpless to take care of your family when they’re sick, to raise your children, to help in their times of struggle, and to give back to your community. Instead you’re a burden, a charity case, someone to pity. It strips you of your self-esteem and your self-respect. That is what breaks a man, not the absence of good food, alcohol, sex, or any of the other inconsequential thing we may often wish we had to temporarily give us pleasure.”
I still find all of that true. Yet, after being confined and isolated for the past 9 years in a supermax prison, I’ve also come to realize that the little things add up too. There are a million little stressors and injustices that prisoners must endure on a daily basis that can also break a man. These are what I will try to describe with this diary. Each one may seem minor, but the cumulative effect of them all is what drives so many here insane. I’m not sure how accurate the word “insane” is, but it definitely causes a variety of mental illnesses. A recent report by the John Howard Association claims that 95% of inmates in Tamms suffer from a diagnosable psychiatric problem. Up to a point I wonder if this figure is just rhetoric or propaganda put out by the administration to further slander and stigmatize us in the eyes of the public, similar to how they call us the “worst of the worst”. I can hear them now, “not only are they the worst of the worst, but they’re all crazy sociopaths!” At the same time it disturbingly seems plausible to me that so many here are mentally ill. Numerous studies have shown that as little as three months in solitary confinement can cause deterioration in one’s mental health. I wonder what the past nine years here have done to me? What psychiatric problem have they surreptitiously diagnosed me with?
March 15, 2011 4:30 a.m.
When I went to see the nurse she informed me that the doctor will not treat hernias until it becomes strangulated and is a life and death situation. I was scheduled to see the doctor, “Dr. Death”, nevertheless. We call him Dr. Death because of his complete lack of compassion for prisoners and his priority of saving his employer money over the lives or health of his patients. When I saw Dr. Death he told me “You’re alright. It’s reducible”. I asked him “Shouldn’t I get it repaired?” He responded, “Yeah, but we’re not going to do it. You can get it repaired when you get Out.” I told him that I’m never getting out, as I have a life without parole sentence. He responded, “Oh, then you’ll die with it.” I then asked him, “What about the pain?” He said, “You’re tough, you can handle it.”
I’m only working on about three hours sleep right now. Two guys on the wing “bugged up” last night, and were screaming and kicking on the door all night. If you’ve ever heard anyone slam steel against steel, you can imagine how loud and nerve-racking five continuous hours of that deafening noise sixty times per minute in close quarters would be. We say someone has “bugged up” when they lose it and start disturbing the wing. We call the guys who are more mentally disturbed “bugs”. I’m not sure why. Maybe it is a reference to pests, or people bugging others or something? Who knows?
The prison vernacular is a hodgepodge of English, Spanish, and Ebonics, filled with innuendos, euphemisms, slang, etc. I’ve been in prison for over a decade and half the time I still don’t know what people are saying. What’s worse is that my language skills are deteriorating to the point where sometimes my family can’t understand what I’m saying or I no longer pronounce words correctly and don’t even notice. Years ago on a visit my mother snapped at me saying “It’s police (pa-lës) not p0 lice!” (pa lés). I don’t even know when I stopped saying it correctly and never realized I was mispronouncing it. Others have heard me talk on the wing without seeing me and have said they thought I was Latino because I have a Spanish accent. When did that happen? Do I really? I can’t tell if I do.
March 18, 2011 6:00a.m.
My daughters always bug me to grow out my hair. I currently have it shaved bald, and use a disposable razor to shave my head in the shower. If I were to grow it out I would have to pay what we call the “hair tax”. It’s a $4 charge anytime you change your appearance because they have to give you a new ID card. That’s the new thing nowadays. Budget crisis? Just make prisoners and their families pay for everything; soap, ID’s, visits, etc. Anyway I’m not giving them fifty bucks just so I can grow my hair out for the next year.
More importantly though, I would then be dependent on the barber to cut my hair and that entails way too much risk for my taste. I used to go out to the barber, but the last time I went I came back with two deep cuts that were dripping blood. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the inmate in the next cell yelled over to me and confessed to being positive for Hepatitis C and that the barber had just cut his hair and drawn blood as well. I asked the correctional officer if he had seen the barber clean the clippers after my neighbor’s haircut and he said no. I also noticed shavings of foreign hair much thicker and blacker than mine on my head and shoulders.
So I asked for a Hepatitis test and was denied one. Then I filed a grievance and Dr. Death called me out to see him and tried to convince me that it is not possible to contract Hepatitis that way. Which is laughable because when we come into prison they tell us not to share electric razors, nail clippers, etc. because that’s how Hepatitis is commonly transmitted. I continued to argue with him until finally he agreed to test me for Hepatitis C only. I said fine (it was better than nothing and that is what my neighbor had). Luckily it came back negative. A year earlier I had finally gotten an HIV test after asking for nearly a decade. That too came back negative. I’m trying to keep it that way. Therefore, just to be on the safe side, I no longer go to the barber. In general population one must also worry about contracting both diseases through fighting. Fights in prison get extremely bloody.
Those aren’t the only ways diseases get passed around in here either. They are supposed to screen kitchen workers and not allow inmates (from the nearby minimum security prison) who have either disease to work in the kitchen, but they still do. A number of years ago we were supposed to have chili for dinner but the trays were empty. We started asking what was going on, and the guards were really mad and told us that one of the kitchen workers had Hepatitis and bled in the chili. They never would have told us, but since the guards often eat the same meals as we do they were mad that this infected guy had been preparing all of our food for month without us knowing. Who knows how many people he may have infected. We all asked for Hepatitis tests then too, but were all denied.
I’ve seen studies that conclude that somewhere between 30% - 40% of prisoners in the U.S. has Hepatitis. The prisons and private health care companies are always fighting against testing inmates for it and never want to treat the people that they know have it. Most of these people will be getting out someday, and will pose an enormous public safety risk if they are unaware that they have Hepatitis. Prisons act as giant incubators for Hepatitis, MRSA, etc., and even HIV rates are much higher in prison than free society.
March 19, 2011 5:40 a.m.
Usually it’s quiet at this time of the morning. That’s why I choose to write this diary around this same time each day. Today though Yip and Yap (two “bugs” on the wing) are screaming at each other. This on top of the background noise of door kicking and howls of the mentally ill on some other wing. I imagine it will be another busy day for the guards. All the noise is usually a harbinger of inmates flooding or trashing the galleries, if not inmates tearing toilets off the walls or throwing feces at each other, and/or staff. Did you know that guys are being sentenced to an extra five years sometimes for throwing feces at guards? That means if they serve those extra five years in Tamms the taxpayers are paying $450,000.00 to punish a guy for slinging urine or excrement at a guard.
It’s never completely quiet on the wing unless a power outage occurs. There’s a constant and loud white noise here at Tamms. It’s the giant fan that struggles to circulate air in an otherwise hermetically sealed environment. You get used to it but only after some months. After a year or so there would be times that it would just really drive me crazy though. Then after about two years it ceased to ever bother me. It adds to the difficulty in communicating with others on the wing though.
Actually it also has its positive aspects as well. On the rare occasion that the power goes off it gets so quiet in here that you can hear every inmate urinating, farting, snoring, etc. Not pleasant! It’s also a warning that someone is going to be maced. Whenever the guards are about to mace someone they kick it on high which is extremely loud, to the point where you can’t even hear the guy in the next cell yelling to you.
Whenever they mace someone on the pod it spreads to every wing. So even if it’s on the other side of the pod you’re going to be coughing too. If you’re on the same wing as someone who gets maced you too feel the full effects, because you’re in a sealed cement box of ten cells sharing the same air. The administrative directive concerning the use of chemical agents states that staff is supposed to move everyone not being maced off the wing before macing someone, but they never comply with that directive. (Too much of a hassle, and after all, why bother when macing 8 or 10 prisoners is more fun than macing just one).
In the next installment of Joseph Dole’s compelling Prison Diary, among other things, Mr. Dole will discuss noise pollution, bladder control, the anguish of being unable to help family members, and GEDs.