Westword
The year began with Manuel Rodriguez being strapped into a restraint chair. It ended with Rodriguez back in the chair.
At Colorado's state supermax prison, inmates get into confrontations
with guards -- over food, hygiene, privileges, a refusal to "cuff up" or
whatever -- out of boredom, mental illness or plain orneriness. Some
claim to be provoked by staff.
Whatever the reason, it's a contest the prisoner is going to lose every time.
Colorado Department of Corrections documents obtained by
Westword
reflect a year's "use of force" incidents at the Colorado State
Penitenitary, where the state's most disruptive inmates are confined to
their cells 23 hours a day. There were 61 such incidents reported from
March 1, 2012 to March 1 of this year, ranging from situations that
merely required minor physical contact, known in prisonspeak as "soft
empty hand control," to standoffs resulting in cell extraction teams
unleashing pepper spray or confining belligerent prisoners to restraint
chairs.
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| Manuel Rodriguez. |
Although
proponents of supermax prisons claim that they act as a deterrent to
violence elsewhere in the corrections systems, the facilities also
become repositories of "problem" inmates, whose failure to follow the
rules tends to prolong their stay in solitary confinement -- and
possibly exacerbate any preexisting mental problems. (As we've
previously reported,
roughly a third of CSP inmates have been diagnosed with some form of
mental illness.) Overall, the use-of-force incident numbers have dropped
dramatically at CSP since the late 1990s, when the staff was averaging
ten cell extractions a month.
But troubles in supermax are often a good indicator of trouble down the road, too.
Evan Ebel,
the parolee believed to have killed a pizza delivery man and DOC chief
Tom Clements before dying in a shootout in Texas, acquired
an extensive disciplinary record at CSP and the Sterling Correctional Facility before his release earlier this year.
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| JJ Alejandro. |
The
61 CSP use-of-force incidents logged for a twelve-month period,
obtained through an open records request, involved a total of 41 inmates
-- with just four prisoners accounting for more than a quarter of the
reports. Although the DOC declined to release details of each incident,
DOC regulations call for an escalating spectrum of force, depending on
the level of perceived threat.
The log lists twelve instances of "emergent need entry" into cells,
generally triggered by an inmate being unresponsive or refusing to obey
rules (such as refusing to put hands through the food slot to be cuffed
before staff entry); ten cell extractions, including five using pepper
spray; 31 episodes of varying degree of force to subdue inmates, from
"soft empty hand control" to "hard intermediate control;" four uses of
the restraint chair; and four occasions when a SORT team was activated
but no use of force was required.
