Colorado Prison Inmate Wins Right To Outdoor Exercise
The Denver Post
For 12 years, virtually the only exposure Troy Anderson has had to the outdoors has come in a 90-square-foot room.
At
one end of the room are two slits in the wall that are 6-inches wide
and 5-feet tall. The slits are covered with metal grates. On one wall of
the room is a chin-up bar.
This, Colorado Department of Corrections officials argued in a lawsuit Anderson filed,
satisfied the constitutional requirement that Anderson, a prisoner at
the Colorado State Penitentiary, be given outdoor exercise
opportunities.
In a ruling issued last week, a federal judge in
Denver disagreed and ordered prison officials to allow Anderson to
exercise in a place with no roof where the rain can fall on him and the
wind can blow at him.
"The Eighth Amendment does not mandate
comfortable prisons," U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson wrote in his
ruling, "but it does forbid inhumane conditions."
Anderson's treatment, Jackson wrote, was "a paradigm of inhumane treatment."
The ruling could have widespread impact.
The Colorado State Penitentiary,
or CSP for short, is the most restrictive prison in the state system
and is used to house the state's most dangerous inmates. Prisoners are
kept in their cells for at least 23 hours a day. Meals come through a
slot in the cell door. The only window in the cell is difficult to look
through.
There are 756 inmates at the prison, according to the
Department of Corrections. Anderson, who has spent most of his adult
life in prison for crimes that include a shootout with police, is one of
nine inmates who have been housed in solitary confinement for more than
10 years, according to Jackson's ruling.
Anderson's attorneys —
law students from the University of Denver and their faculty advisors —
say the ruling could mean that all inmates at CSP must be given genuine
outdoor exercise time.
"We're hopeful the ruling will be the
catalyst ... to change that inhumane practice," DU law professor
Brittany Glidden, one of the faculty advisers, said.
But, in an
e-mail, a Department of Corrections spokeswoman said the department sees
the ruling as applying only to Anderson. Jackson gave the department 60
days to come up with a plan for giving Anderson outdoor exercise for
one hour at a time, three days a week.
One of the options, Glidden said, is that the department might just move him into a less-resrtictive prison.
"We
just received the ruling and are now analyzing how we are going to
implement the judge's orders," DOC spokeswoman Katherine Sanguinetti
wrote in an e-mail.
Jackson noted in his ruling that one prison
expert who testified at trial in the case said CSP is the only prison in
the nation that does not provide true outdoor exercise for inmates.
Instead, across the country, prisons are rethinking the use of prolonged solitary confinement.
"CDOC officials," Jackson wrote, "know that CSP is out of step with the rest of the nation."
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