From The Colorado Independent's Susan Greene.
To have known Tom Clements during his first year in Colorado meant
hearing a statistic, sometimes over and over again, that haunted him as
director of the state’s Corrections Department.
He mentioned it the day we met, shortly after shaking my hand.
“Did you know that 47 percent of offenders in ad-seg are walking directly out onto the streets?” he said.
Ad-seg, short for administrative segregation, the department’s term
for solitary confinement, originally was meant to house the most violent
prisoners, the so-called worst of the worst, to separate them from
general population. In practice, it also has been used for gang leaders,
convicts with gang affiliations and those who, for various reasons,
aren’t considered compliant inmates.
Ad-seg involves locking prisoners down 23 hours a day alone in a
cement cell about the size of two queen-sized mattresses. It means
limiting human interactions to the small slot through which guards pass
food, mail and toilet paper. It means shackling them for the short walk
to and from an indoor exercise cage where their 24th hour is spent, also
alone, without sunlight or fresh air.
In Colorado, ad-seg has meant spending months, years and sometimes
decades without normal social
contact. For many prisoners, it means
marinating in numbing boredom, loneliness and the untreated mental
illnesses that either landed them in solitary or that developed as a
result of isolation.
“Forty-seven
percent of these guys are walking right out of ad-seg into our
communities,” Clements told me in 2011. “Forty-seven percent. That’s the
number that keeps me awake at night.”
In slightly more than two years on the job, Clements cut the use of
ad-seg by more than 40 percent, and the prison system saw no uptick in
prison violence during that time. Clements closed Colorado State
Penitentiary II, the state’s brand new supermax prison in Cañon City
designed exclusively for solitary confinement. And by reintegrating
isolated prisoners into social environments before setting them free, he
managed to lower the 47 percent statistic that preoccupied him to 23
percent. His goal was to drive that percentage down to zero.
He didn’t get the chance.
On March 19 of this year, a man dressed in a pizza delivery uniform
rang the doorbell at his home in Monument, fatally shot him and fled.
Rumors spread instantly fueled by mainstream-media reports, that the
murder was a hit orchestrated by a white supremacist prison gang, or by a
prisoner with ties to the Saudi Arabian government, or both.
But those were just conspiracy theories.
The truth about Clements’ murder is rooted in the statistical reality
that kept him up at night – that it’s a public safety risk to let any
percentage of prisoners walk directly out of solitary confinement
without helping them adjust to being around people. As it turns out, his
fears were justified. Evan Ebel, the Colorado Department of Corrections
parolee who killed Clements, had walked directly out of solitary into
society and struggled with the transition for less than two months
before he killed Nathan Leon, a pizza deliverer in Denver, gunned down
Clements and then led police on a high-speed chase in Texas that ended
in a shootout and his death.
“Evan Ebel was exactly what Tom warned us about every single day,” said Roxane White, chief of staff for Gov. John Hickenlooper.
“Here you had two people, one who suffered significantly from
solitary confinement and the other who was trying to do something about
it,” added Paul Herman, Clements’ longtime friend and colleague. “If
what happened to Tom isn’t the ultimate irony, I don’t know what is.”
An alternative to amputations and executions
The notion that isolation harms the human psyche is hardly new.
Solitary confinement started in U.S. prisons in the 1820s as a social
experiment by Quakers seeking a more humane alternative to prison
amputations and the death penalty. The theory, which Quakers soon
disavowed, was that criminals would rehabilitate after long periods of
introspection.
In the 1840s, Charles Dickens deemed the practice to be “cruel and
wrong,” entailing “a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but
the sufferers themselves can fathom.” Dickens described conditions in a
Pennsylvania isolation unit as a “slow and daily tampering with the
mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the
body.”
By the late 1800s, solitary confinement was abandoned by most prisons
(although reinstated after an outbreak of prison violence a century
later). In 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in by freeing James
Medley, a Colorado man sentenced to death for killing his wife, on
grounds that his stint in isolation had harmed him psychologically.
“This matter of solitary confinement is not…a mere unimportant
regulation as to the safe-keeping of the prisoner,” the court ruled. “A
considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short
confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to
impossible to arouse them, while those who stood the ordeal better were
not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient
mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.”
In Colorado and across the country, solitary confinement re-emerged
in the late 20th Century as part of the national wave of prison violence
and war on crime.
Before Clements took over, Colorado’s Department of Corrections was
facing several civil rights lawsuits about how it treated prisoners. It
had sought federal funding for a year-long study about the psychological
effects of administrative segregation, hoping to use its conclusions to
defend the department in court. The authors of the research found a
slight “improvement in psychological well-being among all study groups”
of prisoners surveyed.
The 2010 report — which the DOC’s chief researcher Maureen O’Keefe
referred to has her “baby” — was slammed by some civil libertarians for
its methodology. One problem, dubbed the “Alysha Effect,” stemmed from
the fact that an attractive graduate student named Alysha was sent to
interview the prisoners who had gone long spells without any meaningful
human contact.
Two of the subjects under observation were tossed out of the study because they hit on Alysha.
Critics also questioned prisoners’ candor in answering the study
questions. No matter what the extent of their mental illness, human
rights activists argued, few people trying to work their way out of
solitary confinement would admit to psychological problems.
Controversy about the flawed study became known widely among prison
administrators, mental health experts, civil rights lawyers, human
rights organizations, prison watchdogs and prisoners. Stuart Grassian, a
leading expert on solitary’s effect on mental health, had this to say
to The Denver Post about the 2010 study: “It’s garbage in, garbage out.”
“I have never seen Chief Researcher Maureen O’Keefe here when
the…jungle howls reverberate back and forth off the walls at night,”
Clair L. Beazer, then a DOC prisoner, wrote in an essay published by
Realcostofprisons.org. “I doubt she’s ever experienced the urine splash
or the pre-prepared package of excrement that is regularly delivered by
[the DOC’s] supposedly happy customers,”
A ‘great adventure’
Clements learned about the effects of long-term solitary confinement
from almost two decades spent in probation and parole at Missouri’s
Department of Corrections. Clements was hired and mentored there by a
man named Gail Hughes, who believed that, given the right opportunities,
prisoners could change their lives upon re-entering society.
Given that about 97 percent of prisoners were serving sentences that
would make them eligible for release some day, his job was to make sure
the system was helping them more than harming them. For Clements, it
wasn’t just a question of redemption, but of public safety to protect
the public from the vast majority of prisoners who one day would be
released.
“We were there to help them make those changes. That’s very different
than the people on the other side of corrections” who run the prisons,
said Clements’ friend Herman, also a protégé of Hughes.
As a young probation and parole officer, Clements became well aware
of the wounds that can come out of serving time, especially among the
mentally ill, many of whom became entwined in the criminal justice
system after de-institutionalization in the 1970s and 80s. Some of the
sickest and most difficult to manage were banished into solitary
confinement, which made resurgence throughout the country after a series
of widely publicized prison murders in the 1980s. Isolation only
exacerbated problems for many of theose prisoners. And so began a
revolving door in which they would spend years in virtual solitude, get
released and then quickly re-offend. Many of these mentally ill
prisoners found it difficult to reenter the community when basic social
norms, such as eye contact, touch or conversation, would set them into
tailspins.
“We realized that we had to do something with those individuals and
help them live within society. What you saw with Tom was our philosophy
of trying to get those people out of ad seg as much as possible,” said
George Lombardi, director of Missouri’s Department of Corrections and
Clements’ former boss.
It was Clements’ friend Herman — now a consultant for Colorado’s
prison system, among others – who suggested Clements apply to run CDOC
after Hickenlooper’s election in 2010.
Chief of Staff Roxane said the Governor’s transition team had made
prison reform, especially changes in solitary confinement policies, a
priority in picking a new corrections director. Out of a wide field of
candidates, she recalls Clements was by far the most familiar with the
issue.
“Tom hit it out of the ballpark in terms of understanding,” she said.
During the vetting process, Herman says he and Clements had long
conversations about whether Clements should stay in Missouri and build
on his progress there or, if hired by Hickenlooper, try to create a
larger legacy in Colorado. Clements landed the job. Herman said
Clements’ wife, Lisa, referred to the move west as their “great
adventure.”
Statistics and grins
A few months after then-Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter’s DOC released its
controversial study touting the apparent psychological benefits of
solitary confinement, Clements, Hickenlooper’s brand new appointee,
launched a fact-finding mission about Colorado’s use of ad-seg early in
2011. The study by the U.S. Justice Department’s National Institute of
Corrections found that more than 50 percent of prisoners in solitary
confinement have significant mental health needs. The study also found
that Colorado’s solitary confinement policies, although effective for
certain periods of time for the most violent prisoners, over-relied on
isolation as a management tool, especially in the case of mentally ill
prisoners.
“For Colorado to go from a stance that ad-seg is not a problem to a
stance that it is a problem and overused was a major turnabout,” Herman
said.
Combing through Colorado’s data, Clements fixated on the statistic he
quoted to me when we met. He believed that the 47 percent of prisoners
in solitary confinement who were walking free needed step-down programs
to relearn social skills and develop ways to cope with the world outside
their tiny cells. He brought up the statistic at staff retreats,
community meetings and over dinner with friends.
“I can’t tell you how many conversations I had with him about the 47
percent,” said DOC spokeswoman Alison Morgan. “He kept talking about the
47 percent and how it’s what basic public safety is about. You cannot
take an offender from administrative segregation and put them directly
into the community and expect him or her to know how to behave and do it
successfully.”
“He told the number to everybody,” White added. “We’d be at a meeting
and I’d say, ‘You haven’t told me the ad-seg number.’ He’d have a big
grin on his face and would say, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to ask.’”
White remembers the day in May 2011, just months after Clements
started, when data came in showing the statistic was down by several
percentage points.
“When the numbers landed on his desk…he had this grin, ear to ear.
His eyes were so bright. It was like you had just given him the key to
the city,” she said.
Moving beyond custody and control
Clements defied expectations inside and outside of the prison bureaucracy.
Considering the fact that wardens are trained to house and control
prisoners, not reform them, some veterans on the DOC staff were
skeptical about Clements and his plans.
“And here we were telling them that what they were doing wasn’t
enough. It’s a big step from custody and control to thinking of the
well-being of the offenders and the safety of the community once they’re
out,” Herman said. “There was resistance from the inside, no doubt. To
get his message across, I’m pretty sure Tom had to beat the wardens over
the head with a club.”
Part of that tension arose with the establishment early this year of a
250-bed residential treatment program designed to shift mentally ill
prisoners out of isolation and into therapy. The transition has been
slow and required major adjustments to how prison wardens, psychologists
and guards do their jobs.
Outside the department, many longtime critics of the DOC’s practices were surprised to find such a reform-minded director.
“I’m pretty sure none of them expected to like this guy,” Herman
said. “But there were many of us who
knew the surprise that was coming.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, which has a long
history of suing the DOC, credits Clements for actively engaging in
discussions about practices that raise constitutional concerns,
including placing seriously mentally ill prisoners in solitary
confinement and shackling them without good reason.
The group also praises Clements for dramatically cutting reliance on
solitary confinement, which, it notes, costs nearly twice as much as
housing a prisoner in general population.
“Mr. Clements never saw a contradiction between protecting human
rights, fiscal responsibility and protecting institutional security. He
thought they all could be met simultaneously. That belief is no more
clear than in his work on ad-seg,” said Rebecca Wallace, an ACLU staff
attorney, who notes that her group “didn’t file a single lawsuit against
the Department during Mr. Clements’ tenure.”
“We understood Mr. Clements directed his team to work with us. As a
result, we would write a letter explaining our concerns and, in every
instance, we would receive a call back saying Let’s find a way to work
this out,” Wallace said. “That was a big difference from before.”
A ‘streak of cruelty and anger’
Evan Ebel, CDOC offender #125083, had a history of behavioral and
criminal problems that became worse after his sister died in a car
crash. He had the word hopeless tattooed on his abdomen.
“From the beginning, [Ebel] just seemed to have this bad streak, a
streak of cruelty and anger,” Hickenlooper told CNN in the wake of the
Clements shooting. The Governor is a former geologist and coincidentally
a longtime friend of Ebel’s father, oil-and-gas lawyer Jack Ebel,
As a teen on Colorado’s Front Range, Evan Ebel went on a gun-toting
crime spree that, with the help of a prominent defense attorney,
resulted in a three-year sentence in community corrections rather than
in prison. A subsequent crime spree involving a carjacking landed him an
eight-year prison sentence in 2005. He racked up another conviction in
prison in 2006 for assaulting a prison guard. That assault led Ebel to
spend most of his prison time isolated in solitary confinement at the
state’s highest security prison, Colorado State Penitentiary.
Prisoners who came to know Ebel by passing notes back and forth on
their unit say he had been part of the 211 Crew, a white supremacist
prison gang founded in Denver that, like prison gangs dominated by other
races, protected its white followers. Ebel subscribed to a white-power
magazine and, at least for a time, listed his religion as Asatru, a
movement with Nordic roots that has factions extolling Aryan supremacy.
Four current and former 211 Crew members tell The Colorado
Independent that Ebel had distanced himself from the gang before his
release.
Jack Ebel — who did not respond to requests for interviews —
testified at a 2011 Colorado Senate Judiciary hearing about how
isolation was tearing his son apart psychologically. He told lawmakers
that he was “shocked by how solitary confinement is used in this state.”
“What I have seen over six years is, [Evan] has a high level of paranoia and [is] extremely anxious,” he said.
“When he gets out to visit me and he gets out of his cell to talk to
me, he’s so agitated that it will take an hour to an hour-and-a-half
before we can actually talk,” he testified. ” I just sit there. I go,
‘It’s not about me, it’s about his condition.’ I let him get it out, and
eventually, because I am his father, he will talk to me. But I am
convinced if any of the rest of you were to go to talk to him, he
wouldn’t be able to talk to you.”
Ebel formally warned of his struggles in a
series of grievances he filed with the DOC shortly before his release from solitary confinement.
“Do you have an obligation to the public to reacclimate me, the
dangerous inmate, to being around other human beings prior to being
released and, if not, why?” Ebel asked in three formal grievances, each
written using almost the same phrasing, in the months before he walked
free in January.
But the department answered the complaint — the last substantive
official communication of a prisoner with a history of threatening and
injuring guards — two weeks after it had released him on parole. And,
instead of addressing Ebel’s public-safety concerns, the department
response focused on bureaucratic minutia.
“In this instance, you have written two lines of narrative into many
of the lined spaces intended for just one line of narrative,” Grievance
Officer Anthony DeCesaro wrote on Feb. 11. “This resulted in a great
deal of your grievance becoming illegible. So, when you claim in the
Step 2 that the Step 1 response didn’t read your grievance perhaps it
was because the Step 1 was in most part illegible. In addition, you
claim that you are just looking for answer to questions about policy.
Grievance Procedures is not the appropriate method for debating policy
questions nor is it designed to address the policy questions you have
posed. Please review AR 1350-03 Constituent Services Coordinator for
more information about directing your concerns.”
DeCesaro didn’t seem interested in creating the kind of safe
transition Clements envisioned his department providing to prisoners
moving from solitary confinement to freedom.
Ebel had expressed his mental health struggles in poems to his
mother, Jody Mangue, and in letters and poetry he sent to a project
called
“Incarcerated Voices.” Those writings, submitted four and six months before his release, were obtained by
The Colorado Independent.
His June 27, 2012, submission, coming just months before his release,
included three poems on violence, mortality, his identity and the role
he might play outside prison.
In a poem called “Life,” he wrote:
I’ve looked in the mirror and don’t even recognize
This thing staring back at me
Though I see your death implicit in its eyes
And really that’s all I care to see.
In an essay sent to “Incarcerated Voices” Sept. 12, 2012, Ebel contemplated murder:
If I kill to further the aims of the American government, however
base and ignoble they may be, it is not only sanctioned but celebrated…
Conversely, if I kill in the name of my own interests as an individual,
however noble and just my reasons for doing so, I’m vilified.
Dr. Scott Washington, a director at Incarcerated Voices, said Ebel’s
letters came among hundreds of others from prisoners and went unnoticed
until his office checked its files for Ebel’s name after the Clements
shooting.
“It’s clear that solitary changed him. He didn’t recognize himself in
the mirror,” said Washington, himself a former prisoner. “Ideally,
somebody would have been working with him to address those problems
before he was released.”
Ebel kept writing about his adjustment problems after his release. The Independent obtained
dozens of text messages
he sent to Ryan Pettigrew, who was released last summer after having
served time in Ebel’s unit at Colorado State Penitentiary. The texts
span from Feb. 1, four days after Ebel’s release, to March 5, less than
two weeks before Ebel went on his shooting spree. Ebel had told
Pettigrew about the panic attacks he was having in the free world.
“He was saying that he couldn’t sleep and was having a hard time
eating and being around people. He didn’t want to have any associations
with anybody. He was feeling extremely anxious. It was all the same
stuff I was experiencing when I got out. He was a lot like me,”
Pettigrew said.
One text from mid February shows Ebel asking Pettigrew to fight with him as a way to release tension.
“I’m just feeling peculiar & the only way I know I know to remedy
that is via use of ‘violence’ even if that ‘violence’ be something as
petty & inconsequential as a fist fight which id prefer be with
someone I can trust as opposed to some renegade civilian who odds are
will tell.”
Inmate Troy Anderson, who spent years in prison units with Ebel at
CSA and Sterling Correctional Facility, received a goodbye letter two
weeks before Ebel’s death. As Anderson wrote to The Independent, “He
didn’t feel like he belonged” in the free world. “He was consumed by
what they did to him” in prison.
“You know, what they do through their solitary policies is akin to
rape. They steal such a precious part of our souls, our humanity, our
ability to be. They committed such hateful acts on us. Through contempt
and disdain they breed rage,” Anderson continued. “They stole his chance
at any real future.”
Herman wonders if Ebel even knew of the reforms Clements was making.
Clements hadn’t been in charge long enough for the change in culture to
become apparent to most prisoners, he said. Herman noted that it takes
six or seven years for “a director’s vision to trickle down to the
population and for offenders to see, day to day, that this guy is really
changing the culture of the organization.” In other words, from Ebel’s
perspective, the Corrections Department may have looked the same as it
did under the last director, Ari Zavaras. Clements’ reforms didn’t seem
to benefit Ebel, who had an altercation during his brief period in a
step-down program in late 2012 that landed him back in isolation before
his release. He likely didn’t know that the man he would kill was trying
to fix what, as he wrote, had broken him.
“I don’t know that Evan knew Tom’s story. And I don’t know if Tom
knew Evan’s story. But people around them knew both stories – one crying
out for help and the other trying to give people that help,” Herman
said. “What’s so hard to take is that they probably never crossed paths
until that night at Tom’s house, that one horrible moment.”
Tragedy, conjecture, speculation
Alison Morgan, the DOC spokeswoman, got a text message from
Hickenlooper’s spokesman Eric Brown at about 9 p.m. on March 19. “Are
you ok?” it read. She wrote back “Why wouldn’t I be?” thinking Brown had
meant to text somebody else. A few minutes later a DOC colleague phoned
her to say, “I have the most horrible news in the world to tell you.”
He paused. She told him to just say it, quickly.
After learning Clements had been shot, Morgan headed to her closet
and grabbed an overnight bag she keeps ready in case of emergencies.
“Some of us haven’t had a chance to grieve over this,” she said.
“From the night the call came about Tom, we knew that he would have
wanted us to move on and work.”
At the state capitol, news of Clements’ death came during a hearing
on a bill to abolish the death penalty, which was stretching late into
the night.
Conjecture about the shooting started immediately in the lobby
outside the hearing room. First, there was speculation – and subsequent
stories by the mainstream news media citing anonymous sources – that
Clements’ murder related to his decision a week before his death not to
allow Homaidan al-Turki, a Saudi national accused of enslaving and
sexually assaulting his housekeeper, to serve out the rest of his prison
term in Saudi Arabia. The theory
wasn’t supported by evidence. It infuriated Colorado’s Muslim community, which accused several news outlets of racial bias.
Unsupported news stories also speculated that Saudis had hired the 211 Crew, Ebel’s former gang, to carry out the assassination.
Headlines later focused on a clerical mistake made by a district
court that caused Ebel to be released from prison in late January
without serving additional time for a plea agreement he made in
connection with assaulting the prison guard. News reports also pointed
fingers at the DOC’s parole department. Parole records show Ebel had
broken free of his ankle bracelet and was at large for at least five
days before officers issued a warrant for his arrest. The error was
among hundreds made by state parole officers who have caseloads vastly
exceeding system standards in many other states.
In the mainstream media’s rush to explain Clements’ murder, lurid rumors and Department mistakes provided easy answers.
“It’s human nature to look for something to blame. You grab at straws
because understanding death is one of the most difficult things we can
do,” Herman said.
“It’s understandable that the public focused on parole errors and the
error that led to Ebel’s early release. But the much bigger issue is
how DOC is going to prepare the 97 percent of prisoner who will one day
be released to the public to be contributors to society,” Wallace added.
What nobody discussed, at least publicly, was what drove Ebel to kill
Clements. It was the elephant in the room. In their anger, those close
to Clements found it difficult to look through the lens of his killer’s
psyche and attempt to understand the motivations behind the attack. In
their grief, it was tough to come to terms with the uncomfortable truth
that, despite all Clements’ progress lowering the percentage of inmates
directly released from solitary confinement, one of them who most needed
help slipped through the cracks and killed him.
The irony rattled White when the Governor’s office became aware of Ebel’s recent release directly from solitary. “My first responsibility was to call and tell Lisa [Clements’ widow]
what had happened and to explain to her that we hadn’t gotten to Evan,”
she said. “I remember sitting on the floor crying and both of us saying
‘We have to fix this. Tom warned us.’”
An ‘unforgettable teachable moment’
At the memorial service, Lisa Clements told mourners that her husband
“would want justice, certainly. But moreover, he would want
forgiveness.”
Forgiving a man who carjacked and pointed guns at strangers, attacked
a guard in prison and then killed a pizza delivery man for a uniform in
which he would kill the state Corrections chief requires a leap,
especially for a department in shock over the murder of its director.
But the request invites a statewide discussion about what long-term
solitary does to prisoners here and what kind of services they need to
safely move back into Colorado neighborhoods. If nothing else, Clements’
death is more evidence that solitary confinement isn’t just an abstract
ethical and legal question about torture and the “evolving standards of
human decency” as defined by the 8th Amendment. It is, as Clements
argued, an issue of immediate public safety.
“What Tom was about was how are people going to come back to our
communities and be our neighbors,” White said. “Tom’s murder is an
incomprehensible tragedy that has to motivate us to do corrections
better. It’s just a tragedy that motivates me to remember.”
Hickenlooper’s appointment in June of Wisconsin’s former Corrections
Chief Rick Raemisch to replace Clements was based in part, White said,
on a commitment to carry on Clements’ legacy.
Clements left his department with a vastly improved system to
classify the security risks posed by inmates. That system, insiders say,
is based far more on science than on fear. White lauds Clements as the
first Hickenlooper cabinet member to put his department’s strategic plan
on the state website. She says it contains clear, measurable benchmarks
that the public can use to gauge its effectiveness.
Still, much work needs to be done.
Although in his two years here Clements managed to reduce Colorado’s
1,297-person solitary confinement population to about 726 prisoners,
about a quarter of those who remain in isolation could still, like Ebel,
walk free without meaningful step-down programs.
Of those who remain in isolation, 87 are seriously mentally ill.
Fifty-four of them have been in solitary confinement for more than a
year and 14 have spent more than four years in isolation.
The ACLU’s Wallace notes that much of DOC’s progress addressing her
group’s concerns halted after Clements’ death. Citing a letter in which
Clements promised a policy would be drafted requiring mental health
professionals to participate in disciplinary decisions made about
seriously mentally ill prisoners — particularly those in ad seg – she
said to date she has no knowledge that such a policy has been drafted.
“The conversation has stalled,” she said.
The ACLU also has concerns that some mentally ill prisoners who have
been transferred out of administrative segregation into what the
department calls a “residential treatment program” may be living in
conditions just as severe and isolated as administrative segregation.
“We hope these concerns are addressed by Director Raemisch,” Wallace said.
Herman, a 40-year veteran of corrections work, said that “as long as
you’ve still got people who are about to go out into the community and
there’s no intervention, no preparation for personal human interaction
and communication, you’re setting up what could be another tragedy for
us all.”
“If I was killed by this individual and Tom was here, he would look
at it from every angle,” he added. “I’d hope to heck that if I died
under these circumstances, it would be a seriously unforgettable
teachable moment.”
