Photo Credit: Wikipedia user Dual Freq
The Columbia Correctional Institution near Portage, Wis. with an occupied guard tower as photographed from Interstate 39.
Columbia Correctional Institution (CCI) has had off-and-on lockdowns in recent weeks due to conflicts with staff members. CCI is operating at 150% of its design capacity. This unnecessary and avoidable overcrowding due to our “mass incarceration,” which is condemned by both conservative and liberals, is just one cause of these problems in this and other Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities. The tension and “psychological warfare” incarcerated people say is brought about by the CCI’s guards seems to be escalating, while incarcerated people and the guards need new structures to interrupt cycles of violence. The following is the view of some of those incarcerated at our correction facilities.
The DOC has confirmed a series of three violent incidents leading to facility lockdowns. Our incarcerated contacts sent us detailed reports about these incidents, which conflict with what DOC officials were told by their staff.
On Oct. 22: A sergeant called a black man “boy.” The man responded by attacking the officer, leaving him “severely beaten.” The facility went on lockdown until Oct 25.
On Oct. 29: Four days after coming off lockdown, another guard provoked another black man by calling him the n-word. He was also assaulted, but less severely. The facility went on lockdown again until Nov 5.
On Nov. 8: A guard was stabbed during program services. The facility has been on lockdown, which means that all of the people inside are deprived of their basic rights and fundamentals of human dignity, from Nov. 8 to the date of this writing (Dec. 8). This is obviously a form of “collective punishment.”
On Nov. 19, Makda Fessahaye, the head of the DOC’s Division of Adult Institutions (DAI), spoke on a panel at Marquette University. After the panel, she told me she was investigating these incidents but had been told that all three staff members “were blindsided.”
However, prisoner advocates insist “nobody is just randomly assaulting staff” and argue that, given Wisconsin DOC’s history of taking abusive guards’ words at face value, however unbelievable, they are demanding thorough investigations. Forum For Understanding Prisons (FFUP), an advocacy organization, has also filed open records requests for shift logs and any “inmate complaints” filed over the last month in an effort to contact the people most directly involved.
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One of our main sources is an incarcerated artist and advocate named Nate Lindell, whose work can be found on Facebook @PrometheusWrites. He says he attempted to send more detailed information, but CorrLinks (the institutional email system) flagged his emails, and staff blocked them. He then was issued a conduct report to punish him for writing about the incidents. Lindell appealed the conduct report and filed a complaint about censorship of his emails. In the emails that did get through, Lindell described the officer stabbed on Nov. 8 as “notoriously foul mouthed, yells at prisoners, follows them around to make sure their shirts are tucked in. I saw him stare at a prisoner insultingly, aggressively, with contempt, for more than a minute.” Lindell said that the other officers also go out of their way to exacerbate situations that harm incarcerated people held at CCI, stating, “Both had rude, insulting, lazy attitudes, as do many staff here.” He said these guards frequently “delayed letting us out of our cells for passes, didn’t let us out to use the phone, didn't pass out our mail.”
The above conduct violates standards of training to which correctional officers are supposed to be held. The advocates for the incarcerated argue that the routine violence of captivity and basic deprivation of human agency such as attacking a guard who engages in verbal abuse and harassment should be considered an act of self-defense. At the very least, DOC officials should recognize that these guards were not blindsided without reason.
Collective Punishment
FFUP has long documented a culture of abuse and violence at CCI. Guards often target certain prisoners with relentless harassment to provoke a violent response, which they then use to justify a lockdown and collective punishment against everyone in the prison. In the context of the lockdown, the violence against incarcerated people escalates. Others incarcerated at CCI describe the situation as psychological warfare and collective punishment.
In this instance, from Nov. 8 to the time of this writing, collective punishment took the following forms:
• No hot food. Instead, three times a day people get “the same bag meal... a small bag of chips, one sandwich of one very thinly sliced piece of meat, one slice of processed cheese, piece of fruit, carrots and a cookie or other small bakery item.” On that diet, people are rapidly losing weight.
• No commissary. People are not allowed to purchase food to supplement the bagged meals.
• No clean clothes. Laundry service is suspended, and new clothes cannot be purchased.
• No showers. Nov. 17, nine days into the lockdown, was the first time inmates were allowed to take a shower.
• Property ordered from the commissary prior to the lockdown is not delivered.
• No recreation.
• No phone calls.
• No visitation.
• No supplies, including complaint forms, state-issued soap and toothpaste.
On top of those deprivations, staff is reducing already negligent medical and health treatment. Medically prescribed showers and medical and psychological treatment request forms are being denied. Lindell reported that, on Oct. 9, a sergeant denied everyone on his range medications because one person didn’t stand for count. Others refused to stand for the next count. Many people at CCI are taking serious psychological medications, and missing a dose can have powerfully negative effects, especially under the stressful circumstance of a lockdown.
The Restrictive Housing Unit (RHU) at CCI houses people who have been in solitary confinement for months, years or even decades. These people have suffered great trauma, and many developed severe psychological disorders. Under normal prison operations, every day is a potential crisis for such people. The additional restrictions imposed during lockdown can increase distress to catastrophic levels.
According to a memo from Warden Susan Novak (transcribed by Theodore Oswald, incarcerated at CCI), television channels have also been limited due to an antenna replacement project that won’t be completed until sometime this month. Also, the institution information channel is inexplicably broken. During this lockdown, people have been additionally deprived of a conduit for information about the institution and the outside world, as well as a means to pass time while trapped in their cells. Novak’s memo said she was “tentatively reviewing the possibility of restoring visits beginning Monday, Nov. 25.”
Oswald also said that in his 25 years in prison, he doesn’t “recall any… lockdown being as depriving” as the one that began Nov. 8. Inmate Jimmy Baldwin, who works as a barber, wrote, “It’s a psychological warfare going on here… a lot [of people are] trying to resist this attack on their mental psyche; [others have] been broken into submission.” Being a barber, he sees many people and hears their complaints, and he says, “I have become stressed listening and witnessing the abuse… this administration here is part of the problem.”
Collective Agency and Reconciliation
Wisconsin’s prisons have been overcrowded for years. In the more than 15 years that FFUP has been researching Wisconsin prisons and advocating for people held in them, conditions have only worsened. The election of Gov. Tony Evers, who promised to shrink and reform Wisconsin prisons, sparked hope, but reform has been gruelingly slow.
Rather than trusting an Internal Affairs Division or even a governor’s ombudsman to self-regulate, prisoners at CCI have proposed a better solution: collective agency for incarcerated people. They call for a body composed of both staff and incarcerated people who will mediate and reconcile conflicts and resolve grievances together.
Baldwin, the incarcerated barber quoted above, describes this proposed body in some detail. “If you want a solution to resolve the issues here, let everyone come together in some form of institutional staff meeting, as well as one which includes prisoners to stress their concerns,” he writes. “You can have spokesmen for each group, whether it’s the institution’s staff officers or a spokesman chosen by the officers collectively, as well as two spokesmen chosen by the prisoners for each unit. There can be a memo submitted to ask for names of individuals who wouldn’t mind being a spokesman of their represented unit or group, [then] another memo to each of those groups with the names to democratically select whoever they represent. Have them in on this meeting to address concerns here and any institution that has similar concerns. This is a need now in these institutions, or else DOC will continue to have prisoners feeling abused.”
Another incarcerated person, Ras Uhuru Mutawakkil, developed an even more robust proposal called Common Ground. Uhuru was tortured at CCI by force feeding for participating in a hunger strike protest in 2016 and wrote up the Common Ground proposal in the summer of 2018. Common Ground is based on building structures for communication and mutual respect between staff and captives who are in conflict. The goal is to “find common grounds that everyone can respect each other’s security and classification concerns without placing blame and the use of inferiority labels that makes one party feel the need to be defensive, which is what most prisoners who are held in AC-long seg. feel. This defensiveness has been the main reason no previous administration or clinical programs have successfully led to the prisoners transitioning and eventual release from AC-long seg.”
Incarcerated organizers have long advocated for this kind of agency as a class. Prior to the mass incarceration boom of the 1980s and ’90s, organizers across the country demanded basic respect and control of their circumstances. They defended themselves from staff abuse, both physically and in the courts, winning strong legal precedents and protections for improved conditions. Backlash from prison administrators and racist politicians was brutal. Mass incarceration justified by the war on drugs caused an influx of captives, overcrowding facilities and diluting people’s ability to organize. Meanwhile, the proliferation of restrictive housing units and other forms of solitary confinement isolated prisoner organizers, skilled litigators and social leaders. Today, it is common for prison systems to use years of administrative confinement to not only isolate leaders, but also to break the minds of anyone who stands against them. Wisconsin’s use of administrative confinement and abuse of people held in solitary confinement stands out nationally.
The fundamental problem in Wisconsin’s prisons is overcrowding. The system is 33% above capacity, with some facilities like Columbia being more than 50% overcrowded. This overcrowding is entirely avoidable according to both conservative and liberals. They are on the same side on the issue of correcting the abuses of mass incarceration for minor, non-violent crimes, usually drug possession. Former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson is working to reverse the over-incarceration started during his term as governor.
Addressing overcrowding will improve conditions for both the incarcerated and the staff, reducing the frequency of conflicts and the need to retain high staffing levels. Currently, it appears that racist and sadistic behavior from some of the most abusive staff members is tolerated out of fear of creating a staffing crisis. The massive cost savings from reducing the incarcerated populations could be invested in treatment programs and facilities, allowing staff to be in a helpful, rather than harmful, role. Also, a number of prison reform advocates view Ras Uhuru’s Common Ground proposal as a starting point for some reforms that would alleviate much of the tension in the prisons, while also beginning to prepare incarcerated people to function in a more responsible manner when they leave prison.
