Street Roots • August 25-31, 2017
News
Page 5
SOLITARY, from page 4
began.
Staggs said he mailed money to someone
outside of the prison for a pair of shoes that
were no longer available in the canteen.
According to prison investigators, it was an
address inmates were known to send money
to for drugs.
Up until that point, it would appear
Staggs had been focused and doing well. He
had reached the highest incentive level in
the prison, was active in the Uhuru SaSa
BY EMILY GREEN
cultural club, held a good job and had
STAFF W RITER
earned high grades in the college courses
he’d taken.
When he was brought in for questioning
about the money he’d sent, he said the two
investigators, one of whom was the
It was intended to limit frivolous
lieutenant, hung his achievements over his
lawsuits, as prisoner court filings were
head.
Staggs said they told him he wasn’t really
commensurate with the increase in prison
a factor in their investigation and reminded
population. The rate was actually lower
him he could lose his good standing. They
than in the previous decade, according to
showed him three photos of inmates who
data compiled by Margo Schlanger, a law
Staggs said he didn’t know. He said he was
professor.
asked to point to one of the three photos
She studied 40 years of prison litigation
and write a confidential statement saying
and authored a paper stating that since the
that person was bringing in drugs, but he
1970s, court orders had been a major
refused.
source of regulation and oversight for
“The next day, I had a disciplinary report
America’s jails and prisons.
for allegedly bringing drugs in to the prison,
She found that those court filings
which resulted in a year of solitary
plummeted after the 1996 reform act.
confinement,” he wrote.
The act restricted lawsuits based on
While it violates state ordinance to
sentence an inmate to one year of solitary
court’s ability to change prison policy,
confinement, there’s a loophole. Once a
applied court fees to incarcerated people,
prisoner hits the 180-day maximum allowed
and limited th e am ount of litigation costs
in disciplinary segregation, he can be
shipped off to Snake River Correctional
Institution to be housed indefinitely in the
Intensive Management Unit (IMU), another
Policy Institute argue that as the nation
version of solitary confinement.
reconsiders mass incarceration, it’s also
According to one inmate, the IMU is
time to reconsider this reform act.
known within the prison as the fortress of
The act also requires that before
solitude.”
inmates can sue their correctional facility,
During the course of an 18-month period
j they must exhaust all internal
tracked by the Vera Institute of Justice, 549
administrative processes first.
inmates statewide were moved from
This can be problematic at Oregon state
disciplinary segregation to an IMU. Nearly
prisons where the internal administrative
half had spent four or more months in
process involves a complicated set of rules
segregation before the transfer.
written in legalese that can be difficult for
The National Commission on Correctional
;ome mmatesto decipher.
~ .
Health Care’s most recent position states
In this system, Oregon’s state prison
that to house anyone in solitary confinement
for longer than 15 consecutive days is
take issue with the way a rule is being
“cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment,
applied or with their treatment by staff.
and harmful to an individual’s health.”
The main difference between IMU and
disciplinary segregation is anger
Department of Corrections and sent them
management and substance abuse
to Nick Crasper, a licensed mental health
programming. Inmates in both units spend
and chemical dependency counselor who
the vast majority of their time alone in a cell
counsels former inmates at Sponsors Inc.
the size of a parking space with little to
re-entry services in Eugene.
occupy their minds.
Crasper gave us mixed reviews of the
While in the past this programming was
programming. One packet, a Substance
“limited to packets that adults in custody
Abuse and Mental Health Services
were expected to complete alone in their
Administration publication, he said, was an
cells,” according to the Vera Institute of
effective and evidence-based curriculum that
Justice report, a more comprehensive and
he, himself, has taught from. However, he
interactive program has been added.
used it for facilitated groups, whereas in
But this was not available during Staggs
IMU, inmates work through it alone.
first stint in IMU. He wrote, In
,
Another packet on anger management,
administration’s eyes ‘packets’ = ‘programs.
Crasper said, was based on dated
I can assure you, a ‘program’ it is not. 1 e
approaches and was not in an effective
packets consist of outdated, generic
format.
multiple-choice questions that never change,
Crasper said the most solid curriculum
let alone make a difference in one’s way of
was the new Pathfinders of Oregon
thinking or ability to make healthier
program, which incorporates actual
classroom time and is facilitator driven. An
decisions.”
t
,
We obtained copies of all the current
instructor heads a classroom outfitted with
program packets and curriculum from the
rules often leave inmates
They are encouraged to confront the
problem person-to-person, using this
grievance system only in cases that cannot
someone is grieving, difficult to abide by
completely in order to make it through the
first level of review to even be considered
They must exhaust this system and its
different levels of appeal before they can
She said a better way of bringing issues
to the attention of the administration is
needed, “especially when we know that a
number of the women have not gone far in
school and don’t have the strongest
reading and writing skills.”
She said that many women are afraid to
file grievances in the first place because
Inspector General Craig Prins said an
average of 640 out of Oregon’s 14,600
inmates filed a grievance each month
during the second quarter of this year. He
said all but 1.2 percent of those complaints
were responded to within 24 days.
“We’re proud of that,” he said. “That’s
something that we’ve worked on hard, and
I think that shows it’s a program we take
msly,”
He said when inmates disagree with the
response to the grievance, they have a
first appeal and second appeal option
where independent eyes review the
evidence to see if the claim can be
*They eitb
retaliation after filing a grievance, know of
someone else who was retaliated against
for filing grievance, or just have no trust in
prison staff or the system and assume
retaliation will follow. And so they will not
speak out about what happened to them
Jhrougb a gri
Jetto n /
In three out of the 17 grievances Street
Roots reviewed, the inmate explicitly
stated that as part of their desired
outcome, they did not want to be retaliated
But in order to exhaust the system, the
grievance has to be accepted as being in
compliance with the grievance rules.
In a sampling of 17 grievances filed
against one Oregon State Penitentiary
employee that Street Roots reviewed, 10
“We very much think this is a part of
giving the adults in our custody a voice,”
Prins said of the grievance system. “We
very much think it’s a part of respecting
and showing them a prosocial way to deal
compliance with the “Grievance Review
Y o sh im o to ’s e x p e r ie n c e a t C o ffe e C r e e k
Julia Yoshimoto is an attorney who has
helped inmates at Coffee Creek
Correctional Institution, a women’s prison
“Women often share With me that they
grievance system as part of her work with
the Oregon Justice Resource Center.
She said that often the inmates don’t
comprehend why their grievances have
been returned or denied or know how to
fix it. They often just drop it entirely or
process does anything for them. They may
try to go through it because they feel it’s
the only option to let administration know
about an incident - to feel like they didn’t
just take it and that they at least tried to
advocate for themselves - but they don’t
have any real expectations for a positive
outcome. It’s as if they expect to be
ignored. And when filing grievances leads
to a denial, to no real change or to
retaliation, it can leave a woman feeling
even more beaten down and silenced. One
woman told me that she just wanted some
sign that adm
‘acknowledged’ her and her concerns.
jbend a similar compbint
“The regulations, which explain the
grievance process and set the grievance
rules, are long, read like a maze, and are
difficult to follow,” Yoshimoto said. “As an
attorney. I’m used to combing through
regulations and statutes, but I find the
rules complicated and, given the
cjj
nces and
3© of incident
chairs that allow for inmates to be cuffed
and shackled into the seat.
After Staggs finished six months in IMU,
he was returned to the general population at
Oregon State Penitentiary in March 2016.
Because of his placements in segregation
and IMU, he had lost his job, program
placements and good standing.
His fiancée remembers visiting him there
shortly after his release from the IMU. She
said he was pale and had become so skinny
it brought tears to her eyes. He had lost 40
pounds.
w
“I touched his arm, and his face changed,
she said. “He said it felt weird to be
touched.”
She said his friends told her they had to
be patient with him because he was anxious
all the time and acting strangely. But he got
better. He was able to buy food items from
the commissary and gain back some weight,
and he began to act like his old self again.
<
He soon completed a voluntary three-
phase Substance Abuse Awareness group
therapy program and rejoined his cultural
club as newsletter editor. He completed an
eight-week mentorship class, bought a
guitar, enrolled in a music theory class and
got a job in the laundry.
“I was doing more and accomplished
more in seven months than many inmates
have done in 10 years, he wrote. I was on
track.”
A product of severe child abuse growing
up and a drug user since the age of 9,
Staggs was on a better path than at most
other points in his life.
One day in August 2016, while he was at
work in the laundry, his cellmate was found
with methamphetamine in their shared cell.
On Nov. 17, Staggs was placed in
segregation pending a 30-day investigation
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