Hidden Costs of Incarceration, Part 3

Like all League of Women Voters position statements, its Impact on Issues statement about incarceration is the result of national studies. (Read the previous column from the first week of December on how studies are conducted.)

The statement looks “at the policies and procedures that apply to employees of and incarcerated individuals in local jails and state prisons.” It calls upon “correctional systems to provide humane, dignified, non-discriminatory treatment of incarcerated people and personnel, including appropriate health care and access to community-based rehabilitation programs.” It calls for the elimination of the practice of solitary confinement; to provide clear, safe and accessible ways to report abuse; and “to address recidivism with programs that focus on rehabilitation, education, mental health treatment, substance abuse recovery and transitional programs.”

Such programs, the statement reads, “call for case management services to match education, behavior, job training, work, and mental health programs with the needs of incarcerated individuals; to provide sufficient psychological services, including training and evaluation.” Because it helps with re-entry, the LWV believes “correctional systems should encourage family and community visitations and ways to maintain contact.”

The LWV calls for the elimination of private prisons.

It doesn’t name the private, for-profit services, including the communications and service contracts mentioned in parts 1 and 2 of this series.

In addition to providing monitoring, commissary fund services and communications, the nation’s jails and prisons often contract with healthcare and food service providers. The contracts focus on the expertise and reduce the workload of the sheriff or commanding officer.

“It’s a godsend, you know,” says Montgomery County Sheriff Ryan Needham of their contract with Quality Correctional Health, which provides a nurse from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, with a doctor on call 24/7. These professionals put protocols in place and ensure that staff are trained to dispense medication.

“She’s not my employee,” said Needham. “I’m not a doctor. I have no business supervising a nurse, you know?” His predecessor, Mark Casteel, had previously supervised health professionals. “I know when Mark was sheriff, the nurse was a county employee, and Mark was responsible for her. And he was like, ‘I am a police officer. How am I supposed to know?’”

Casteel and Needham both kept in-house food service, along with commissary.

“Our kitchen goes well above and beyond,” said Needham. “Our menus are approved yearly by a licensed dietician, and I believe we exceed the recommended calorie intake on every meal.  I know several facilities have begun outsourcing their kitchen and meals but we have not.  I have no doubt that some facilities probably do cut corners but this is not something we do.  Our food is very good, and I believe most of the inmates would agree with this.”

Casteel was the first sheriff to set up any contract, the one with the communications that now gives inmates access to tablets, including the free libraries, and the fee-based texting, music and video services.

Outsourcing these services in prisons tracks with trends across other industries. Outsourcing allows prisons – like hospitals – to focus on their mission. Still, it reveals some of the vulnerabilities in achieving the best outcomes, those called upon by the LWV and other prison policy reform groups.

Consider the experience of Paul (introduced in Part 1 of the series), whose experience was typical.

“The county jail here is a much easier jail than a lot of other Maryland jails,” said Paul. “Still my first week was 100 percent the hardest time you could ever imagine. And not even having to deal with other inmates, just mentally getting acclimated to it.”

He spent his first day in holding, the first stop after arrest. It’s the long wait where the charges, mug shots and figuring out where to put a new prisoner are sorted. “So you spend your first whole day just kind of shuffling around the system and not knowing what to expect.”

“The way my county jail works is they have a quarantine system.” This is a new step since COVID. It remains policy in eastern Maryland, where the population is more dense. It could be three to five days and ensures a new prisoner won’t be introducing a serious communicable disease to a close community.

“Because I was detoxing off of alcohol, I got a 14-day quarantine with supervision. And then also got the privilege of spending some time in the segregation or solitary unit, because they thought I was suicidal.”

It’s not unusual.

“Statistically speaking, I mean, if you are going to harm yourself over being distraught or being arrested, the humiliation and all that, if you’re going to attempt suicide, you are going to do that within the first 48 hours,” said Needham, explaining the isolation.

Locally, Needham says intake may be shorter, depending on how busy it is. It may also be lengthened if an inmate is under the influence.

“We have two padded cells that are full every day,” said Needham. “Whether you’re violent, whether you’re suicidal, whether you’re having a mental breakdown. It’s not right, but there’s nowhere else to put them.”

“That is probably one of the top five biggest aggravators in my law enforcement career, especially the last 10 years. We talk and talk about mental health, and nothing’s done. It’s a catchphrase, but I don’t think we’re any better off today than we were five years ago.”

Needham noted that there is nowhere to take people with complex mental health issues.

“The last place they need to be is here, but this was the only place,” Needham said. “Coast to coast, we’re all fighting that issue. We have mental health as part of our medical contract, but it’s minimal. I mean, we have it. But if you’re truly having a mental breakdown or mental issues that need chronic care, you’re not going to get them in jail.”

Paul’s account concurs. “One of my biggest issues with the jail system, even being in one of the easier jails in Maryland is that they do nothing for mental stability. They have a counselor or a therapist there. You go in and see her and her whole objective is to figure it out or not, whether you’re going to kill yourself. And that’s it. They offer you no therapy. They offer you no guidance, especially somebody that’s not ever dealt with the prison system before.”

“And there’s no kind of structure for that. They do this five-minute interview with you and they say, oh, suicidal. They take your clothes; they take everything you have. They put you in what we call the turtle suit, but it’s a big giant Velcro suit thing. And you get to sit alone in the cell with nothing for a week and a half.”

Paul’s local jail had three levels. “Initially you’re on level three, which means they come and check on you every hour. You get nothing. That’s my biggest problem with having to deal with all of this. And I understand they have to cover their butts on things like that. But I also think they could offer some sort of mental structure for people who are going through it. Because that’s a trauma that just builds on everything else that I think is not needed.”

Compounding psychological stress, isolation from positive social networks – church and family – and sequestering inmates with others in similar situations often have the undesirable effect of increasing recidivism. It cuts inmates off from resources that will help them reintegrate without repeated arrests.

Prisoners with long sentences spend their first weeks in a local jail before being transferred to a state prison. The transfer includes a stop in a facility not unlike Paul’s intake.

Zach (from part 2 of the series) was sent to the transfer facility a week before Christmas. His mother Trudy received no warning because jails don’t communicate with families and inmates in the facility do not have tablets, visits, texts or phone calls. Only able to write letters, Zach wrote of being in lockdown 23 hours a day, of a lack of fruits and vegetables, of bologna as a constant meat source. He will remain there indefinitely until the state determines where to place him.

Zach’s experience can be somewhat understood by watching the Netflix documentary Unlocked, in which an Arkansas sheriff experiments with ending similar 23-hour lockdowns, encouraging self-governance in a unit and allowing all calls to be free. Such experiments aim to build skills that better prepare inmates for a more successful life outside of prison and to achieve “correction.”

Final note: The Indiana Department of Corrections (IDOC) did not respond to a request for an interview, nor did it provide responses to questions about contracts, kickbacks, health and food concerns as well as the impact on families. They did provide the following statement via email:

The Indiana Department of Correction contracts with ViaPath (also known as Global Tel Link( GTL) for incarcerated individual communications services,  Aramark for food services to the population, and Centurion for medical services. Money collected from the IDOC’s contractual partners is allocated in a variety of ways that include funding rehabilitative programming for the incarcerated population. These contracts are available for public viewing on the Indiana Transparency Portal at in.gov/itp/. The IDOC holds each contractual partner accountable for these agreements. If the standards agreed upon in the contract are not maintained, the IDOC will terminate the agreement within the agreed upon terms of the contract. Visitor lists for each incarcerated individual are maintained to ensure continued safety and security within the facility and to the general public.

The League of Women Voters is a nonpartisan, multi-issue political organization which encourages informed and active participation in government. For information about the League, visit the website www.lwvmontcoin.org; or, visit the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County, Indiana Facebook page.