All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is James Ridgway.
He is senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones magazine, where he writes both articles for the magazine and a weekly web column on motherjones.com.
He also writes pieces for The Guardian and Counterpunch and collaborates on original short videos, available at ridgwayng.com.
He served as Washington correspondent for the Village Voice for more than 30 years, where he wrote the weekly Mondo Washington column, as well as features on national and international politics.
His website is jamesridgway.net.
Welcome back to the show, James.
Yeah, how are you?
I'm doing good.
I really appreciate you joining us.
And I forgot to mention, I meant to say in your bio that you're also the guy from Mother Jones who's really good on the Oklahoma City bombing, which is the most important, least reported story in the history of America.
And so I highly encourage people to go and read your work on that subject at Mother Jones magazine, from the realm of a right wing conspiracy theory to, hey, look, there's a guy Mother Jones wrote all about it.
Go read it for yourself.
I love having you for a footnote there.
Now, let's talk about this new project that you guys have going on here.
It's called Solitary Watch.
And it's at solitarywatch.com.
And unfortunately, I wasn't able to find that Al Jazeera piece that you mentioned in your email there.
But in any case, can you, I guess, start off with telling us here a little bit about this project, who all's working with you on it, and what's the point?
Yeah, well, this is a project of mine.
It's separate from everything else.
And there's no money involved in it.
But anyhow, I was assigned by Mother Jones to write about something called the Angola Three.
These were three men who were accused and convicted of killing a guard inside a prison, the Angola prison in Louisiana, back in the 70s.
And they had been in solitary confinement for now, for 30, two of them, for 37 years.
One of them got out, but two of them, for 37 years in solitary confinement.
And I thought to myself, I don't see how anybody could possibly do that.
I mean, wouldn't you go crazy or kill yourself?
It seemed incredible.
So I got into this case, and I read all the depositions, and I discovered that there was federal courts that actually overturned the case.
But when a guy gets, of course, to the big courts, the appellate court in the state and federal, he gets turned around.
But anyhow, there were these depositions, and one of them was from the warden, Warden Kane.
And they asked him, well, what's the problem with these two guys?
Why are they in solitary?
And he said, well, they're the most dangerous men in America.
These guys are like 67, 68 years old.
And they said, well, why do you think that?
And he said, well, they're guilty of pantherism.
And they were black panthers in the early 70s.
And so I said, well, what's that?
And he said, well, they raise their fist and shake it.
And he said, and one of them, the one that got out, he had, he was making candies, and he had on his little bag of candies the picture of a little black panther.
And it was a revolutionary symbol.
And when I saw that, I knew that they were gonna plot a revolution inside the prison.
I couldn't, you know, I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm just stupid, but I mean, I just couldn't get it, you know?
And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, well, I don't understand how a federal judge could get it, to tell you the truth.
Yeah, I mean, I have to say here, James, this sounds, you know, kind of confusing.
I think most people, if we just like went by what we know from TV and movies, that kind of thing, you get thrown in the hole if you attack a guard or get in a fight, kill somebody else in prison, something like that.
You get thrown in there for a few days, maybe, a couple of weeks, something like that.
But in America, you're telling me that we keep people in solitary confinement for decades on end?
Yeah, well, okay, so I wrote this story, and then I began, you know, I began to look around and tried to gather material on solitary confinement.
And basically, you can't find anything much.
I mean, it's not publicized.
Whether you go in solitary or you don't go in solitary is the decision of the warden, usually, or always.
And there are procedures inside the prison that, you know, maybe sound like hearings, but they're really not hearings.
And so you can put in, I now get letters from people who say they've been in prison in solitary for 20 years, 18 years.
I got a letter from a guy, 78 years old, who said he'd been in prison in solitary because they accused him of raping a cat.
And, okay, so they're gonna say, oh, he's just crazy.
Who cares, you know?
But there are maybe, according to, if you look at the statistics, there are certainly 20,000 people in the United States held in solitary confinement.
How many?
20,000.
Wow.
That's known, but there are as many as 50,000, and some people claim 100,000.
And in the state of Colorado, which is sort of prison central, where, you know, they have more prisons, I guess, than anywhere else, there are 1,500 people in solitary confinement.
And you know how much that costs?
That costs like $90,000 a year for a supermax.
That's the best kind of solitary confinement you can get, you know, the most, and compared with $20,000 for, you know, just regular prison.
So it's a huge amount of money, just think of multiplying $90,000 against, well, I don't know, even 20,000 people, in addition to the humanitarian issues, you know?
So I started this project, and the project was not to get involved in fights with people about, you know, who's innocent and who's not innocent, but simply to try to open the window on this solitary confinement, like how many people there are, what do we actually know about it, what can we find out about it, you know, so that the general public would have an idea of what's going on here.
And you know, if there's nothing going on, okay, so there's nothing going on, but I don't think that's the case.
I think there's plenty going on.
And what we do is, since it's very hard to get any general statistical information, we kind of work on an ad hoc basis on cases and on little known stories, and we publish something almost every day on solitary.
And we put together this long list of resources, which can be used by prisoners and by lawyers and by activists.
And that list was put together probably by us and then Washington and Lee University, which has a death penalty clinic.
And David Brock, who's quite a famous attorney, you know, kind of pitches in with us and gets his students to work on this stuff.
Then we have a column called Voices from Solitary, where prisoners get a chance to, you know, tell us what's going on.
So there are two people involved in this project, myself and my longtime editor, Jean Casella.
She's in New York and I'm in Washington, and we're trying to get some interns right now.
We don't have any money, and we try to raise a little bit here and there.
But that's basically what it is.
And I don't think there's any other website quite like this.
But anyhow, and a lot of people don't care about it.
Look, a lot of people think, you know, you did the crime, do the time, you know, sort of stuff.
But I think you've got to treat people as humans, no matter what they did.
Well, you know, obviously, this is the news.
You know, it's been brought to everyone's attention because of the treatment of Bradley Manning, accused in the WikiLeaks case.
And, you know, when you talk to, when you talk about the Supermax facility there in Florence, Colorado, I think even they are allowed out of their cell to go outside into the yard and talk to each other for one hour a day, where Bradley Manning doesn't even get that.
And it seems like they're even using, you know, these protective measures, they call it, in order to persecute him, basically torture him in the name of keeping him safe.
Right.
Well, look, there's one guy, I don't even think they get out one hour a day.
They are locked down 23 hours.
And a couple of times a week, they get to go on a dog run.
And, you know, run back and forth independently.
And there's one guy I ran across, who's mentally ill, has tried to kill himself on different occasions.
He hasn't seen sunlight for 10 years in Colorado.
Oh my God.
I mean, it just seems like unnecessary to put him away.
Well, the thing is, I mean, there are some really horrible people in prison who deserve to be in prison.
But when we say, you know, lock them in the deepest hole and throw away the key, that's supposed to just be a figure of speech.
There's supposed to be justice here.
And in fact, the Eighth Amendment forbids the government from using cruel and unusual punishment on people.
That's right.
I mean, a lot of states would tell you that they don't have solitary confinement.
They just change the name to something else.
Massachusetts, for instance, says, oh, we don't have solitary confinement.
After they threw a guy in the hole, and put him in solitary, they said, oh, well, we don't have solitary.
What's the problem?
So when you act like that and you can't get access to the records, or you don't know what's going on inside, what do you suppose, it becomes a problem, like for any few investigative reporters that have gone at this stuff and been very, very successful.
It helps a lot, but not very many.
It's James Ridgway, senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones Magazine.
We're talking about his new project with Gene Casella.
It's called Solitary Watch.
It's at solitarywatch.com.
And some horrifying statistics here we're learning about the extent to which solitary confinement is used in American prisons.
And again, James, it seems like, if I can just guess what the average person thinks, it's more or less what I think based off of what I see on TV, that kind of thing, is that if you have extremely violent inmates who are stabbing each other, then they get sent to solitary for some short amount of time as a means of protecting the others, perhaps punishing them, but especially protecting the others from them, that kind of thing.
And yet, I think the common understanding is that that's a very temporary circumstance.
It's not the kind of thing that you have locked people in there for decades.
I mean, does anybody even know that that's true?
Well, see, I don't think so, but I mean, most people don't.
And the idea, of course, putting people into a quiet place for when they're acting out, yeah, I mean, you can make an argument for that.
Psychiatrists and so forth should be involved in it.
But like you say, it shouldn't be for long periods of time.
You know, it should be, you know, I mean, days or weeks at the most.
Well, you know, part of me wonders whether it's just ignorance or whether Americans really are basically barbarians.
I mean, after all, I think it's pretty much a common understanding among all 300 million of us in this society that to go to prison means, at least chances are, you're gonna get raped.
And that's just considered part of the sentence.
And everybody's got a joke or two about it, something smart to say about, you know, oh, don't go to prison or else don't drop the soap and this and that and the other thing.
And everybody just doesn't even care.
It's not like there's a movement to stop prison rape or anything.
That's just part of going to jail for an armed robbery or mail fraud or whatever.
That's what happens.
Well, that's right.
I mean, I've written a fair amount about deaf prisoners who, you know, like one third of the prison population in the United States is estimated to be hard of hearing.
So it doesn't mean completely deaf, but hard of hearing.
So again, there are quite a few deaf prisoners and they can't tell when a guard yells at them or when they're supposed to go out.
They can't read the judge's lips.
When you ask them a question, there was one guy, for example, who wasn't able to, the judge had whiskers and he tried to learn how to read lips really well, but he couldn't read the judge's lips.
And they're not provided with any kind of interpreters.
Some are, some are, but there are a lot that are not.
And then there are the old people, you know, the population's aging and there are a lot more old people in jail.
And nobody wants to let them out when they can barely walk.
There's guys that are paralyzed, can't move, wheelchairs, high conditions, you know, 70, 80 years old.
Women, you know, an old woman who shot her husband when she was 20, been in prison ever since.
It's conceivably, it's hard to believe she's a danger to society.
She wants to die on the outside.
No, can't have that.
She's a security risk.
So, you know, the prison system ought to be looked at, at the very least, by some kind of an independent body.
And I don't understand the whole judiciary attitude towards it.
I mean, it just seems to me it's like the judges, you know, sentence, you know, hear the trial, sentence the people, and then they say, that's it.
The corrections departments of the states and the federal government, you guys know what you're doing, we don't.
We don't know how to handle this.
You just go ahead and do the best you can.
And I know there's some states in which the federal government's got involved, but not as a rule, you know?
Yeah, well, I wonder, have you ever heard of a politician running or at least making a big deal while in office about what a great job he's doing, trying to reform the prisons to, you know, maybe make it a little bit more just, or that's just not a winning issue, right?
Americans like their neighbors locked up.
Yeah, that's basically true.
I mean, there's a couple of John Conyers and Bobby Scott from Virginia, and Jim Webb, the senator from Virginia, started out, but he's quitting.
But- I'm sorry, you say he started out that way, but then he quit?
He's quit the Senate.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I knew that was coming up anyway, but I thought you meant he quit trying, even on the prison reform issue.
Well, Ralph Nader, who is in support of my website, he said, well, what we ought to do is try to persuade, well, not persuade, get the members of the Supreme Court and put them in solitary for a couple of weeks, and see what happens.
Yeah, well, you know, I actually saw a thing this morning on TV, running on mute here, getting ready for the show about how some New York Child Protective Service workers have been arrested for not doing their job, and a toddler died when apparently they had a chance to save the toddler, something like that.
There are people now talking about, in New Hampshire, they passed a law saying that they will prosecute TSA employees for sexual assault if they do their TSA job at New Hampshire airports, and I just wonder whether maybe that's the solution here, is coming up with, you know, finding a prosecutor somewhere who can, you know, make his name prosecuting prison guards who allow these things to happen on their watch, prosecuting governors and attorney generals for mandating these kinds of policies in their prisons.
I mean, somebody's gotta be held responsible for this, is the only way it's going to change.
Well, that's true, but like in Louisiana, the attorney general is the political person who is behind keeping these guys in jail, those people I mentioned before, and he's an elected official, and it's a popular issue, you know, no matter what they do.
But you're right, I mean, why can't there be some guy who's in the federal government or independent, and so a prisoner says he's being beaten up all the time, writes the guy a letter, the guy looks into, the federal guy looks into it, and then he goes into the prison and decides, well, what the hell's going on here?
You know, but nobody does that.
You can't get anybody.
There's a guy in Louisiana, these prisoners were sending him police, you know, they're filing motions to try to people beat him up or get this and that, and this guy was throwing him in the waste paper basket, and when he was exposed, he shot himself.
But I think that the system doesn't work, to put it mildly.
Yeah, well now, tell me, in your investigations of the solitary confinement problem specifically, have you found any psychiatric studies about what this does to human beings, being locked away from others for so long?
Well, yeah, I mean, there are a number of psychiatric studies that have been done, I mean, that indicate that the people sort of begin to lose it.
But then, of course, they're contradicted by other psychiatric studies, so you can't, it's very hard, you know, for the ordinary person to make a judgment, but, and that's why, in this Angola Free case, there is one of the, there's several different cases, but one of them is a civil case in which they're trying to establish the effect on the psyche and the person in general, and show that this is cruel and unusual punishment in a federal court.
And that will introduce a whole lot of this stuff, and that could be, you know, pretty helpful in understanding the issue.
But, you know, look, there are guys in Louisiana who the ACLU protested, they were put in what they call squirrel cages, they were three feet by three feet, and naked, because they were thought to be suicide risks.
And that's how the sheriff in this one local parish wanted to keep tabs on them.
Now, I don't know, think about that for a while.
Yeah, I mean, there's nothing that can make somebody want to kill themselves more than doing that to them.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny, it's, to me, it's like economics, it's a matter of time preference.
Like, I learned in junior college, in psychology class about how many people falsely confess to crimes, and you can basically just put somebody in a small interrogation room with a couple of fat, stinky cops who don't even hit them, right, but just hot lights and bad breath and lots of yelling, and they will go ahead and confess to a crime that carries a life sentence on the condition that you promise you'll let me out of this room if I go ahead and admit what you want me to admit.
And it happens, like, every day, because their time preference gets shortened to such a small point where, never mind the rest of their life, and never mind a trial coming up in a couple of months and going to prison and maybe ending up in solitary confinement and all that, all they can think of is, I want out of this room right now.
And so, of course, you know, locking somebody in a little three-by-three squirrel cage is the kind of thing that would, you know, have that same effect, it would seem, like shorten people's time preference, where, never mind the rest of my life, I want out of this misery now, one way or another.
Yeah, well, I think it's true, I think it's true.
And, you know, the question is, how would you, first of all, you gotta get people to learn about it and understand it.
And Bradley Manning, really, I mean, that poor guy's been really put through the wringer.
And how he can make it without going mad, I don't know.
I mean, no, I mean, he hasn't even been, he certainly hasn't been convicted of anything, he hasn't even been formally charged with anything, as far as I know.
And putting him in solitary is just ridiculous.
You gotta be out on bond.
You know, but his case has brought attention to this general practice, to some extent.
Well, and I sure hope that, you know, this website of yours, this project, will catch on, that more people will take notice of it.
It's funny, I keep thinking about how, you know, the U.S. military goes around the world bombing people and invading them and starting wars in order to perfect their society, supposedly.
And yet, look at us, as though we finished, you know, building that pyramid and finished perfecting our society.
And we're in any position to go around lecturing the Arab world about their barbarity, when look at us.
Yeah, well, incidentally, this is not one of these left-right issues, you know.
It's not like liberals are for, against, solitary, and people on the right are for it.
It cuts across all kinds of political lines.
Not only on the humanitarian score, but on money.
Because people are trying to save money, you know.
I mean, the Tea Party, the right-wing Republicans, even some Democrats, libertarians, I guess.
I mean, how can you rationalize having as many as, I don't know, 50,000, possibly even 90,000 people in solitary confinement at such a high cost?
It just seems wacko.
Yeah, well, and the entire drug war, for that matter.
I mean, we have, what, two million people in jail or prison right now, seven million people, if you count everybody on parole or probation or sitting in county jail.
I mean, that's amazing.
Our police state puts the Chinese to shame.
Yeah, it certainly does.
I mean, and they've got more than three times our population, it's just crazy.
Yeah, and you know, there's been a general tamping down of the use of the death penalty.
So instead of the death penalty, people are being put into solitary.
And the people in solitary, as you say, go before the judge and they plea for execution because they say they can't stand, you know, like the 20-year-old, 30-year-old people can't stand looking at a long life in solitary.
They'd rather die.
No, that's, be careful, don't say that too much around Republicans, because I think they'll latch right onto that.
We'll just line up all these people and put them up against the wall and that'll get them out of solitary, you know?
There's a budget-cutting measure that a right-winger can love.
Yeah, that's true, that's true.
Yeah, well, you know, I really appreciate your work on this project and knowing that there is such a thing out there.
It's one of those things where you don't do it, it doesn't get done, and it's, you know, one of the symptoms, I think, of the corruption of America just from top to bottom here we're dealing with as we go spiraling down the drain of imperial collapse here.
We've really allowed our government to wage war against us here, not just against Libyans and Iraqis and Afghans overseas.
And, you know, there's something that can crystallize in the minds of Americans what our rulers really think of us and what they're willing to do to us.
It's issues like this, and I hope that it really, you know, will help change people's minds about, you know, not just this particular issue, but even the society that they're living in, and how could it have ever gotten this way in the first place?
What about all those baby boomers that had all those voting rights all those years?
Why did they let this, how could they have let this happen?
How could it be like this in 2011?
Yeah.
You know, generations in a row have led us to this.
Okay, well, you know, if you can get elected and tough on crime, and you, you know, you can show that you put a few people behind bars, that makes it all the more, you know, legitimate and popular.
Right.
Yeah, as long as people vote for bad policy, that's what makes it legit, right?
There's one thing about the American system I understand, it's that.
We all agreed on the bad thing to do.
Right, absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen, again, I really appreciate this, and especially the attention paid to the Bradley Manning case.
I think it's the most important thing going on in America right now.
And I really appreciate your time on the show today, James.
Okay, thanks a lot, Scott.
All right, everybody, that is James Ridgway.
He is senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones.
He keeps the website jamesridgway.net.
And this most important new website is called solitarywatch.com.
This is Anti-War Radio.
We'll be back.
