Chairing the Committee on Correction: Prisons and Jails

In 1988, with my blessing, New York opened its first “maxi-max” prison facility, Southport Correctional, in Chemung County, near Elmira. Not only were we running out of solitary confinement units to house violent and otherwise disruptive inmates, Commissioner Tom Coughlin and I felt that we could improve on the unofficial system of distributing “bad” inmates and officers to the worst facilities. We thought that this prison, comprised entirely of solitary confinement cells, would provide a more humane alternative to the old system, based – unofficially – on beatings. In retrospect, I am not sure we were right. Some prison experts feel that solitary confinement tortures inmates psychologically in ways that involve crueler punishment even than physical abuse.

In any event, back in 1990, the correction officers’ union, then Council 82 of AFSCME, wanted me to investigate complaints by the officers at Southport. George Winner, my Republican colleague in the Assembly who represented the area, accompanied me on the visit. Shortly after our arrival, the correction officers and union officials had us don white plastic garments that covered us from head to toe. These “shit suits” were to protect us against “throwers,” inmates who would hide their own feces until they could throw them at officers. As we moved through the tiers, or cellblocks, we heard many of the inmates screaming or raving incessantly. Clearly, a substantial percentage suffered mental illness, whether brought on by solitary confinement or perhaps responsible for their in-prison violence in the first place.

The officers pointed out, however, that during the legally required hour of exercise outside their cells, the inmates moved to an outdoor area with flimsy fencing. Staffing levels did not suffice to assure security either. The conditions presented a serious danger of riot.

Immediately upon my return, I sent a memo to Commissioner Coughlin seeking urging attention to these issues. A few weeks later, nothing having been changed, the inmates rioted and took hostages. The incident, and my memo, made the front page of the New York Times. Fortunately, Commissioner Coughlin resolved the situation within a few days without any fatalities.

Assembly Member Winner, later a State Senator, had won a reputation for especially cutting remarks to Democratic opponents in Assembly floor debates. He and I, however, always enjoyed a cordial relationship. So a few months later, when he rose to debate one of my bills, I slowly and ostentatiously removed from the drawer of my desk in the Chamber the white plastic suit I had been saving for just that occasion. Winner, overcome by hysterics, could not proceed.

So far, I have discussed only maximum security facilities. Green Correctional, about 20 miles south of Albany, houses younger offenders, eighteen to twenty-one years of age, in medium security. This makes it harder to run than some of the maximum security joints: raging hormones and immaturity do not help keep a prison calm. Unlike maximum security prisons, where cells stretch out along lengthy corridors, or “tiers,” medium-security prisons house inmates in dormitory rooms, sometimes with ten or twenty inmates to a room. They still use razor wire to cover their walls, so they protect the security of the outside world in ways not significantly different from maximum security prisons, but the security inside the walls is looser. Minimum security facilities often house inmates who may leave during the day on work-release programs. There, the system presumes that the outside world needs less protection.

Jails run on different rules altogether. That does not necessarily mean they are easier to run. Even Clinton Correctional, the State’s largest prison, could fit into a corner of Riker’s Island, New York City’s enormous jail, which at its peak housed about 20,000 inmates and detainees. Criminal defendants awaiting trial stay in jail, not prison; defendants convicted of misdemeanors, who serve sentences of a year or less, also go to jail. Defendants convicted of felonies must serve more than a year, and they serve that time in prison, except for any credit they may be owed for time served in jail awaiting trial or sentencing. Short-term detainees, on average, cause more trouble than long-term inmates. Often, they have not yet acclimated to detention, and so have not figured out that bad behavior will make their stay less pleasant. They may not expect to stay long, and therefore in any event have less motivation to try to assure themselves a more pleasant stay by cooperating. For these reasons, I think it is more difficult to run Riker’s Island than to run any State prison.

Chairing the Committee on Correction: Maximum Security

I can say, with some confidence, that I spent more time in prison than any other New York elected official who was never convicted of a crime. New York had 62 correctional facilities – prisons – in the twelve years I chaired the Assembly Committee on Correction, and I spent time in most of them. This experience made me see that we needed fewer prisons, not more, and that we really needed to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws, as I explained in Tales from the Sausage Factory. But my prison experience taught me many other things.

For one, it undid some preconceptions about who serves time for what. I remember a long talk, early in my tenure, with a highly intelligent and articulate inmate who had done graduate work at NYU prior to his business career. He corrected my assumption that he was doing time for embezzlement or some other white collar crime. He was a kidnapper, for profit. I made similar assumptions about the slight Chinese-American fellow, also at Green Haven, a prison near Beacon, New York, in Dutchess County, housing a lot of lifers. This fellow murdered someone, with a knife. The prison warden – superintendent, in modern lingo – explained to me that a whole category of small guys characteristically committed murder. These fellows grew up in tough places, where a fast response to a threat might save their lives. However, sometimes they overestimated the threat, a realization that came after the lightning-fast thrust of their knife into the gut of the perceived attacker. The big muscular fellows tended to be much less dangerous, because they rarely felt threatened.

For a long time, New York had an unofficial system for dealing with especially difficult inmates. It sent the worst inmates to the same prisons it sent the worst correction officers. Great Meadow, in the far northeast of the state, took the prize. There, the inmates might well attack the officers, but the inmates surely got the worst of it. As I visited the various facilities, I could sense the differences in atmosphere. Attica, although not as bad as Great Meadow, still retained the deeply grim and oppressive character that had been exemplified in the 1971 riot there, where the National Guard killed dozens of inmates. Clinton Correctional, in Dannemora, New York, with about 3000 inmates, is the state’s largest prison and one of its oldest. Its mere size makes it fairly oppressive.

Green Haven, in contrast, generally impressed me as a relatively cheerful place. Although the aforementioned prisons all include lifers, I learned that everything else being equal, lifers tend to stabilize a prison. They have had the time to find that cooperation leads to more pleasant conditions, and since they know they will be staying a long time they have a lot of incentive to keep it as pleasant as possible. Green Haven has an especially active prison industries program, with a big furniture shop, and during my time, an auto-body repair shop.

I had an especially memorable visit to Sing Sing in the early 1990s, when the AIDS epidemic hit the prison population hard. Many inmates had used intravenous drugs, and others had consensual or non-consensual anal sex. My visit had the unhappy purpose of investigating the AIDS unit, to make sure it had sufficient staff and facilities, and the much happier purpose of speaking at the graduation of about thirty inmates from Mercy College, which in those days was permitted to enroll inmates in a college-degree-granting program of instruction, provided inside the prison walls. Because I had been exposed to tuberculosis as a youngster, and tested positive on the TB tine test, I was assured that I was immune against various strains of tuberculosis, including the multi-drug resistant strain that frightened many at the time, especially among AIDS victims. In the AIDS unit, I saw several dying men. Sad though they were, they praised the conditions of their care.

At the graduation, I saw something more pleasant. I need to provide some background to explain my reaction. Throughout my service in the Assembly, I spent a great deal of time visiting the schools in my district, because the education of their children held great importance to my constituents and to me. As noted in a previous blog, I also attended virtually every school graduation each year. For the first few years, Jewish and Italian kids overwhelmingly dominated the ranks of the valedictorians and salutatorians. Gradually, though, the Asian kids, mostly Chinese, took over those ranks. Now, at Sing Sing, I was waiting my turn to speak to the graduates as the valedictorian was called to the rostrum first. Oh yes. They get in everywhere…

Creeping Republicanism

In the 1973 and 1974 City Council campaigns, I saw the power of incumbency. Walter Ward was a politician who could barely articulate a statement on any matter of public policy, who never authored serious legislation, and much of whose district, during his tenure, deteriorated as a result of poorly planned low-income housing and nursing home construction under the auspices of the City government to which he was elected. Yet he beat me handily in both primaries. So many voters had personally benefited from Walter’s help – perhaps he got an extra crossing guard for their children’s school, or arranged for an extra sanitation pick-up, or got the City Council to pass a resolution honoring their grandfather on his 100^th birthday – that he got plenty of votes even in the Rockaways, my part of the council district, which had suffered greatly.

But from the late 1980s through the 1990s, incumbency (and habit, a related matter) worked powerfully to my benefit. The demographic changes I described in the previous two posts rendered my district far more conservative than it had been when I was first elected. Because I endorsed David Dinkins over Rudy Giuliani in the 1989 general election, members of the various senior citizens centers in my district, who had always given me strong support, actually booed me when I spoke.  Although Dinkins won the mayoralty that year, he did not win the vote in the 45^th. So far as I could tell, the electorate did not share my strong support for gay rights. My efforts to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws seemed to puzzle many constituents, and probably annoyed many others.  But by then my office had helped them get school crossing guards, arranged extra sanitation pick-ups, and brought Assembly proclamations for 100^th birthdays, as well as a thousand other things that built voter loyalty.

I did not control the leadership of the Club. Lupka had never given me any trouble, and had never asked me to put anyone on the Assembly payroll, or in any other way violate my “reform” principles. As noted earlier, though, in 1987 Lupka had to relinquish the leadership, I very reluctantly took it for a year and a half, and then happily handed it to Hal Epstein. But Hal quickly tired of it, and in 1990, when I must still have been too much in recovery from the 1989 race for District Attorney to pay much attention, Etan Merwis ran to succeed him as the Club’s candidate, defeating Jerry Bisogno (a political ally of Harry Smoler). Etan’s mother, Hilda Mirwis, worked for Borough President Golden, and fancied herself a political power in Manhattan Beach. Abrasive and outspokenly conservative, she had pushed her twenty-something-year-old son into the race. Etan himself having alienated many Club members, in 1992 Hal Epstein’s friend, yet another Manhattan Beach resident, challenged Merwis for the leadership in the Democratic primary. [I thank Howard Graubard for wisely doubting my original recollection of this history, and for getting what I believe to be a more accurate history from Jeff Feldman, who at the time ran the Brooklyn Democratic County organization for then County Leader (and Borough President) Howard Golden.] I endorsed and campaigned vigorously for Geller, since he seemed pleasant and articulate. Geller even prevailed in the election district that included the Merwis home.

But in June of 1993 I got a phone call from Geller in which he informed me that the next morning he and Mary Tobin, his conservative Democratic co-leader, would endorse Republican Rudy Giuliani over incumbent Democratic Mayor David Dinkins. There was nothing I could do about it. In fact, if it was a question of reading the will of the constituency, Geller and Tobin read it quite well. Dinkins would lose the 45^th by a bigger margin than he had in 1989, and this time would lose the mayoralty as well.

It was not that I felt a duty to endorse a Democrat. If they had stayed neutral, I would not have been offended. But for my Democratic party leaders to endorse a Republican was appalling and personally hurtful to me. Geller and Tobin were not merely reflecting the constituency, though. Their own personal political ideology reflected the district better than mine did.

Dinkins, of course, had done nothing to endear himself to my constituents. His passivity during the first hours of the 1991 Crown Heights race riot, during which Yankel Rosenbaum was murdered, infuriated many voters throughout the City. Closer to home, his office announced plans to establish a welfare center on Brighton 12^th Street in my district. The prospect of welfare recipients congregating on that block did nothing to sooth my constituents’ feelings. No doubt, racial prejudice played a role in their highly negative reaction. However, the proposal also lacked common sense on practical grounds. During the summer, no street in the district suffered worse traffic congestion. It could take a half hour for a car to negotiate that one block. The Dinkins administration, in effect, told my constituents that it intended to make the situation worse still. In reality, for logistical reasons, they had chosen a very poor location. However, despite protests from all the area’s local elected officials, the Dinkins administration refused to reconsider.

Few voters supported Dinkins in (mostly white) southern Brooklyn. No elected officials from the area endorsed him. Early in the spring of 1993, John Bozella, one of the City’s lobbyists, approached me in Albany and asked me to endorse the Mayor. I thought it over, and decided that however unpopular he might be with my constituents, and despite my qualms about him, I would like to support him against Rudy Giuliani, his challenger. However, I needed some degree of political protection. I told Bozella that if the Mayor would reverse his decision to place a welfare center on Brighton 12^th Street, I could use that concession as my public rationale for such an endorsement. I could say that I endorsed him in return for that benefit to my district.

Months passed. Geller and Tobin announced their endorsement of Giuliani. No white politician from southern Brooklyn endorsed Dinkins. Summer turned into fall. An endorsement from one reasonably popular white Jewish elected official could have had some impact, possibly somewhat mitigating the stunning impact of the endorsement from my two Democratic district leaders.  I considered the possibility that if the Dinkins administration was incompetent enough to ignore my offer, perhaps he really shouldn’t be reelected mayor. And he wasn’t.