Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore lives in a 6 foot by 9 foot cell. An
inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, he spends 23
hours a day alone in his cell and gets one hour a day out to
shower, exercise, or walk around.
This has been his life for the past 28 years.
But soon that might change. Recently, Warden Burl Cain told
reporters with the Medill Justice Project that he might soon let
Whitmore back into the general prison population.
Whitmore, 59, is a convicted murder serving a life sentence, and
he’s escaped from prison once but that doesn’t seem to be why
he’s been held in solitary confinement for so long.
Cain said he was concerned about is Whitmore’s longstanding
affiliation with the Angola chapter of the Black Panther Party, a
black revolutionary socialist organization that grew to prominence
in the 1960s. Whitmore tried to escape in 1986, which also made him
a security risk. Cain said Whitmore has the right to hold his
political beliefs—as he himself does—but he expressed concern that
Whitmore could spread his beliefs in the prison, sparking violence
among inmates.
“The Black Panther Party advocates violence and racism—I’m not
going to let anybody walk around advocating violence and racism,”
Cain said.
Michelle Rutherford, Whitmore’s attorney in his federal suit,
said in a
prepared response, “Warden Cain’s statement confirms the
allegations Mr. Whitmore makes in his civil rights suit: he has
been held in a 9 by 6 foot cell for over 35 years because of his
political beliefs, not because of any demonstrated violent or
disruptive behavior.”
As Reason contributor
Steve Chapman points out in a piece on the ever-increasing use of
solitary confinement in the U.S., isolating prisoners for long
periods of time may only backfire.
The use of isolation originated in this country in the early
19th century, with the purpose of spurring criminals to reflect on
their misdeeds and repent.
Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and former professor at Harvard
Medical School, writes that the results were “catastrophic. The
incidence of mental disturbances among prisoners so detained, and
the severity of such disturbances, was so great that the system
fell into disfavor and was ultimately abandoned.”Americans of that era eventually saw that isolating prisoners
was not only inhumane but self-defeating, making criminals worse
instead of better.
But less than a century later, all of that was forgotten in a
frenzy of tough-on-crime measures, including “supermax” prisons
that imposed extreme isolation on the worst offenders—and, in the
words of a federal court, skirted “the edge of what is humanly
tolerable for those with normal resilience.”
A bill sponsored by Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond to study and
change the way solitary confinement is used was introduced to
Congress in May. The bill is called, “The Solitary Confinement
Study and Reform Act.”
Richmond is particularly concerned with the fact that in many
cases, prisoners are held in solitary without any sort of
administrative procedure being followed first.“If you put somebody in solitary confinement, you can’t just put
them there and throw it away,” Richmond said. “At some point since
that is an additional punishment of itself, there has to be
something in place that [proves] solitary confinement is
warranted.”
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