Perspective: For humanity in our prisons

TALLAHASSEE -- During a visit to Florida State Prison many years ago, the sergeant escorting me greeted one of the lifers, a fairly famous one, by his first name. He saw that I had noticed and remarked that he wasn't supposed to do that. But, he said, he wouldn't feel right if he didn't. He couldn't be the man's jailer year after year without trying to show him some simple humanity.

On another occasion, a new judge and I were listening to a veteran guard describe how he had prepared inmates for the electric chair, then in disuse pending the Supreme Court's short-lived ban on the death penalty. The guard seemed to be relishing the memory. An assistant superintendent who was accompanying us had left the room. I found him waiting in the hall outside, disgust written all over his face.

Anyone who has read Stephen King's The Green Mile or has seen the movie will recognize the types. It's a fantasy, of course, but one with premises in fact. Prisons by their nature are brutalizing institutions, yet many who work there manage to maintain their decency, like Paul Edgecomb, the death-row supervisor whom Tom Hanks played in the movie. Some, however, are like the sadistic Percy Wetmore, who couldn't be fired because he was the governor's nephew. You have to hope that the people in charge are alert to the difference and to the danger, because try as they might, some Percys will always slither through.

The examples that management sets are critical. I wonder if, at this moment, Florida's managers are sufficiently sensitive to that. Corrections Secretary Michael Moore and his deputies contend they have nothing but safety in mind as their reason for adding steel mesh grating to the barred cell doors on death row. That another state does it is an irrelevant excuse. Are Florida's death-row inmates so utterly uncontrollable that guards and trusties need this draconian protection? The department has only a few minor incidents to show and they're not remotely convincing.

This might not seem like a big thing to those of us who don't pass all the days and nights of our lives in a 6-by-9-foot cell with no view but a facing wall beyond that cell and no natural light but what filters through the windows on that wall. To those who do, however, the gratings may be the difference between keeping and losing a grip on hope and sanity.

This comes from the same people who won't let death-row inmates have even crayons any longer on the pretext that all hobby supplies are dangerous and who proposed to stop death-row prisoners from ever hugging or even touching their visitors. The suggested rule calling for "non-contact" visits, presumably separated by plexiglass and telephones, has been "indefinitely" postponed, but not withdrawn.

Putting it all together, advocates for the prisoners have begun wondering aloud whether there's a deliberate calculation to drive them to such despair that more will waive their appeals like the late Dan Patrick Hauser and two men still on death row. This fear underlies the protest that Florida Roman Catholic bishops took public last week.

"Whether or not intended, the policies implemented this year may be having the effect of encouraging death-row inmates to volunteer for execution because of the unbearable conditions," wrote D. Michael McCarron, executive director of the Florida Catholic Conference, in a last-ditch letter to Moore.

Doubtlessly there are Floridians who hope that's so -- the sort of people who say lethal injection is too easy (and who will be pleased, I'm sure, to learn that the department is asking for $3.2-million to ring three of its toughest prisons with electric fences than can be adjusted to stun or to kill). Decency aside, however, the bishops and others make two practical points. One is that needless cruelty exposes prison workers to greater danger from vengeful inmates. No one can be perfectly vigilant all the time. The other is that oppressiveness may backfire in court.

"It may drive some people to give up their appeals, but it may drive lots of people into incompetency so that when it comes time to have a death warrant, there'll be another six months of litigation over whether they're competent," warns Peter Siegel, a prisoner's advocate attorney with the Florida Justice Institute.

The prison system already is beset with what it regards as a significant systemwide increase in inmate assaults on officers -- a projected 679 this year compared with 601 a year ago. Though that's cited to support the security crackdown on death row, they can't say whether death row is any worse than elsewhere. Nor is any study under way, as there should be, to show whether the rebelliousness may be a result of harsher measures, not all of which are management's fault. Intuition and experience say that the longer sentences and meaner conditions -- i.e., less recreation -- imposed by the Legislature are also likely to make behavior worse.

It's not about coddling crime. It's about a decent society. Most Floridians, I would hope, would want Paul Edgecombs running our prisons, not Percy Wetmores. We shouldn't have to worry which type is in charge.

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