Tamms Year Ten calls for end to torture

Ten years ago the first group of inmates deemed the worst-of-the-worst were transferred from Illinois prisons to the Tamms Closed Maximum Security facility. At Tamms, they spend 23 hours a day in an 8ft-by-12ft concrete cell: alone to eat, sleep, urinate, defecate, and wonder how long they would stay sane. The 24th hour is for isolated exercise in a small pen with a wire mesh ceiling and no equipment - worth it if only to catch a glimpse of the sun. There is no human contact, except the occasional knock of a guard's hand connecting shackles. There are no phone calls. Reading material is severely restricted, and visits (if approved) are extremely rare, involving no contact. If they do happen, visitations are recorded, behind a physical barrier, and through voice-activated speakers.

This March marks the 10th anniversary of the prison's opening. For the Tamms Year Ten Committee, this inhumane treatment has gone on 10 years too long.

The Tamms Year Ten Campaign is a series of educational, artistic and prisoner support events to create awareness of the horrifying conditions at Tamms. Letter-writing sessions, a blues and jazz benefit concert and film screenings are some of the events being held in Chicago in March and April.

"We've created this series of events around the 10th anniversary, because it's time the public knew what's going on in Tamms," says Laurie Jo Reynolds of the Year Ten Campaign. "We wanted to mark the anniversary publicly so that people can question whether it is acceptable or not." And they're confident the public will agree it's not.

Tamms is located 360 miles south of Chicago, making it hard to get to and easy to ignore. The conditions in the prison are tantamount to torture, according to both the Geneva Convention and the U.N. Convention Against Torture, say the campaign's organizers. Solitary confinement exceeding four weeks requires special clearance at Guantanamo Bay. But Tamms' prisoners watch weeks turn into months and months turn into years with no idea when their isolation will end.

The initial purpose of Tamms was to serve as a short-term "extra-punishment" for prisoners who behave badly or act as jailhouse lawyers. The Illinois Department of Corrections assured the public that men sent to Tamms would remain for one to two years and then return to the general population, but most of the 270 men have been there for several years - many for a decade.

Year Ten comprises ex-prisoners, families of prisoners, artists, lawyers, poets and concerned citizens, all determined to end the practice of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation in prisons.

"The means of reaching our goal are multiple: first create awareness and second motivate the public to get active," says Stephen Eisenman, a Northwestern art history professor and author of "The Abu Ghraib Effect."

Eisenman, the campaign spokesman, also wants to bring attention to the exorbitant public costs of housing prisoners in what he calls a "modern-day dungeon." Lodging a prisoner in the $73 million facility costs nearly twice as much as at any other adult prison in Illinois, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections Web site. The average annual cost per prisoner at Tamms is more than $58,000 per year.

Former inmate Reginald Akeem Berry says Year Ten is an opportunity to speak on behalf of the voiceless men in Tamms.

"Unless an individual has experienced visiting a loved one (at Tamms), they really couldn't begin to understand the element of torture," Berry says.

Laurie Jo Reynolds, the "linch pin of it all" to her colleagues, got involved with the original Tamms Committee in 2001 when she visited the facility and began corresponding with an inmate. Impressed with the complex and expressive letters she received and compelled to do something more, Reynolds connected with artists and poets to form the Tamms Poetry Committee. The group members sent one letter and one poem to each prisoner every month and promised to respond to each letter they received. Berry recalls anticipating the letters. "There (were) very few things to look forward to," he says. "Food and mail are the only things that break the monotony and take your mind off your environment."

Jean Maclean Snyder, an attorney who has represented prisoners at Tamms, describes the surroundings as "the kind of life that would drive most people bonkers." Snyder has been using litigation as a tool to improve conditions at the prison for nearly 10 years. She filed a lawsuit in January 1999 on behalf of five men who were seriously mentally ill, contending that their medical treatment violated the Eighth Amendment, which protects detainees from cruel and unusual punishment.

"The courts are very hostile to prisoner's cases," Snyder says. "We had to strategize."

The court was willing to listen to Snyder's case because she identified severe mental illness as an outcome of the prisoner's surroundings. Her efforts were effective. The prison began screening people for mental illness and established a mental unit called "J-pod" in February 2000. Despite this change, Tamms is still an awful place, Snyder says.

Legislative hearings about the conditions at Tamms will be held on April 28, in the Prison Reform Committee of the Illinois House. The campaign is calling for an end to the torture of prisoners in Illinois. While the ultimate goal is closing Tamms for good, Year Ten will first propose alternatives to long-term solitary confinement and sensory deprivation - both practices that do no public good and are torture, Stephen Eisenman says. Laurie Jo Reynolds agrees.

"There is no right way to do the wrong thing," she says. "There is no benefit to this; no rationale, no advantage to public safety, no advantage for the prisoners or their families."