There were 460 dime-size holes in the door of Reginald Berry’s cell at Tamms Correctional Center. He knows because he counted them over and over. The door also had a slot for his meals to travel through, but other than that it was solid steel, and the view through the holes was of a concrete wall. Between 4 and 4:30 AM the electronic door to his pod would whir and clang, signaling that breakfast was on the way—boiled eggs on Monday, farina on Tuesday, cold cereal on Wednesday, etc. Breakfast was followed by a sea of time. He had no job, no phone calls, and no visual contact with other prisoners. But perhaps worst of all, he had no idea how long it would all last.
What’s the state getting for all that extra dough? A group of attorneys and concerned citizens, now called Tamms Year Ten in honor of the prison’s tenth anniversary, is making the case that keeping inmates in extended solitary confinement doesn’t do anyone any good, much less society as a whole. Advocates say the conditions there cause and exacerbate mental illness and that Tamms inmates are denied due process by being denied information about why they’ve been sent there and when or if they’ll ever get out.
But he led something of a double life. He’d started hanging out with the Four Corner Hustlers gang at 12 and through his teens and early 20s compiled a rap sheet “four pages long.” He fought, pimped, sold drugs. “I’m having two cars, motorcycle, all the jewelry, the best amenities, VIPs in all the clubs, the restaurants,” he says, “and I was, like, cool.”
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After two years he was shipped out. “I’d been involved in a couple of stabbings. I’d been stabbed myself; I’d been sliced with a razor across my neck.” He went “on the circuit,” 30 days at one prison, six months at another. He began to reconsider the choices he’d made. Denise was working and raising their son, whom she brought to visit regularly. If Berry stayed out of trouble, he might not grow old in prison. “So I started behaving, so to say.”
A month later, on March 17, a team of tactical officers stomped down the hall yelling his name. “In ordinary circumstances they don’t have a tac team,” says Berry. “They give you a heads-up when you’re leaving.” But rumors had been circulating about the new prison, and he got a bad feeling. “I knew in my heart of hearts: I’m going to Tamms.”
“You try to get communal things, to strengthen your bond with one another,” he says. “We might play a game of historical naming pharaohs. You have guys who play chess. We can’t move on [a] board, but if you’re next door to me or down the hall, I’d say, ‘Want to play some chess?’ ‘Yeah man, after I do my workout.’
No one was supposed to stay more than a year. But in fact many stays are much longer, and advocates say the prison has been used not only to punish bad behavior but to retaliate for a range of other activities. A pending suit filed in March 2000 by Alan Mills of the Uptown People’s Law Center on behalf of dozens of Tamms inmates alleges that their constitutional rights were violated by transfer and detention there. Some of the plaintiffs had organized or participated in hunger strikes or filed legal complaints about their treatment in the system.
Torture in the Era of Democracy
Mon 4/28, 10 AM, James R. Thompson Center, 100 W. Randolph, room 2-025, yearten@riseup.org.
Tu 4/29, 4PM, Northwestern University, BCSIS conference room, 1902 Sheridan, Evanston, 847-467-2770.
