Prison Reform’s Shell Game (Boston Review)
Below is an excerpt from an article published in the Boston Review on July 10. The article by Bonnie Tenneriello discusses the steps Massachusetts has taken to reduce incarceration. Bonnie discusses efforts implemented as a result of Massachusetts’s 2018 prison reform law. Although the reforms are insufficient, they reflect growing awareness around imprisonment.
I first saw Davongie Stone last year through a small window in a very solid cell door. Representing Prisoners’ Legal Services, where I work as an attorney, I was touring a unit in Massachusetts’s maximum-security prison as a member of an oversight committee created by a 2018 criminal justice reform law. After years of grassroots pressure, the state legislature had passed measures intended to limit the use of solitary confinement, a practice that the United Nations Special Rapporteur has said can amount to torture.
We were there to observe the transformation of what had previously been called the Restrictive Housing Unit (RHU), one of the many euphemisms Massachusetts has employed for solitary confinement. The unit was now known as a Behavioral Assessment Unit (BAU), part of a revamp that officials like to say has ended solitary in the state’s prison system. An even older defunct name for solitary—Special Management Unit—was still stenciled on the doors.
Stone is a tall, young Black man with long dreadlocks and a serious demeanor. He recalls being sent to the unit because he had refused to live with a cellmate. Suffering from severe PTSD, bipolar disorder, and anxiety, he was overwhelmed by the idea of being locked in a cell with someone else nearly all day. He had come into the system six years before we met, at twenty years old, with all the things that funnel people into incarceration—childhood abuse, entry into foster care and then the juvenile justice system, and brown skin. When he was twelve, a psychological evaluator described him as “a young man who has experienced a debilitating degree of trauma and uncertainty in his environment” and noted among his strengths, “he is intelligent, is genuinely interested in others, and strives to remain hopeful about his future.” He landed in prison for a violent offense at twenty-one.
Read more at the Boston Review.
