7 by 8 foot windowless boxes. No reading material. Coffins for living beings. See added correctional supervision chart at the end.

 

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Kay Lee <kaylee1@...> wrote:

To: "MTWT on FSP Hunger Strike"
From: "Kay Lee"
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2004 22:20:40 -0500
Subject: DW. WHEN Q-WING WAS X-WING d

Not all of the inmates on Q-WING (previously X-wing) are lifers or on Death
Row. Most have a release date. They went on strike February 1st to tell us
that conditions are so bad that they can't endure it for the length of time
they are made to stay there. They have quit eating to bring attention to the
plight of people put there and forgotten. Knowing the punishment they will
endure, I figure what they have to tell us is pretty important, despite
DoC's usual claims to the contrary.

Q-Wing aka X-Wing's Maximum Management is for all practical purposes
solitary confinement, isolation in the form of the brutal Super-Max prisons.
Some defenders of extreme punishment measures are fond of saying, "they
deserve what they get," but if 'what they get' is illegal, destructive,
un-rehabilitative, then we are the ones who suffer.
Isolation was originally designed and instilled in prisons to break a man
down so he could be rebuilt. The problem is, there is no rebuilding after
the breakdown. When those men, made sick by zealous keepers and bad
methods, come out of prison, it could be us or someone we love who suffers
the wrath of their mental state.


I'm going to include some quotes from a Special Report written by Meg
Laughlin for the Miami Herald on May 30, 1999 after Frank Valdes was killed
there. For the full article please go to
http://www.angelfire.com/fl4/fci/FSPxwing.html  KayLee

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"FSP is the end of the line for prisoners in Florida. It is the strictest,
bleakest, most prison-like prison in the state - a treeless, wind-swept
compound of metal, concrete and surgically sharp razor wire. It is home to
Death Row and the electric chair.

And in the bowels of FSP is X Wing: a prison within a prison. Mini-storage
containers off a narrow corridor where inmates cannot be seen or heard. Nor
do they see or hear. Instead, they sit and stare at four closed walls.
Sometimes for years. For Muhammad, it was 12 years - longer than anyone.

X Wing consists of 24 seven-foot by eight-foot sealed vaults on the wing
that ends with the electric chair. Each vault has two doors, one in front of
the other. The inside door is barred and covered with steel mesh, the other
solid steel. The windowless boxes have beige concrete floors and beige
concrete walls. Instead of furniture, there is a concrete slab with a pad
for a bed, a metal toilet, a metal sink and a metal box.

In his recent book, Black's Law, Miami attorney Roy Black, who represented
Muhammad in the mid-'90s, described X-Wing: ``No window, no breeze, no air
conditioning to get through the brutal Florida summers, no one to talk to
and only that solid steel door to look at . . . like living in a
coffin.''...

No reading materials other than their own legal documents. No visits. No
exercise and no going outside. Sometimes, no open outer door or way to see
out of the cell. Sometimes, three ``management meals'' a day - a loaf of
bread with imitation cheese and grated carrots baked into it and a big glass
of water...

Correctional officers call X Wing ``the worst of the worst for the worst of
the worst.'' Human-rights investigators call it ``cruel and unusual
punishment.'' Psychiatrists study it and write about the irreversible mental
damage to those held there for more than a few months...

``The extreme isolation causes substantial mental deterioration in a short
amount of time, which makes inmates more impulsive and uncontrollable. This
sends them further and further into the belly of the beast with no way
out,'' says Harvard psychiatrist Stuart Grassian...

...``disassociating from reality'' that psychiatrist Grassian says X-Wing
inmates inevitably display.

Jack Fevurly, a retired federal prison administrator for a ten-state area,
studied X Wing in the early '90s and wrote a report that said it was not up
to national correctional standards. He described it as ``draconian'' and
``cruel.''

`Inmates should have minimal things - like five hours of exercise a week,
books, a place to write, a time to go outside. If you take too much away,
they become so severely impaired they're a bigger problem when they get out
than when they went in.''
David Lehr, a former FSP assistant superintendendant who led the recent
prison tour, explained that Death Row inmates are put on X Wing a month
before their scheduled execution to complete the process of breaking them
down before they are strapped into the electric chair.

``This way, they go quietly,'' he said."

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

FSP HUNGER STRIKE
http://www.angelfire.com/fl4/fci/FSPhunger.html


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