I have been following the horrific murder case of The Watts Family.. For those unfamiliar, Chris Watts brutally murdered his pregnant wife, buried her in a shallow grave, suffocated his two young children and stuffed their bodies in crude oil tanks. He pleaded guilty and got 7 life sentences without possibility of parole.
News reports say that due to constant, ongoing death threats from other inmates, Watts is being held in “administrative segregation” (solitary) indefinitely at a federal prison in Wisconsin. Apparently this means he is locked in his cell 23 hours a day and let out for one hour for exercise. He has also been on suicide watch several times.
I very curious what this is really like. How small might his cell really be? Does it have a window/can he see outside? Does he have a pillow and blankets and if so is he warm and comfortable at night or is the cell cold and the blanket inadequate?
Reports also say that he is allowed no entertainment at all - no TV, no books, etc. Only a bible. A bible? Last time I checked, bibles are books, and he is not allowed to have books. So what’s up with that? Did he have to ask for this, or are prisoners issued a bible like in the Shawshank Redemption? What if they are atheist or just don’t want one? Could he have a Koran instead? Why are religious books allowed but not a copy of “War and Peace” or the complete works of Shakespeare?
Is he allowed to just sleep all day or does he have to adhere to a rigid schedule? Are the lights on in his cell 24/7 or are they dimmed/turned off for sleeping at night? Is he allowed earplugs or an eye mask to block out noise and light to be able to sleep?
So many questions, but that’s it for now. Hoping Dr. Qadcop might have a few minutes to weigh in!
It seems strange to me that solitary as a protective measure would come with the same restrictions as solitary as a punitive measure. If he’s there because he received death threats rather than because he was an extremely difficult prisoner, why would they deny him things like books or TV?
Normal solitary does consist of remaining alone in a cell with one hour of out-of-cell movement each day.
Within those guidelines, there can be a lot of variance. At one extreme, we might have a solitary prisoner who does the cleaning on the unit. We’d often allow him to have extra time out of his cell as a bonus (in addition to the time he spends out of his cell doing the cleaning). So he might end up spending most of the day out watching TV in a rec room and only lock in at night. On the other extreme, you can have a cell with no windows and a small attached rec area that’s used for the out-of-cell movement. This means the prisoners spends day after day in the same small confined area.
Property in the cells also varies. Prisoners are allowed to have up to three books (either their own or ones borrowed from the prison library) in addition to a religious book. But having those three books is a privilege that can be taken away if the prisoner causes a problem. Some units also have a system like an airline radio where a prisoner can plug in a pair of headphones and listen to the radio. Like the books, these headphones can be taken away for disciplinary reasons. The same is true for other items like personal clothing or photographs; behave and you can have some things, don’t behave and you lose them.
There isn’t just one set of rules either. There are different rules depending on why the prisoner is in the unit. There are different statuses like Administrative Segregation, Protective Custody, Special Housing Confinement, Investigative Hold, Reclassification Hold, Transfer Hold, Keeplock Overflow, and Medical Isolation which all have different rules.
The inmate has ways to force prison staff to make contact with him anyway. He could, for instance, refuse to return the food trays, thus forcing the staff to come in and get them. Of course, this would probably just add to his solitary sentence, though.
As has been said, all depends on the institution and the warden as to what cons get and don’t get, it’s not written down anywhere.
But technically, segregation isn’t always protective custody and segregation doesn’t always mean solitary confinement (“the hole”). If you’re a diddler or a snitch or you have unpaid debts), you can’t stay on the range but you haven’t done anything to deserve solitary except you’re what they call “institutionally incompatible” which means you’ll be beaten or killed by other inmates for your crimes. The more notorious you are, the more status an attack on you brings. You can be put into a segregated range with the rest of the molesters or into PC for your safety, it’s like a regular range but for low-status inmates and it’s a one-way trip. Once you’ve bitched up, as asking to be removed from a range for your own safety is called, you can never come back to an open range and you can’t work a job off that range or have regular yard or eat in the chow hall with the other inmates or do school or counselling because you can’t be in a room with regular convicts. From the sounds of this guy, not even the lowest of the low would share a range let alone a cell with him. His world will be very small for the next few decades.
Is protective custody an entirely separate mini-prison within a prison (that is, it has its own cafeteria, library, exercise yard, etc.) or is it more that the inmate gets put into a cell of his/her own and meals are brought to him but will never get to the use the main prison facilities?
It’s almost always a completely separate unit from the rest of the prison (general population). Prisoners are fed in their cells and things like library books are delivered to the cells. The rec areas, like exercise yards, are separate from the rec areas used by general population. And depending on their status, the prisoners in the unit may be kept isolated from the other prisoners on the unit as well as general population; they might spend their hour in the yard by themselves.
It can be its own PRISON. I’m Canadian and the worst of the worst got sent to Kingston Pen, but when I say WOTW, I don’t mean killers and bank robbers and criminal masterminds. KP was where they dumped all the incompatibles from all the prisons, all the skinners and the rapists and the guys with psychiatric problems like screaming all night and throwing their faces at guards. Those people shouldn’t be in max, but there’s no treatment and yeah, get the range locked down three days for your biohazard contamination and see how long you live the fourth day. Prison is pretty shitty place all round, but as one lifer put it to me, “The real problem with being in prison isn’t being in prison. It’s the kind of people you have to be in prison WITH”
I know prison is not meant to be fun, and the folks who find themselves in 24-hour isolation are bad and all, but damn that sounds unbelievably horrible. Being in a room by yourself 23 hours a day, then in an exercise yard by yourself the other hour? I’d probably want to be executed instead.
Okay, my previous post was a joke. In reality, skinners and diddlers are prisoners who committed sex crimes against children. They are not popular people in prison.
Prisoners who plead guilty, as Watts did, often do so in order to escape the death penalty in exchange for life without parole. One of the conditions includes a life of 23 hour a day lockdown.
I think [if I were actually guilty of whatever the crime/s was/were] I would prefer execution to life in solitary - if I were actually innocent, I would prefer to stay alive and possibly eventually get discovered innocent and released.
Though I did once tell a judge sitting on my court case that while I wasn’t actually trying to be disrespectful, throwing me in jail wasn’t that big a deal, 3 hots and a cot while they sort things out was better than what I had at the time [just departed my abusive relationship and was actually applying for food stamps and assistance as I was living on minimum wage … and living in a high crime white/military slum area called Ocean View in Norfolk VA] He stopped, thought about it and agreed with me [case ended up being dismissed as I could prove that I didn’t write the bad checks, my departed roomie stole my checkbook and did it, they had pictures and there was no way at the time I ws a fat blond older woman as I was 24, brunette and rail thin.]
Heh. According to my son, who works in a prison, you do not do stuff like that in isolation. You do not “force the staff to come in and get them”. Rather, the staff calls together an extraction team who enter the cell en masse and extract the prisoner from the cell, using shields and batons to force compliance. Once the prisoner is chained outside of the cell the staff then gets their tray and the prisoner is then returned to his cell.