There's been a lot of news action recently, with John Henry Browne talking to an AP
reporter about Colton being locked down in maximum security. It's worth me doing another post to update the one I wrote on March 30th about Colt and the chances he'll spend a considerable amount of time in max.
The facts are that Colton Harris-Moore is now in the
Washington State Penitentiary at Walla
Walla and is being held in their IMU – Intensive Mangagement Unit. IMU is high-level
maximum security, which includes the worst and most-dangerous adult offenders
as well as inmates on death row.
In IMU, Colton gets five hours outside of his solitary
confinement cell, and three showers per week. He doesn’t mix with other
inmates, and his only human contact so far has been with prison guards and
officials.
Prior to this, Colton was held at the Washington State
prison in Shelton, which serves as a sort-of induction center where inmates are
given medical and mental tests to determine where they’ll be sent. Apparently
they don’t learn enough there, because officials at Walla Walla are saying they
need another seven weeks, which Colton will spend in solitary at their IMU, to
evaluate where they’re going to put him next. It’s not an uncommon practice for
prisons to segregate new prisoners before assigning them a permanent unit, but
this double evaluation within the Washington State DOC seems redundant.
After his capture in the Bahamas, Colton was held in
solitary at SeaTac Federal Detention Center for at least six months. Interestingly,
he requested he stay segregated even after he was deemed eligible to move into
the general population. As I detail in
The Barefoot Bandit: The True Tale ofColton Harris-Moore, Colton did not do too well juvenile prison. As once source
who served time with Colt in County told me, “There were a lot of guys who had
trouble with him, but didn’t go after him only because they didn’t want to go
on lockdown.” However, a prison buddy from his time at the Greenhill juvenile state
facility told me about a number of times where Colton was chased into his room
and beaten after getting into arguments with other boys.
Colton eventually did move into general population at SeaTac
and by all accounts did fine. There’s often a big difference between the kinds
of inmates you find in a federal facility and a state prison, especially
maximum security. Feds house a lot of swindlers, fraudsters and other
white-collar crooks. Murderers, rapists, gang-bangers and other violent and
dangerous felons: you’ll find them in state prisons.
One class of people you’ll find in all prisons, but
especially at the local level, are the mentally ill. It’s estimated there are
at least 350,000 mentally ill people in US prisons, a number that skyrocketed
after the wholesale closings of state hospitals in the 80s and 90s. Huge
numbers of the mentally ill were pushed onto the streets, and many now simply
revolve through the prison system time and again.
Two issues that come up with solitary confinement are
physical safety and mental well-being. Colton is, of course, a big guy at 6’5”,
but by all accounts he’s not a fighter and nothing in all of my research says
he’s confrontational or violent. He will be physically safe in solitary unless
he got into a confrontation with guards, which seems extremely unlikely given
his history.
The mental issue, though, is critical. Special advisors to
the United Nations have testified that solitary confinement “can amount to
torture.” Those prisoners with mental issues are particularly prone to damage
since often part of the segregation means that along with little human contact
and extremely limited opportunities for fresh air and exercise, the inmates in
IMU are not given the same access to education and counseling opportunities, or
even the distractions of TV and radio, as the general population.
We all know the argument that these are prisoners and they
deserve to be locked away and not given a cushy existence. And yes, Colt is a
criminal who committed dozens of felonies and deserves to spend years behind
bars. However, the short-sightedness that I see in our justice system is that
it leans way too much toward retribution than rehabilitation, and often seems
to forget that these people are coming back to our communities one day. Do we
want them to come back simply as better crooks, having gotten their masters degrees
in Criminal U? Do we want them to come back with their mental problems worse?
Do we want non-violent offenders turned violent because of what they’ve had to
do to survive inside or simply because they’ve lost all hope in a “justice”
system?
Colton will be out of prison and back in society at age 25,
with a long life ahead of him. People that I’m talking to in our communities in
the islands – the ones most affected by Colton Harris-Moore’s crimes – are very
concerned about what Colt will be like when he gets out. They’re hoping for
second-chance Colt, a man who takes advantage of the educational opportunities and
specialized counseling (being paid for by friends who’ve known him for years and who see him as eminently
salvageable) to help him move beyond the challenges he still faces due to the lingering
effects of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, the traumas of his childhood, and his own poor record of decision-making.
What they fear is a Colt who’s been further beaten down by
yet another “system.” A Colt who has whatever optimism for a functional life
further beaten out of him or driven out of him by too much time alone in a box,
and who winds up simply learning to become a better, and perhaps more
dangerous, criminal.
A number of letters have been written to the governor –
including some by victims who had their homes on Camano Island burglarized multiple
times by Colton. The letters have asked for her to intervene, to get Colton Harris-Moore
out of maximum security and into a facility where he can start the serious work
on his rehabilitation. Colton’s defense team has been working behind the scenes
for the same thing. By John Henry Browne taking this issue public, it’s safe to
say that those efforts have failed – so far.
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