COMMENTARY
Delta blues for Hawai'i prisoners
Associated Press library photo I Photo illustration by Martha J. Hernandez
By David Stannard
There is joy today in the backwaters of the Mississippi Delta, thanks to the callousness of Hawai'i state officials. Under a recently signed agreement, 600 prison inmates from the Islands will be transferred to Mississippi's Tallahatchie County prison by the end of August.
They will be held in a privately run lockup that no other state wants anything to do with. Even Mississippi itself, with the fifth-highest incarceration rate in the country, has never housed a single prisoner there.
Four years ago, the Tennessee-based Corrections Corporation of America opened the doors to its new $35 million Tallahatchie County prison in the tiny Mississippi town of Tutwiler. With room for 1,350 inmates, the facility had the potential for a population larger than the town surrounding it. But no one showed up.
Part of the problem was the reputation of the profit-based company that owns the prison.
Just last weekend, a riot involving hundreds of men broke out at CCA's Diamondback Correctional Center in Arizona. Although none of the prison's nearly 1,000 inmates from Hawai'i were involved in the violence, about 70 prisoners were injured and the entire facility was put in lockdown.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing has been going on at CCA prisons for years.
In 2001, a Youngstown, Ohio, penitentiary managed by CCA closed down after the federal government canceled its contract following riots, murders, assaults and numerous escapes.
CCA agreed to pay $1.65 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by prisoners.
At about the same time, major sex and drug allegations involving prisoners and guards were reported at another new CCA prison in Colorado. Within a year, more than half the institution's staff resigned or was fired, including the warden, who complained of inadequate security.
Since then, Associated Press reports have linked dozens of similar incidents to prisons run by CCA in Oklahoma, Arizona, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana, Texas and the District of Columbia.
Asked about these matters last year by a reporter for Alabama's Birmingham News, a CCA spokesman said only that "those (incidents) are so far in the past, really, I would rather not address them."
The reporter was interested because Alabama recently had agreed to transfer more than 1,000 prisoners from its own state facilities to Tallahatchie, where the Hawai'i prisoners will be housed.
Alabama prisons had been operating at almost double their capacity when that state signed its contract with CCA. Yet only eight months after sending its first inmates to Tallahatchie, Alabama decided to bring them home. Two years earlier, Wisconsin did the same, pulling out several hundred prisoners sent to the Mississippi prison on an experimental basis.
What is so bad about the Tallahatchie prison? The words on a water tower outside Tutwiler begin to tell the story: "Where the blues was born."
"It is easy to see why," wrote a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, soon after Wisconsin sent its inmates to the prison. "The only thing that separates Tutwiler and its block after block of ramshackle dwellings from third-world status is the gleaming new prison that stands 500 yards outside the town's northern boundary, surrounded on all sides by cotton fields. ... A local joke asks whether the fence is there to keep the prisoners in or the poverty-stricken residents of Tutwiler out."
Then, as now, Tallahatchie County was one of the poorest places in the poorest state in the nation. Today, annual income in Tutwiler averages less than $20,000 per household. Forty percent of the population lives below the poverty line. That makes it an ideal spot to put a profit-making prison seeking low-wage employees.
For many people who live in the area, working in prisons is all they know. And until four years ago there was only one place to do it. Just a 10-minute drive south from Tutwiler, along dusty, flat and nearly deserted Highway 49, is one of the most infamous prisons in American history, Parchman Farm, officially known as the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
The Tallahatchie prison is so close to 18,000-acre Parchman Farm, in fact, that it is nearly an annex of the larger institution.
The inmate population of Parchman is roughly 6,500, almost identical in number to the entire working population of Tallahatchie County. Immortalized in blues songs and films like "The Defiant Ones" and "Cool Hand Luke," it also is an institution steeped in racism and murderous brutality.
The most thorough study of Parchman Farm, written by David Oshinsky in 1996, is titled "Worse Than Slavery." Year in and year out, Parchman authorities are still hauled into court for human-rights violations. After turning up an enormous list of "physical assaults, abuses, indignities and cruelties," one Mississippi judge declared the place "unfit for human habitation."
Despite some recent improvements, Oshinsky's book reports on older inmates who say that in certain respects, the violence and hardship is now worse than ever.
Brutality, of course, is notoriously commonplace in prisons. Especially when it cannot be reported because inmates are deprived of visits from family, friends or attorneys. One of the reasons given by Wisconsin officials for terminating that state's contract with CCA and the Tallahatchie prison was the problem of visitation.
It had proved "too difficult and expensive for inmate families," explained a spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. "It's a simple matter of geography," he said.
Wisconsin is less than 1,000 miles from Mississippi. Hawai'i is more than 4,000 miles away.
Even those with the resources to travel to Tutwiler will find no place to stay when they get there. The closest town with a few motels is Clarksdale, 16 miles northwest. It boasts an Econo Lodge and a Comfort Inn. More colorful is the widely-advertised Shack Up Inn, with its tin-roofed "authentic sharecropper shacks" available for rent by the night to anyone interested in experiencing "plantation life as it existed only a few short years ago."
This is the Mississippi Delta, where the people of Hawa'i, through their elected representatives, have chosen to send Island residents who have committed crimes. And not especially serious crimes. Of the 600 prisoners who are being moved there, no more than 15 inmates are designated maximum-security risks.
But Tallahatchie is a maximum-security prison. And that means the remaining 750 beds can be filled with violent criminals from any state willing to pay the price of admission. This mixing of medium-security inmates with maximum-security murderers and rapists from different states is precisely what caused the riots and killings at CCA's Youngstown, Ohio, prison three years ago.
Meanwhile, Hawai'i officials justify the move to Mississippi by citing how much money is saved. Prisoners housed in Arizona and Oklahoma facilities cost taxpayers an average of $52 a day. The Tallahatchie prison will only cost $43 a day, although the rate is scheduled to increase next year.
When Alabama pulled its inmates out of Tallahatchie three months ago, it was paying only $27 per day. It cited financial savings as one reason for canceling the contract with CCA and bringing its prisoners home.
Two weeks ago, the Clarksdale Press Register reported that "the Tallahatchie County Courthouse erupted with cheers and applause Thursday afternoon when county officials approved a two-year contract to house Hawaiian inmates at the private prison in Tutwiler. ... The news triggered a standing ovation from more than 100 prison employees."
An accompanying photograph and caption showed the CEO of CCA, John Ferguson, smiling and "celebrating the news" with prison officials.
The paper also printed a message from Howard Komori, Hawai'i's liaison for Mainland prison arrangements. "We are looking forward to working with the people of Mississippi in keeping your economy going strong," it said.
No mention was made of the fact that Gov. Linda Lingle received a $6,000 campaign contribution from CCA in 2002.
David Stannard is a professor of American studies at the University of Hawai'i.
