Yesterday, we learned that Governor Pat Quinn is still planning to close several prisons in Illinois over the objections of the union and many elected officials. It is a real act of political courage. If you are from Illinois, please consider taking a couple of minutes today or tomorrow to thank Gov. Quinn for sticking to his recommendations: Springfield: 217-782-0244, Chicago: 312-814-2121

One of the prisons that the Governor will close is TAMMS-Supermax which I have written about several times on the blog. Simply put: TAMMS is a torture chamber where prisoners are kept locked in their cells for 23.5 hours a day. Many groups, particularly TAMMS YEAR TEN, have been advocating for years to close the facility. It is almost too much to believe that this might be coming to pass.

As a reminder of the mental torture that is incarceration, I want to share an excerpt from another letter written by Alfred Hassan, a prisoner whose letters were published in a 1972 book titled “Maximum Security: Letters from Prison.” His words are searing and powerful and true.

We spend the vast majority of our time vegetating and plunging deeper into the pit of Lost Souls. It is no wonder that we behave like snakes crawling around at the bottom of a deep, dark pit. When you cage a man up like an animal, how else do you expect for him to behave? No man, no matter what he has done in life, deserves to be treated like an animal. If a man has done something so bad that we can’t stand to look at him, then shoot him. But don’t tamper with his soul. If he is a tyrant, then relieve him of his misery with a bullet in his brain. But don’t whip his mind. Don’t lie to him when he knows you are lying. Don’t hand him that shit about rehabilitation. Don’t make promises you’ll never keep. A man can stand so much. You can beat the flesh but it will soon become accustomed to the pain. But the mind is very, very tender. It can stand so much. And once the mind is gone, what do you do with the body? You put the body out on the Yard. Yeah, that’s it. Walking down long corridors, in small rooms, across the neatly trimmed grass. I’m talking about the convicts who are in the Pit forever.

I swear I want to cry sometimes when I look at some of the older prisoners who have been in prison so long that they hold conversations with people who aren’t there and blink their sad eyes once every four or five minutes. I swell all up inside every time I watch those old convicts shuffling aimlessly around the yard with no particular destination in mind. What they feel inside, however, is beyond my scope of knowing, and I will not attempt to enter into their troubled minds. This would be unfair, I think. All I can do at this stage of the game is look at my older brothers of oppression and wonder if this will be me 15 or 20 years from now. Can I hold on? Will I last? Will I someday hold conversations with ghosts? Will I let my mind plunge downwards into the pit of Lost Souls, where it is cold and damp and lonely? These are things I often think about. I try not to think about them, but the harder I try the more vivid they become in my mind. It is enough to make a cat shake his closed fists at the sky. I feel this way because I know something is very wrong. It’s not right that a man should spend half of his life behind prison walls because of a mistake he made in his youth. I know this is wrong because I have seen what long periods of incarceration have done to the mind – the soul. I have seen cats leave here twice as hostile, twice as confused, twice as anti-social than they were when they entered. Depleted of nearly all of their mental juices, they are “thrown back” into society where they are expected to function like normal human beings. And then society wonders why recidivism is so high in the country; why a man serves five or ten years in prison only to go out and commit the same act again.