FROM: North County Public Radio
BRIAN NAM-SONENSTEIN: We surveyed close to 50 incarcerated people for this report and asked them questions like: What charges do you see enforced the most? What charges do you see enforced the least? What is your experience with the disciplinary process? And I think most of them, if I had to distill their answers, said [the disciplinary system] is essentially a way to enforce a petty arbitrary form of power over a powerless population and that a lot of what happens, in terms of how these policies are carried out, comes down to the individual and even daily whims of particular corrections officers.
The same goes in the other direction- if you successfully fight your disciplinary charge, that often involves getting lucky and getting the right corrections officer to intervene on your behalf. I think all of this has the effect on incarcerated people of discouraging them from wanting to engage in their own rehabilitation. And that's not even just the ways that it actually obstructs people. It removes the hope people have of becoming better or believing that they're in a place where that's even possible because they're constantly nitpicked and anything that they do can be used against them or constructed out of whole cloth to get them into trouble.
EMILY RUSSELL: I obtained the disciplinary records of one inmate here in Northern New York and for just one incident, he was charged with creating a disturbance, interference, violating a direct order, and a movement violation. So, how does that reflect a strategy of taking multiple charges against an inmate?
NAM-SONENSTEIN: The idea here, according to the incarcerated people we spoke with, is that they are going to layer as many of the most plausible charges on a misconduct report with the hopes that something is going to stick. So the [disciplinary] hearing officer might say, ‘Well, I don't know about disrupting the orderly operation of the institution, but they did disobey an order.’ Then on the other side of it, there's this idea that if you're facing all these charges, you should just plead guilty and maybe they'll reduce the charges or maybe you'll get some sort of leniency in the sanction for an admission of guilt.
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