Bridgewater: A Peculiar Institution

In Massachusetts, if they label you a sexually dangerous person (SDP), criminally-insane, or unfit to stand trial, you end up at Bridgewater.

Massachusetts Correctional Institute Bridgewater is not a hospital; it is the state's oldest and largest prison, a maximum-security fortress, the bulk of which was built nearly 100 years ago. Most of the cells have a window. If the prisoner looks through the three layers of steel and wire that shield the window, he will see a walled-in grass plot, his only change of scenery from the decaying prison. The cells were built with three-inch slits above the doors for air, but these have been sealed off so the prisoners cannot throw their shit into the corridors. Most of the cells nave no bathroom.

Those inmates judged "criminally-insane," who are under commitment or in for pre-trial observation, were moved across the road last December into a new maximum-security complex that has toilets in the cells and is surrounded by a double barbed-wire steel fence instead of brick walls. Those judged as SDPs remain behind in the old prison, one part of which is so dirty that a federal district court judge last September challenged on confinement in Bridgewater on the grounds that it was cruel and unusual punisment.

Prisoners in both the "state hospital" for the criminally-insane and the treatment center for SDPs have indeterminate sentences. They are confined by judicial order under a "psychiatrist's" a recommendation, and can not be released until two prison psychiatrists" give their approval. Wealthy persons can hire their own psychiatrists; the poor must use those provided by the Department of Corrections.

However, as New England Prisoners Association executive director Russell Carmichel points out, few if any of these appointees are licensed doctors, not to mention medical specialists. They are allowed to practice only within the prison walls.

"Some doctors have almost no formal knowledge of medicine," Carmichel says. "You have doctors who can't even speak English. The frightening thing is that thousands and thousands of people have been committed according to their recommendations."

The current state hospital population comprises more than insane perpetrators of violent crimes. Some state hospital inmates are alleged criminals who have been sent to Bridgewater for pre-trial observation by the prison's medical staff." With the current backing of trial cases, pre-trial observation often lasts for months, even years. Other inmates wind up at Bridgewater because their lawyers have tried to obtain shorter sentences for them by having them plead insanity Because most "patients" are given drugs--often against their will--the ploy can easily backfire, burdening taxpayers, destroying the minds and lives of human beings.

"A lot of sharp guys come in here, take drugs, and get mindless," one prisoner who works in the state hospital says. "These are guys who could do things. some of them never leave."

Charles W. Gaughan '37, superintendent of Bridgewater, acknowledges that such mistakes can occur.

"I don't particularly encourage the use of drugs among rational prisoners," he says. "These mistakes are the fault of the judicial system."

Certainly the judicial system, overworked, pliant to the wills of those with power, prestige and money, deserves part of the blame. But after you spend some times at the "state hospital" or treatment center, you begin to feel as if the courts are only sorting out pre-marked parcels. Many state hospital and treatment center inmates are persons of average intelligence or above who went to school for four, six, and even eight years without being taught to read on the first grade level. They are able-bodied people who could not find jobs in a country which in this century has approached full employment only during wars. Almost all of them lived in the decaying neighborhoods of medium or large-sized cities. Few of them are insane.

So you ride the 45 miles out to Bridgewater once each week and for an hour and a half you teach a guy to read. Your first time down you wonder how some convict who has been labeled criminally-insane or sexually-dangerous is going to react to an occasional visitor from Harvard. You meet the guy, try to find something to talk about, administer a battery of standardized reading tests. At 9 p.m. you finish. You say good-bye to the guy you've tutored and don't know whether to smile, look sad, or even look at him. Then you ride back to Harvard. But after only a couple of weeks, you realize that although the inmates might have reason to resent you they do not. Unable to read in a society which leaves the individual largely on his own, these inmates have been swindled, ridiculed, deprived of work, virtually forced to pursue a path that leads to the prisons. The inmates who have volunteered for the reading program often make a supreme effort to learn. Besides, in a prison environment virtually devoid of therapy and personal virtually devoid of therapy and personal attention, even short visits mean a lot. Guys you don't tutor flock over to say hello and rap for a few seconds. After a few weeks, tutees start talking to you about prison life, at times about personal problems.

At the treatment center the SDPs admire women who, like Riva Korashon '75, are not afraid to come in and tutor them. When Riva couldn't get down to Bridgewater one week she wrote her tutee a letter. She got back a note written on the level of a struggling first grade student, with post-script "I love you."

But the prison setting often severely restricts the amount of learning or emotional development anyone can accomplish. When an inmate has received drugs shortly before a tutoring session he cannot concentrate. The anxiety of prison life overwhelms many prisoners; it is virtually impossible to learn if you can't relax.

Inmates get relocated inside the prison, and to visit them. Many guards want to help you, but one or two resentful corrections officers can block your path by telling you that you're late (even if you're not) and that you'll have to wait an hour before a guard can leave his station to escort you to the prison school. You wonder why this occurs in a institution with over 400 guards for less than 9000 inmates.

And you realize that you're giving someone a few reading skills, hopefully some confidence and security, but that you're trying to heal the scars of decades and that as you prepare to return to Harvard you've ignored a thousand other prisoners. To me it always feels like sending someone in Biafra a care package.

Many members of Phillips Brooks House Prisons Committee feel that teaching reading in the prisons does more harm than good.

"A lot of things have been done in the name of rehabilitation that have done nothing but increase the power of the existing prison system," committee chairman Joseph E. Sandler '75 says. "We've been used in the past to build up that system."

Sandler and others point to the Martinson report, released last fall in New York by the governor's special committee on criminal offenders, that said no rehabilitation program within the prisons has reduced recidivism rates or increased inmates' educational or post prison income levels.

"Our position is that we don't want rehabilitation to occur within the prisons," Sandler says. "Because it doesn't work."

He says he would prefer to see volunteers working on research and political projects, such as lobbying for the bill now before the state legislature that would take SDPs out of the prison and place them in mental hospitals.

Almost everyone who teaches at Bridgewater feels the futility at times and questions his own actions.

Basically of agree with the prisons committee, because it does keep up the myth of rehabilitation. Korastion said. "But for me the positive side of going and establishing a relationship outweighs it."

Jeffrey" Schnitzer, who did public relations work for SNCC and large-scale organizing in the late 1960s, says he finds benefits in the one-to-one approach that he did not find in mass organizing.

"After a while you need to feel that you can specialize, that you can directly help someone," he says. "I don't have much hope for massive change right now the times are not right."

"In the long-run I hope to work for reform on a larger scale," says Eric Mandelbaum '78. "Now I'm doing what I feel I need to do. Besides, what would I say to my tutee?"

A just and sensible corrections system should distinguish between those who need continuing care and treatment and those who if given some therapy and a job, could live peacefully outside an institution. But this is a job for highly competent psychiatrists, not the Department of Correction's informally-trained charlatans. A system of rehabilition that minimized the ex-convict's trouble in adjusting would make life easier for him and everyone else. Whether any rehabilitation can occur in a system dominated by corrections officers becomes the essential question.

It is difficult to determine how much if any improvement has occurred within the prisons system in the last two decades. Department of Corrections statistics show that work by therapists and non-disciplinary work by guards reduces recidivism rates; the Martinson report offers contradictory evidence. Gaughan points out that younger guards show more of a desire to help the inmates and calls them a new breed, but their enthusiasm may wane after years of work as corrections officers. Inmates do not always get along well with the few social workers and therapists, but on the whole they relate better to them than to the guards, who they know always have security foremost on their minds.

"Some patients respond to authority." One Department of Corrections supervisor says. "But for most of them, after dealing with the cops and all that, the last thing they want to see is another uniform."

The state hospital has an occupational therapy center, but only a fraction of the institution's population uses any of the facilities. For many of these inmates occupational therapy means making stuffed animals or mailing letters.

An excerpt from a recent Department of Corrections pamphlet unintentionally reveals the inadequacy of the prison rehabilitation program:

"The opportunities for self improvement have greatly increased since 1959. Many inmates, who 15 years ago were completely idle the entire day, now find enjoyment in aiding T.B., Heart, Cancer, and other charitable drives by sealing and stuffing envelopes."

Although the prison population at Bridgewater has diminished by over 50 per cent in the past six years, the number of guards has remained the same, largely because corrections officers in Massachusetts, as in most state, form a well organized and powerful interest group. Gaughan defends the current guard staff size, and has asked for close to 100 more corrections officers, ostensibly to improve the rehabilitation effort.

But as Gaughan himself points out, guards don't have much incentive to engage in rehabilitation. "For rehabilitating a prisoner a guard gets no recognition from anyone, but it he fails in the area of security he'll be held responsible, his job will be jeopardized." he says.

If the government provided a program for retraining employees, perhaps substantive prison reform would become feasible. Without such a program, correction officers have little alternative but to fight to hold on to jobs which are often superfluous.

Distorted and sensational reporting by the media does as much to impede prison reform as organized political opposition. A recent Boston magazine "expose" of the treatment center for SDPs described at length the violent sexual acts of two treatment center inmates, then closed with a lament that SDPs have enormous trouble gaining the community's acceptance after they have left the center. Such articles ignore the plight of the majority who are not incorrigible and allow people to harbor misconceptions about who inhabits our prisons and what can or cannot be done to help them.

When I went down to Bridgewater earlier this week, I learned that an inmate I knew had been released by the prison psychiatrists. He did not have much confidence about living outside the institution, and always wanted me to reassure him that he'd have no trouble getting a good job once he left Bridgewater. I tried to give him confidence, but realized that he had almost no chance because of the soaring unemployment rate and that under the circumstances he might easily revert to criminal behavior. Which could lead you to conclude that the success of a reading program--or any rehabilitation effort inside the prison--depends on what goes on outside the prison.

Bob Ullmann, a Crimson editor, tutors reading at Massachusetts Correctional Institute--Bridgewater, in conjunction with Education T-317, a course about reading disabilities in the context of the prisons system. Jeanne S. Chall, professor of Education and Jeffrey Schnitzer teach the course.