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January 07, 2025
May 2024 Newsletter
The May Newsletter includes promoting the interview with author Ben Austen on May 15, an update on our efforts to reach the grassroots in Maryland, an appeal to join the effort to end solitary at the DC Jail, the need for more pen pals, and an essay in the NY Times about the lack of care for the mentally ill in U.S. prisons.
Notable about the NY Times essay is the connection it makes between solitary confinement and mental illness. Too often solitary becomes the only way that prisons deal with people who act out due to their illness. Placing a mentally ill person in solitary only makes that person more ill and more likely to become suicidal. The Times essay gives us more evidence of the urgent need to put an end to long-term isolation.
Interview with Ben Austen-May 15
Outreach to Marylanders
Ending Solitary at the DC Jail
Pen Pal Outreach
"When Prison and Mental Illness Amount to a Death Sentence
Interview with Ben Austen
On Wednesday, May 15, at noon, Rabbi Feinberg will interview Ben Austen, the author of Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change. 
Ben Austen is a journalist from Chicago. He is the author of Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change, named one of the best books of 2023 by the Washington Post. His book High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction and named one of the best books of 2018 by Booklist, Mother Jones, and the public libraries of Chicago and St. Louis. A former editor at Harper’s Magazine, Ben teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago. His feature writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Wired, and many other publications. He is the writer and host of the upcoming Audible Originals podcasts The Last Days of Cabrini-Green and The Parole Room, and he is the co-host, with Khalil Gibran Muhammad, of the podcast Some of My Best Friends Are….
The interview will be on Zoom on Wednesday, May 15 at noon. Please register for the talk by clicking here. Upon registering we will send you the Zoom link.
Click here to read Rabbi Feinberg's review of Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change.
Grassroots Organizing in Maryland
This May, Natasha White, IAHR’s Director of Community Engagement, will be 
actively engaging with communities in Baltimore County and City. She plans to visit re-entry programs, probation offices, and neighborhoods directly affected by the criminal justice system. Her mission is to elevate the dialogue around the urgent need to end solitary confinement. In addition, Natasha will lead training sessions focused on legislative advocacy with our "Facts on Solitary" initiative, gearing up for the pivotal 2025 legislative session.
If your organization, school, or clergy supports humane practices for incarcerated individuals and you would like to contribute to our grassroots efforts, we warmly encourage you to get involved. Please contact IAHR or reach out to Natasha directly at [email protected] to see how you can help.
Campaign To End Torture at the DC Jail
Washington, D.C.’s Department of Corrections uses solitary confinement three times more than the national average. The United Nations, through their Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, identified prolonged solitary confinement (isolation for longer than 15 days, 22 hours a day) as torture.
Solitary Cells in the DC Jail
On October 18, 2023, D.C. Councilmember Brianne Nadeau introduced the Eliminating Restrictive and Segregated Enclosures (“ERASE”) Solitary Confinement Act of 2023 to put an end to the use of solitary confinement in D.C.’s jails. The Council Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety now needs to hold a hearing on the bill and move it forward. There will be a budget oversight hearing of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services on Wednesday, April 10. During that hearing the "Erase Solitary Confinement Act of 2023 will be To join us in pushing for passage of the ERASE bill in Council Period 25, you can write Council Members urging their support of the "Erase Act," by clicking here.
Click here to send a message to each member of the DC Council.
A Call for Pen Pals
Do You Enjoy Writing? Do You Like to Meet New People? Join Interfaith Action’s Pen Pal Progam
When prisoners lose connection to their family and community they are more likely to commit crimes after they are released. D.C. residents who
are convicted of a felony serve their sentence in a federal prison. Over 3,000 D.C. residents are incarcerated in 122 prisons around the United States. D.C. residents are incarcerated in prisons from California to Florida to upstate New York. D.C. residents in prison often feel very isolated since they are often incarcerated so far from home.
- You can save a Soul
- Build new friendships
- Learn about life behind prison walls
- Enlighten people in the community about prison life
You can exchange letters once a month. Please write to us at [email protected] to let us know you are interested. Once you contact us, we can schedule an orientation that is convenient for you.
Become a pen pal, learn more about what goes on in prisons. Become a pen pal and make a friend!
The downward spiral of one inmate, Markus Johnson, shows the larger failures of the nation’s prisons to care for the mentally ill.
Glenn Thrush spent more than a year reporting this article, interviewing close to 50 people, and reviewing court-obtained body-camera footage and more than 1,500 pages of documents.
May 5, 2024
Markus Johnson slumped naked against the wall of his cell, skin flecked with pepper spray, his face a mask of puzzlement, exhaustion and resignation. Four men in black tactical gear pinned him, his face to the concrete, to cuff his hands behind his back.
He did not resist. He couldn’t. He was so gravely dehydrated he would be dead by their next shift change.
“I didn’t do anything,” Mr. Johnson moaned as they pressed a shield between his shoulders.
It was 1:19 p.m. on Sept. 6, 2019, in the Danville Correctional Center, a medium-security prison a few hours south of Chicago. Mr. Johnson, 21 and serving a short sentence for gun possession, was in the throes of a mental collapse that had gone largely untreated, but hardly unwatched.
He had entered in good health, with hopes of using the time to gain work skills. But for the previous three weeks, Mr. Johnson, who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, had refused to eat or take his medication. Most dangerous of all, he had stealthily stopped drinking water, hastening the physical collapse that often accompanies full-scale mental crises. 
Markus and his sisters shared a close bond. His family has dozens of snapshots of him as a child. Credit...via the Johnson Family
Mr. Johnson’s horrific downward spiral, which has not been previously reported, represents the larger failures of the nation’s prisons to care for the mentally ill. Many seriously ill people receive no treatment. For those who do, the outcome is often determined by the vigilance and commitment of individual supervisors and frontline staff, which vary greatly from system to system, prison to prison, and even shift to shift.
The country’s jails and prisons have become its largest provider of inpatient mental health treatment, with 10 times as many seriously mentally ill people now held behind bars as in hospitals. Estimating the population of incarcerated people with major psychological problems is difficult, but the number is likely 200,000 to 300,000, experts say.
Click here to read the rest of the essay.
May 07, 2024
Corrections is a Misnomer
Interview of Author Ben Austen
On Wednesday, May 15, at noon, Rabbi Feinberg will interview Ben Austen, the author of Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change.
Ben Austen is a journalist from Chicago. He is the author of Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change, named one of the best books of 2023 by the Washington Post. His book High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction and named one of the best books of 2018 by Booklist, Mother Jones, and the public libraries of Chicago and St. Louis. A former editor at Harper’s Magazine, Ben teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago. His feature writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Wired, and many other publications. He is the writer and host of the upcoming Audible Originals podcasts The Last Days of Cabrini-Green and The Parole Room, and he is the co-host, with Khalil Gibran Muhammad, of the podcast Some of My Best Friends Are….
The interview will be on Zoom on Wednesday, May 15 at noon. Please register for the talk by clicking here. Upon registering we will send you the Zoom link.
Read Rabbi Feinberg's review of Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change below.
Corrections is a Misnomer for American Prisons
Review of Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change.
Rabbi Charles Feinberg
State and Federal prisons are usually called correctional institutions. FCI is the acronym for “Federal Correctional Institution.” Most of the 122 federal prisons are FCI. In Maryland and Virginia, most of the state prisons are called correctional institutions. Yet federal and state prisons don’t spend much of their budget on helping incarcerated people make different decisions for themselves. Educational, vocational, medical, and mental health opportunities are few and far between. Drug rehab programs are limited with long waiting periods to get into them. Many prisons don’t even offer drug rehab programs.
Ben Austen, who is a Chicago-based journalist and a faculty member at the University of Chicago, has written a compelling book on what happens to people who spend a long time in Illinois state prisons. The book centers on two men, Michael and Johnnie who were convicted of violent crimes in the early 1970s. Mr. Austen has befriended both men and learned as much as he could about their incarceration.
As the Prison Policy Initiative has reported, Illinois is one of 34 states that even offer discretionary parole, and those that do are generally not set up to help people earn release. As Mr. Austen documents, parole boards often choose to deny the majority of those who appear before them. Correction then is the story of Michael and Jonnie’s quest to be paroled before the end of their lives.
Both men were convicted over 50 years ago of killing another man. When he was 19, Michael, who lived in East St. Louis, Illinois, killed a young man while trying to rob him so he could buy some beer. The young man refused to hand over any money, and Michael shot him. Johnnie, who lived in Chicago, was convicted of killing two Chicago policemen on the grounds of the Cabrini-Green Housing Project. Michael was sentenced to 101 years in prison. Jonnie was sentenced to an indeterminate sentence of 100 to 199 years.
Michael eventually admitted that he killed the young man during an aborted robbery. Jonnie, on the other hand, has always insisted on his innocence. Indeed, Mr. Austen brings persuasive evidence that Johnnie could not have committed the murders. He was in a place that made it almost impossible to shoot the policemen given where they were standing. Witnesses lied and the prosecutor’s theory of the case did not line up with the facts. But two policemen were shot dead in the line of duty. It was a sensational case in Chicago. Someone had to pay.
What we learn from Mr. Austen’s account is how perverse the incentives are for a person to be paroled. The record that an incarcerated person compiles in prison: how many infractions he incurred, how many educational opportunities he took advantage of, and how determined he is to change his life and prepare for life after prison often make little impression on a parole board. What matters is that a person must show remorse for his crime, no matter how little or how much that person has changed.
We find out that this makes a big difference for Johnnie who insisted throughout his long incarceration that he was innocent of the crime he was convicted of. The Parole Board could not imagine releasing anyone who killed two policemen and not show any remorse. Michael, on the other hand, did admit to his crime and did show remorse through most of the time of his incarceration.
We also learn how influential the families of victims are. Family members of victims lobby the parole board not to consider releasing a person no matter how much he or she has changed. Often family members believe that the memory of their loved one will be desecrated if the perpetrator is released. In Johnnie’s case, Chicago policemen, most of whom were born decades after the deceased officers were murdered, regularly showed up at Johnnie’s parole hearing to make sure that Johnnie never was ever released.
After reading Correction, I came away believing that our society---not just our criminal justice institutions---is overly focused on punishment and pays at best lip service to the idea that people can change, they can self-correct. Because we are so hooked on punishment, we all become trapped by the memory of the crime and the victim. We have an incredibly hard time accepting that a person can change, and we allow the memory of the victim to paralyze us. Everyone involved in the crime---perpetrators, law enforcement, judges, and the victim’s loved ones--- becomes mired in the past.
Mr. Austen tells a great story about two men and their journey through the criminal justice system. By doing so, he sheds much light on the reality of criminal justice in America.
You have a chance to listen to Mr. Austen at a Zoom meeting and ask him a question on Wednesday, May 15 at noon. Click here to register for the program. Once you register, we will send you the Zoom link.
May 02, 2024