Unit 32

Death Row: two words that can send shivers down the spine. We have all seen movies like The Green Mile or Dead Man Walking and the sense that accompanies Death Row is that of deprivation, inhumanity and loss.

When u agree to do an internship with Amicus (sometimes known as a death row internship), you know there is a real possibility that you will visit inmates on death row, it’s just part of the job.

I had my first visit to death row, aka Unit 32 at MS State Penitentiary, a few weeks ago. The State Penitentiary is located in Parchman. It’s about a 3 hour drive north from Jackson which means an early start.  The drive to Parchman is essentially a straight line and I was happy to be driving as it is not the most exciting scenery. Mississippi is a very rural state which means that much of the landscape is flat farmland. In winter this results in a lot of brown – scrubland, dead grass, and barren trees. What saved the drive for me was the bright sunshine and blue sky. 

I think part of me had been expecting Parchman to be an impenetrable fortress, a bastion of death, an evil blockhouse thrust from the depths of hell itself (just to be dramatic!). However, quite the reverse turned out to be true. No guardhouses, or high impenetrable walls, just a big gate staffed by guards. Inside the gate was a sign for ‘children playing’ and a series of white clapboard houses, that presumably are homes to prison guards’ families. Not quite what I was expecting! The facility itself seemed to comprise of a number of ‘units’ and ancillary buildings spread out over what I can only imagine to have been many hectares. We drove past various units, down a number of roads of flat scrubland until we arrived at Unit 32.

Another security check, akin to airport security, and we were directed, through some outdoor caged corridors to the visitation area. As a visitor, you don’t really get far into the unit. On your way in though you can see the exercise cages. Cage is an apt term to use, as even in exercise they are kept like animals. The cages are no bigger than cells and leave no room for any form of exercise. What they offer, I suppose, is fresh air and the opportunity to look up at the sky.

As part of my LLM I visited a number of prisons, Mountjoy being one of them. For those of you unfamiliar with ‘The Joy’, Mountjoy is a relic from the Victorian age. Based on the design of London’s Pentonville prison, not much has changed at Mountjoy in the intervening years and inmates are still subject to ‘slopping out’ and overcrowding.  I found Mountjoy to be dark, dank, miserable and generally scary - exactly what one imagines prisons to have been like in the Victorian age (just not in the noughties).

 Parchman, in comparison, seemed practically hospitable. As I said, it was a bright sunny day, and perhaps it affected my impression of the place, but the most striking thought I had was that it was like an old hospital. White walls and linoleum floors; it was just very clinical. To be fair, I am sure that on a grey day, it would be a different story. I am also sure that behind the scenes things are not quite so bright and visitor-friendly. Inmates spoke of leaking cells, limited access to showers and unkind guards, of isolation, loneliness and fear.

Once inside the unit the visitation area is directly in front of you:  A glass paneled box, inside of which are the ubiquitous glass-divided visitation booths. Inmates are brought to the visitation room in shackles. The shackles remain on for the duration of the visit; hands are bound at the wrists to a chain round the waist and feet are chained to the floor. The cuffs at the wrists cut into the skin and leave red marks.

Visits are so important for the moral of inmates. They spend 23 hours of the day in their cells with an hour allowed for exercise in the cages. Many of the inmates don’t get many visitors and so attorney visits are a real opportunity to get out of the cells and talk to people.

Over the course of about 2 hours I spoke to a number of our clients. It was not easy. Those who know me know that small talk is not my forte and what these men needed most was someone to just talk. Talk about normal things, the world outside, music, TV and their families. Some were easy to talk to, others weren’t. I was surprised by how upbeat and positive some of the inmates were. I was surprised, in some ways, by how normal the conversations were. We could have been friends in different lives. It was challenging though, especially when talking to inmates who were having a bad time of it. Trying to engage with them and take their minds off things was difficult and by the time we left I felt completely drained.

Leaving unit 32 I felt many things. I was glad that had I come and met these people, glad that I had decided to do the internship. I was exhausted by the experience and I also felt overwhelmed by the obstacles we faced in getting even one of them off death row. 

Obviously I oppose the death penalty and my work here is to help get people off death row. This does not mean that I believe people on death row are innocent of crimes or that I want to see murderers running free about the place. I simply disagree with the form of the punishment. Even if I didn’t oppose the death penalty in principle, I would still disagree with it as it is currently practiced. It is supposed to be for ‘the worst of the worst’, those crimes so heinous no other punishment will do. However the inmates I have met and the cases I have read about have shown me that all too often the death penalty is used in spurious circumstances and applied to cases which, for lack of a better term, were that of ‘ordinary murder’.

Prison in one thing, death is another. The two should not be bedfellows and I stand by my opposition to the death penalty. None of the inmates I met were the ‘worst of the worst’. So many factors come together to result in an imposition of death – lazy criminal investigations, poor forensics, politics, racism and poverty, among others. I have seen them all in the cases I am involved in. What I have not seen is a verdict so secure, or a man so monstrous that the death penalty should be imposed.