This is a letter from an inmate at Southern Desert Correctional Center (SDCC), Indian Springs, NV, about the deteriorating conditions there:
September 12, 2008
To: Mr. Donald Hinton Spartacus Project
Dear Don:
I am writing to make you aware of what is happening at Southern Desert Correctional Center (SDCC), Indian Springs, NV, with the hope that you can confront the appropriate authorities and politicians to improve our situation. You may already be aware of some of these things, and some are specific to SDCC where our living conditions have steadily deteriorated at the direction of Warden Brian Williams and his assistants.
1. Parole hearings are now being conducted in absentia and almost no one is being paroled, and certainly not one year prior to expiration as directed by legislature. The system is clogged up as ever and they are just perpetuating the problem by not paroling people, as they will just have to see them again in a year or two. The absentia hearings are taking place many months after the eligibility dates, but the dumps are effective from the late hearing date, not the original eligibility date.
2. Good time credit is still not being given day for day. They are giving 6 credits per month instead of 10 days, or 12 credits instead of 20 days, depending on the circumstances.
3. Overcrowding has become a real problem at SDCC since they built two new housing units, adding 500 more inmates to the yard with no additional support services, resulting
in:
a. Culinary being so busy trying to keep up that it takes hours to feed all the inmates.
They have even resorted to handing out sack lunches at breakfast to try to keep up. The quality and quantity of food has been cut, I guess to try to save on road costs, leaving hungry inmates.
b. An overwhelmed Medical department with one doctor, one dentist, and an eye doctor that comes in one or two days a month, to service 2.300 inmates… They were already besieged before adding the extra inmates, now it is completely out-of-hand having to wait months on end for an appointment.
c. The Education department was not large enough to handle the amount of inmates before the new housing units were added, now it too is completely overwhelmed with people having to wait forever to get into a class. Vocational students who have their high school diploma but need additional training, such as computers, have no hope of getting a class.
d. Visiting times have been cut substantially because they don't have enough room to accommodate everyone. Someone wanting to visit has to make an appointment a week in advance and can only visit for a morning or afternoon, not the entire day. People are not allowed to use the visiting patio anymore, further diminishing the amount of visitors that can be accommodated. People are being denied visits because there is not enough room.
e. Yard Time bas been reduced significantly since Brian Williams took over. The yard used to be open to each unit as they were released for chow. Now the yard is not opened until all units have been fed, and considering the extra time it now takes to feed a11 these inmates, we get less than half the yard time we used to get. They have also reduced the number of days that each unit gets yard time to cut down on the amount of inmates on the yard at any one time, again a result of the overpopulation. Inmates are also being made late to class and their programming activities because the yard does not open on time.
4. Convenience Bed Moves are no longer allowed, so if eel1mates are not getting along, the only alternative is to go to the hole. This policy results in violence and makes living conditions unbearable in certain conditions. Convenience bed moves were accommodated until Brian Williams got here.
5. Outcounts so that inmates can remain at their job during the 11 :15 a.m. count time instead of having to return to their unit has been eliminated, wasting valuable work time and putting a strain on free staff and the inmate workers because they can't keep up with their workload. 1 to 1-1/2 hours a day is being wasted.
6. Door calls have been instituted where inmates can only enter or leave their housing unit during a ten minute time span on the hour and half hour. Inmates are being made late for appointments and other obligations, and if they have to leave work to get their latmdry or store purchases, they have to wait to get in and out oftheir unit to put their things in their cell, making them lose more worklprogramming time. To make matters more diffieult, some guards are not keeping to tbe established door eaU sehedule and only open them when and if they feellike it.
7. The Package Program where inmate's families could order clothing and food items for them twice a year has been eliminated. Clothing items have also been eliminated from the inmate store, so no clothing can be purchased at all. This is only going to cost the state more money having to provide clothing that most inmates used to buy. There are also rumors that they are going to put all inmates in jumpsuits, which will cause a rebellion as many will not tolerate this humiliation.
8. The Inmate Store and Coffee Shop have both been forced to substantially cut down the food items available for purchase. Inmates that can afford it buy most of their food from the stores because the culinary food is so horrible. Now that is being restricted which will make the prison food costs increase unnecessarily.
9. Inmate jobs are very hard to get because there are not enough of them, and more are being eliminated, instead of trying to create them. This results in longer prison sentences because inmates have no way of earning the good time credit. All night time porter jobs were recently eliminated, putting dozens of inmates out of work.
10. A new camp is under construction outside the fence of SDCC, at the same time as the state is having budget problems and supposedly were to cut out all new construction. I wonder if the taxpayers are aware of this.
I hope that you can find an opportunity to address these subjects at the appropriate level so that our quality of living and parole issues can improve. Thank you for your efforts on our behalf.
Sincerely,
(an inmate at SDCC)
P.O. Box 208,
Indian Springs, NV 89070
