POUND — The twisting road that climbs like an asphalt snake to the top of Red Onion Mountain is a dead end, and that seems only appropriate.
At the end of Virginia 361 stands the gate of Red Onion State Prison. The newly constructed maze of concrete and steel is a prison within a prison system – the place where hard-core convicts who have plotted escapes, incited riots or assaulted guards or other inmates will be banished to serve a new definition of hard time.
“The inmates we’re getting here at Red Onion are going to be the worst in Virginia, ” Lt. Perry Ratcliff recently told visitors touring the Wise County prison, which opened last week.
“We’re getting the worst of the worst.”
It’s called a “supermax,” short for super maximum security. It is the first supermax in Virginia – the product of a major prison-building campaign to accommodate criminals serving longer terms under the state’s new no-parole laws – and the latest in a national trend.
When authorities say inmates at Red Onion will be “under the gun,” they mean it literally. Shotgun-wielding guards will watch the population from 16 gun ports within the prison. Motion detectors, video surveillance and automated cell doors are part of a lockup so tight that even the manhole covers are welded shut.
Some inmates will be locked up, alone, in 7-by-12-foot cells 23 hours a day, then given one hour of “recreation time,” alone, to pace a concrete-walled yard. Rehabilitation is not a priority; there’s just one classroom in a complex designed for 1,211 prisoners.
While inmate advocates denounce supermaxes as “high-tech dungeons,” Red Onion has been embraced by local governments looking to jump-start the stagnant coalfield economy, and touted by corrections officials as a way to make other prisons safer by isolating the most incorrigible inmates.
At a recent dedication ceremony for Red Onion, Department of Corrections Director Ron Angelone showed up wearing cowboy boots and chomping on a cigar, the proud father of a $72million prison he helped design. He called it a “special day” for Virginia.
Angelone shot down a question about what rehabilitative services a supermax might offer its inhabitants.
“What are they going to be rehabilitated for?” he said. “To die gracefully in prison? Let’s face it; they’re here to die in prison.”
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Once word spreads through the prison grapevine about what a miserable and hopeless place Red Onion is, most inmates will do their best to avoid it. At least, that’s what corrections officials are hoping.
“The inmates that are here will pass the word through the system faster than any newspaper could,” Angelone said. “When the inmates hear it from one of their own that you don’t want to be here, they believe it.”
“And I believe it will provide tranquillity throughout the entire system.”
Others predict that Red Onion will become a $72million monument to human failure, and that the Department of Corrections is relying on a self-fulfilling prophecy by building a prison on the theory that large numbers of mean men are destined to grow meaner.
“Once you’ve built an expensive prison like this, you’re not going to say, `We really don’t need it; we don’t have enough problem prisoners,”’ said Jenni Gainsborough, assistant director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “What you’re going to do is find the problem prisoners to fill it.”
Prison officials say they have plenty of dangerous inmates, enough to fill up Red Onion and a second supermax prison under construction on the other side of Wise County. The Wallens Ridge State Prison, which will hold the same number of inmates under conditions identical to those at Red Onion, is scheduled to open next year near Big Stone Gap.
“We’ve got a large group coming,” Angelone said. “These are people we know cannot follow the rules of prison.”
One of the first people to enter Red Onion will be Dennis Keith Webb, convicted of using a shank to slash the warden from ear to lip during a 1996 disturbance at the Buckingham Correctional Center. Inmates involved in a disturbance at the Nottoway Correctional Center are also Red Onion-bound.
Yet for all the tough talk about prison predators, corrections officials have said that assaults behind bars have decreased in recent years – despite the steadily rising inmate count. In fiscal year 1997, there were 86 assaults on inmates, and 72 on staff members. In 1993, when the prison population was 17,000 compared to last year’s total of 28,000, there were 97 assaults on inmates and 80 attacks on staff.
Critics say that seems hardly enough to fill up two supermax prisons.
“Where in the world are all these bad guys coming from?” asked Jean Aldridge, head of the Virginia chapter of CURE, or Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants. “I can see that there are some people who are anti-social, and can’t get along with other people. But I can’t see 1,200 of them.”
In some cases, inmates who have accumulated a record of relatively minor offenses – such as verbal abuse or possession of contraband – could wind up at Red Onion. “If they have a lot of little things, that can add up,” said Larry Traylor, spokesman for the Department of Corrections.
One thing is certain: The inmates who are sent to Red Onion will come from a rapidly growing prison population. And people like Gainsborough believe that overcrowding will create tense conditions ripe for the type of behavior that could land an inmate in Red Onion.
Although the state’s prison system is operating at 137 percent capacity, the Department of Corrections plans to import more than 3,000 inmates from other states over the next year.
“That will certainly help them fill up their supermaxes,” Gainsborough said.
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From the moment an inmate arrives at Red Onion, there are few opportunities for him to cause the kind of trouble that got him there.
The prison was designed to minimize contact between the guards and the guarded – from the way prisoners receive their food trays from a slot in the cafeteria wall to the overhead catwalks that guards use to get to the gun ports that look down on the inmates.
One of the most telling things about Red Onion is that the state decided to call it a prison and not a correctional center. There is no vocational center where someone can learn a trade, no “yard” where inmates can congregate, no softball fields on the prison perimeter.
On visiting days, inmates are strip-searched and shackled before being led to an area where, still in chains, they use telephones to speak to loved ones through a shatterproof glass window. No contact is allowed. All other prisons permit at least an embrace at the end of a visit.
On each cell wall is an 18-inch square defined by a dotted line. It is the only space where photographs, posters or other personal items are allowed on the wall. All the furniture is bolted down. The sink and toilet are a single unit of stainless steel.
And then there’s “ad seg,” prison parlance for administrative segregation.
Inmates in the segregation units are locked in their cells 23 hours a day and have little to no contact with humans. Television and reading materials are prohibited. Their food is shoved through slots in the cell door, and when they go to the small yard for an hour of “rec time,” five days a week, it’s always alone. The yard is furnished with nothing but a urinal. But there is something there not found anywhere else in the 362,000-square-foot complex – fresh, mountain air and a view of the sky through a grated ceiling.
A shower every 72 hours offers a rare chance to leave the cell, albeit under the constant watch of two guards.
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Although there will soon be more people living in Red Onion than in the nearest town of Pound, population 995, it will nonetheless be a lonely place.
The worst thing about supermax segregation units, according to inmate advocates, is the psychological toll that long periods of isolation can take on an inmate.
“Putting people in these kinds of conditions is extremely toxic to their mental functioning,” said Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist from Boston who has testified as an expert witness in class-action lawsuits against several supermax prisons, including the Pelican Bay State Prison in California.
Despite challenges from some quarters, supermax prisons are becoming increasingly popular as the nation’s adult prison population continues to grow, from 774,000 in 1990 to 1.2 million last year. Although crime has been dropping since 1994, incarceration rates continue to climb as states like Virginia abolish parole and pass other tough-on-crime laws.
More than half the states have followed the federal government’s lead in building their own supermax prisons, and more are on the way.
A Human Rights Watch report on supermax prisons, titled “Cold Storage,” found that the facilities are especially damaging for mentally ill inmates, who have a heightened chance of being placed in segregation because they are not emotionally able to cope with prison.
“It is particularly reprehensible to confine mentally ill people in these facilities,” said Jamie Fellner, the author of “Cold Storage.”
The report stated that, for the mentally ill, “placement in super maximum security conditions is a horror: the social isolation and restrictive activities aggravate their illnesses and immeasurably increase their pain and suffering.
“In a tragic, vicious cycle, the worsened mental conditions lead to more rule infractions, such as self-mutilation, for which they receive the additional punishment of even more time in segregation.”
Prison officials justify the scarcity of treatment options in supermax prisons by saying that most of the inmates are serving the equivalent of life sentences. For example, when Webb was charged with stabbing the Buckingham warden, he had a release date of 2069.
“They know they’re going to die in prison, and that’s why these [supermax] prisons were built,” Angelone said.
Yet the prisons are not exactly teeming with convicts serving life sentences. Department of Corrections statistics show that the average sentence for people who entered prison in 1997 was just 5.4 years. The average sentence of all inmates was 20.9 years.
It could be months before anyone knows the average sentence of Red Onion inmates. The first group of about a dozen arrived Friday. Corrections officials say they plan to move about 30 inmates a week into the prison until it reaches its capacity of 1,211. By then, the Wallens Ridge prison will be ready to take even more of the “worst of the worst.”
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When someone is sent to a supermax, it usually is not for a definite term. Prison officials said they will decide how long someone stays there on a case-by-case basis – which is another area of concern for the Human Rights Watch.
“There is a tendency to keep difficult prisoners in super-maximum security facilities longer than is required in the interest of security, and longer than is wise for the prisoner’s well-being,” Fellner wrote in “Cold Storage.”
Grassian argues that the inmates most likely to end up in supermax prison are not the cold, calculating killers who are serving life sentences. They are more likely to be emotionally unstable people, influenced more by their disorders than by malice, who act on impulse and then suffer the consequences.
“You’re not dealing with the James Cagneys of the prison system,” he said. “You’re dealing with people who are more often the wretched of the earth.”
Grassian believes that if the state puts people who will eventually walk free in Red Onion, it will be courting disaster with public safety.
“You’re taking people and making them enraged and mentally ill, and then you’re releasing them back on the streets,” Grassian said. “If that’s your paradigm, then the community is going to pay for it.”