Alice Tracy’s son killed himself in a notorious Virigina prison where he and other New Haveners were shipped to serve their time. His suicide echoed both on screen — and in a call to action from Alice Tracy (pictured) and others — at a downtown event.
People Against Injustice, a local prison reform group, screened the movie in the community room at the main New Haven library. Many audience members were in it.
The movie, called Up the Ridge: A U.S. Prison Story, presents the history and rationale for building the Wallens Ridge super-maximum security prison in southwestern Virginia: the idea was that prison jobs would replace jobs in the dying coal industry. Virginia officials expressed candidly on camera their view that prisons are a profit-generating industry.
But Virginia couldn’t supply enough prisoners to fill the new facility, so inmates were imported from overcrowded prisons in Connecticut and other states.
David Tracy, 20, was one of the 480 Connecticut inmates sent there. He committed suicide in 2000 with just a few months left to serve on a minor drug offense. His mother, several of his nine siblings, and many young nieces and nephews attended the screening. (Some of them are pictured, left.)
Barbara Fair (pictured), a founder of People Against Injustice, said she and others were at a public hearing about the exported Connecticut prisoners when they learned of Tracy’s suicide. “That was it,” she said. “That was the fire that was not going to go out until every one [of the Connecticut prisoners] in Virginia was out.”
In the film, surveillance cameras showed how long it took prison guards to enter Tracy’s cell. Following prison regulations, they first stocked up on weapons of various kinds in case he was faking and lashed out at them. Then it showed medical personnel’s vain efforts to revive him.
At that point, Fair got up from her seat and went over to hug Alice Tracy.
People Against Injustice and similar groups in several other Connecticut cities united in their opposition to sending Connecticut prisoners more than 700 miles away organized a bus trip to Wallens Ridge. The movie shows many Connecticut living room gatherings, then the bus trip, where tired but determined people emerge many hours later into another world —” a world of beautiful mountains with a super max prison perched on a windy ridge, feeling remote from even the nearest town.
The movie, by film makers Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby, shows how the efforts of family members and other supporters helped —” contrary to then-Gov. John Rowland’s request to send 500 more Connecticut prisoners to Wallens Ridge —” to bring all the state’s prisoners back by 2004.
David Tracy was white, but 70 percent of Connecticut’s prisoners are black and Latino. Larry Frazier, an African American prisoner sent to Wallens Ridge, died when he went into diabetic shock and instead of being treated medically, was shot with stun guns. Both the Frazier and Tracy families won wrongful death settlements from the State of Connecticut.
After the film, Fair exclaimed passionately, “We have to stop thinking that prison is a part of our life, that it’s a way of life we just accept, that our kids are gonna grow up and end up in prison at some point. We have to just stop accepting that.”
Alice Tracy (pictured) added, “I was very sad my son died. I hope nobody else dies in jail, and nobody else goes through what we did. But we’re still fighting to help other people.”
Her daughter, Mary, addressed the crowd and urged even those without incarcerated loved ones to get involved in changing the nature of the criminal justice system. While Mary’s daughter Davidanna (pictured above) listened, Mary urged the audience, “Start participating because one day you may have someone in jail.”
People Against Injustice is hosting a public meeting at City Hall on Aug. 29 to prioritize issues for next year’s legislative session. Two hot items, Fair says, are the prohibitively high cost of inmate phone calls and the lack of transparency in the system that makes it very hard for families to get information.