Yale Visual Law Project Stills
The bed and window in a Northern Correctional Institution cell.
I am writing to you from inside my cell in MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield. As a victim and witness of the abuse prisoners suffer in this state, I strongly support S. B. 1059, the bill to end long-term solitary confinement.
Solitary confinement destroys individuals like myself and leaves people with serious mental health issues without the proper treatment or help. I would know. Altogether, I spent more than five years at Northern Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s notorious supermax prison. That prison is now closing. But all around me, I am seeing that the Department of Correction (DOC) has no intention of stopping the abuses I endured there.
At Northern, I was on a status called “administrative segregation.” I was locked in my cell for 22 or more hours a day. On weekends, I never came out at all. I was shut up for 24 hours in a concrete room the size of a parking space. You are forced to strip naked in front of correctional officers anytime you go out for the hour of recreation. The extreme conditions messed with my head. I found it hard to follow orders from the officers. Sometimes I’d act out, desperate for human interaction, by putting my hand through the food trap in my cell door. My reactions to the environment were punished with disciplinary tickets, keeping me at Northern longer.
The sink in a Northern cell.
Sometimes, they punished me with in-cell shackling. Those times, I was locked in a cell, shackled at my ankles and wrists, with a heavy tether chain connecting them, so that I could barely stand up straight. The chains would dig into my skin and leave scars that would be opened again the next time I was on the status. I was left in that state for days, fed cold meals out of a bag or a Styrofoam cup with nothing to eat with other than my hands. I had no shoes on my feet. There was feces on the walls, doors, floor. Blood as well, from people who had been locked in there before me, some of them chained up while still bleeding from self-harm or officer assaults.
I – – someone’s son, brother, father, and uncle – – was a victim of torture. I have scars from Northern physically, but my biggest scars haunt me mentally, and I can’t get rid of them because they’re in my head. I live with them and fight them every day just trying to live a normal prison life. I spend every day managing my mental illness, caused by the conditions in solitary confinement.
The DOC is closing Northern this summer, and I am thankful that after this year no one else will be tortured there. But the restrictive statuses that were housed there – – administrative segregation (AS) and others – – are still going. Staff in my building, MacDougall, are preparing to run the same so-called programs next door at Walker.
The conditions at Northern shouldn’t be replicated. They should be done away with. Just creating Northern under another name is continuing the same psychological abuse.
Solitary confinement breaks you down. It degrades you to the point where you question who you are. You don’t feel like a man anymore. You don’t feel like a human being.
Some of us going home have children. We can’t even aid our own child, because we need aid ourselves. They send you home with no treatment. They cause such serious harm and then sending you to the streets without the support to cope with the impact. This is setting people up to fail.
The DOC isn’t going to make these changes on their own. The Connecticut legislature needs to act to prevent more people from going through what I did. I may be locked up, but I’m not going to stop using my voice. Connecticut needs to pass S.B. 1059, the PROTECT Act, and stop the torture of human beings for good.
Kezlyn Mendez is currently incarcerated and is a survivor of solitary confinement. He grew up between New Haven and Hartford. The Yale Law School’s Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic forwarded Mendez’s op-ed to the Independent. Learn more about Northern by clicking on the Yale Law School documentary above.