After LWOP: The Solitary Life of Ian Manuel

THE GOOD NEWS: Monday’s Supreme court decision declared Life Without Parole for juveniles unconstitutional in cases where no murder was involved. This will make it possible for some men and women who have served decades behind bars for crimes they committed as kids, to be up for parole.

THE BAD NEWS: Some of those grown up kids have spent most of their time in solitary confinement where they were deeply psychologically damaged by the system that was supposed to rehabilitate them.

More and more experts in the field have equated solitary confinement with torture, as physician Atul Gawande describes in his remarkable 2009 New Yorker article, Hellhole. Even John McCain wrote, in describing his 5 1/2 year experience as a prisoner of war, that prolonged isolation was far worse than physical torture. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.”

So if solitary confinement is tortuous and harmful to adults, how does it affect the children whom we elect to incarcerate in adult institutions and then often keep for months or years or…. decades in isolation.

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SOLITARY KIDS

According to a 2005 report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch:

….teenagers in adult prisons often end up in solitary, either because they are considered disciplinary problems, because they feel compelled to join prison gangs, or because they have to be isolated from adult offenders “for their own protection.”

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IAN MANUEL IN SOLITARY

Meg Laughlin of the St. Petersburg Times has a portrait of one such person. His name is Ian Manuel. When he was 13-years old he shot a woman in the face as he and two other kids attempted to rob her and the whole thing went bad. Now Ian Manual is 33 years old and he has spent most of the past 20 years in solitary confinement. He is Florida’s longest serving inmate it solitary.

As a consequence of Monday’s decision, Ian Manuel will finally be eligible for parole.

If he was given parole, in what condition would Ian Manuel be released? Due to his time in solitary, Manuel’s life has been dialed down to a tiny fraction of what even other inmates are allowed. He has spent more than half his life in a concrete cell the size of a walk-in closet. He has no windows. His food is delivered through a slot in the door. He never sees another inmate. For something to do, he has become a cutter. Watching his blood trickle is better than watching nothing. It is a common way that those in isolation relieve the boredom, say psychologists familiar with prisoners in solitary confinement.

Laughlin describes Manuel as having “no work skills, no formal education and so much psychological damage that he once set himself on fire.”

Here are some clips from her story:

When he began his sentence in a tough adult prison at age 14, he was small and defensive. Afraid to appear vulnerable, he got into trouble immediately. He’d veer into the grass instead of walking on the path in the prison yard. When guards yelled at him, he’d yell back. When they came at him, he’d make obscene gestures. In less than a year, he was in solitary.

From there, the disciplinary infractions multiplied — for storing aspirin, for sticking his hand through the food flap, for standing at his cell door, for masturbating and for cursing. He would go six months at a time lying on his bed in what he called “a state of hibernation” to stay out of trouble. But it didn’t matter. Each infraction added months and after a while the hole was so deep he couldn’t get out.

Recently, he received a visit from someone not on his legal team. It was his first in 15 years. Leaning forward toward the glass separating him from his visitor, he tried to explain what kept him there:

“I’d tell myself to keep quiet and behave. But I was so desperate I couldn’t control my impulses.”

The result has been a life stripped of life.

No programs or education. No visitors, phone calls or human touch. No books, magazines, TV or radio. No talking. No standing at the cell door and looking out. Three 10-minute showers a week. Meals pushed through a flap in the door. Enforced idleness in a concrete box, year after year.

According to corrections reports, Manuel became a cutter at 17 — slicing his arms with tiny fragments of glass and metal and watching the blood flow.

“It gave me relief from the intolerable numbness,” he said.

By the way, from the beginning, Manual has always been loaded with remorse about his crime, and demonstrated it. Laughlin explains in an earlier article about Manual when she tells about Manual’s first Christmas in prison when he was still a tiny, very skinny teenager:

On Christmas Eve 1992, he was allowed to make one phone call. He called Debbie Baigrie, the woman he had shot.

“This is Ian. I am sorry for all the suffering I’ve caused you,” she remembers him saying.

They began to correspond regularly. Baigrie said she was impressed with how well he wrote.

She asked prison officials to let him take the General Educational Development test and take college courses.

“I got a second chance in life. I recovered and went on,” Baigrie said. “I wanted Ian to have the same chance.”

But the rules of solitary forbade Manuel from participating in any kind of self-improvement or educational program. Instead, he sat in his cell day in and day out, without reading materials or human interaction, racking up more infractions for “disrespect,” which only extended his time in solitary.

After several years, Baigrie gave up.

“Not because of Ian,” she said, “but because the system made it impossible for him to improve. What does it say when a victim tries to do more for an inmate than the very system that’s supposed to rehabilitate him?”

Please read the rest of both articles. And then tell me how this is the right and humane thing to have done to a 13-year-old—thirteen—despite the fact that he did something awful 20 years ago.

Even his victim believes we owed him something better.

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Photo by Michael Spooneybarger |Special to the St. Petersburg Times