WESTEFER v. SNYDER
725 F.Supp.2d 735 (2010)
United States District Court, S.D. Illinois.
July 20, 2010.
Q. 30,000 in a regular?
A. About 23 on the average.
Q. That's a pretty good incentive to pay attention to it?
A. Yes.
Q. I'm sure your budget, like everyone else's, is under pressure?
A. A lot of pressure, your Honor.
Doc. 522 (Randle Testimony) at 44-45. The IDOC has no reason to penalize inmates who have been transferred out of Tamms and in fact, given the substantially higher cost of housing inmates in the supermax prison at Tamms than at lower-security prisons in the IDOC system, the agency's incentive is quite the contrary. As IDOC Director Randle testified, the IDOC's interest lies in rewarding, not penalizing, inmates who successfully complete a term of confinement at Tamms. The evidence of record simply does not support the view that the IDOC has a policy of discriminating against former Tamms inmates. As a further matter, the Court cannot understand how an order requiring IDOC officials to scrub from the jackets of all former inmates of Tamms any record of the confinement of those inmates at the supermax prison (thereby falsifying the correctional history of those inmates) conforms to the requirement of narrowly-tailored relief under both Sandin and the PLRA. In any event, the weight of the evidence in this case, namely, the testimony of IDOC Director Randle and Chief Administrative Officer Johnson, shows that there is no IDOC policy of discriminating against former Tamms inmates and in fact IDOC policy is very much to the contrary, e.g., to encourage IDOC inmates, including former Tamms inmates, to obey prison rules by giving them incentives to stay out of Tamms. The declaratory relief requested by Plaintiffs and the class will be denied.
1. The Court notes that there is also a minimum security prison at Tamms; all references to Tamms in this Order are to the supermax prison there.
2. This perhaps is the place to note that this Order is intended to be a concise account of the bench trial conducted on the procedural due process claims in this case, and to that end only matters deemed by the Court to be credible, material, and relevant will be reported. The reader should presume that evidence omitted from the Court's findings of fact was considered by the Court to be irrelevant or in any event less persuasive than competing evidence. The Court notes in passing that, in addition to alleging violations of procedural due process, Plaintiffs Von Perbandt, Taylor, Sparling, Sorrentino, Santiago, V. Rodriguez, E. Rodriguez, Lasley, Knox, Horton, Harper, Felton, Combs, Clayton, Chapman, Burrell, Bivens, and Cunningham also assert claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 alleging that they were assigned by Defendants to the supermax prison at Tamms in retaliation for filing grievances and lawsuits and engaging in other protected activities challenging the conditions of their confinement, in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. These retaliation claims have been resolved in a series of jury trials, and they are not at issue here.
3. In fact, statistical data assembled by the IDOC shows that the average time served for the current population at Tamms is 73.4 months, or over six years. See Ten-Point Plan (Plaintiffs' Exhibit 7) at 6. Seventy of the 243 inmates (28.3%) have been at Tamms for at least ten years, and more than half have been at Tamms for over five years. See id. at 8. Over three-quarters (76.9%) or 190 of the inmates at Tamms have been there for over three years. See id., Table 4.
4. The Court recognizes that it is assuming here that, were work, education, and substance abuse programs available at Tamms, inmates of the supermax prison would participate in such programs. This assumption seems reasonable to the Court. Participation in such programs doubtless would be a happy alternative to the crushing monotony of being confined alone in a cell for up to twenty-four hours a day that currently is the lot of Tamms inmates. Also, it seems probable that Tamms inmates would welcome the opportunity to earn money by participating in work programs, in order to purchase small items like walkmans or arch supports that make life in a place like Tamms somewhat more bearable. See Doc. 433 (Testimony of Adolfo Rosario) at 50-51 (the witness, a Tamms inmate, complained that the shoes issued to him by Tamms correctional personnel lack arch supports, but he cannot purchase shoe inserts at the prison commissary because he is indigent and has no money to spend at the commissary).
5. Finally, although strictly speaking Point Two of IDOC Director Randle's Plan is not concerned with the issue of whether or not an inmate should be placed at Tamms, it is worth noting that Point Two protects inmates from spending an unnecessary amount of time in the supermax prison. Under the Plan, as already has been noted, upon arrival at Tamms new inmates of the supermax prison will be advised at orientation of the probable length of their stay at the prison, expressed as a range of possible terms of supermax confinement; further, inmates will work with counselors to ensure that they achieve the behavioral levels necessary to be transferred out of Tamms in the least possible time. See Ten-Point Plan (Plaintiffs' Exhibit 7) at 16; Doc. 522 (Randle Testimony) at 13-14.