Steven Backstrom was having trouble staying awake while working at a prison shoe factory. Machines can be dangerous if you’re not careful, and he was asleep for about three and a half hours.
Clements State Penitentiary in Amarillo, Texas, is a constant buzz of activity. Night after night doors were slammed and people screamed. Staff sometimes delivered drugs as early as 2 a.m., and on many nights forced officers to come in front of cells for security checks. After a sleepless night, he felt like his brain was full of scum.
But taking time off work wasn’t an option for him. The work didn’t pay well, and they could be punished if they didn’t report to work.
That morning, he accidentally pressed the wrong button on the machine, and the shoe-forming device squeezed Backstrom’s right hand. The pain was excruciating. When he raised his hand, his fingers were so mushy that he thought they looked like they were dangling in the air. Backstrom later described stitches and metal pin wounds on his little finger and ring finger in a handwritten complaint to prison officials in 2011.
Backstrom sued the prison the following year over the accident, alleging injuries caused by sleep deprivation, but a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit. More than a decade later, Backstrom still can’t close his hands. He is still unable to get a proper night’s sleep due to persistent disturbances and noise that are a nightly routine in Clements Ward, where he is incarcerated.
The Marshall Project and the Los Angeles Times have identified more than 30 lawsuits related to sleep deprivation in prisons over the past 30 years, including a lawsuit that ended in a settlement three years ago demanding changes at a San Francisco prison. is also included. More than 20 interviews with inmates, guards and regulators from Georgia to Texas to California reveal that extreme sleep deprivation continues to be a problem in prisons and jails. .
Sleep may seem like a trivial issue, a matter of comfort. However, sleep deprivation can cause serious mental and physical illness and, in some cases, lead to early death. U.S. and international courts have recognized sleep deprivation as cruel and unusual punishment.
Sleep deprivation can also lead to broader institutional problems. In communities where no one gets enough rest, conflict and conflict are more likely. UCLA School of Law professor Sharon Drovich is researching sleep deprivation in prisons and jails for an upcoming academic paper, and given that sleep deprivation affects nearly every aspect of corrections, the topic is He said he was surprised by the lack of research on the issue. We support all kinds of systems, from security to mental and physical health.
“This is a deep-rooted, pervasive and serious problem,” Drovic said. “And the attention that is being paid to this problem is overall very small compared to the scale of the problem.”
There are many reasons why people can’t sleep behind bars. Prisons can be too cold in the winter or too hot in the summer. The lights might not turn off, the mattress might be missing, or the equipment might be too noisy.
In Los Angeles, prison officials have a long history of withholding bedding, sheets and a place to sleep for the men and women in their custody. In the 1970s, a federal judge ordered the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to provide better sleeping conditions after several inmates at the downtown jail filed a class-action lawsuit over poor prison conditions. But the department consistently failed to do so, and more than 30 years later another judge found the agency guilty of “deliberate indifference” for failing to provide beds.
“Simply put, it is self-evident that the practice of denying inmates a place to sleep except on the floor constitutes cruel and unusual punishment,” U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson wrote in 2007. .
Before Pregerson handed down his sentence, one man testified that he was forced to sleep under another man’s bunk in a five-person room and ended up developing a staph infection caused by mold.
“Prisons should not deprive the people in their custody of a basic place to sleep, a bed,” Pregerson said. “Because sleeping in a bed, like putting on clothes, identifies our common humanity.”
When supervisory inspectors from the county’s Civil Brands Commission visited Men’s Central Jail this year, they noticed mold on some of the mattresses. After visiting the Twin Towers Correctional Facility across the street, they summarized their concerns in a lengthy report.
“Most people in the areas we visited do not have sheets or pillows,” they wrote. “Several people reported that they were cold because they did not have enough blankets to cover themselves.”
Months later, prison wardens returned to Men’s Central Prison to find that many of the mattresses were “torn or parts of the mattresses were missing,” and that the men incarcerated there were unable to fill out complaint forms or He noted that he was unable to lodge a formal complaint because he did not have a pencil to write with. they went out.
A May 2006 photo shows detainees sleeping on the floor while awaiting processing at Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
The sheriff’s office said in an emailed statement this month that the mattresses are distributed as “clean and intact,” but that they are sometimes “deliberately damaged” by users.
The ministry also said that “many” reforms had been carried out since 2007 and that the prison “had not been fitted with floor pillows due to a lack of housing for many years”. In response to further questions, the ministry said that the reason people are now being forced to sleep on the floor is due to processing delays, not overcrowding.
But an October monitoring report contradicted this, noting that people incarcerated at the county’s largest jail continue to report that they are sometimes forced to sleep on the floor due to a lack of space. .
In some jails and prisons, guards ring each inmate’s cell door or shine a light in everyone’s face once or several times an hour to prevent escapes. I’m checking to see if he’s still alive. A man incarcerated in a Georgia prison, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, said his unit has “giant lights” and late-night emergency counts are often held at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. He said that he was being told. ” he said.
But for many facilities, doors and lighting aren’t the only issues. In 2013, Michael Garrett sued a Texas prison, alleging that meals, work, staffing and medication times started early in the morning, making it impossible for him to get more than 2 1/2 hours of continuous sleep. The state was largely successful in avoiding the incident. But this year, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Garrett and said the case should proceed. The lawsuit is pending.
This year, Stephen Bowman, an inmate at another Texas prison, told the Times and the Marshall Project that he usually wakes up after 2 a.m. to head to the medical wing for a 3 a.m. insulin injection. He said he is doing so. He then goes to the diner for breakfast and goes about his day. It said it wouldn’t end until the final count around 11 p.m.
Employees in other departments described similar schedules. The employee requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record and feared retaliation. They provided records this year showing that the unit’s last standing count took place just before midnight, that prisoners working the first shift started their day at 2 a.m., and that breakfast was served two hours later.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice declined to release other departments’ daily schedules in response to records requests, but officials say they will adjust the schedule across the state in 2022 to increase the number of inmates per day from eight to eight. He said the number had been reduced to six.
“This reduction increases operational efficiency, improves staffing challenges, and ensures inmates have more uninterrupted time,” prison spokeswoman Amanda Hernandez said in an email. wrote, adding that the prison now uses night lights instead of overhead lights for late-night counts.
According to the National Institutes of Health, sleep deprivation is linked to a myriad of problems, including heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, as well as mental health issues, including depression and suicide. And murder scenes present unique risks. People awaiting trial in two different San Francisco County jails had severely impaired cognitive function due to sleep deprivation and were unable to adequately participate in their defense in court, according to a lawsuit filing. .
Maureen Hanlon, a civil rights attorney with ArchCity Defenders, has witnessed similar situations with incarcerated clients in the St. Louis area. “It shows in how they can work together, how they can understand, how they can think about things rationally,” Hanlon said. She believes sleep deprivation is a hidden factor in people making bad plea deals.
John Thompson was incarcerated in a Pennsylvania prison for more than 37 years. He said he spent part of that time in a cell where the lights were on 24 hours a day. He tried to stretch out socks and wrap them around his eyes to block out the light, but it wasn’t enough.
“I feel like my body never gets any rest. It’s like daytime all the time. So even when I try to sleep, sleep never comes,” he said.
Thompson remembers witnessing one of the men in the cell next door experiencing extreme sleep deprivation and his condition worsening. When he first arrived, he appeared to be in good spirits, Thompson said. But after weeks of complaining that he couldn’t sleep under bright lights, the man began to describe voices that others couldn’t hear. He became combative, causing water to flood his cell and screaming throughout the night, making it difficult for the others to sleep.
Thompson was released from prison in 2017 and now works for the Abolitionist Law Center, which litigates over poor prison conditions. One of the cases, filed this year, alleges constant sleep deprivation in Pennsylvania prison cells due to constant lights. Pennsylvania officials declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.
There are many problems that lead to sleep deprivation, so solving sleep deprivation requires many solutions. Prison staff can provide cleaner, higher-quality bedding and ensure facilities are neither too cold nor too hot. Lights can be dimmed in the evening and schedules and procedures can be adjusted to avoid waking people in the middle of the night for meals, medications, and safety checks. The ability to release people who are at low risk of reoffending could reduce crowding in facilities, allowing beds to be spaced further apart in dormitories and reducing noise.
Round-the-clock checks and 24/7 lighting are ostensibly safety measures, but Drovic is skeptical that such measures will actually help prevent suicides or escapes. She believes the time between checkpoints is more than enough time for a suicide attempt, and that it is highly unlikely that he would have escaped from the locked facility at night. Problems caused by lack of sleep can interfere with the very thing authorities want. Suicide is correlated with lack of sleep. Dorovich said prison officials are trying to prevent people from committing suicide, but they don’t take into account factors that can lead to suicide, such as insomnia.
“Decisions about how facilities are run reflect a failure to recognize the humanity of the people within them,” she says.
She makes similar claims about security. Sleep-deprived people are more likely to get into fights, so security measures that make sleep worse can be counterproductive.
A man recently incarcerated at Arizona’s Florence State Prison said he observed how sleep deprivation can lead to violence. His name has not been released out of concern for his safety.
“It’s like a bubble. It all builds up and builds up, and if you have enough of them in the same environment, it will eventually explode,” he said.
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook.
