Tour of Tamms Correctional Center
Reporters could see but couldn’t talk to Tamms Correctional Center inmate
Faygie Fields as he bounced on his toes, smiled and waved wildly from behind a perforated steel door Thursday. Report, with video tour, on the Belleville News-Democrat.
Illinois Department of Corrections Director Michael Randle opened the prison to the media as part of his 10-point reform plan for Tamms, and he escorted about 10 reporters on a tour guided by Warden Yolande Johnson.
Fields, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, was included in the News-Democrat series Trapped in Tamms. Fields battled for six years to be moved from the disciplinary unit to the prison’s mental health or “special treatment” unit — JPod. He remains alone in a cell for 23 hours a day, but receives counseling.
Fields was not among the four inmates with whom reporters were allowed to talk after the tour. The prison denied a reporter’s request to talk with others.
In the special treatment unit, five inmates sat inside individual Plexiglas booths in a therapy room, watching a morning television talk show. A staff member described playing cards with the inmates. Each has his own deck of cards and deals himself a hand, then they see who has the best hand.
“We play chess, too,” one inmate said through the Plexiglas. “We shout out the numbers to each other, then move them on our boards.”
The special treatment unit houses 12 inmates, but one was out of the prison Thursday awaiting a court hearing, Johnson said. The inmates attend group therapy from their booths, meet with a psychiatrist every two weeks, a psychologist every week and with mental health staff every day, Randle said.
Inmates also are allowed recreation alone in outdoor cages that measure 18 feet, 6 inches by 9 feet. They shower at least once a week.
Demetrious Papademetriou, another inmate on the prison’s special treatment unit who killed his cellmate before coming to Tamms, told reporters during a group interview in the prison’s courtroom that he felt he was being helped at Tamms. He said he spends his days reading books by self-help guru Tony Robbins and attending therapy sessions.
Brian Nelson, a 45-year-old who was convicted of armed robbery, murder, escape and aggravated battery, is one of 38 men marked for transfer from Tamms, where he has been in solitary confinement for more than 10 years. Ten inmates have been transferred since September after Randle’s review of the supermax.
“It’s been 12 years of sitting in an empty, gray cave,” said Nelson, who then described receiving prostate examinations while guards looked on. “I’m afraid of people. I’m afraid of getting a cellmate.”
He is scheduled for release in 2011.
Nelson has developed quirks since he’s been at Tamms, he said, such as pacing the cell at 3 a.m. — a habit that likely would annoy a cellmate.
“They say that we are the rottenest of the rotten,” Nelson said. “The worst of the worst, but it ain’t true.”
Of the 247 inmates held at Tamms as of June 30, according to the Trapped In Tamms series, 138 had not been convicted of a crime after entering the prison system. Of the 109 inmates who had been convicted of crimes in prison, 55 committed acts such as throwing feces and urine, struggling with guards or carrying homemade weapons — acts that did not result in serious injury and could be attributed to mental illness or a need for self-protection.
“We are trying to keep safe, secure environments in our facilities,” Randle said. “They have done something to get here. In some cases, they have done something so serious they can’t make it in general population.”
The prison boasts the highest mental-health-staff-to-inmate ratio in the state, Randle said, providing mental health treatment to any of 226 inmates who might require it and determining whether an inmate is mentally healthy enough for Tamms. Critics, however, including members of the Chicago-based Tamms Ten Year Committee, contend that many Tamms inmates held in the disciplinary section are seriously mentally ill.
When asked whether any mentally ill person should be in solitary confinement, Randle replied, “There are different levels of mental illness, and that decision is being made by a clinician.”
Steve Wuebbles, who is serving a life sentence for murdering his brother-in-law in 1992 in Trenton, then stabbing a guard at another prison, told reporters he would stay in Tamms for the rest of his life.
Flanked by two guards, he was led from the room, back to the elevated security unit.
“I can never deal with a cellie now. One of us is going to die. Either he is going to kill me or I will kill him,” Wuebbles said. “After all this isolation, I know that I can never deal with a person in that close of an environment ever again.”
As Wuebbles stood to leave, he looked at reporters and asked, “Do you believe me? I don’t have any reason to lie to you.”
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