TOUGHER THAN GUANTANAMO
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issued a blanket commutation for all Death Row prisoners, Griffith was sent to Menard Correctional Center, not Tamms. Wilford Mackey, convicted of armed violence in the same slaying, also never went to Tamms, and is currently housed at IDOC's high-medium security facility in Danville. Robinson Wesley was convicted of murder for the 1988 beating of a prison commissary worker at Stateville, yet he has never been sent to Tamms. Nor has Domingo Perez, convicted of killing a fellow inmate in Stateville.
Anthony Hall seems overqualified by the state code’s definition of CMAX candidates: Convicted of the 1983 stabbing to death a beloved Pontiac cafeteria supervisor named Frieda King, Hall has also punched a judge in the face and used a chair to beat an attorney.
He is currently incarcerated at Menard. Johnnie Walton, on the other hand, has never killed anyone. His rap sheet includes 13 armed robberies, all committed in the 1970s, a 1986 escape and a 1987 felony charge for selling PCP (that conviction was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals in March of 2004.) A former Vice Lord, 58-year-old Walton claims he gave up gang life in 1988, when his son was murdered.
In prison, he earned an associates degree in auto mechanics and was so well-behaved that he was given the privilege of working in Illinois Correctional Industries. “To qualify as an ICI worker, inmates must demonstrate good disciplinary status; have at least a GED; not be an escape risk; [and] have received a positive review by Internal Affairs,” according to IDOC’s Web site. “We made the mattresses for Tamms. We were the good guys,” Walton says. “So when they shipped me to Tamms, that was a great surprise to me. I had been a model prisoner for 18 years.”
Schnapp says IDOC staff must have had some cause to place Walton in solitary confinement. "Every person placed at Tamms, it was reviewed by our executive staff and there was a reason for them to go there," he says. Walton believes he was targeted by a prison staffer who read letters he was sending home in anticipation of his release, organizing a gang prevention program called Universal Brotherhood. Prison officials deemed his letters “unauthorized gang activity.” He spent more than three years in Tamms, beginning in February 2004, one month before his conviction was reversed. He was released in 2007. He received an annual step-down review, but says it was meaningless. “They tell you that you have to renounce the gang. I say renounce what? You have to give them information on where the gang is, what they do, and if you do that, you’re a dead man,” Walton says. He knows three men who agreed to renounce their former gangs, and provided information, only to be told the review committee didn’t believe them. Walton says two of those men are still at Tamms.
Steve isn’t sure why his younger brother, Mike, has been in Tamms since 2000. He asked that their surname not be published, for fear of retaliation, but he provided a reporter with his brother’s prison identification number.
Mike’s rap sheet shows he was convicted of a 1988 murder plus a class 3 aggravated battery while in Pontiac. His tattoos, listed below his mug shot, suggest that he was a member of a gang. Steve, a soft-spoken 41-year-old, doesn’t minimize his brother’s crimes.
“He pled guilty. He’s not upset with the system for putting him in prison. He did wrong and he knows it. That’s his sentence and he’s serving it,” Steve says. “But this is something entirely different. This is like a sentence on top of a sentence.”
Like many inmates, Mike was told upon arrival at Tamms that good behavior would earn him a transfer out after a year, but it hasn’t happened. He would be required to provide information on his gang, and Steve says Mike simply can’t. “What information does he know? He’s there. He doesn’t have any information from anybody,” Steve says. “After nine years [in Tamms], you don’t know anything.”
Mike is scheduled to be released in 2012, and when that happens, he will most likely come live with Steve and his two young children. Steve describes his brother as “very quiet, very kind, a good-hearted person who just got caught up in city life;” still, Steve frets about how his brother — or anyone who has spent a decade in solitary confinement — will function in the free world.
“My concern is that when they eventually do get out, there’s no rehabilitation in there. How are they going to adapt to society?” Steve asks. “I can’t see that those guys are going to come out, like, normal.”
Steve has joined Tamms Year Ten, a coalition of ex-prisoners, inmates’ families, educators, attorneys and other activists formed in 2008 (Tamms’ 10 th year of operation) calling for reforms at the CMAX. The group has worked with legislators and IDOC officials, and has weekly meetings at a storefront office in Chicago’s Humboldt Park. The group was organized by Laurie Jo Reynolds, an adjunct professor of film and video at Columbia College. Reynolds, whose undergraduate degree is in public policy, says the perspective of people like Steve and other Tamms families is the factor that was missing during the creation of Tamms.
“People never imagine that their own children could make a mistake and end up in prison,” she says. “They only imagine their children as victims. That’s how we end up making these bad policies.”
