March 16, 2006
DOC (code) crackers
By Carlos Pabellon
The Wisconsin Department of Corrections, the statewide agency in charge of the prisons, develops and enacts regulations that prisons in Wisconsin are required to follow. One of these regulations is called “Unauthorized Forms of Communication” and says, “Any inmate who communicates with another person by a method not authorized by the institution is guilty of an offense.” The penalties for violating the rule could include extending an inmate’s sentence.
It’s not hard to imagine why the Department of Corrections would want every prison to have the ability stop unauthorized communications. Safety and security are the paramount concerns in any prison or jail, and stopping inmates from using indecipherable code or doublespeak to assist them in planning an escape or some other harmful act is critical. But at least one prison in Wisconsin is using the regulation to not only prevent inmates from conspiring in code, but also to make the institution into a virtual “English Only” facility.
The Wisconsin Secure Program Facility (WSPF) in Boscobel, which used to be called the “supermax” prison, has been using this regulation as a way to stop Latino inmates from speaking in Spanish when family and friends call or visit. Latino inmates can petition the security staff at WSPF for an exception, but granting the petition is up to the discretion of the staff.
Thus, many of these inmates are faced with one of two frustrating choices: either attempt to speak in English despite the difficulty in doing so and the humiliation of knowing that WSPF staff are listening in, or suffer through another way that WSPF isolates its inmates.
Reasonable alternatives to this institutional policy such as the hiring of bilingual staff apparently are not being pursued, even though hiring someone who can read, speak and understand a language other than English is critical in a number of contexts when it comes to communicating with inmates who may be Latino or Hmong. With clear communication, inmates who may have ulterior motives in using their native language could be more properly and reliably monitored. Isn’t this the level of security we have a prison to house the “worst of the worst” for in the first place?
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