I had been in other prisons prior to Wednesday. Even the trip to Northern Correctional was familiar. Driving along the winding, rolling farmland that cradles Shaker Road in Enfield, you pass a string of state "correctional institutions." First is Carl Robinson, a prison camp, followed by Enfield Correctional and Willard. Shaker Road continues in a turn to the left, heading toward East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. It's a right turn into a driveway that goes uphill to where Northern hides behind a green bluff that serves as its front lawn. The tower that overlooks the prisons and this entire area of Connecticut gives the location away. Northern is a relatively new prison on the same campus as the Osborn complex. Osborn used to be known as the Somers prison, the former maximum security facility where Connecticut’s electric chair was housed. "Old Sparky," they called it. Of course, as in most states, the electric chair has now given way to lethal injection as the less cruel and unusual means for the state government to take an inmate's life. With the construction of newer places to house sentenced inmates, Osborn had become a medium security prison with shorter term sentenced inmates.
There was nothing shocking about the appearance of Northern as you approached it. The government-issue stone block exterior topped by a waving sea of razor wire was all too common in modern corrections. On this particular day, a warm and bright day in late September, the sun reflected off the tangled web of slick steel, flashing like a strobe as my car turned in the circle leading to the parking area.
At Northern, even the front door to the building is locked. Once clicked inside, a guard greets you at a small table, clipboard in hand holding an array of memos, prior approvals for access into hell. Once permitted, you are walked to a door leading into the first waiting area. The door opens with a whoosh, tracking back into the wall as if on air. The first guard advises you to wait there and instructs that another guard would be in to take you further into the facility. Three women, non-lawyers, huddled on the first row of concrete benches that stood in rows in this room. It was a room built for utility, not comfort. The only adornment on the walls was a warning -- in English and Spanish -- about not taking unauthorized items into the facility and threatening the criminal prosecution of all violators. A camera, badly hidden behind a dark globe in one corner of the room, posed as a reminder that the State meant what it said. Perhaps the bleak appearance of the waiting area was intended as preparation for the far bleaker environment once the next threshold had been crossed.
The guard took us toward another door on the wall opposite the entrance. When the door opened it led, not to a hallway where we would visit with the inmate, but into an elevator that led to the second floor of the prison: my first trip in an elevator in any Connecticut jail. When the elevator stopped, the door on the other side of the car opened into the longest and darkest hallway I have ever seen, in a prison or elsewhere. It soon became obvious that the guard was taking us to the prisoners, the prisoners were not being taken to us. As we walked, stops were made along the way, halting in front of different doorways leading to various pods within the prison. Each time a steel door slid open with that same whoosh and closed solidly behind the visitor.
The unit holding my client was the last unit at the very end of the hall. There are no windows to be seen at any point in our journey and no daylight was visible once we all stepped into the elevator. This was science fiction made real. The floors, walls, and ceiling looked like one seamless piece of solid concrete. As we walked I observed the occasional, obligatory drip from the ceiling, collecting in a puddle on the floor. It was a textbook Hollywood scene: the drip falling from a place where nothing should leak. The only thing missing was a swift-moving, indescribable creature that hid in the shadows of the long, dark hallway and would soon slice or otherwise rend us into meaningless pulp. Alas, the real horrors lied within the crimes that sent most of the inmates to this facility and now lied within the innermost bowels of Northern Correctional.
More later.
12:01:38 AM 
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