Equal Justice Initiative

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The Miami Herald

By FRED GRIMM
February 5, 2009

Imagine the life of a prisoner in solitary. Then imagine he's a child.

Twenty-four hours a day in a concrete box. No interaction with other inmates. Food comes via a slot in the door. Prisoners get five hours of exercise a week in what Meg Laughlin of The St. Petersburg Times described as an ``empty concrete cage that resembles a dog run.''

In 2006, Laughlin (a former Miami Herald reporter) discovered that an inmate named Ian Michael* had served the longest time of any Florida prisoner in solitary confinement. Michael, who was 29, was entering his 15th year in the box. Half his life had been spent in solitary confinement.

Michael had been arrested in Tampa on an attempted-murder charge in 1990. He was just 13. In Florida, that doesn't count for much. A boy who was so small that prison officials cut off the legs of regular prison pants to put him in a uniform was sent to finish out his life in one of Florida's toughest adult lockups. With no chance of parole.

Laughlin's story reads like a dispatch from a third-world hellhole. But this is Florida, which now has 265 inmates serving life-without-parole sentences for crimes committed when they were 17 or younger. Other states put kids away for life, but only Florida has put away kids for life at 13 for crimes other than murder.

LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE

Florida has two such prisoners, Michael and Joe Harris Sullivan, who at age 13 was arrested on burglary and rape charges in Pensacola. The judge promised, ''I'm going to try and send him away for as long as I can.'' And he did. Life without parole. Sullivan has been in prison now for two decades.

But the Equal Justice Initiative took his case to federal court and on Monday wrested an order from the U.S. Supreme Court forcing the state to review what EJI director Bryan Stevenson calls Sullivan's ''death by prison'' sentence.

Both Stevenson and Paolo Annino, who runs the Children in Prison project at the Florida State University School of Law, spoke Wednesday about the state's failure to recognize ''what every parents knows.'' That the brains of young teens aren't fully developed. That young teens who commit stupid, egregious crimes are not beyond redemption.

Stevenson has challenged Draconian sentences for kids through the courts and hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually consider Florida's juvenile sentencing laws. EJI also backs federal legislation that would require sentence reviews after 15 years in prison for children sentenced at age 15 or under.

PROPOSED LAW

Annino hopes the Florida Legislature will take up a bill making parole a possibility for kids 15 and younger who have been sentenced to 10 years or more in prison (253 Florida prisoners meet that criteria). His bill includes a series of strict requirements for parole, such as a high school equivalence diploma, rehab programs and no prison discipline problems. ''But we really do have to provide some kind of motivation,'' he said.

For someone like Michael (finally released from solitary after Laughlin's story) with a psyche muddled by his record-breaking stint in the box, the Second Chance Act would provide only the faintest hope. But the state's unwavering juvenile death-by-prison sentences diminish any Floridian with the notion they live in a civilized place. A fix would free us from our own concrete box.

*Note: Ian Michael is actually Ian Manuel, a client of EJI.