Opinion ID: 284813
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Effect of the Transfer from Clinton Prison to Dannemora

Text: 24 The state characterizes Schuster's transfer from Clinton to Dannemora as no more than a mere administrative matter, claiming that it represented a simple change in the place of detention and that this action was beyond the purview of judicial review. See People ex rel. Sacconanno v. Shaw, 4 App.Div.2d 817, 164 N.Y.S.2d 750 (3d Dept.1957); Urban v. Settle, 298 F.2d 592 (8th Cir. 1962); 18 U.S.C. § 4241. 5 There is no doubt, as the Supreme Court has recently remarked, that discipline and administration of state detention facilities are state functions. They are subject to federal authority only where paramount federal constitutional or statutory rights supervene. It is clear, however, that in instances where state regulations applicable to inmates of prison facilities conflict with such rights, the regulations may be invalidated. Johnson v. Avery, 394 U.S. ___, 89 S.Ct. 747, 21 L.Ed.2d 718 (1969). It is not to difficult, in this regard, to discern that a transfer of the character confronting us involves rights of the nature described by the Supreme Court. Not only did the transfer effectively eliminate the possibility of Schuster's parole, but it significantly increased the restraints upon him, exposed him to extraordinary hardships, and caused him to suffer indignities, frustrations and dangers, both physical and psychological, he would not be required to endure in a typical prison setting. 25 The adversities and rigors of an institution such as Dannemora have been catalogued in a scholarly and persuasive study of the problem by a distinguished committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Special Committee on the Study of Commitment Procedures and the Law Relating to Incompetents of the Ass'n of the Bar of the City of New York, Mental Illness, Due Process, and the Criminal Defendant 23-26 (1968) [hereinafter cited as N.Y. Bar Report]. The members of this eminent body included New York State's Commissioner of Correction, a deputy commissioner of the Department of Mental Hygiene, four state Supreme Court Justices, the Director of Matteawan State Hospital, the Director of Central Islip State Hospital, the Director of Psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, New York, two assistant district attorneys, the Director of the Mental Health Information Service for the First Judicial Department, a professor of law, and other distinguished practicing attorneys and physicians. It spent two years exhaustively studying the problem, aided by an able staff under the direction of Malachy T. Mahon, now Dean of the Law School of Hofstra University. As a measure of its position as a respected initiator of needed reforms, we notice that the Committee's prior report, made in 1962, led to substantial changes in the Mental Hygiene Law, McKinney's Consol.Laws, c. 27, particularly in what is now §§ 72-74, the procedures for involuntary civil commitment. 26 In considering the problem posed we are faced with the obvious but terrifying possibility that the transferred prisoner may not be mentally ill at all. Yet he will be confined with men who are not only mad but dangerously so. As the New York Courts have themselves indicated, he will be exposed to physical, emotional and general mental agony. Confined with those who are insane, told repeatedly that he too is insane and indeed treated as insane, it does not take much for a man to question his own sanity and in the end to succumb to some mental aberration. Cf. Dennison v. New York, 49 Misc.2d 533, 267 N.Y.S.2d 920 (Ct.Cl. 1960), rev'd on other grounds 28 App. Div. 608, 280 N.Y.S.2d 31 (3d Dept. 1967); People ex rel. Cirrone v. Hoffmann, 255 App.Div. 404, 407, 8 N.Y.S.2d 83, 86 (3d Dept.); People ex rel. Brown v. Johnston, supra. Moreover, the facts reveal that there always lurks the grisly possibility that a prisoner placed in Dannemora will be marooned and forsaken. For example, Matteawan State Hospital is the functional equivalent of Dannemora for those convicted of misdemeanors, for female prisoners and for those civilly committed who are found to be dangerous under Mental Hygiene Law § 85. See Correction Law § 400. The commitment procedures for prisoners to either hospital are identical. See Correction Law § 408. Matteawan has 119 inmates who have been confined there since 1935, 29 since 1925, and 4 patients who have been there since at least 1915 — over half a century. Morris, supra, at 656. The New York Bar Association study discloses the startling information that as of November 1, 1965, one inmate, then 83 years old, had been at Matteawan since 1901, when as an uneducated boy of 19 years he was imprisoned in this maximum-security institution for the insane. N.Y. Bar Report at 72. The study also reveals another individual who was accused of stealing a horse and buggy in 1905, committed to Matteawan after pleading not guilty and found to suffer acute delusional insanity. This inmate was more fortunate than the former; he was released 59 years later at the age of 89 because he was no longer a menace to society or other patients. N.Y. Bar n. 1 at 72. See also Dennison v. State, supra, in which the plaintiff was initially awarded $115,000 in damages after wrongly spending 24 years in Dannemora because he had stolen candy valued at $5.00 at the age of 16. 6 27 Moreover, there is considerable evidence that a prolonged commitment in an institution providing only custodial confinement for the mentally sick and nothing more may itself cause serious psychological harm or exacerbate any pre-existing condition. As one psychiatrist has explained: [U]nder prevailing conditions, we super-impose new disabilities on existing disabilities — at least in many cases — when we forcibly commit sick people to places called mental hospitals which in reality remain custodial asylums. Hearings on Constitutional Rights of the Mentally Ill before the Subcomm. on Constitutional Rights of the Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, 87th Cong., 1st Sess. pt. 1 at 44. And, as another has warned: There is repetitive evidence that once a patient has remained in a large mental hospital for two years or more, he is quite unlikely to leave except by death. He becomes one of the large mass of so-caller `chronic' patients. Bloomberg, A Proposal for a Community-based Hospital as a Branch of a State Hospital, cited in Katz, Goldstein & Dershowitz, Psycho-Analysis, Psychiatry & the Law, at 664 (1967). 7 28 In addition, by its very nature, confinement at an institution for the criminally insane is far more restrictive than at a prison. Nothing more dramatically illustrates this difference than the petty indignities to which inmates in the former are subjected. For example, their visiting and correspondence rights are curtailed. In the appendix we reproduce a pro se petition by a prisoner in a similar institution in Massachusetts listing at least thirty-five such differences illustrating that these seemingly small but numerous indignities may accumulate to the point where the prisoner-patients consider them the most galling of all restraints. 29 Finally as the court below stated, prisoners held in Dannemora are in practice not even called for hearing by the Parole Board. By contrast, had Schuster remained in Clinton, he might have returned to society over 20 years ago. Additionally, as long as Schuster is considered insane, New York law prevents him from seeking to vacate his original conviction by a writ of coram nobis. People v. Booth, 17 N.Y.2d 681, 216 N.E.2d 615, 269 N.Y.S.2d 457 (1966). 30 We are not alone in attributing significance to a transfer from a prison to an institution for the criminally insane. Recognizing that such a transfer may cause further substantial deprivation of liberties, New York's own courts have permitted a prisoner to challenge his transfer by writ of habeas corpus. People ex rel. Brown v. Johnston, supra. Thus, the New York Court of Appeals stressed that any further restraint in excess of that permitted by the judgment or constitutional guarantees should be subject to inquiry. An individual, once validly convicted and placed under the jurisdiction of the Department of Correction    is not to be divested of all rights and unalterably abandoned and forgotten by the remainder of society. 9 N.Y.2d at 485, 215 N.Y.S.2d at 45-46, 174 N.E.2d at 726 (emphasis in the original). 31 Accordingly, we would delude ourselves if we believed that a prisoner's transfer to a prison maintained for the criminally insane is a mere administrative matter. Prison and asylum are divided by far more than the few miles that separate Clinton and Dannemora. In view of the substantial deprivations, hardships and indignities such a move may produce, judicial scrutiny is necessary to ensure that the procedures preceding the transfer adequately safeguard the fundamental rights of the prisoner. 32