Tony Medina has spent two decades in a concrete box in Texas, alone
TONY MEDINA is a polite, burly man with heavily tattooed arms. Like all who are confined at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, he is dressed in white. The prison’s squat, grey buildings hold 214 death-row inmates. Locked into a tiny booth in a visiting room, handcuffs off, he compares being “out here” to a vacation. It is quiet, save clangs of metal doors. The room is also cooled and, a rarity, he can see through Plexiglass to the face of another human.
He gets an hour in an enclosed yard, most days, for recreation. Again he is alone. In his cell he reads , writes or sometimes paints. Relations and volunteers, mostly European women, visit and send messages. Inmates shout to each other, cell-to-cell. But Texas, unlike some states, denies solitary prisoners any physical contact, other than frequent body inspections by guards. He says he last touched a relative, hugging his mother, on August 1st 1996.
Dennis Longmire, of Sam Houston State University in nearby Huntsville, says prolonged use of solitary cells is costly and needless. The UN and advocacy groups routinely condemn the practice. He has testified at 40 trials that older inmates are not especially violent to others. He recalls that his own visits to death row were deafening and unpleasant. Unsurprisingly, many guards demand to work elsewhere.
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