Judge gets his own medicine, learns of life in a Club Fed jail

National Catholic Reporter, April 19, 1996 by Colman McCarthy

Obviously, Sol Wachtler had been heeding the wise words of Politicians who say that America's prisons are luxury resorts, Club Feds or, in Phil Gramm's stump phrase, Holiday Inns. Otherwise, Wachtler would have had no fear when entering a medium-security federal prison in Butner, N.C., Sept. 28, 1993.

That day, the 63-year-old New Yorker had become the unlikeliest inmate among the nation's 1.1 million state and federal prisoners. Wachtler had been the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York, the highest-ranking member of the state judiciary. He came to that court in 1972, after serving four years as a justice of the New York Supreme Court. Nationally known, he had been a guest lecturer at Yale Law School.

Wachtler's decisions were laced with eloquence. His other writings included this: "The greatest responsibility for our national welfare does not rest with statutes carved in stone but with the principles, conscience and morality of the individuals who constitute this generation."

Wachtler's personal ethics failed him in the early 1990s when he began harassing a woman with whom he had an affair. Three carloads of FBI agents pulled him over on the Long Island Expressway for an arrest. Soon after, he resigned in public humiliation. He pleaded guilty to harassment and was sent to prison for 13 months.

Wachtler kept a diary. Last month The New York Times ran a 3,000-word excerpt. By any standard - factual reporting, unerring analysis, logical conclusions - Wachtler has written an unreservedly compelling account of the dehumanizing reality of prison life. Little that he experienced came close to corroborating the claims of candidates and officeholders that prisoners are living in country clubs with too many weight rooms, televisions and sundry privileges.

In January 1995, the No Frills Prison Act was introduced in the House by Rep. Dick Zimmer, R-N.J. Section 2 of the bill would require "the elimination of luxurious prison conditions." Such frills as in-cell coffee pots, in-cell televisions, weightlifting equipment, computers and earned good-time credits would go.

During 13 months of caged punishment, Sol Wachtler saw meanness, misery and violence but not much luxury. He recalls his days on the bench when, being a dutiful jurist, he would take tours of state prisons: Wardens made him "feel like a vestige of royalty. I always knew that I was seeing only what I was supposed to see but I felt my visit was a demonstration to the inmates that we cared about their conditions. Now that I am a prisoner, and judges are being shown the facility that imprisons me, I realize how deluded I was in those years by my own vanity and by those escorts who so carefully planned my intinerary."

As an inmate, Wachtler saw judges taken through an air-conditioned mental health unit: "They were not escorted through the vast majority of the units, which had unventilated, cramped, doublebunked cells built for two but each holding four inmates. My home was one of these. ... The only thing accomplished by these tours is to create yet another group of propagandists who spread the word that life in prison is pretty good or - far more ominous for the future treatment of prisoners - that life in prison is too good."

One night Wachtler was stabbed while sleeping. After receiving stitches for the wound - not by a doctor and not with an anesthetic - he was handcuffed and taken to a security room. There he was told by an officer that the assailant had been found: "Sol, you did a lousy job. We all know you did it to yourself."

Wachtler wrote, "I looked at him in silence and disbelief. ... But why would I want to stab myself?" Officer: Because you want to get out of Butner and you figured this would be the quickest way to do it."

Wachtler spent nearly a month in solitary confinement, the hole.

While in prison, the former chief judge met men who had once been in his court years back. Some had legal papers bearing Wachtler's name. He met men whose sentences he now realized were irrationally severe, owing to unbendable sentencing guidelines that give judges no discretion. As a result, he writes, "we cannot build prisons fast enough and, instead of exploring alternatives, we continue to criminalize things that should not be criminalized."

Wachtler was released from prison in October 1994. He returned to his home in Great Neck, N.Y., where he is a consultant for dispute-resolution programs. He works also to raise funds for legal assistance for poor people.

In Congress, the No Frills Prison Act has passed the House and Senate. It is part of an omnibus spending bill about to become law.