As for his current situation, David seems to be in good hands while at Marion Correctional Treatment Center, but he spends a substantial amount of time at Wallens Ridge State Prison, a Level 5 security facility built on a sheared-off mountaintop next to an old coal mining town called Big Stone Gap. A product of tough-on-crime Governor George Allen’s 1990s strategy for economic diversification in southwestern Virginia, Wallens Ridge (along with its twin facility, Red Onion State Prison, thirty miles away) was designed as a super-max to house the “worst of the worst.” Ronald Angelone, Virginia’s Director of Corrections at the time, boasted, “It’s not a nice place, and I designed it not to be a nice place” (Timberg, 1999, C1). However, it turned out that there were not enough of the “worst of the worst” in Virginia to fill these prisons. The result is a complex migratory network of primarily prisoners of color imported from inner cities not only of Virginia but of several other states. Staffed primarily by white guards from the rural surroundings, the facility has been at the center of controversy since it opened in 1999. In 2001, after a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the death of two Connecticut inmates, and the refusal of Angelone to allow a visit from a Connecticut state agency charged with protecting the rights of mentally ill, Connecticut pulled its prisoners from Wallens Ridge (Timberg, 2001, B1). I would argue that this is not a humane custodial setting for any inmate, especially one who is Native Hawaiian, nor adequate clinical care for some one with David’s mental health issues. Tellingly, when he gets transferred to Wallens Ridge from Marion, David generally goes off of his medication and deteriorates quite rapidly.
