A Scandal in Our Prisons
WASHINGTON -- Neli Latson has a music player. Also, he can order snacks from the canteen, and leave his cell for several hours a day.
This is good news, or what passes for it, in the life of Reginald Latson, a 23-year-old with autism and an IQ of 69 who goes by the nickname of Neli. It is good news because, for more than a year, he has been held in solitary confinement in a Virginia prison.
Except: Latson should not be in prison at all.
That's not to say Latson should be free. He is, by the accounts of those who know him best, a sweet young man who nonetheless can become aggressive when agitated. Winchester County jail superintendent James Whitley, who took the extraordinary step of testifying on Latson's behalf at two sentencing hearings, described him as "like a child wanting to please us."
Latson should be -- and Virginia's mental health officials support this outcome even as its corrections system incarcerates him -- in a secure residential treatment facility.
His journey through Virginia's criminal justice system began four years ago when he assaulted and badly injured a police officer who had demanded to know why Latson was sitting outside the public library. (Answer: Waiting for it to open. Hint: He was a young black man wearing a hoodie.)
That launched a self-defeating, seemingly perpetual cycle of imprisonment, release to a group home, and re-incarceration after police were summoned to the home to deal with an agitated Latson.
Next month, he is to stand trial on the most ridiculous charge of all: that Latson assaulted a correctional officer when, after being taken off his medications and threatening suicide, he was being transferred from a solitary confinement cell to a "crisis cell" with no mattress and with a hole in the floor for a toilet.
This scuffle warrants, at most, internal prison discipline, not additional prosecution by Stafford County Commonwealth's Attorney Eric Olsen, who describes Latson as a cop-hating, racist thug pretending to be "mentally retarded" rather than a young man with a disability in need of treatment.
Given Olsen's intransigence, the best outcome -- for Latson and for the citizens of Virginia -- would be for him to plead guilty and Gov. Terry McAuliffe to swiftly grant a conditional pardon that would allow Latson to be transferred to a secure treatment facility in Florida -- a facility that's already agreed to take him and for which the state has secured federal funding.
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Copyright 2014 Washington Post Writers Group
