Last summer, some 600 inmates in the notorious supermaximum-security unit at California's Pelican Bay State Prison stopped eating. They were protesting the conditions in which the state says it must hold its most difficult prisoners: locked up for 23 hours out of every 24 in a barren concrete cell measuring 7 1/2 by 11 feet. One wall of these cells is perforated steel; inmates can squint out through the holes, but there's nothing to see outside either. In Pelican Bay's supermax unit, as in most supermax prisons around the country, the cells are arranged in lines radiating out like spokes from a control hub, so that no prisoner can see another human being--except for those who are double-bunked. Last year, the average population of the Pelican Bay supermax unit was 1,200 inmates, and on average, 288 men shared their tiny space with a "cellie." Since 1995, 12 double-bunked prisoners in the Pelican Bay supermax unit have been murdered by their cell mates. But near-total isolation is the more typical condition.
Meals are slid to the inmates through a slot in the steel wall. Someprisoners are kept in isolation even for the one hour per day that they'reallowed out to exercise; all are shackled whenever they are taken out of theircells. And many are forced to live this way for years on end.
Such extreme deprivation, the food strikers said, literally drives peoplecrazy. Many experts agree. But the protest died out after two weeks, accordingto the jailhouse lawyer who organized it; and though a state senator promisedthat he would look into the strikers' complaints, so far conditions at PelicanBay remain unchanged.
All told, more than 8,000 prisoners in California and at least 42,000 aroundthe country, by the conservative estimate of the Corrections Yearbook, arecurrently held in similar conditions of extreme confinement. As of 2000, Texasalone boasted 16 supermax prisons and supermax units, housing some 10,000 inmates. In Florida, more than 7,000 inmates were double-bunked in suchfacilities and the corrections department was lobbying to build another one (atan estimated cost of nearly $50 million) to house an additional 1,000 offenders.
Seven years ago, in January 1995, inmates at Pelican Bay won a class-actionlawsuit, Madrid v. Gomez, against the California Department of Corrections. Among other constitutional violations, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson found that the staff had systematically brutalized inmates, particularly mentally ill inmates. "The Eighth Amendment's restraint on using excessive force has been repeatedly violated at Pelican Bay, leading to a conspicuous pattern of excessive force," Henderson wrote in describing the severe beatings then common at the facility, the third-degree burns inflicted on one mentally ill inmate who was thrown into boiling water after he smeared himself with feces, and the routine use of painful restraining weapons against others. The judge ordered California to remove any seriously mentally ill or retarded inmates from the supermax unit, and he appointed a special master to overhaul the prison.
What Henderson didn't rule, however, was that the supermax model, per se,amounted to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.And so, while a new warden and new rules were brought to Pelican Bay, the basic conditions of sensory deprivation in its supermax unit have remained intact.Extremely mentally ill inmates are now held elsewhere; but critics say that lesssevere cases are still sent to the unit, where they often deterioratedrastically, for the same reasons that Judge Henderson originally identified:"The physical environment reinforces a sense of isolation and detachment from the outside world, and helps create a palpable distance from ordinarycompunctions, inhibitions and community norms."
Meanwhile, the prescribed method for dealing with uncooperative inmates who"act out" in a supermax is still to send a team of guards into the cell withbatons, stun guns, Mace, and tear gas. Thus, say critics, the chances forguard-on-inmate violence remain high at Pelican Bay, just as at other supermaxesaround the country.
The supermax model emerged out of the prison violence of the1970s and the early 1980s, when dozens of guards around the country, includingtwo at the maximum-security federal prison at Marion, Illinois, were murderedby prisoners. First, prison authorities developed procedures to minimizeinmate-staff contact; then they took to "locking down" entire prisons forindefinite periods, keeping inmates in their cells all day and closing downcommunal dining rooms and exercise yards. Eventually, they began to explore theidea of making the general prison population safer by creating entirely separatehigh-tech, supermax prisons in which "the worst of the worst" gang leaders andsociopaths would be incarcerated in permanent lockdown conditions. In the late1980s, several states and the federal government began constructing supermaxunits. California--which had seen 11 guards murdered by inmates between 1970 and1973, and a staggering 32 prisoners killed by other inmates in 1972 alone--openedCorcoran State Prison and its supermax unit in 1988 and Pelican Bay the yearfollowing. In 1994 the first federal supermax opened, in Florence, Colorado.Soon, dozens of correctional systems across the country were embracing thismodel.
Indeed, throughout the 1990s, despite year-by-year declines in crime, onestate after another pumped tens of millions of dollars into building supermaxprisons and supermax facilities within existing prisons--sections that areusually called "secure housing units," or SHUs. Defenders of supermaxes, likeTodd Ishee, warden of Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP), a supermax in Youngstown,argue that their restrictions provide a way to establish control in what isstill--and inherently--an extremely dangerous environment. "In 1993," he says,"our maximumsecurity prison at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility was host to ariot. One correctional officer was killed. A number of inmates were killed andseveral injured. Following the riot, the department made a decision that a500-bed facility of this nature was needed to control the most dangerousinmates."
But while it may be necessary to maintain such restricted facilities asprisons of last resort for some inmates, critics point out that far lesstroublesome inmates end up being sent to them. In Ohio, for example, a speciallegislative committee appointed to inspect the state's prisons in 1999 concludedthat fewer than half of the inmates at OSP met the state's own supermaxguidelines. State correctional-department data indicate that of the more than 350inmates currently incarcerated at OSP, 20 were ringleaders of the 1993 riot and31 had killed either an inmate or a correctional officer while living among thegeneral prison population; but the rest had been sent there for much less serious offenses (often little more than a fistfight with another inmate).
And Ohio isn't alone in this practice. According to a study issued by thestate of Florida, fully one-third of the correctional departments across thecountry that operate supermax prisons report placing inmates in them simplybecause they don't have enough short-term disciplinary housing in lower-security prisons. Given that the supermaxes' average cost to taxpayers is about $50,000per inmate per year--compared with $20,000 to $30,000 for lower-securityprisons--this is hardly an economically efficient arrangement.
Yet the available numbers suggest that casual overuse of these facilities iscommon. For in tough-on-crime America, imposing grim conditions on prisoners isall too often seen as a good in itself, regardless of the long-term costs. TheU.S. Department of Justice's 1997 report on supermax housing (the most recentavailable) found Mississippi officials insisting that they needed to house fully20 percent of their prison inmates in separate supermax-type prisons and another35 percent in similar units within existing prisons. Arizona claimed that itneeded to house 8 percent of its inmates in supermax prisons and another 20percent in SHUs. In Virginia, after Jim Austin, the state's nationally renownedconsultant on prisoner classification, told officials that they needed to putmore of their inmates into medium-security prisons, the state instead spentapproximately $150 million to build Red Onion and Wallens Ridge, two supermax prisons with a combined capacity to house 2,400 prisoners.
Proponents of the supermax system claim that its introduction has reducedviolence in the general prison population--both by removing the most hard-coremiscreants and also by introducing a fearsome deterrent to misbehavior. But thedata on this are, at best, mixed. Among Ohio's total prison population, forexample, there were more inmate-on-inmate assaults serious enough to be writtenup by officials in 2000 than there were in 1997, the year before the OSP supermaxopened for business (8 assaults for every 1,000 prisoners in 1997 compared with10 for every 1,000 in 2000). And even where lower-security prisons have beenmade somewhat safer, that safety has been purchased at a staggering financialand, ultimately, social cost.
Even the best-run of the supermax facilities seem to see highrates of mental illness among their inmates. For example, a study carried out bythe Washington State Department of Corrections, which is known as one of the morehumane, rehabilitation-focused prison systems in the country, found thatapproximately 30 percent of inmates in its supermax units show evidence ofserious psychiatric disorders--at least twice the rate in the overall prisonpopulation.
In Connecticut's Northern Correctional Institution (NCI), Warden LarryMyers presides over an inmate population just shy of 500 and a staff of just over300. With six mental-health professionals, a gradated three-phase programoffering inmates the possibility of returning to the general prison populationwithin one year, and relatively calm inmate-staff relations, Myers prides himselfon running a tight ship. Unlike staffers at many other supermaxes, once those atNCI identify an inmate as psychotic, they remove him to an institution thatcaters to mentally ill prisoners. Myers says that to avoid a "ping-pong effect," with inmates bouncing back and forth between NCI and mental-healthinstitutions, the prison has not accepted severely disturbed inmates since 1999.
Yet even in Myers's prison, psychiatrist Paul Chaplin estimates that 10percent of the inmates are on antidepressants or antipsychotic drugs, and severaltimes a month an inmate gets violent enough to be placed in four-pointrestraints. Last September, guards had to subdue prisoners with Mace on 12 occasions. As I toured the pink-painted steel tiers of level one, dozens ofinmates began screaming out their often incoherent complaints in a bone-jarringcacophony of despair.
"This is shitty," shouted one of the more intelligible of them. "We ain't gotno recreations, no space. If I try to sit back and motivate, you got peopleyelling." He said he sleeps for more than 10 hours a day, does push-ups, and sitsaround. "I have trouble concentrating," he yelled. Through the narrow Plexiglaswindow in the door of his cell, a 21-year-old shouted: "I'm in jail for behaviorproblems. My cellie has behavior problems. Why put two people with behaviorproblems in the same cell?"
The greatly disputed chicken-and-egg question is: Do previously healthyinmates go mad under these extreme conditions of confinement, or do inmates whoare already mentally unstable and impulsive commit disciplinary infractions thatget them shipped off to SHUs or supermax prisons, where they are then likely tofurther decompensate?
Some psychiatrists, including Harvard University professor Stuart Grassian,have testified in court that the sensory deprivation in a supermax frequentlyleads otherwise healthy individuals to develop extreme manifestations ofpsychosis, such as hallucinations, uncontrollable rage, paranoia, and nearlycatatonic depressions. Grassian and others have also documented examples ofextreme self-mutilation: supermax inmates gouging out their eyes or cutting offtheir genitals. Using the tools of the supermax prison, writes James Gilligan inhis book Violence, "does not protect the public; it only sends a human time bomb into the community" when the inmate is eventually released.
Other psychiatrists are more cautious, arguing that while some perfectlyhealthy people are driven insane by these dehumanizing prison settings, the morecommon problem is that mildly mentally ill inmates are often precisely the oneswho find it hardest to control their behavior while in the general prison population and who therefore get sent to the supermax or SHU. Judge Hendersonacknowledged this in his Pelican Bay ruling; and in Ruiz v. Johnson, a 1999 case involving Texas's use of long-term inmate-segregation facilities in its prisons, another federal court likewise found that "inmates, obviously in need of medical help, are instead inappropriately managed merely as miscreants."
In the large supermaxes of Texas, correctional bureaucrats have devised asystematically humiliating and, indeed, dehumanizing regimen of punishments forprisoners who elsewhere would more likely be considered disturbed: no real meals,only a "food loaf" of all the day's food ground together, for prisoners whodon't return their food trays; paper gowns forced on those who won't wear theirclothes. I myself have heard guards joking about "the mutilators" who slash theirown veins to get attention. According to Thomas Conklin, a psychiatrist andmedical director at the Hampden County Jail in Massachusetts who was called on toevaluate mental-health care in one Texas supermax, "All suicide gestures byinmates [were] seen as manipulating the correctional system with the consciousintent of secondary gain. In not one case was the inmate's behavior seen asreflecting mental pathology that could be treated." In most supermaxes, this kindof thinking still seems to be the norm.
Although prison authorities say that they provide mental-health care to theirsupermax inmates, prisoner advocates tend to dismiss these claims.Documentary-film maker Jim Lipscomb, who has interviewed scores of inmates inOhio's most secure prisons, reports that mental-health programs there oftenconsist of little more than in-cell videos offering such platitudes as "If youfeel angry at one of the guards, try not to curse and shout at him."
"That's called mental health!" Lipscomb says in amazement.
"The forceful rushes of this isolational perversion has pulled my essence intoa cesspool," wrote one inmate from a supermax in Pennsylvania to Bonnie Kernessof the American Friends Service Committee (ASFC). "This just ain't life,pathologized in a subsumed litany of steel and cement codes preoccupied with thedisturbing thrust of death." Accompanying the florid words was a penciled imageof a grown man curled into a fetal position against a brick wall.
The American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project is currentlyspearheading three class-action lawsuits against supermaxes in Illinois, Ohio,and Wisconsin. In the Wisconsin case, U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Crabbissued a preliminary ruling in October against the Supermax CorrectionalInstitute in Boscobel after hearing the testimony of various health experts,including Dr. Terry Kupers, a Berkeley psychiatrist and author of the book PrisonMadness. Kupers, who had been to Boscobel, told me that "there're a lot of crazypeople in here, and they need to be removed on an emergency basis because it'snot safe." In court, he testified that he had interviewed inmates who had beendiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and who continued to hallucinate despitebeing given high doses of Thorazine.
Judge Crabb ordered prison authorities to remove five mentally ill inmatesfrom the facility immediately and to provide an independent mental-healthassessment to any inmate with symptoms of mental illness. "The conditions atSupermax are so severe and restrictive," Crabb wrote, "that they exacerbate thesymptoms that mentally ill inmates exhibit. Many of the severe conditions serveno legitimate penological interest; they can only be considered punishment forpunishment's sake." She also set a trial date in July 2002 to hear evidence onthe lawsuit's larger claim that the stringent conditions of confinement at thesupermax--the extreme isolation, extraordinary levels of surveillance, and tightrestrictions on personal property--constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
For advocates of prisoners' rights, this is the Holy Grail: a broad newreading of the Eighth Amendment that would prohibit supermax-styleincarceration. And a broad reading is warranted, they say, by the internationalconventions that the United States has signed--such as the International Covenanton Civil and Political Rights and the United Nations' Standard Minimum Rules forTreatment of Prisoners, which prohibit torture and regulate prison conditionsmuch more stringently than does U.S. case law. It's also a matter of humandecency, says attorney Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch. "The moral critiqueis this: Secure-housing units have been designed, at the best, with utterdisregard for human misery. At the worst, it's a deliberate use of human miseryfor deterrence and punishment."
Pending such a ruling, however, the filing of lawsuits provides virtually theonly public accountability for what goes on in the supermaxes. With the exceptionof the New York Correctional Association, there is no legislatively mandatedoversight agency watching the prisons--no civilian review board or independentombudsman--in any state with supermax facilities. And over the past few years, inresponse to a rash of critical media coverage and unfavorable reports byhuman-rights organizations, many prison authorities have stopped allowing outsideobservers to visit these prisons or interview their inmates. (In the past, I have visited supermax sites in California, Texas, and Illinois to report on them.For this article, only Connecticut opened its supermax doors to me; Arizona, NewJersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia all refused to do so.) Says HumanRights Watch's Fellner: "It is incredible that it's sometimes easier to getaccess to prisons in closed regimes in third-world countries than it is in theU.S."
If nothing else, the lawsuits are keeping the human-rights questions on thetable. Supermax critics are also trying to call attention to the public costs,which are not just financial. Tens of thousands of inmates are now being held insupermax facilities, and almost all of them will be released one day. Indeed,many states are releasing such inmates directly from the SHUs to the streetsafter their sentence is up, without even reacclimatizing them to a socialenvironment.
Although no national tracking surveys of ex-supermax and ex-SHU inmates havebeen carried out, anecdotal evidence suggests that many prisoners have been mademore violent by their long-term spells of extreme deprivation and isolation.Bonnie Kerness of the AFSC talks about a whole new generation of cons coming outof supermax prisons with hair-trigger tempers. One former inmate at Rikers Islandjail in New York City, who now participates in a rehabilitation program run bythe Manhattan-based Fortune Society, recalls that prisoners routinely referred to"Bing monsters." (The Bing is the nickname for the Rikers Island version of theSHU.)
"The impact on society could be devastating," says Steve Rigg, a formercorrectional officer who worked at California's supermax prison in Corcoranduring the mid-1990s and blew the whistle on his fellow officers for organizingfights between rival prison-gang members. Corcoran's administration wasoverhauled after this, but Rigg warns that the underlying dangers inundermonitored supermaxes remain. "There's more [inmate] recidivism," he says ofSHUs. "They breed the worst."
