PROBING THE HAPHAZARD RISE OF SUPERMAX PRISONS

  http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/12/07/supermax/

December 7, 2010  BERKELEY, CA

When Keramet
Reiter set out to conduct a series of in-depth research interviews
earlier this year, most of those she approached asked to meet
outdoors or close to a window. No, these weren’t claustrophobics
she was speaking with. Rather, they were former prisoners living
in the shadow of long-term confinement in “supermaximum”
isolation units.

PhD student Keramet Reiter is researching the rise of supermaximum confinement. (Cathy Cockrell/NewsCenter)

An upbeat Berkeley doctoral student who has volunteered in jails
and prisons since her undergraduate years at Harvard, Reiter,
now 30, is keenly interested in “how criminal-justice policy
gets made.” For her Ph.D. work in jurisprudence and social
policy (she earned her J.D. at Berkeley Law in 2009), she decided
to trace the rise, development, and boom in a form of
incarceration she characterizes as extreme, widespread, and
“incredibly” expensive.

The project has led Reiter to scour the California legislative
record as well as to interview lawyers, current and former prison
administrators, and architects who helped design the state’s
supermaximum units — designed to protect prison staff and
inmates alike from particularly violent prisoners, and high-risk
inmates, especially members of rival gangs, from each other.

The first supermax prison opened in Florence, Ariz. in 1986,
and California quickly followed suit, opening a unit at Corcoran
State Prison in 1988, and the Pelican Bay complex in 1989. Today
almost every U.S. state, as well as the federal prison system,
has one or more supermax units, holding an estimated 25,000
prisoners between them. California, with about 3,330 prisoners
in supermax, houses more people in this form of confinement
than any other state — “by a factor of 10,” Reiter estimates.

Supermax conditions

Supermaximum prison units are also referred to as “control
units” or “the SHU,” short for Special Housing Unit in the
federal prison system, or Security Housing Unit in California
prisons. SHU units, Reiter notes, typically consist of small,
antiseptic, constantly lit one-person cells, designed for
maximum social isolation and sensory deprivation and 24/7
electronic surveillance — this in contrast to the cramped,
dirty, dank “hole” that had been the hallmark of solitary
confinement for centuries. (In California, due to
overcrowding, supermax prisoners are sometimes double-celled.)

Typically, “the day-to-day lives of those on supermax,” Reiter
says, “are more confined than those on death row.” Most
are allowed radios but only some have TVs; access to reading
materials is limited. Meals arrive through a small slot in a
remotely controlled door. A prisoner is permitted outside his
or her poured-concrete cell four or five times a week — to
shower or to exercise briefly in a small cage partially exposed
to natural light. To leave the cellblock for a medical appointment
or a disciplinary hearing, an inmate must be escorted in cuffs
or chains by at least two officers.

Early solitary confinement in theU.S.

Reform-minded Protestants are credited with launching, in
the late 1700s, America’s long-running experiment with solitary
confinement — on the theory that complete isolation,
with a Bible, in a dark stone cell would lead a prisoner to
prayer and penitence. “Penitentiaries” were built, even
as evidence began to suggest that such conditions drove
many individuals not to the straight and narrow but
straight over the edge.

“A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even
a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which
it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others become
violently insane; others still committed suicide,” U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman Miller wrote in a 1890
opinion, Medly v. U.S.

Charles Dickens, after visiting an early Pennsylvania penitentiary,
wrote of his shock at the pale, wild-eyed inmates he
encountered — “dead to everything but torturing
anxieties and horrible despair.… I hold this slow and daily
tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be
immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”

Supermax prisoners are not permitted to work in prison industries,
take part in group free time on the yard, or participate in
substance-abuse treatment, spiritual support groups, classroom
assistance toward a high-school G.E.D., or any other prison
programming. Originally intended for fixed terms of
confinement of at least six months, it’s not uncommon today
for prisoners to remain in supermax for years at a stretch —
sometimes even decades, Reiter notes. Inmates sometimes say
that there are only three ways out of supermax: “parole,
snitch, or die.” A federal court recently agreed to hear a
challenge (Silverstein v. Federal Bureau of Prisons) brought by a man who has spent 27 years in solitary confinement.

Boon or hazard to public safety?

“We think of supermax as taking the worst of the worst,” says
Reiter — noting that California inmates are sent to the SHU
if they’re determined to be a gang leader or if they commit a
serious infraction of prison rules, such as attacking a
guard, while inside. “Yet most supermax prisoners get out
eventually.” California releases 50 to 100 prisoners a month
to parole from supermax — often without any transitional
programming inside to re-acclimate them to human interaction,
or prepare them to make a living on the outside.

You don’t have to have a law degree or a human-rights orientation,
as Reiter does, to wonder whether such a system is the best way
to protect the public, especially given longstanding concerns
about the psychological effects of solitary confinement. (See
the 2009 New Yorker article
by Atul Gawande on this topic.) For those with documented
pre-existing mental vulnerabilities, such as schizophrenia,
the federal courts have outlawed supermax confinement as cruel
and unusual punishment.

Over the summer Reiter, supported by a Human Rights Center
Fellowship, interviewed a number of former prisoners who
served months or years in a SHU. Having worked with people
caught up in the criminal-justice system for more than a
decade, she felt less “initial trepidation,” she says, than
many might bring to a two to four-hour conversation with
someone who has served time for a violent crime.

“My anxieties mainly focused on how I would find people,
whether they would have time to talk to me, and where we could
meet that would be comfortable for both of us,” she reports.
Most of those she interviewed were convicted of a murder or felony
murder charge, mostly in their late teens or early twenties.

Reflecting on those encounters, what surprised Reiter most,
she says, “is how powerful and powerfully sad these former
prisoners’ stories were.” Each “had different, but poignant,
anecdotes about the way they experienced the deprivation
conditions,” she recalls. People spoke of having no clocks,
daylight, or seasons to mark the passage of time; growing pale
from lack of sunlight; and being amazed at the sight of a single
bird, insect, or even the moon, after months or years of virtually
no exposure to the natural world.

Pelican Bay State Prison

Pelican Bay State Prison, near Crescent City, Calif. The X-shaped cluster is the supermax Security Housing Unit. (CDCR photo)

The logic of the SHU, at least in part, “is to protect
officers and prisoners from each other,” Reiter notes. Yet her
informants often reported being “just as scared in supermax” as
when housed with the general prison population. “Officers
press a button to let you go out to exercise,” Reiter says. “Sometimes
they open two prisoners’ doors at once, either by accident or
on purpose” — and a physical assault can follow.

Yet lack of contact with other human beings is its own psychological
endurance test. A man who spent 10 years in solitary
confinement at Pelican Bay told Reiter about what happened
once when his cell and his neighbor’s opened just slightly at
the same time: a prisoner from a rival gang reached through
and the two tough guys held hands. In the moment, being
enemies “didn’t really matter,” she says. “They were just
happy for the human touch.”

Reiter’s research has led her to conclude that the policy governing
California’’s supermaximum units has evolved haphazardly.
The system’s early architects, concerned with a rise of dangerous
gang rioting in the prisons, envisioned sending a small number
of inmates to SHU units for as long as a few years, but not
indefinitely, and with transitional “step-down” programming
prior to their parole.

“None of these principles were actually successfully implemented,”
Reiter says. “Supermax units appear to be functioning very
differently from original intentions of their designers.”

The exponential growth of California’s prison system over the
past 30 years is storied. The parallel growth of its supermaxes,
in Reiter’s view, may well be “the ultimate representation
of what’s gone wrong.”

Related information: