Guantanamo-Like Torture Everyday in a Super-Max Prison Near You

Americans Face Guantanamo-Like Torture Everyday
in a Super-Max Prison Near You

By Lance Tapley, Boston Review
Posted on January 18, 2011, Printed on January 19, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149233/

Editor's Note: Courageous WikiLeaks whistleblower
<http://www.alternet.org/rights/149431/why_wikileaks_whistleblower_bradle...
Manning is reportedly suffering some of the same
horrible experiences detailed in the article
below, including 23 hours a day of solitary
confinement, which has been labeled torture by
numerous prison and psychological experts.

?They beat the shit out of you,? Mike James said,
hunched near the smeared plexiglass separating
us. He was talking about the cell ?extractions?
he?d endured at the hands of the supermax-unit
guards at the Maine State Prison.

?They push you, knee you, poke you,? he said, his
voice faint but ardent through the speaker. ?They
slam your head against the wall and drop you on
the floor while you?re cuffed.? He lifted his
manacled hands to a scar on his chin. ?They split
it wide open. They?re yelling ?Stop resisting!
Stop resisting!? when you?re not even moving.?

When you meet Mike James you notice first his
deep-set eyes and the many scars on his shaved
head, including a deep, horizontal gash. He got
that by scraping his head on the cell door slot,
which guards use to pass in food trays.

?They were messing with me,? he explained,
referring to the guards who taunted him. ?I
couldn?t stand it no more.? He added, ?I?ve
knocked myself out by running full force into the wall.?

James, who is in his twenties, has been beaten
all his life, first by family members: ?I was
punched, kicked, slapped, bitten, thrown against
the wall.? He began seeing mental-health workers
at four and taking psychiatric medication at
seven. He said he was bipolar and had many other
disorders. When a doctor took him off his meds at
age eighteen, he got into ?selling drugs, robbing
people, fighting, burglaries.? He received a
twelve-year sentence for robbery. Of the four
years James had been in prison when I met him, he
had spent all but five months in solitary
confinement. The isolation is ?mental torture,
even for people who are able to control
themselves,? he said. It included periods alone
in a cell ?with no blankets, no clothes,
butt-naked, mace covering me.? Everything James
told me was confirmed by other inmates and prison employees.

James?s story illustrates an irony in the
negative reaction of many Americans to the
mistreatment of ?war on terrorism? prisoners at
Guant?namo. To little public outcry, tens of
thousands of American citizens are being held in
equivalent or worse conditions in this country?s
super-harsh, super-maximum security,
solitary-confinement prisons, or in comparable
units of traditional prisons. The Obama
administration? somewhat unsteadily?plans to shut
down the Guant?namo detention center and ship its
inmates to one or more supermaxes in the United
States, as though this would mark a substantive
change. In the supermaxes inmates suffer weeks,
months, years, or even decades of mind-destroying
isolation, usually without meaningful recourse to
challenge the conditions of their captivity.
Prisoners may be regularly beaten in cell
extractions, and they receive meager health
services. The isolation frequently leads to
insane behavior including self-injury and suicide attempts.

In 2004, state-run supermaxes in 44 states held
about 25,000 people, according to Daniel Mears, a
Florida State University criminologist who has
done the most careful count. Mears told me his
number was conservative. In addition the federal
system has a big supermax in Colorado, ADX
Florence, and a total of about 11,000 inmates in
solitary in all its lockups, according to the
Bureau of Prisons. Some researchers peg the state
and federal supermax total as high as a hundred
thousand; their studies sometimes include more
broadly defined ?control units??for example,
those in which men spend all day in a cell with
another prisoner. (Nationally, 91 percent of
prison and jail inmates are men, so
overwhelmingly men fill the supermaxes. Women
also are kept in supermax conditions, but
apparently no one has estimated how many.) Then
there are the county and city jails, the most
sizable of which have large solitary-confinement
sections. Although the roughness in what
prisoners call ?the hole? varies from prison to
prison and jail to jail, isolation is the
overwhelming, defining punishment in this vast
network of what critics have begun to call mass torture.

James experienced frequent cell extractions?on
one occasion, five of them in a single day. In
this procedure, five hollering guards wearing
helmets and body armor charge into the cell. The
point man smashes a big shield into the prisoner.
The others spray mace into his face, push him
onto the bed, and twist his arms behind his back
to handcuff him, connecting the cuffs by a chain
to leg irons. As they continue to mace him, the
guards carry him screaming to an observation
room, where they bind him to a special chair. He remains there for hours.

A scene such as this might have taken place at
supposedly aberrant Abu Ghraib, where American
soldiers tormented captured Iraqis. But as
described by prisoners and guards and vividly
revealed in a leaked video (the Maine prison
records these events to ensure that inmates are
not mistreated), an extraction is the supermax?s
normal, zero-tolerance reaction to prisoner
disobedience, which may be as minor as protesting
bad food by covering the cell door?s tiny window
with a piece of paper. Such extractions occur all
the time, not just in Maine but throughout the
country. The principle applied is total control
of a prisoner?s actions. Even if the inmate has
no history of violence, when he leaves the cell
he?s in handcuffs and ankle shackles, with a guard on either side.

But he doesn?t often leave the cell. In Maine?s
supermax, which is typical, an inmate spends 23
hours a day alone in a 6.5-by-14-foot space. When
the weather is good, he?ll spend an hour a day,
five days a week, usually alone, in a small dog
run outdoors. Radios and TVs are forbidden. Cell
lights are on night and day. When the cold food
is shoved through the door slot, prisoners fear
it is contaminated by the feces, urine, and blood
splattered on the cell door and corridor surfaces
by the many mentally ill or enraged inmates. The
prisoner is not allowed a toothbrush but is
provided a plastic nub to use on a fingertip.
Mental-health care usually amounts to a
five-minute, through-the-steel-door conversation
with a social worker once or twice a week. The
prisoner gets a shower a few times a week, a
brief telephone call every week or two, and
occasional ?no-contact? access to a visitor.
Variations in these conditions exist: for
example, in some states TVs or radios are allowed.

When supermaxes were built across the country in
the 1980s and 1990s, they were theoretically for
?the worst of the worst,? the most violent
prisoners. But an inmate may be put in one for
possession of contraband such as marijuana, if
accused by another inmate of being a gang member,
for hesitating to follow a guard?s order, and
even for protection from other inmates. Several
prisoners are in the Maine supermax because they
got themselves tattooed. By many accounts mental
illness is the most common denominator; mentally
ill inmates have a hard time following prison
rules. A Wisconsin study found that
three-quarters of the prisoners in one
solitary-confinement unit were mentally ill. In
Maine, over half of supermax inmates are
classified as having a serious mental illness.

Prison officials have extraordinary discretion in
extending the stay of supermax inmates. Their
decisions hit the mentally ill the hardest.
Administrators can add time as a disciplinary
measure, and often they will charge prisoners
with criminal offenses that can add years to their sentences.

In 2007 James was tried on ten assault charges
for biting and kicking guards and throwing feces
at them. Most were felony charges, and if
convicted he could have served decades more in
prison. Inmates almost never beat such charges,
but James?s court-appointed lawyer, Joseph
Steinberger, a scrappy ex-New Yorker, succeeded
with a defense rare in cases of Maine prisoners
accused of crimes: he convinced a jury in
Rockland, the nearby county seat, to find James
?not criminally responsible? by reason of
insanity. Steinberger thought the verdict was a
landmark because it called into question the
state?s standard practice of keeping mentally ill
individuals in isolation and then punishing them
with yet more isolation when their conditions
worsen. After the verdict, as the law required,
the judge committed James to a state mental hospital.

But prison officials and the state attorney
general?s office saw the verdict as another kind
of landmark: never before in Maine had a convict
been committed to the mental hospital after being
tried for assault on guards. In the view of the
corrections establishment, James would be
escaping his deserved punishment, and this would
send the wrong signal to prisoners. Officials
refused to send him to the hospital, arguing he
first had to serve the remaining nine years of his sentence.

Steinberger wrote to Maine?s governor?John
Baldacci, a Democrat?begging him to intervene and send James to the hospital:

He continually slits open his arms and legs with
chips of paint and concrete, smears himself and
his cell with feces, strangles himself to
unconsciousness with his clothing. . . . He also
bites, hits, kicks, spits at, and throws urine and feces on his guards.

This behavior was never in dispute, but the governor declined to intervene.

After a year of court battles, Steinberger
finally succeeded in getting James into the
hospital, though the judge conceded to the
Department of Corrections that his time there
would not count against his sentence. So James
faces nine years in prison after however long it
takes to bring him to a sane mental state.

Can supermax treatment legitimately be called
torture? The most widely accepted legal
definition of torture is in the
<http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/cat.htm>United
Nations Convention Against Torture and Other
Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment?a treaty to which the United States is
party, and is therefore U.S. law. In this
definition, torture is treatment that causes
?severe pain or suffering, whether physical or
mental,? when it is inflicted by officials for
purposes of punishment or coercion.

Severe pain and suffering as punishment are
plainly the norm in supermaxes, and prison
officials use isolation to coerce inmates into
ratting on each other or confessing to crimes
committed in prison. (A Maine prisoner told me
about a deputy warden who threw him in the most
brutal cellblock of the supermax and repeatedly
interrogated him about an escape plot, which he
denied any knowledge of.) Even in the careful
words of diplomacy, and even when only mental
suffering is considered, supermax conditions,
especially solitary confinement of American
prisoners for extended periods, have increasingly
been described by UN agencies and
non-governmental human rights organizations as
cruel, inhuman, degrading, verging on torture, or
outright torture. In 2008 the UN special
rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak,
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=1327&bih=698&q=%22Manfred+Nowak%2...
that solitary confinement ?be kept to a minimum,
used in very exceptional cases, for as short a
time as possible, and only as a last
resort??limits that U.S. supermaxes violate in
the course of normal operation. The National
Religious Campaign Against Torture, which has
been active in opposing abuses at Guant?namo,
recently began describing supermax conditions as
torture. And American judges have recognized
solitary confinement of the mentally ill as
equivalent to torture. A key case is
<http://www.clearinghouse.net/detail.php?id=588>the
1995 federal court ruling in
<http://www.clearinghouse.net/detail.php?id=588>Madrid
v. Gomez that forbade keeping mentally ill
prisoners in the notorious Security Housing Unit
of California?s Pelican Bay State Prison.

Solitary confinement is by far the worst torture
in the supermax. Human minds fare poorly in
isolation, which ?often results in severe
exacerbation of a previously existing mental
condition or in the appearance of a mental
illness where none had been observed before,?
Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist and
authority on solitary confinement, writes in
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=1327&bih=698&q=%22Stuart+Grassian...
brief for the Madrid
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=1327&bih=698&q=%22Stuart+Grassian....
Grassian believes supermaxes produce a syndrome
characterized by ?agitation, self-destructive
behavior, and overt psychotic disorganization.?
He also notes memory lapses, ?primitive
aggressive fantasies,? paranoia, and hallucinations.

Grassian?s is the consensus view among scholars
concerned with solitary confinement. Peter
Scharff Smith of the Danish Institute for Human
Rights, who has surveyed in depth the literature
concerning solitary confinement, writes,
?Research on effects of solitary confinement has
produced a massive body of data documenting
serious adverse health effects.? Those effects
may start within a few days, involve as many as
three-quarters of supermax inmates, and often
become permanent. Another expert on supermax
confinement, psychiatrist Terry Kupers, writes,
?being held in isolated confinement for longer
than three months causes lasting emotional damage
if not full-blown psychosis and functional disability.?

The throwing of feces, urine, and blood at
guards; self-injury; and suicide attempts are
common. A<http://www.bnd.com/600/index.html>2009
investigation of Illinois?s Tamms supermax by the
<http://www.bnd.com/600/index.html>Belleville
News-Democrat depicted Faygie Fields, a
schizophrenic imprisoned for killing a man in a
drug deal. Fields regularly cut his arms and
throat with glass and metal, swallowed glass, and
smeared feces all over his cell. The prison
reaction to this kind of behavior was predictable:
Prison officials charged him $5.30 for tearing up
a state-owned sheet to make a noose to kill
himself. . . . If he hadn?t been charged with
crimes in prison, Fields could have been paroled
in 2004 after serving 20 years of a 40-year
sentence. But Fields must serve all the extra
time for throwing food, urine and committing
other offenses against guards. That amounts to 34
years, or 54 years total, that he must serve
before becoming eligible for parole in 2038, at age 79.

This American system of administrative
punishment?except in extremely rare cases, prison
staff, not judges, decide who goes into the
hole?has no counterpart in scale or severity.
There are solitary-confinement cells in other
countries? prisons and the odd, small supermax,
such as the Vught prison in the Netherlands, but
they are few. When Corey Weinstein, a San
Francisco physician, toured prisons in the United
Kingdom in 2004 on behalf of the American Public
Health Association, he was shown ?eight of the
forty men out of 75,000 [in England and Wales]
considered too dangerous or disruptive to be in
any other facility.? Seven of the eight
were out of their cells at exercise or at a
computer or with a counselor or teacher. . . .
With embarrassment the host took us to the one
cell holding the single individual who had to be continuously locked down.

The British and other Europeans did use solitary
confinement starting in the mid-nineteenth
century, taking as models the American
penitentiaries that had invented mass isolation
in the 1820s. But Europe largely gave it up later
in the century because, rather than becoming
penitent, prisoners went insane. A shocked
Charles Dickens, after visiting a Pennsylvania
prison in 1842, called solitary confinement
?immeasurably worse than any torture of the
body.? Americans gave it up, too, in the late
1800s, only to resurrect it a century later.

Officially called the Special Management Unit or
SMU, Maine?s supermax opened in 1992, hidden in
the woods of the pretty coastal village of
Warren. Ten years later the new, maximum-security
Maine State Prison was built around it. Literally
and metaphorically, the supermax?s 132 cells are
the core of the stark, low, 925-inmate complex
with its radiating ?pods.? Maine?s crime and
incarceration rates are among the lowest in the
country, but its supermax is as brutal as any.
After allegations of beatings by guards and of
deliberately withheld medical care, the state
police are currently investigating two inmate
deaths in the SMU. Grassian has told a
legislative committee that Maine?s supermax
treats its inmates worse than its peers in many states.

Still, supermaxes are more alike than different.
As America?s prisoner population exploded?the
U.S. incarceration rate now is nearly four times
what it was in 1980, more than five times the
world average, and the highest in the
world?overcrowding tossed urban state prisons
into turmoil. The federal system provided a model
for dealing with the tumult: in 1983 mayhem in
the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois,
resulted in a permanent lockdown and,
effectively, the first supermax. ?No evidence
exists that states undertook any rigorous
assessment of need,? Mears, the Florida State
criminologist, writes of supermax proliferation,
but the states still decided they would segregate
whomever they deemed the most troublesome
inmates. Maine?s supermax is a case in point,
constructed in the absence of prisoner unrest.
George Keiser, a veteran prisons official who
works for the Department of Justice?s National
Institute of Corrections, puts it bluntly: supermaxes became ?a fad.?

An expensive fad. American supermax buildings are
so high-tech and the management of their
prisoners is so labor-intensive that the
facilities ?typically are two to three times more
costly to build and operate than other types of
prisons,? Mears writes. Yet, according to Keiser,
tax money poured into supermax construction
because these harsh prisons were ?the animal of
public-policy makers.? The beast was fed by
politicians capitalizing on public fears of crime
incited by increasing news-media sensationalism.

There was no significant opposition to the
supermaxes, even when it became clear that the
mentally ill would be housed there. Legislatively
mandated deinstitutionalization meant patients
were thrown onto the streets without enough
community care, and eventually many wound up in
jails and prisons. Also, ?for a time,? Keiser
said, ?there was a thought that nothing worked?
to rehabilitate prisoners. With conservative
scholars such as James Q. Wilson leading the way
in the 1970s, ?corrections? was essentially abandoned.

The supermax experiment has not been a success.

Norman Kehling?small, balding, middle-aged?is
serving 40 years in the Maine State Prison for an
arson in which, he told me, no one was hurt. When
I interviewed him, he was in the supermax for
trafficking heroin within the prison. I asked him
about the mentally ill men there. ?One guy cut
his testicle out of his sack,? he reported,
shaking his head. ?They shouldn?t be here.? He
added, ?This place breeds hate. What they?re doing obviously isn?t working.?

Wardens continue to justify supermaxes by
claiming they decrease prison violence, but a
study
<http://tpj.sagepub.com/content/88/1/43.abstract>published
in The Prison Journal
<http://tpj.sagepub.com/content/88/1/43.abstract>in
2008 finds ?no empirical evidence to support the
notion that supermax prisons are effective? in
meeting this goal. And when enraged and mentally
damaged inmates rejoin the general prison
population or the outside world, as the vast
majority do, the result, according to
psychiatrist Kupers, is ?a new population of
prisoners who, on account of lengthy stints in
isolation units, are not well prepared to return
to a social milieu.? In the worst cases, supermax
alumni?frequently released from solitary
confinement directly onto the street??may be time
bombs waiting to explode,? criminologist Hans Toch writes.

The bombs are already going off. In July of 2007
Michael Woodbury, then 31, walked into a New
Hampshire store and, in a botched robbery, shot
and killed three men. He had just completed a
five-year stint at the Maine State Prison for
robbery and theft and had done much of his time
in the supermax. When he was being taken to court
he told reporters, ?I reached out and told them I
need medication. I reached out and told them I
shouldn?t be out in society. I told numerous
cops, numerous guards.? While in prison, he said,
he had given a four-page ?manifesto? to a prison
mental-health worker saying he ?was going to
crack like this.? Woodbury pleaded guilty and
received a life sentence. Unsurprisingly, a
Washington state study shows a high degree of
recidivism among inmates released directly to the community from the supermax.

Summing up the major pragamatic arguments, Sharon
Shalev of the London School of Economics and
author of a recent prizewinning book,
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1843924080?ie=UTF8&tag=bostrevi-20&crea...
Controlling Risk Through Solitary Confinement,
says, ?Supermax prisons are expensive, ineffective, and they drive people mad.?

So what can be done?

Legally, solitary confinement is not likely to be
considered torture anytime soon. According to
legal scholar Jules Lobel, when the Senate
ratified the Convention Against Torture, it
qualified its approval so much that under the
U.S. interpretation ?the placement of even
mentally ill prisoners in prolonged solitary
confinement would not constitute torture even if
the mental pain caused thereby drove the prisoner
to commit suicide.? And despite the
Constitution?s prohibition of ?cruel and unusual
punishment,? courts have refused to see supermax
confinement per se as unconstitutional. Lawsuits
on behalf of the mentally ill have had more
success. In New York a suit brought about the
creation of a residential mental-health unit for
prisoners, with another on the way, plus more
time out of the cell for the mentally ill. Still,
fifteen years after Madrid v. Gomez,
court-ordered reform has been infrequent and its implementation contested.

Supermax torture wasn?t instituted because of a
utilitarian calculation about dollars and cents.

There are other roadblocks to legal action.
Thanks to the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a law
signed by President Bill Clinton that restricts
an inmate?s right to sue corrections officials,
an individual prisoner has little ability to
mount a court challenge to his placement or
prison conditions. For example, before going to
court, a prisoner is required to exhaust the
prison grievance system?a dilatory process
seemingly designed to lose or chew up inmate
complaints. And on the rare occasions when
prisoners make it to court, they usually have to
represent themselves. Unlike at Guant?namo,
lawyers from prosperous Manhattan firms are not
lining up to offer services pro bono to penniless supermax inmates.

Activists who see supermaxes as torture chambers
are increasingly looking beyond legal action and
toward pressure on legislatures and governors.
These reformers want states to abolish supermaxes
or at least to reduce their reliance on prolonged
solitary confinement and provide mental-health
care and rehabilitation for disturbed and
difficult prisoners. A persistent grass-roots
group in Illinois, Tamms Year Ten, has extracted
promises from the state to improve conditions at
Tamms. The Vera Institute of Justice, a New
York?based think tank, has begun working with
officials in Illinois and Maryland to reduce the
number of prisoners in isolation. Vera is trying
to apply lessons from Mississippi, where American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuits resulted in
perhaps the most significant U.S. supermax
reform, shrinking the population of its infamous
Parchman penitentiary supermax from one thousand
to 150. Mississippi expanded its mental-health,
education, and recreation programs for supermax
inmates and, as they improved their behavior,
moved them to the general prison population.

Early this year a Maine prison-reform coalition,
aided by the National Religious Campaign Against
Torture and the ACLU, lobbied the state
legislature to pass a bill to limit terms of
solitary confinement to 45 days and prohibit
people with ?serious mental illness? from being
assigned to the supermax. Although the
majority-Democratic leadership supported the
bill, it failed. In its place the legislature
launched a study of solitary confinement, and
activists are hopeful a similar measure will be
enacted in the future. At the bill?s legislative
hearing, reformers testified that if a
conservative state such as Mississippi could make
sweeping reforms work, then certainly moderate Maine could.

Some reformers believe the public can be turned
against supermaxes on the basis of their high
cost. Faced with ever-rising prison expenditures
at a time of depressed tax revenues,
officeholders are beginning to question draconian
sentencing laws and to see probation and parole
as attractive alternatives. In Missouri a
sentencing commission has begun telling judges,
before they sentence prisoners, about the
extravagant price of incarceration as compared to
measures such as probation. And social scientists
are increasingly producing evidence showing that
investment in prisoner rehabilitation lowers
recidivism and would save taxpayers money in the
long run. Currently, two-thirds of ex-convicts
return to prison within three years.

Supermaxes, however, grew through several
recessions. In the current economic slump, the
Colorado state budget has been under great
strain, but the state just opened a 300-bed
supermax. Although prisoner outcomes make clear
that the high-priced supermaxes are
counterproductive, it appears unlikely that much
will be done immediately about this archipelago
of agony. Prison guards in some states have
strong unions, which will fight supermax closures
that would put their members out of work. Prison
bureaucracies are large and self-protective. The
supermaxes also are the products of relatively
recent investment, so it would be difficult for
legislators to back out on them now.

In any case supermax torture wasn?t instituted
because of a utilitarian calculation about
dollars and cents. ?The object of torture is
torture,? George Orwell wrote. As long ago as
1975, years before the first supermax, Garry
Wills wrote that Americans had become complicit
in ?the psychic incineration of our fellow
citizens.? His evaluation today would be even more devastating.

Lance Tapley is an investigative reporter based
in Maine. This article is adapted from
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814717322?ie=UTF8&tag=bostrevi-20&crea...
United States and Torture: Interrogation,
Incarceration, and Abuse, forthcoming from New
York University Press, and based on five years of
reporting for the Portland Phoenix.