[Ppnews] Concrete Solitaire: A Poor Imitation of Death

[Political Prisoner News]

  Concrete Solitaire: A Poor Imitation of Death

Posted on August 8, 2012 
<http://planetwaves.net/pagetwo/by-enceno-macy/concrete-solitaire-a-poor-imitation-of-death/> 
by Planet Waves <http://planetwaves.net/pagetwo/author/planetwaves/>
http://planetwaves.net/pagetwo/by-enceno-macy/concrete-solitaire-a-poor-imitation-of-death/

/Editor's Note: In March 2010, *we began posting the work of Enceno Macy 
<http://planetwaves.net/pagetwo/?s=enceno+macy&submit=Go>*, an inmate in 
a U.S. prison. Enceno's articles are sent handwritten, then typed and 
edited by a trusted editor. Comments typed into the response area will 
be sent directly to Enceno. Thanks for reading and for the warm response 
he's received each time. --efc & ajp/

*/by Enceno Macy/*

/On June 19, 2012, Senator Dick Durbin held the first ever congressional 
hearing on America's excessive use of solitary confinement 
<http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/06/congress-looks-solitary-confinement>. 
"America has led the way with human rights around the world," Durbin 
said. But "what do our prisons say about our American values?"/

/"Solitary confinement makes our criminal justice criminal ... It 
dehumanizes us all." (Statement by Anthony Graves, exoneree who spent 
nearly 18 years in extreme isolation for a crime he didn't commit.)/

/These are the conditions in which some 80,000 inmates live on any given 
day in American prisons and jails./

The light is as dim as a 40 watt bulb in a basement, like you might see 
in a B-rated horror movie. But this light illuminates a different kind 
of horror.

Imagine you're in a cube, a concrete cube six feet by ten feet max. A 
thick concrete slab three feet high is built into the back wall. An 
exercise mat lies atop the slab, three inches thick and almost as hard 
as the slab itself. A stainless steel combination toilet-sink is built 
into the side wall, and next to it is a solid steel door. There may or 
may not be a small, filthy window, no bigger than a VCR tape, high up in 
one wall. The available floor space is about the same as a standard 4 x 
8 sheet of plywood. This is your entire world, 24/7.

You have two books, if you're lucky, chosen from a very limited 
selection of dog-eared novels, usually with subjects of no interest to 
you. A couple sheets of paper, a pen the size of a golf pencil, a 
toothbrush and a comb complete the inventory of your property.

Three times a day, a slot in your door opens, a tray is shoved through 
with strictly regulated portions of alleged food the FDA may or may not 
have approved strewn across it. Every two days, you are restrained --- 
put in handcuffs and leg chains --- and taken to shower. The hotel-size 
bar soap is made with the most basic ingredients, the major one probably 
lye, leaving your skin instantly dry. So dry that scratching the 
resulting itch tears your skin.

Occasionally you will receive your mail if the guards don't 'lose' it 
and if you are fortunate enough to have anyone care enough to write to 
you. Every little noise echoes. Even the silence echoes, a dry, empty 
silence, the kind where you can hear yourself think. As months go by, 
the thoughts you hear become actual voices. After years in the cube, 
those voices become someone else's and you no longer have a voice of 
your own.

This is a cell in what they call "segregation." It used to be called 
solitary confinement, but for some bureaucratic reason it was changed to 
"segregation," with various adjectives added. The use of solitary, once 
a relatively rare means of isolating prisoners whose violence 
jeopardized both guards and other prisoners, is now so frequent and so 
commonplace in U.S. prisons that prefab concrete segregation cubes are 
standard units of prison construction.

It is not hard to see how difficult it would be to keep yourself from 
going crazy in such a cube. Now add the probability --- actually the 
strong likelihood --- that most of the people put into those cubes 
already have some serious psychological problems before they are put 
there, and even a ten year old could deduce that such treatment would 
compound whatever problems someone had. Yet for the last 25 years, there 
has been a vast expansion of dungeons full of cubes like those I 
describe in prisons throughout the U.S. And their original purpose of 
keeping dangerous prisoners from harming others has been vastly expanded 
to include punishments for violations of prison rules and any behavior 
deemed insubordinate by sadistic or control-freak guards.

To anyone who has endured the horrors of solitary, it is impossible not 
to view this kind of punishment as an extreme form of cruelty. I would 
say cruel and unusual, except that it's no longer unusual because every 
prison in the country has isolation units just as bad or worse than my 
description.

In some prisons, you are put on a leash when you exit the cell for any 
reason, like for medical treatment if you're lucky. You are allowed to 
exit for "yard" once a week, for an hour alone in a slightly larger 
concrete cube with a screen across the open roof twenty feet above. This 
is your only contact with the outdoors. I have done a total of some two 
years off and on in solitary cells such as these. Not one of the 
experiences was anything but depressing and painful.

I am not suggesting that some of the people put into these units do not 
need to be segregated from the rest of the prison population. Many are 
in prison for anti-social behaviors and shouldn't have been stuck with 
each other to begin with. But a very high percentage of them would 
technically be certified for mental institutions if not for their 
violent, criminal behavior. Prison, and especially solitary, simply 
intensifies psychological problems that might be treatable in another 
setting. It is distressing and sad to report from my personal 
observation that there are very few or no opportunities for 
rehabilitation in prison, whether psychological, behavioral or even 
educational.

Logical thinking might lead one to conclude that lock-up, which is 
pretty much a long-term 'time out' from society, is not an adequate 
means of deterring criminal activity, especially when you herd a bunch 
of wildly dysfunctional people together and expect them to change. Of 
course it's not; you might as well herd wild horses into a corral and 
expect them to change into dressage champions. I think actually 
addressing and correcting convicts' issues would be more productive, but 
there is too much political and economic pressure hindering the 
introduction of rehabilitative services. An unempathetic society chooses 
to punish offenders instead of helping them, even if the punishment 
creates worse monsters than the originals.

For example, if you put a 15-year-old kid in prison for a lengthy amount 
of time (as I have been), and offer him little or no avenue to learn how 
to be a positive contributor to society, he will inevitably learn from 
what he is being exposed to. He will come to know only how to cope and 
survive in a locked-up environment surrounded by seriously messed-up 
guys. So when you eventually re-introduce him to society, what 
expectation can you have of him? Even if he tries his best to fit in, 
his reactions to situations will be a product of what he has come to know.

I have written before about the prison environment. It is 99 percent 
negative and sub-primal. This doesn't mean no one ever survives it and 
returns to society to become a functioning citizen, but the likelihood 
of this happening is slim to none.

The same and more so can be said of locking someone in a 
solitary/segregation cube and expecting him to come out any better. The 
overwhelming likelihood is that he will emerge a far more violent, far 
more uncontrolled, far angrier person than ever before. Punishment may 
be a necessary aspect of deterring certain behaviors, but I don't think 
people who have not experienced this kind of punishment can comprehend 
how it can actually harden one to the prospect of such consequences.

When you get put into that kind of isolation, you have no choice but to 
accept it. After a time, some people actually come to embrace the 
solitude, and it becomes a great discomfort to live in the general 
population again. Now they are not only no longer deterred by the threat 
of solitary, but are likely to create the situations that will send them 
there.

Around the country, some of these seg (solitary/segregation) units hold 
people for years, even decades, prolonging and eventually preventing 
their potential recovery from such an experience.

The unrelieved boredom of these units and the lack of any live contact 
drives many inmates to create any opportunity for interaction with 
anybody at all. Common examples are phantom or self-inflicted injuries 
that give them a chance to have contact with medical staff, who may be 
incompetent and totally indifferent but at least are arguably human. An 
extreme example, all too common, is creating a situation requiring "cell 
extraction," which is breaking a rule in seg and then refusing to submit 
to the consequences.

Cell extraction sounds like having a tooth pulled, but it's nowhere near 
so benign. Say you refuse to return your meal tray through the slot, or 
as often happens you give in to the bottomless rage of despair and plug 
your toilet or flood the unit by leaving a tap on. Then you refuse 
orders to back up to the cuff-slot in the door with your hands behind 
your back to be hand-cuffed so the guards can enter and punish you.

What happens next is that six or eight officers in full riot gear with 
gas masks on charge the unit. They spray gas (pepper spray, or OC, which 
stands for 'Oleoresin Capsicum') into your cell, wait for you to succumb 
to the gas, and rush in. They slam you to the ground and beat you, zap 
you, then carry you to the showers before dumping you back into the same 
gas-filled cube, naked except for a bar of soap and a spray-soaked 
blanket. (A vivid and gruesomely accurate description of such 
extractions can be found in David Baldacci's novel, /Divine Justice/; be 
aware that his account is most assuredly not an exaggeration.)

A cell extraction occurs almost every day, sometimes more than once. 
With 70 cells on one isolation tier, there is bound to be at least one 
disgruntled or insane inmate a day who can no longer stand the solitude. 
The officers have a field day with their gear and pepper spray. On at 
least one occasion they 'accidentally' set off an entire canister of 
spray, which made its way into all of the vents and into all of our 
cells. They wouldn't let any of us rinse in the showers, so we endured 
the gassing for the rest of the night. It was so bad that a couple of 
guys passed out and had to be taken to medical. My neighbor's nose would 
not stop bleeding; it gushed for hours until they finally came and threw 
him into the showers.

So far, the longest I've done in seg was 96 days. During that time the 
unit I was in set a state record for the most cell extractions in a 
single day, a total of 86. Such extractions, although common policy, do 
little to deter future negative behaviors. The only reason I never 
subjected myself to extraction, even during my less enlightened days, is 
that I am not fond of undue pain and would rather not pay the $200 (or 
more) fine that comes with it, along with a doubling or tripling of the 
time I would spend in seg. (When you consider that the usual prison job 
might pay you thirty dollars a month at best, you can see what an 
impossible debt that $200 is, since all your pay and any money your 
family sends will be commandeered until it's paid off, and you don't 
work or get paid anything while you're in seg.)

Since most of these guys have little or no ability to anticipate or 
consider consequences in the heat of the moment, the Department of 
Corrections makes thousands of dollars in such fines --- those 86 
extractions brought in $17,200 in one day --- taking advantage of 
inmates' inabilities instead of helping to cure them.

Long-term seg units give inmates 'packets' that they are required to 
complete prior to release back into general population. These are 
basically a joke. The packets ask inmates to explore their behavior in 
an attempt to get them to understand how their thinking and actions led 
to their being in solitary. But there are no simple cookie-cutter 
answers to such complexities.

These inmates have spent their whole lives becoming who they are; a year 
or more of solitary confinement cannot alter the mentality that has been 
created during a lifetime --- except to enhance the most negative 
elements of it. I mean, think about it: the very last things you're 
likely to acquire while locked alone in a concrete cube are empathy or 
civil behavior or social conflict-solving techniques.

I am not an expert, so I can not propose satisfactory solutions to the 
dilemma of holding criminals accountable and at the same time avoiding 
any contribution to their mental and behavioral instabilities. A few 
things come to mind, though, primarily the need to help these guys 
understand the importance of becoming educated. Services using former 
prisoners, who are more likely to be regarded with respect and 
attention, could teach inmates this importance and provide opportunities 
to pursue all kinds of knowledge and skills, which would give them an 
incentive to stay out of trouble and to better themselves.

This would fill another important need: our need to feel useful and have 
something to do good for. Those who have been discarded by society --- 
unloved, unwanted, uncared for --- need this above all: a way to acquire 
or regain that sense of worth. Burying us alive in concrete cubes has 
exactly the opposite effect.

What society has done is invest in more and more solitary confinement 
cubes that intensify the problem, instead of investing in the education 
that could cure or prevent it. Somewhere I read that it is cheaper to 
send someone to Harvard than to incarcerate him for a year. That says it 
all, doesn't it?

*Solitary for Children*

If the above looks like hell for an adult, consider please what solitary 
confinement does to a child, who has no experience or knowledge of how 
to survive such isolation. Children, by definition, are dependent on 
others --- parents, teachers, siblings, friends, neighbors, bus drivers, 
whatever --- for their emotional and intellectual development and 
stability. Take all those contacts away, and the child becomes feral and 
loses all incentive and ability to behave appropriately.

I know. I was fifteen years old when I was arrested, and spent eight 
months alone in a solitary confinement cell while awaiting trial. 
Another child locked in solitary 
<http://solitarywatch.com/2010/09/04/voices-from-solitary-ara-oshagan-photographs-california-juvies/> 
summed it up grimly:

    What comes from nothing?

    What kind of change comes from solitude?

    When has anything new grown from complaining?

    When the days have been stripped of their meaning and purpose

    And we exist only in physicality,

    life becomes a poor imitation of death.

Trapped in that cube, I forgot what sunlight and fresh air were. I was 
allowed one book a week, a golf pencil and two sheets of paper a day. 
The term 'driving me up the wall' is an exact description of what it 
felt like. I spent a lot of hours crying because I didn't know what to 
do with my thoughts. I didn't know what my emotions were, much less how 
to deal with them. I did the only thing a kid with my limited emotional 
experience can do: directed my negative emotions into relentless hate 
and disdain.

This molded me into a scared, hateful, angry person, which I never was 
by nature, drugged into compliance by jail staff. By the time of my 
trial, I had given up any thought or hope of being anything else. How 
such a human wreck could be expected to participate in his own defense 
is an abiding mystery. In this condition I was convicted and sent 
upstate, where my continued erratic behavior led to more and more time 
in solitary for breaking prison rules or mouthing off to guards.

I hated seg, and still do. But that never deterred me, because by the 
time of my trial and for years afterward, I simply didn't care any more.

/Note: Finally the issue of solitary confinement and its abuses is 
gaining some national attention, thanks largely to the efforts of 
Solitary Watch: News from a Nation in Lockdown 
<http://solitarywatch.com/>, which has been collecting the voices of 
prisoners in the hole and recently took our voices to Congress for the 
first ever hearing on the subject. Stay tuned for further developments./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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