[Ppnews] Fortresses of Solitude: Journalists Barred from Prison Isolation Units

[Political Prisoner News]

  Fortresses of Solitude: Journalists Barred from Prison Isolation Units

March 5, 2013 By James Ridgeway 
<http://solitarywatch.com/author/jamesridgeway/>
http://solitarywatch.com/2013/03/05/fortresses-of-solitude-journalists-barred-from-prison-isolation-units/#more-7930 


/The following essay 
<http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/fortresses_of_solitude.php?page=1>by 
Solitary Watch's James Ridgeway appears in the current issue of the 
Columbia Journalism Review <http://www.cjr.org/magazine/>, which also 
includes an excellent story 
<http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/inside_stories.php>on the difficulties 
involved in reporting on prisons in general. For more on prison media 
policies, see our accompanying article <http://wp.me/p2HYoj-23N>by 
Rachel M. Cohen./

Supermax prisons and solitary confinement units are our domestic black 
sites---hidden places where human beings endure unspeakable punishments, 
without benefit of due process in any court of law. On the say-so of 
corrections officials, American prisoners can be placed in conditions of 
extreme isolation and sensory deprivation for months, years, or even 
decades.

At least 80,000 men, women, and children live in such conditions on any 
given day in the United States. And they are not merely separated from 
others for safety reasons. They are effectively buried alive. Most live 
in concrete cells the size of an average parking space, often 
windowless, cut off from all communication by solid steel doors. If they 
are lucky, they will be allowed out for an hour a day to shower or to 
exercise alone in cages resembling dog runs.

Most have never committed a violent act in prison. They are locked down 
because they've been classified as "high risk," or because of nonviolent 
misbehavior---anything from mouthing off or testing positive for 
marijuana to exhibiting the symptoms of untreated mental illness.

A recent lawsuit filed on behalf of prisoners in adx, the federal 
supermax in Florence, CO, described how humans respond to such isolation 
over the long-term. Some "interminably wail, scream, and bang on the 
walls of their cells" or carry on "delusional conversations with voices 
they hear in their heads." Some "mutilate their bodies with razors, 
shards of glass, sharpened chicken bones, and writing utensils" or 
"swallow razor blades, nail clippers, parts of radios and televisions, 
broken glass, and other dangerous objects." Still others "spread feces 
and other human waste and body fluids throughout their cells [and] throw 
it at the correctional staff." While less than 5 percent of US prisoners 
nationwide are held in solitary, close to 50 percent of all prison 
suicides take place there.

After three years of reporting on solitary confinement for Solitary 
Watch, a website I co-founded, I'm convinced that much of what happens 
in these places constitutes torture. How is it possible that a 
human-rights crisis of this magnitude can carry on year after year, with 
impunity?

I believe part of the answer has to do with how effectively the nature 
of these sites have been hidden from the press and, by extension, the 
public. With few exceptions, solitary confinement cells have been kept 
firmly off-limits to journalists---with the approval of the federal 
courts, who defer to corrections officials' purported need to maintain 
"safety and security." If the First Amendment ever manages to make it 
past the prison gates at all, it is stopped short at the door to the 
isolation unit.

As a reporter, I ran into solitary confinement three years ago in 
writing an article about Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, members of 
the so-called Angola 3, who have lived in solitary confinement in 
Louisiana since they were convicted of killing a prison guard in 1972. 
After writing an initial article about the case, based on public 
records, I sought permission to visit Angola and interview the two men. 
I was told by a deputy warden that the prison wanted nothing to do with 
me, because officials didn't like what I had written. The ACLU of 
Louisiana took up my case, gathering evidence to show that while the 
prison denied me entrance, it had welcomed many others, including press, 
politicians, religious figures, schoolchildren, tourist buses, Hollywood 
filmmakers, canoeists paddling past on the Mississippi, and such 
notables as Miss Louisiana. Since Angola had such an open-door policy, 
its discrimination against me was actionable. Warden Burl Cain backed 
off and granted me what turned out to be the standard guided tour of the 
plantation prison. It included numerous dormitories, chapels, and even 
the death chamber---but not the solitary confinement units. Even the 
ACLU couldn't help me penetrate those fortresses of solitude.

It would be the first of many times I was turned away from such units. 
While reporting on solitary confinement in New York State, I was readily 
shown around Auburn Correctional Facility by the affable warden there. I 
saw all kinds of cells, yards, and workshops---everything but the 
so-called Special Housing Unit (SHU) where prisoners are held in 
solitary. These units, I was told, are never shown to the media. At 
another New York prison, I managed to visit (under the watchful eye of a 
guard) with a man who has been in solitary for nearly 25 years. Since 
the Department of Corrections media policy forbids media visits to 
prisoners in "segregation," I had to withhold the fact that I was a 
reporter, and sign in as his "friend."

Once I launched Solitary Watch, I learned of a handful of other 
reporters who were encountering the same restrictions---and working 
around them and in spite of them. "I was never able to get inside" a SHU 
in New York, Mary Beth Pfeiffer, a reporter for the /Poughkeepsie 
Journal/, wrote in an email. "In 2001, after I began writing about links 
between solitary confinement, mental illness, and suicide, they refused 
even to let me into any of their prisons except through the visiting 
room. Even there, I once had my notes seized by prison officials who 
claimed note-taking was not permitted." Pfeiffer says she relied on 
"official reports of conditions and suicides there, and the accounts of 
former prisoners."

George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer of the /Belleville News-Democrat/ 
authored a series of articles called "Trapped in Tamms," about the 
supermax prison in southern Illinois. The 2009 series, which won a 
George Polk award, revealed horrendous treatment of mentally ill 
prisoners and the cruel attitudes of the prison officials, including 
doctors. Unable to secure a visit, Pawlaczyk says their reporting was 
based largely on court documents, mostly depositions, and the surprise 
finding that one Illinois county's mental health reports were filed and 
open to the public.

Susan Greene, the former /Denver Post/ reporter who in 2012 wrote "The 
Gray Box," a blistering report focusing on ADX, for the Dart Society, 
says she couldn't even get close to the prison, which has been 
completely off-limits to the press since 9/11. "I have had absolutely no 
access to the place at all," she told me. When she pulled up in front of 
the driveway to the remote prison complex, she was chased away by armed 
guards. But in addition to public records, Greene based her reporting on 
correspondence with prisoners in extreme isolation, carried on over more 
than a year. Ironically, once her article was published, she could not 
send it to her correspondents in ADX, due to a policy against allowing 
prisoners' names in an article. "So I redacted all the prisoners' 
names," she said, "and then it came back saying something like, 'You can 
still see it if you hold it up to the light.' Out of frustration and 
wanting to be a pain in the ass, I Exacto-knifed out all the names and 
sent it, and it still didn't get through."

Shane Bauer, who wrote a 2012 expose about solitary confinement in 
California for /Mother Jones/, also relied heavily on correspondence 
with dozens of prisoners in Pelican Bay and other state SHUs who had 
staged several highly publicized hunger strikes after years or decades 
in isolation. Bauer spent more than two years in an Iranian prison after 
being captured on the Iran-Iraq border, including four months in 
isolation, and thus has the rare perspective of someone who has himself 
experienced solitary. He also succeeded in gaining access to Pelican 
Bay, though it was severely limited and carefully orchestrated. Bauer 
says he was taken to a unit full of men who had cooperated with prison 
officials by passing on information about prison gangs, "and was allowed 
to interview one inmate while the gang investigator stood by." Visits to 
the solitary cells were refused, as were interviews by the warden and 
top corrections officials.

Lance Tapley began writing about solitary confinement for the Portland 
/Phoenix/ seven years ago, when a supermax prisoner named Deane Brown 
got in touch with him. Brown "wanted to expose to the outside world the 
torture he was experiencing and seeing in the Maine State Prison's 
Special Management Unit," Tapley wrote to me. Initially denied access to 
SMU prisoners, Tapley was able to convince the governor's office to 
intervene. Then he was allowed to interview several men "in hand and 
foot shackles on the other side of a Plexiglas window." Those six 
interviews and a leaked official videotape of a cell extraction, plus 
interviews with the corrections commissioner, defense attorneys, and 
others, formed the basis of his first supermax stories. Once those 
stories were published, Tapley was banned from the prison. And like many 
prisoners who talk to the press, Deane Brown faced retaliation: He was 
shipped to a prison out of state.

Where journalists have succeeded, one way or another, in penetrating the 
black sites, their reporting has undeniably had an impact. In Maine, it 
helped spark a grassroots movement and a legislative initiative, which 
eventually spurred the prison system to reduce its use of solitary 
confinement. In New York, it became ammunition in a battle to keep 
mentally ill prisoners out of solitary. And in Illinois, it provided 
fuel for an effort that has convinced the governor to shut down Tamms 
supermax prison.

The stories have been effective. But their scarcity also suggests that 
the lack of press access to these sites around the nation has stifled 
public debate on a significant issue of policy and human rights. 
"Solitary confinement is a brutal form of prison punishment that has 
claimed many lives and caused untold suffering," says Mary Beth 
Pfieffer. "That is the story that officials do not want told." Until we 
are allowed to tell it properly---until we can visit solitary units 
ourselves, and speak unhindered with prisoners and corrections 
officers---we cannot fulfill our duty to shine a light into society's 
darkest corners.

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