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<font size=4><b>The Worst of the Worst: Supermax Torture in America<br>
</b></font><font size=3>Lance Tapley<br><br>
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2010<br>
<a href="http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.6/tapley.php">
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.6/tapley.php</a><br>
<br>
“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.<br>
<br>
“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.” <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
WARNING: This video may disturb some viewers. (link at website)<br>
<br>
This video, leaked to Lance Tapley, shows a cell extraction at the
super-maximum security unit of the Maine State Prison in Warren. Each
such extraction is videotaped by guards to prove that mistreatment does
not occur. The mentally ill prisoner is maced while he is forcibly moved
from his cell, denuded, and placed in a restraint chair.<br>
<br>
“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.” <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
James’s story illustrates an irony in the negative reaction of many
Americans to the mistreatment of “war on terrorism” prisoners at
Guantánamo. 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 Guantánamo
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
Despite a judge’s order, officials refused to send Mike James to the
hospital, arguing he had to serve his full sentence first.<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
Steinberger wrote to Maine’s governor John Baldacci, a Democratbegging
him to intervene and send James to the hospital:: <br>
<br>
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. <br>
This behavior was never in dispute, but the governor declined to
intervene. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Can supermax treatment legitimately be called torture? The most widely
accepted legal definition of torture is in the United Nations Convention
Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishmenta 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. <br>
<br>
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 cell block 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, recommended 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 Guantánamo, 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
the 1995 federal court ruling in Madrid v. Gomez that forbade keeping
mentally ill prisoners in the notorious Security Housing Unit of
California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. <br>
<br>
This American system of administrative punishment has no counterpart in
scale or severity.<br>
<br>
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 a brief for the Madrid case. 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. <br>
<br>
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.”
<br>
<br>
Video still of a cell extraction in progress. (see website
graphic)<br><br>
The throwing of feces, urine, and blood at guards; self-injury; and
suicide attempts are common. A 2009 investigation of Illinois’s Tamms
supermax by the 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: <br>
<br>
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. <br>
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
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.”
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
"This place breeds hate," one inmate said, ‘What they’re doing
obviously isn’t working."<br>
<br>
There was no significant opposition to the supermaxes, even when it
became clear that the mentally ill would be housed there. Legislatively
mandated de-institutionalization 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.<br>
<br>
The supermax experiment has not been a success. <br>
<br>
Norman Kehlingsmall, 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.” <br>
<br>
Wardens continue to justify supermaxes by claiming they decrease prison
violence, but a study published in The Prison Journal 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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
Summing up the major pragmatic arguments, Sharon Shalev of the London
School of Economics and author of a recent prize winning book, Supermax:
Controlling Risk Through Solitary Confinement, says, “Supermax prisons
are expensive, ineffective, and they drive people mad.”<br><br>
So what can be done? <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Supermax torture wasn’t instituted because of a utilitarian calculation
about dollars and cents.<br>
<br>
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 Guantánamo, lawyers from prosperous Manhattan firms
are not lining up to offer services pro bono to penniless supermax
inmates. <br>
<br>
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 Yorkbased think tank, has begun working
with officials in Illlinois 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. <br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br><br>
This article is adapted from The 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.<br><br>
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