The case against supermax
This week’s Time magazine has this strong article entitled “Are Prisons Driving Prisoners Mad?”. The article discuss the mental torture and negative consequences of how prisoner’s are treated in Supermax prisons. Here are some snippets:
The U.S. holds about 2 million people under lock and key, and 20,000 of them are confined in the 31 supermaxes operated by the states and the Federal Government….
The origin of solitary confinement in the U.S. is actually benign. It was the Philadelphia Quakers of the 19th century who dreamed up the idea, establishing a program at the city’s Walnut Street prison under which inmates were housed in isolation in the hope of providing them with an opportunity for quiet contemplation during which they would develop insight into their crimes. That’s not what has happened….
By the 1830s, evidence began to accumulate that the extended solitude was leading to emotional disintegration, certainly in higher numbers than in communal prisons. In 1890 the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in, deploring solitary confinement for the “semi-fatuous condition” in which it left prisoners. The case was narrow enough that its effect was merely to overturn a single law in a single state, but the court’s distaste for the idea of solitary was clear. “The justices saw it as a form of what some people now call no-touch torture,” says Alfred W. McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of the book A Question of Torture. “It sends prisoners in one of two directions: catatonia or rage.”
Modern science has confirmed this, with electroencephalograms showing that after a few days in solitary, prisoners’ brain waves shift toward a pattern characteristic of stupor and delirium. When sensory deprivation is added … the breakdown is even worse. As long ago as 1952, studies at Montreal’s McGill University showed that when researchers eliminate sight, sound and, with the use of padded gloves, tactile stimulation, subjects can descend into a hallucinatory state in as little as 48 hours.
Though this article notes some lawsuits over Supermax conditions, I remain amazed that there is far more litigation about a few minutes of possible physical torture that might accompany lethal injection for a few convicted murderer than there is about the indefinite mental torture being suffered by thousands of prisoners in Supermax facilities.
Some related posts:
UPDATE: Steven K. Erickson at Crime and Consequences has this strong post discussing prison conditions and mental conditions. It ends with this notable observation: “What most inmates desperately need are good social peers. I think prison ministries are an excellent idea and have witnessed their positive outcomes. I’m perplexed at the tremendous opposition to them.” I could not agree more.