“IF YOU TREAT PEOPLE LIKE ANIMALS THAT’S EXACTLY HOW THEY’LL BEHAVE.” Christopher B. Epps, Mississippi commissioner of corrections
More inmates are held in solitary confinement in the United States, than in any other nation.
There might be 25,000 people in the U.S. being held in solitary. But no one’s really sure. All we know is that at least 25,000 are kept almost entirely away from human contact. However, experts say the real total could be many times that number.
NY Times reporter Erica Goode has a terrific Page One story about the practice of holding prisoners in solitary confinement and the reasons that some states that are scaling back on the policy—with Mississippi leading the way.
Here are some clips from Goode’s excellent story:
[LARGE SNIP]James F. Austin held up the file of an inmate in Unit 32 and posed a question to the staff members gathered in a conference room at the Mississippi Department of Corrections headquarters in Jackson.
“O.K., does this guy really need to be there?” he asked.
It was June 2007, and the department was under pressure to make court-ordered improvements to conditions at Unit 32, where violence was brewing. Dr. Austin, a prison consultant, had been called in by the state. As the discussion proceeded, the staff members were startled to discover that many inmates in Unit 32 had been sent there not because they were highly dangerous, but because they were a nuisance — they had disobeyed orders, had walked away from a minimum-security program or were low-level gang members with no history of causing trouble while incarcerated.
“He started saying, ‘You tell me what kind of person needs to be locked up,’ and it wasn’t near the numbers that we had,” said Emmitt L. Sparkman, deputy commissioner of corrections. By the time they were done, the group had determined that up to 80 percent of the 1,000 or more inmates at Unit 32 could probably be safely moved to less restrictive settings.
Like many such prisons, Mississippi’s supermax, opened in 1990, owed its existence to the fervor for tougher punishment that swept through the country in the 1980s and 1990s.
“There was an incredible explosion in the prison population coupled with a big infusion of gangs,” Dr. Austin said. “Riots were occurring. Prison officials were literally losing control.”
Some states built special units to isolate difficult prisoners — “the worst of the worst,” prison officials said — from the general prison population. Others retrofitted existing prisons or established smaller units within larger facilities. The federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., was locked down in 1983 after the murder of two prison guards, its inmates confined to cells 23 hours a day and then kept that way permanently. In 1989, California opened Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, a remote town near the Oregon border, specially designed to control inmates in conditions that minimize human interaction.
By 2005, 44 states had supermax prisons or their equivalents. In most, inmates were let out of their cells for only a few hours a week. They were fed through slots in their cell doors and were denied access to work programs or other rehabilitation efforts. If visitors were allowed, the interactions were conducted with no physical contact.
And while prisoners had previously been sent to isolation for 10 or perhaps 30 days as a temporary disciplinary measure, they were now often placed there indefinitely.
Many states continue to house inmates with mental illness in isolation. Some inmates appear to function adequately in solitary confinement or even say they prefer it. But studies suggest that the rigid control, absence of normal human interaction and lack of stimulation imposed by prolonged isolation can cause a wide range of psychological symptoms including insomnia, withdrawal, rage and aggression, depression, hallucinations and thoughts of suicide, even in prisoners who are mentally healthy to begin with.
A study of prisoners in the Pelican Bay supermax, for example, found that almost all reported nervousness, anxiety, lethargy or other psychological complaints. Seventy percent said they felt themselves to be at risk of “impending nervous breakdown.”
“Worse still is the fact that for many of these men, the real damage only becomes apparent when they get out of this environment,” said Craig W. Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an expert on the effects of solitary confinement, who led the study.
In fact, some research has found that inmates released from supermax units are more likely to reoffend than comparable prisoners released from conventional maximum-security prisons, and that those crimes are more likely to be violent. In Colorado, said Tom Clements, executive director of corrections, it turned out that about 40 percent of inmates held in long-term isolation were being released directly to the community with no transition period.
TAKING A DEAL: LOSING THE RIGHT TO A TRIAL
Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow (an extremely important book, by the way), has an Op Ed in Sunday’s New York Times that draws attention to yet another little-talked about broken link in our criminal justice system.
Alexander writes about the fact that most people who are accused of crimes never go to trial—even when they are innocent. Instead, they are usually pressured to “take a deal,” and do so simply because they are convinced by the prosecutor (or their court appointed attorney) that if they proceed to trial they are likely to get decades in prison—or worse— rather than the, say, four or eight or twelve years the Assistant DA is offering.
Here’s a clip from what Alexander wrote, but read it all. (And keep an eye our for her generally. What Alexander writes is inevitably worth reading.)
The Bill of Rights guarantees the accused basic safeguards, including the right to be informed of charges against them, to an impartial, fair and speedy jury trial, to cross-examine witnesses and to the assistance of counsel.
But in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation’s prison population has quintupled in a few decades partly as a result of the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty.
“The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,” said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. In other words: the system is rigged.
In the race to incarcerate, politicians champion stiff sentences for nearly all crimes, including harsh mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws; the result is a dramatic power shift, from judges to prosecutors.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
No wonder, then, that most people waive their rights…..
NOTE: AN INTRIGUING STORY ON THE JAILS COMMISSION COMING LATER THIS WEEK….WITH PART 5 AND PART 6 OF DANGEROUS JAILS STILL TO COME (SOON).
One of the 12-foot-by-7 ½-foot solitary cells in Unit 32 of the Mississippi State Penitentiary—photographed by Josh Anderson for The New York Times
And if you allow vicious and violent animals run loose among the sheep, what do you think will happen?
Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time!