Reading Set B (9 articles in 38 pages)
Directions:Read with a pencil, making note of useful facts, quotes, and what you’ll need to “RE-search.” After you read each article, free-write your impressions, reaction, and whatever was memorable in the article. Then write a question that would use the article to answer. When you have finished all the readings, revise the question so you have one that would fit all the readings. Then write your first draft.
How Did a Form of Torture Become Policy in America’s Prison System?
The cruel rise of solitary confinement in America.
ByAndrew Gumbel/Los Angeles Review of Books
October 11, 2013
In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville visited the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia to observe first-hand the effects of a peculiar — and, at the time, entirely novel — form of incarceration. The Quakers, who had opened the prison two years earlier, believed that long-term solitary confinement was an ideal form of religious penitence (whence the termpenitentiary) and would hasten prisoners’ rehabilitation and reintegration into society. They saw it not as extreme punishment but as a progressive idea, far preferable to the giant holding pens typical of the age, where mutilations and violence among prisoners were common, and spiritual betterment all but unthinkable.
Tocqueville was favorably impressed. “Can there be a combination more powerful for reformation,” he wrote, “than that of a prison which hands over the prisoner to all the trials of solitude, leads him through reflection to remorse, through religion to hope, and makes him industrious by the burden of idleness?"
Ten years later, Dickens paid his own visit to Eastern State, and came away with a rather different opinion. Solitary confinement, he found, inflicted unimaginable torment on the minds of those subjected to it. Far from leading prisoners to enlightenment, it ruined their concentration and haunted them with hideous visions. They fell into deep despair, losing track of time and of themselves. “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body,” he wrote in hisAmerican Notes for General Circulation:
[B]ecause its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear [...] It wears the mind into a morbid state, which renders it unfit for the rough contact and busy action of the world.
Dickens was not alone. Harry Hawser, who wrote poems about his experience at Eastern State around the same time, hauntingly described the effects of being plunged into a “living tomb.” By the end of the 19th century, the Supreme Court noted that solitary confinement had caused many prisoners to fall “into a semi-fatuous condition,” and others still to kill themselves or to become violently insane. By World War I, the practice was largely abandoned.
Still, the idea never entirely went away, and in our bewildering world of chronically overcrowded, gang-infested prisons, it has returned with a vengeance. The new generation of high-security supermax prisons, whose spreading popularity over the past 40 years has coincided with an explosion in prisoner numbers, is premised on the notion that dangerous inmates — the “worst of the worst,” in official parlance — need to be kept separate from the general prison population, and from each other.
The term “solitary confinement” is scrupulously avoided in favor of other, more clinically bureaucratic terms like “security housing unit” (SHU) and “administrative segregation.” But the result is essentially the same as it was in 1840s Philadelphia. Prisoners are deprived of almost all human contact — not just for days or weeks but in many cases for years on end. They spend 22 or 23 hours a day in cramped cells without windows, with no work or other structured activity, and with limited access to books, television, and other outside stimulation. If they talk to their fellow prisoners at all, it is by shouting through the plumbing system. Visits are difficult or impossible to arrange, and contact with the outside world — even the opportunity to see or send photographs — is rare to nonexistent. Their only experience of touching another human is when they put their hands through a slot in their cell doors to be cuffed or chained en route to their hour-long daily exercise in an enclosed concrete pen.
Tocqueville and the Quaker model are gone, but solitary confinement retains its share of supporters. Jeffrey Beard, the head of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), claims that the authorities are in a state of virtual warfare with vicious criminals bent on fomenting “terror,” more or less for the sake of it. Keeping prisoners isolated, he and his fellow prison officials argue, is the only way to keep mayhem and violence at bay.
On the other side are prisoners, their advocates, and human rights organizations, who argue that long-term solitary confinement falls under international definitions of torture. It does not diminish prison violence, they say; it can only exacerbate unrest. Too many prisoners are moved into isolation cells for indefinite periods without due process and without a justifiable reason. In California, which keeps about 12,000 inmates in long-term isolation (out of 80,000 nationwide), prisoners do not have to be proven gang members to qualify; mere “association” is enough. And the decision on what constitutes association is left to the whim of prison administrators meeting behind closed doors. Neither the inmates themselves nor their lawyers have any say, or any right to challenge the evidence. A number of documented cases demonstrate the shocking paucity of some of that evidence: it may be no more than a choice of reading material, or the coincidence of having been placed in a cell with a known gang member, or something as innocuous as a coincidental symbol of a Christmas card.
Once inmates have been tarred, rightly or wrongly, with the gang label, they are liable to be thrown into isolation, with their parole eligibility suspended indefinitely. Whatever their original crimes, they now serve a de facto life sentence.
The battle lines over solitary confinement are now more than ever entrenched, and the reasons justifying the practice have become significantly more retributive. The problem is not just a failure to learn the lessons of the past. It is also that, when it comes to prisons, people tend to see only what they want to see.
***
In early July, 30,000 prisoners across California began what became a 60-day hunger strike to demand a major overhaul, if not outright abolition, of the solitary confinement regimen. They also made demands for better food, better access to medical care, more human contact, fresh air, and sunlight. In so doing, they attracted more media attention — and public sympathy — to their plight than at any time since the opening of California’s most notorious supermax prison at Pelican Bay, in the far north of the state, in 1989. The new protest was significantly larger than two earlier hunger strikes in 2011, which had been premised on the same idea: that something dramatic had to be done to draw the attention of an otherwise apathetic public to conditions unworthy of a democratic society, and to move otherwise intractable public officials to corrective action.
The causes of such widespread prisoner unrest are not hard to discern. California not only keeps more prisoners in solitary than any other US state, it also treats them more harshly — because so many are gang “associates” rather than full members — and holds them for longer. In the words of a class action lawsuit working its way through the federal courts, the state is an “outlier in this country and in the civilized world.” At Pelican Bay alone, about 500 prisoners have been in solitary for more than 10 years. (The prison houses about 3,000 inmates, one-third of them in “security housing.”) About 90 have been in isolation for more than 20 years, and one prisoner has been on his own for 43 years and counting.
Usually, the only way out of solitary is to “debrief” — in other words, for a prisoner to tell the authorities everything he knows about his gang connections. But debriefing is fraught with problems. Bona fide gang members face all kinds of risks from their fellow prisoners once they turn snitch, so they tend to keep quiet. And many of those labeled gang “associates” — 78 percent of the total at Pelican Bay, according to official records from 2011 — have little or no information to offer in the first place.
Take Gabriel Reyes, one of the class action plaintiffs, who was originally convicted of housebreaking and sentenced under California’s draconian three strikes law. He was thrown into solitary 17 years ago, based on the mere fact that he was seen exercising with known gang members. Since then, everything from his tattoos to his Mexican-themed artwork has been held against him as evidence of gang association. He has not hugged his daughters in two decades, since they were in preschool, a startling deprivation for a man without a violent record. Some time ago, Reyes described to his lawyers how he and his fellow inmates were ready to “explode.”
After the 2011 strikes, authorities promised a number of reforms but delivered on only a handful. Prisoners are now allowed to hang a calendar in their cells where previously they had to keep their walls bare, and they are given a handball for their daily exercise in the concrete yard known as the “dog run.” About 250 prisoners in solitary — roughly two percent of the total in California — have also been deemed eligible for return to the general population, although it is not clear how many of them have actually been transferred. Other demands have gone unheeded — even relatively modest ones like a weekly phone call, or an annual photograph to send to family and friends. A 2012 document outlining the state’s proposed changes to its system of gang “validation” (identifying inmates as members or associates) has been condemned by lawyers representing some of the most prominent Pelican Bay inmates as “making virtually no meaningful changes and, instead, expanding the net of who may be incarcerated in the SHU [Security Housing Unit].”
This summer’s strike began with an extraordinary sense of purpose. Leaders of the most feared gangs — black, Mexican and neo-Nazi — signed a pact setting aside their mutual animosity to unite instead against their common enemy, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. They managed to spread word of the strike across a dozen high-security prisons. While the number of prisoners refusing to eat inevitably tailed off over time, the sheer determination of those left at the end took prison officials by surprise. “A couple of these guys are really serious,” prisoners’ rights lawyer Charles Carbone told me a few weeks in. “Whether or not they are in a gang, a lot of them have a soldier mentality. They believe one or two soldiers need to be sacrificed for a greater purpose, and they are willing to do it. They have very little to lose.”
Until the final phase of the hunger strike, California officials took their own hard line in response. “Don't be fooled,” Beard wrote in a strikingly aggressive op-ed piece in theLos Angeles Timesin early August:
Many of those participating in the hunger strike are under extreme pressure to do so from violent prison gangs, which called the strike in an attempt to restore their ability to terrorize fellow prisoners, prison staff and communities throughout California [...] We're talking about convicted murderers who are putting lives at risk to advance their own agenda of violence.
Beard and the CDCR, in other words, took the view that making concessions during the previous strike had been a mistake. And they did their best to crack down even harder on a group of prisoners with precious little in the way of privileges left to take away. According to prisoners’ advocates, certain attorneys were told they could no longer talk to their clients. Exercise time for the hunger strikers was reduced, prisoners had property confiscated, sandbags were placed at the bottom of their cell doors, and contact with the outside world — particularly mail from their families — was restricted or cut off altogether. In late August, several dozen Pelican Bay inmates were woken in the middle of the night and dispersed around the state to isolate them even further.
The state made clear it was willing to force-feed prisoners to keep them alive, even if they had previously signed do-not-resuscitate orders. The prospect brought back memories of force-feeding at Guantanamo Bay — a practice condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Commission as a form of torture. But the State argued in federal court, just as Beard did in theLos Angeles Times, that many of the hunger strikers were being coerced by prison gang leaders. It was an argument undermined each day by dozens, sometimes hundreds of prisoners, who gave up on the hunger strike with no sign of retaliation or reprisals.
In the end, both sides showed signs of compromise. The warden of Calipatria State Prison, between the Salton Sea and the Mexican border, persuaded his 22 hunger strikers to resume eating in exchange for extra television channels, better food in the canteen, and permission to make monthly phone calls beginning this fall. Tom Hayden, the veteran activist and politician who has successfully negotiated truces between Los Angeles street gangs, pressed the idea that similar accommodations could end the strike statewide. When that initiative failed, he approached two state legislators and persuaded them to hold hearings on the conditions in California prisons, including solitary confinement, starting later this month. The remaining strikers, some of them getting close to the end, took this breakthrough as a form of victory and agreed to resume eating.
***
The key issue for the legislative hearings is the fact that prisoners in solitary have effectively been placed in a special legal category, where they are denied rights simply because of who they are — or, more precisely, who the government says they are. Some may indeed be the “worst of the worst,” while others, like Gabriel Reyes, do not appear to belong in a high-security unit at all. Whatever their original crimes, they are now punished without recourse to courts, without legal review, and with little or no prospect of reversal. It’s a “scorched earth solution,” says Carbone. “The attitude is, we don’t care if we’ve got all the right people or all the wrong people; we just know we’ve got some of the right people.”
Just as the Bush administration relied, in the wake of 9/11, on public tolerance or even support for the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, the California government appears to be counting on the indifference or outright hostility of its own population toward high-security prisoners. Even avowed liberals like Jerry Brown, California’s governor, and Kamala Harris, the state attorney general, seem to see nothing wrong with the system and are fully behind Jeffrey Beard’s hardline stance. In a response to the class action lawsuit, Harris said that long-term solitary confinement did not qualify as cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment because it did not constitute “a sufficiently serious injury” and did not meet the level of “deliberate indifference” on the part of state officials.
That’s an argument contradicted by a vast and all but unanimous penological literature condemning solitary confinement as a punishment unfit for civilized society. Dickens’s observations at the Eastern State Penitentiary have been amply borne out by more recent medical studies. “Between a quarter and a half of the prisoners in the SHU’s I have visited or read about suffer serious and long-term mental illnesses,” the Harvard psychiatrist Stuart Grassian reported back in 1998. “They are, on average, the most severely psychotic people I have seen in my entire 25 years of psychiatric practice.
Symptoms reported by Grassian and many others, include massive free-floating anxiety, an inability to concentrate or remember anything, distortions and hallucinations, hyper-responsiveness to the slightest noise or other external stimulus, and a tendency to lash out in sudden destructive, often self-mutilating outbursts. Prisoners going into solitary sometimes imagine they can take advantage of their isolation to read, or study, or develop an interest in painting, but, invariably, they grow listless and unfocused within just a few days — unable to concentrate for even short periods of time. In a 2003 paper, Craig Haney of the University of California, Santa Cruz noted: “There is not a single published study of solitary or supermax-like confinement in which nonvoluntary confinement lasting for longer than 10 days [...] failed to result in negative psychological effects.”