by Corey Weinstein, M.D., C.C.H.P
Anthony Hall, 18, spends 23 hours per day in this cell in the supermax prison in
Boscobel, Wisc. Judging from letters to the Bay View from prisons throughout the
country, Boscobel seems to be one of the worst for Black prisoners. Prison officials
there have often refused to deliver the Bay View to subscribers on the excuse that
it would “incite a riot.” – Photo: Andy Manis, APDuring the past 25 years I’ve spent
a lot of time with survivors of torture, men and women enduring long term solitary
confinement in California’s prisons. They are the most urgent victims of U.S. mass
incarceration with its overcrowded facilities and policy of incapacitation, not
rehabilitation.
Those thousands held in solitary for years on end report the expected classic
symptoms of psychic disturbance, mental deterioration and social disruption. As
described by various penal psychiatric experts, the symptoms of this syndrome
include massive free-floating anxiety, hyperresponsiveness to external stimuli,
perceptual distortions and hallucinations, a feeling of unreality, difficulty with
concentration and memory, acute confusional states, the emergence of primitive
aggressive fantasies, persecutory ideation, motor excitement and violent destructive
or self-mutilatory outbursts.
The degrading conditions produce behaviors ranging from fights among prisoners to
assaults on staff, assaults by staff, excrement throwing, self mutilation and
contract killings. Isolation tears apart family and friendship ties, creating social
dislocation.
In California there are about 4,000 men and women held in the state’s supermax
facilities, called Security Housing Units, including 600 serving SHU terms in
Administrative Segregation. That is 2.5 percent of the total population of 160,000.
The regime in SHU is a 23.5 hour per day lockdown in the 8’ x 10’ cell with no
communal activities aside from small group exercise yards for some. There is no
work, no school, no communal worship and meals are eaten in cell.
TVs and radios must be purchased, so the poor have none. Visits are noncontact,
behind glass and limited to one or two hours on each weekend visit day. Each
prisoner must submit to being handcuffed behind the back in order to exit the cell.
Leg iron hobble chains are commonly used.
More than 50 percent of the men in SHU are assigned indeterminate terms there
because of alleged gang membership or activity. The only program that the California
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCr) offers to them is to debrief.
The single way offered to earn their way out of SHU is to tell departmental gang
investigators everything they know about gang membership and activities, including
describing crimes they have committed. The department calls it debriefing. The
prisoners call it “snitch, parole or die.” The only ways out are to snitch, finish
the prison term or die. The protection against self incrimination is collapsed in
the service of anti-gang investigation.
CDCr asserts that the lockdown and snitch policy are required for the safety and
security of the institution. Having legitimate penalogical purpose, the SHU program
is deemed worth any harm done to the prisoners.
California prisons continue to have a high rate of assaultive incidents among
prisoners and from prisoners to staff. There is no proof or even any study that
demonstrates that these measures are effective anti-gang measures. They appear to be
no more useful than previous brutalities like that unleashed at Corcoran prison more
than a decade ago.
Between 1988 and 1995, CDCr ran a program at the Corcoran SHU called the Integrated
Yard Policy. Rival gang members were deliberately mixed together in small group
exercise yards. The prisoners had to fight, and fight well or be punished by their
own gangs.
When the fights occurred, guards were required to fire first anti-riot guns and then
assault rifles at the combatants. Seven prisoners were killed and hundreds wounded.
The program of beating prisoners down into the concrete with gunfire resulted in
bigger, stronger gangs with new martyrs and heroes.
Mayhem and violence was added to the prison social system by departmental policy. No
CDCr official has ever been held accountable or even assigned responsibility for
what was know at Corcoran as the gladiator days. Line staff brought to trial by the
U.S. Department of Justice avoided criminal convictions by proving that they were
just following orders.
There are four prisons in California with SHUs: Corcoran, Pelican Bay and Tehachapi
for men and Valley State Prison for Women. Only a few women have ever been given a
SHU term for gang activity.
All those identified as gang members by the administrative kangaroo court serve SHU
terms without end. The only way out is to debrief, to testify against oneself to
prison rules violations and crimes.
Prisoners have found it very hard to attack the abuses in the SHU, even though the
U.S. is under the jurisdiction of the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT). The
U.S. states reservations to the treaty asserting that the U.S. Constitution and body
of law are all that is required to satisfy the obligations of CAT.
But the 1995 Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) that prohibits a prisoner bringing
action for mental or emotional injury without prior showing of physical injury is
one law that violates CAT. The U.N. Committee on Torture expressed concern that by
disallowing compensation for psychic abuse the PLRA is out of compliance with CAT.
Under CAT, torture includes “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether
physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted.” But the U.S. 1990 reservations to
CAT were designed specifically to allow solitary confinement, as the reservations
state that mental pain and suffering must be prolonged, be tied to infliction or
threats of infliction of physical pain, the result of drugging or the result of
death threats.
Despite SHU confinement without end to attempt to control gangs, prison gangs thrive
in California’s prisons. The gang leadership predictably uses the snitch sessions to
falsely target their rivals, or just recruit new members. Just as we have seen in
U.S. anti-terror investigations, information derived from coercion is often
unreliable.
Using indeterminate total lockdown to extract confessions is torture by
international standards, as is the use of prolonged solitary confinement. U.S.
prison officials order by rule the torture of prisoners. One in 31 adults in the
U.S. is under the supervision of the criminal detention system – jail, prison,
probation or parole – with 2.5 million behind bars.
Prisons dominate the lives of poor communities and communities of color and are
ignored by affluent white America. One in 11 African-Americans and one in 27
Latino-Americans are under penal jurisdiction. Prisoners damaged by incarceration
are returning to communities increasingly less able to absorb them.
The 2005 census found that severe poverty increased 26 percent more than the overall
growth in poverty. In 2002, 43 percent of the nation’s poor were living in severe
poverty, the highest rate since 1975.
Torture has always served more to beat down a population than to extract reliable
information. The unstated goal is to incapacitate and marginalize the dangerous poor
who are locked out of America’s opportunity and riches. The routine even banal
nature of torture in U.S. prisons enables torture to be acceptable, and informs our
failing strategies of dealing with any opposition by using brute force.
A more useful way to undermine and blunt prison gangs would be to provide programs
and procedures that enliven the community of prisoners with rehabilitative activity
making them too busy and too hopeful to become involved. Drug and mental health
treatment and education and vocational training rather than enforced idleness and
despair will help change the culture of the prison yard from a battleground to a
place for personal and social renewal. To be successful at a renewal behind bars, a
revitalization of our poor communities is desperately needed.
I’ll never forget my visit to several prisons in the United Kingdom a number of
years ago. I toured one of their high security units housing eight of the 40 men out
of 75,000 considered too dangerous or disruptive to be in any other facility. The
men were out of their cells at exercise or at a computer or with a counselor or
teacher.
The goal was to get them back on mainline through rehabilitation, not terror. With
embarrassment, the host took us to the one cell holding the single individual who
had to be continuously locked down and cuffed and hobbled before exit from his cell.
I was equally embarrassed to tell our guide that this is how 2.5 percent of U.S.
prisoners are routinely treated.
Corey Weinstein, MD, CCHP, is a physician, a Certified Correctional Health
Professional and a renowned advocate for justice behind enemy lines. He can be
reached at coreman@igc.org.
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