Cruelty in Isolation

The first time my friend Jacob Ind went to Colorado State Penitentiary, our state’s Supermax, he was 18. He emerged at 25. He returned last year at the ripe old age of 30.

I visit Jacob every other week. Rules allow us three hours. Even though we’re separated by plate glass and concrete blocks Jacob’s legs remain shackled and he sits upon an uncomfortable metal stool that’s bolted to the floor.

Jacob seldom complains. He’s always cheerful and engaged. During our last visit we discussed Shakespeare, which he’s reading and I largely haven’t. He wonders why Shakespeare’s characters are talking about “garters” and asks whether the term had the same meaning then as now. We discuss politics – we’ll never agree–, the atmosphere in his pod – too many fishes who don’t know how to do time –, the status of his case – nothing going on –, whether he might soon be moved back into g.p., and two books I’ve recently read, I’M PERFECT, YOU’RE DOOMED and LOSING MY RELIGION. He’s witty, insightful, occasionally profound — and is often far more coherent than his visitor.

Occasionally, when I remember where we’re at and that such manufactured isolation can create psychosis, hallucinations, and mental, emotional and physical deterioration after weeks, let alone years, I study Jacob for signs of deterioration. Outside visitors help prisoners maintain sanity, studies show. That’s good. Jacob has dropped at least 50 pounds but he says he meant to lose weight. I think that’s okay. After his last stint at CSP – seven years–, he was pretty wild-eyed and it took him a while to get re-adjusted to other humans, not to mention larger spaces. But since Jacob’s not drooling, doesn’t laugh inappropriately or display any weird facial tics, maintains good eye contact – though he’s actually close to blind from years where his vision was confined to very short distances — and can speak coherent sentences, hey, let’s give solitary confinement a big thumbs up!

Control units must be a-okay. Otherwise Supermax prisons wouldn’t be increasing as inexorably as our national debt.
Atul Gawande, author of Hellhole: (The New Yorker magazine ), disagrees.

In a long article that is as appalling as it is powerful, Gawande lays out the case against prolonged isolation – whether for prisoners of war or prisoners of our courts.
Gawande cites a study out of California’s notorious Pelican Bay where Professor. Craig Haney noted that after time in isolation, many prisoners began “to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose… Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.”

We humans need social interaction. We need the presence and companionship of our fellow humans. When we don’t receive it, we go insane.

Yet…this is public policy in America.

This is what we are doing to Jacob. This is what we are doing to more than 1,000 prisoners in Colorado. This is what we are doing to at least 25,000 other prisoners around the country. (And another 50-80,000 in isolation within regular prisons.)

John McCain was a P.O.W for 5 ½ years. His symptoms and experiences were very similar to those we deplored when delivered by the Vietnamese, and proudly initiated in America’s prisons.

From Hellhole: “When P.O.Ws are isolated, they “begin to see themselves primarily as combatants in the world, people whose identity is rooted in thwarting prison control.”

We call that anger, that determination to foil the enemy “heroic” when practiced by prisoners of war. We produce movies about their bravery. We snap up their memoirs. We applaud their courage and grit on Fox News

“According to the Navy P.O.W. researchers, the instinct to fight back against the enemy constituted the most important coping mechanism for the prisoners they studied. Resistance was often their sole means of maintaining a sense of purpose, and so their sanity. Yet resistance is precisely what we wish to destroy in our supermax prisoners. As Haney observed in a review of research findings, prisoners in solitary confinement must be able to withstand the experience in order to be allowed to return to the highly social world of mainline prison or free society. Perversely, then, the prisoners who can’t handle profound isolation are the ones who are forced to remain in it. “And those who have adapted,” Haney writes, “are prime candidates for release to a social world to which they may be incapable of ever fully readjusting.”

John McCain has spoken against conditions at Guantanomo. Has he EVER spoken out against conditions in the Supermax prisons in his home state? Have any of our politicians?

What have we the people become?

Prison officials maintain that long-term isolation cuts down on violence and is reserved for “the worst of the worst.” However, since the wholesale implementation of control units – and America is the only nation that uses control units so extensively – institutional violence has not decreased.

“Perhaps the most careful inquiry into whether supermax prisons decrease violence and disorder was a 2003 analysis examining the experience in three states—Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota—following the opening of their supermax prisons. The study found that levels of inmate-on-inmate violence were unchanged, and that levels of inmate-on-staff violence changed unpredictably, rising in Arizona, falling in Illinois, and holding steady in Minnesota.”
States with fewer control units do NOT have higher rates of crime and violence.

The current buzz in corrections is, “Don’t present us anything unless you can show that it works.” Their only interest is in successful “evidence-based practices.”

Well, the evidence shows that control units don’t work. So why do we continue to think it’s perfectly okay to lock people away in rooms the size of a parking space for years on end?

We don’t…think, that is.

The rise in prison sentences has largely been pushed by liberals who fear being seen as soft on crime. How’s that for integrity? Using the least among us, using the most despised, to further political careers? As politicians have scapegoated prisoners – let’s remember that the rich and the politicans are seldom ensnared in the morass of our criminal justice system – they’ve also cut back on programs or other forms of rehabilitation. We can afford to build and staff regular and supermax prisons into infinity but we can’t afford to provide programs that would increase public safety and end recidivism. Those who want prisoners to exist on bread and water and spend their days on chain gangs or rotting in their cells without anything but cockroaches to keep them company get re-elected. Those who don’t lose. So we can’t really blame our representatives. We the people are driving their votes and their faux ourtrage. (Because most of them have known for many years these policies don’t work.) We’ve all happily conspired to create cesspools of violence and dehumanization and we don’t care – as long as we don’t have to see the results or nobody in our family ever ends up sleeping among the cockroaches.

What has happened to us as? We weren’t always so barbaric. Only in the last two decades have Supermax prisons become de rigueur. One hundred years ago our social conscience was more evolved.

Atul Gawande writes:

“In 1890, the United States Supreme Court came close to declaring the punishment to be unconstitutional. Writing for the majority in the case of a Colorado murderer who had been held in isolation for a month, Justice Samuel Miller noted that experience had revealed “serious objections” to solitary confinement:
“A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.”

Yet, we in the 21st century with gritted teeth and flashing eyes declare that it’s perfectly okay to treat human beings worse than beasts.

Why are we so angry?

Why are we so heartless?

Why are we so short-sighted?

Other nations, after determining that isolation will never garner the desired results, have deep-sixed control units. Great Britain, which was infamous for its treatment of members of the Irish Republican Army, once used solitary confinement as a means to control the rebels.

It didn’t work. The violence inside prisons remained unchanged while related costs skyrocketed.

So what did the British do?

Unlike America where, when we determine something doesn’t work we throw more money at it and increase its usage, the Brits

“gradually adopted a strategy that focussed on preventing prison violence rather than on delivering an ever more brutal series of punishments for it. The approach starts with the simple observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence.

“So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed “Close Supervision Centres,” prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, “contact visits,” and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to track the results and enable adjustments based on the data.
The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in “extreme custody” than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.”

So why do we happily continue spending money we don’t have on a policy that doesn’t work?

We are to blame. No one else. Politicians are voting for these tough-and-dumb-on-crime policies because we demand it, condone it or don’t give a rat’s butt about it. How can it be that we’ve so devolved as a nation? When did we become so self-absorbed and so mindlessly cruel and so mindlessly stupid – because we are getting the opposite outcomes that we supposedly intend — that we would allow torture to go on right under our noses? What is wrong with us? After 9/11 we trembled and swooned like 19th century heroines over the terrorists who, “Oh, please, sir, don’t!” might hurt us once again. Talk shows called for torture; we agreed. Opinion polls showed that the majority condoned or even applauded torture, just so long as it would make us safe. What cowards we have become! And the irony is, torture makes us LESS safe. Just like isolating and torturing our own makes us less safe. Most of the men and women locked down 23 out of 24 hours for years on end will come out of prison, after all.

Do you want someone who’s been locked down for years on end without programs or mental health treatment, who are fed a diet of oppression and hatred, coming to a neighborhood near you?

Of course you do. Because you demanded this. You voted for this. You’re fine with this—at least until you have a husband or a brother or a Jacob rotting away in a control unit somewhere.

Then you say, “This is awful.This is inhuman. We have to do something.”

I used to wonder what it would have been like to live in Nazi Germany. Would I have had the courage to speak up? Would I have risked my family’s life or my own to rebel against tyranny?

Possibly not.

Just as we don’t know how we would behave in situations or living in environments that caused many of America’s prisoners to be incarcerated, we can bluster about how courageous and strong and principled we would be fighting Nazis or terrorists or crime in our neighborhood, but the truth is far different.

A strong, courageous and moral people wouldn’t incarcerate more men and women than any other nation. We wouldn’t torture people and call it rehabilitation.

Such actions come from weakness and fear.

How low we’ve sunk.

UPDATE: Two weeks after penning this blog, Jacob was busted back from Level III to Level II. So the pattern begins again. Will it take Jacob another 7 years to work his way through CSP a second time? Whatever causes my friend to endlessly repeat this pattern I’m not capable of either understanding it or of fixing it. Perhaps all I can do is observe and report. And mourn.

This entry was posted on 23. April 2009 at 16:38 and is filed under Prison Reform Advocates, Juvenile Reform Advocates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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