Harmful Effects of Prolonged Isolated Confinement
By Stephen
Lendman
April 19, 2010
Terry Kupers is a practicing psychiatrist, an expert on long-term isolated
prison confinement, author of numerous articles on the subject as well as his
book titled, "Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We
Must Do About It." He's also a frequent expert witness in related cases, serves
as a consultant, and is currently Institute Professor in the Graduate School of
Psychology at Wright Institute, Berkeley, CA. More on his work below.
Social scientists have studied the effects for years, social psychologist Hans
Toch coining the term "isolation panic" to describe symptoms he observed in men
he interviewed, including panic, rage, a sense of total loss of control,
emotional breakdown, regressive behavior, and self-mutiliation. He distinguished
between difficult but tolerable incarceration and intolerable long-term
isolation.
An October 14, 2007 Scott Pelley's 60 Minutes report called Supermax prisons "A
Clean Version of Hell," referring to the only federal one, the US Penitentiary
Florence (ADMAX) Facility, Florence, Colorado, entirely a Supermax facility. He
called it secretive, closed to the public, the media, and 60 Minutes only could
approach the perimeter and be able to interview former warden Robert Hood, in
charge from 2002 - 2005.
He called it "the Harvard of the system....except that (its) ivory towers may be
easier to get into." Allegedly, most inmates are too violent to be kept
elsewhere, and over 40 (as of October 2007) were convicted "terrorists." Based
on this writer's work, most, if not all, are innocent victims of police state
justice.
Garrett Linderman was released. Pelly interviewed him and asked how it's
different from other lockups. "Your connections to the outside. Your family.
Through phone calls, visits, all those are pretty much stopped at the ADX.
There's no comparison. It breaks down the human spirit. It breaks down the human
psyche. It breaks your mind. (It's the) perfection of isolation, painted
pretty." (They) perfected it there."
60 Minutes learned of an even higher confinement level inside, sort of an "ultramax"
group of cells with virtually no human contact, not even with guards, housing
only two prisoners considered so dangerous they're in "Range 13." One is Tommy
Silverstein who killed a prison guard. The other is alleged World Trade Center
bomber Ramzi Yousef.
According to Hood, Yousef is there because "He has that Charlie Manson look. He
just has the eyes. He has some charisma about him. He's in uniform. But you know
that there's a powerful person that you're looking at."
Other prominent Supermax prisoners include unabomber Ted Kaczynski; Oklahoma
City bombers Timothy McVeigh (before his execution) and Terry Nichols; Robert
Hanssen, the FBI supervisor turned Soviet spy; Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park
bomber, alleged Al Qaeda terrorists who bombed US African embassies, and mob
informant Sammy "The Bull" Gravano.
Perhaps heading there are the Fort Hood shooter, and alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and his four co-conspirators, now at Guantanamo. They'll likely be tried in rigged military tribunals with no right of appeal, are already pre-judged guilty, face certain convictions and the death penalty, followed by isolated confinement until executed - even though no evidence substantiates their guilt.
So-called "terrorists" are denied due process and judicial fairness. Charges
against them are bogus. The rule of law is undermined. Secret evidence is
unavailable to the defense. Extremist judges allow it. Major media reports are
viciously biased, and juries are intimidated to convict.
Definitions
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) National Institute of Corrections calls the
term "supermax" the most common one to describe "special housing unit(s),
maxi-maxi, maximum control facilit(ies), secured housing unit(s), intensive
management unit(s), and administrative maximum penitentiar(ies.)." It describes
them as:
"a highly restrictive, high-custody housing unit within a secure
facility....that isolates inmates from the general prison population and from
each other due to grievous crimes, repetitive assaultive or violent
institutional behavior, the threat of escape or actual escape from high-custody
facility(s), or inciting or threatening to incite disturbances in a correctional
institution."
In a 1999 report titled, "Supermax Prisons: Overview and General
Considerations," the DOJ said although "concentration, dispersal, and isolation
are not new, the development of 'supermax' prisons is a relatively recent
trend." Prisons always had "prisons within the prison" for their worst inmates
(usually called administrative segregation), and most states operate one or more
facilities for their "most threatening inmates." Florence, CO is the sole
federal one and 100% Supermax.
Other definitions describes "control-unit" prisons, or units within prisons
providing the most secure levels of custody for the "worst of the worst"
criminals and those threatening national security. They're maximum security
facilities or prison wings in which inmates are held in long-term solitary
confinement under constant surveillance by closed-circuit TV.
Alcatraz was the prototype until it closed in 1963. In 1861, it was used for
civil war prisoners. In 1867, a brick jailhouse was built, and in 1868, it was
officially designated a long-term detention facility for military prisoners.
After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, it housed civilian prisoners, but
remained a military facility until 1933 when it was transferred to the Bureau of
Prisons.
Supermax facilities evolved from a "get tough on crime" philosophy, keeping
hardened offenders separate from the rest, the greater prison population safer,
and the public also because they're "escape-proof." In addition, they provide
high-paying jobs in isolated areas that would have far fewer ones otherwise.
Over the last two decades, nearly 60 facilities were built in over 40 states,
currently housing over 20,000 inmates. They represent a huge investment because
they're expensive to build and operate, two to three times more than a
conventional prison.
They have high-tech security features. Walls, floors, ceilings and doors are
built out of reinforced materials. Complex electronic systems minimize
officer-inmate contact. Moving inmates requires multiple officers. They're
confined in windowless single cells about 7 by 12 feet for up to 23 hours a day,
with a shower and concrete bed. The staff-to-prisoner ratio is much higher than
in conventional prisons. Inmates have few if any programs. Very little
constructive activity is offered on a daily basis. Few visits are allowed,
though almost no contact ones.
Overall, there's very little human contact. Most inmates are incarcerated for
life but other sentences are determinate. No federal entry or release standard
is observed. Some states use Supermax facilities for different reasons,
including when a shortage of segregation beds exist elsewhere.
Money spent on them reduces amounts for other facilities. Long-term isolation
contributes to anti-social behavior and mental illness, so released inmates may
be violent and unemployable. Yet proponents say they're the most effective way
to deal with dangerous offenders. Opponents believe they do more harm than good,
and the expense compounds the problem.
They're designed for society's most incorrigible (or ones authorities want to
punish for political or other reasons) on the notion that solitary confinement,
sensory deprivation, and punitive treatment will change behavior, only for the
worst according to experts.
The facilities are extremely harsh. They crush the human spirit, mind and body
through isolation and cruelty. Physical abuse and extreme deprivation are
common, inflicted as punishment. Inmate contact with staff is restricted and
none allowed with other prisoners. They're confined in windowless cells 23 hours
a day, have no work, social contact, education, recreation, rehabilitation or
personal privacy. Nearly everything is delivered - food, medical supplies and
other materials. Outside their cells, they're escorted by 4-man teams, painfully
handcuffed and shacked. Over time, it causes:
-- severe anxiety;
-- panic attacks;
-- lethargy;
-- insomnia;
-- nightmares;
-- dizziness;
-- irrational anger, at time uncontrollable;
-- confusion;
-- social withdrawal;
-- memory loss;
-- appetite loss;
-- delusions and hallucinations;
-- mutilations;
-- profound despair and hopelessness;
-- suicidal thoughts;
-- paranoia; and
-- for many, a totally dysfunctional state and inability ever to live normally
outside of confinement.
Prisoner anecdotes describe the experience:
-- "People come in here with a few problems and will leave sociopaths;
-- You're like a "caged animal. I've seen people just crack and either scream
for hours on end or cry."
-- Isolation "creates monsters (who) want revenge on society."
-- We "have a sense of hopelessness. Plus my anger (is) a silent rage....I am
beginning to really hate people."
-- "They....try to break a person down mentally (and) mental abuse leaves no
evidence behind (like) physical abuse."
-- Others say isolation is like being buried alive and living in a tomb.
When long-term, it often causes irreversible psychological trauma and harm, a
condition no society should inflict on anyone, nor should lawmakers allow it.
That's why forced isolation violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
the UN Torture Convention, and the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Racial Discrimination. In 1995, the UN Human Rights Committee called
long-term prison isolation incompatible with international standards, and in
1996, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment agreed.
Kupers on "How to Create Madness in Prisons"
Isolating inmates in windowless cells 23 hours a day makes it easy. Even the
strongest-willed can break. Try it in a windowless room for 24 hours with enough
food and water for one day. Imagine the desperation to get out. Then imagine it
for many years or life.
Mental asylum can have the same effect, Kuper using this example as evidence:
-- family members confine their son in one;
-- he loudly protests his sanity and his parents for wanting him confined;
-- the psychiatric evaluation misinterprets his anger as illness;
-- after being involuntarily confined, his protests become louder and more
desperate;
-- staff members say its more evidence of illness, place him in a locked ward,
and deprive him of ways to express himself;
-- his greater anger convinces staff he's crazy; they put him in isolation with
no clothes, pens or writing materials;
-- even more desperate, he smears feces on the wall and writes messages with his
finger to express himself.
Kuper cites this to show the effects of institutionalized isolation. In fact, he
says:
"in the USA, there are more people suffering from serious mental illness in the
jails and prisons than there are in psychiatric hospitals. And the bizarre
scenarios enacted in correctional settings today can make the 'back wards' of
1940's asylums look tame in comparison."
Besides the destructive effects of Supermax isolation, imagine the greater harm
when a "disturbed/disruptive prisoner winds up in some form of punitive
segregation, typically in a supermaximum security unit where he remains isolated
and idle in his cell nearly 24 hours a day."
It produces psychiatric symptoms in even healthy prisoners because of feelings
of being overwhelmed. As a result:
"The walls may seem to be moving in on him....He may begin to suffer from panic
attacks wherein he cannot breathe and he thinks his heart is beating so fast he
is going to die."
They can't focus on tasks, sleep, and fear their anxiety will boil over into
rage. Many isolated prisoners say they can't contain it and fear greater
punishment will result.
"Eventually, and often rather quickly, a prisoner's psychiatric condition
deteriorates (to) where he inexplicably refuses to return his food tray, cuts
himself or pastes paper over the small window in his solid metal door, causing
security staff to trigger an emergency 'take-down' or 'cell extraction.' "
At supermaximum security prisons, it happens as often as 10 times a week because
total isolation breaks the human spirit and causes bizarre behavior. Madness is
easy to create under these conditions:
-- overcrowd
prisons and impose long sentences;
-- dismantle rehabilitation and education programs;
-- create forced idleness;
-- some prisoners already are mentally ill;
-- obstruct or restrict visitations and other human contact;
-- punish violence and psychosis by total isolation;
-- ignore prison traumas like rape;
-- call mental disorder "malingering" and out-of-control prisoners
"psychopaths;"
-- deny them treatment; and
-- isolate them in supermaximum security units.
The effect of prison life is rising recidivism and "a new breed of incorrigible
criminals and 'superpredators'..One had only to tour a prison to understand how
violence and madness were bred by the crowding." Then consider the effects of
prolonged isolated confinement and the violence and madness it produces.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons estimates at least 283,000 inmates have
significant emotional problems and need treatment. In prison, they don't get it.
Instead, they're confined to cells and given psychiatric medications.
Prison violence is a major problem. Supermax confinement was designed to limit
it. "There is ample evidence that long-term cell-confinement with almost no
social interactions and no meaningful activities has very destructive
psychological effects," including mental disorders, violence, and high suicide
rates.
Long-term isolation builds "uncontrollable rage....A disproportionate number of
prisoners with serious mental illness wind up in punitive segregation." The
effect is "to exacerbate the general level of pandemonium." Frustrated staff
become more insensitive, lose their tempers, and take it out on inmates. "The
bottom line is that we seem to have reproduced some of the worst aspects of an
earlier epoch's snake pit mental asylums in the isolation units of our modern
prisons."
Prison mismanagement is the cause, using Supermax facilities punitively, not for
rehabilitation, and in conventional institutions, creating harmful overcrowding
that produces violence and harsher punishments. "We need to stop blaming the
victim's innate 'badness' for failed" prison policies.
The Shame of America's Prison System
America has the largest prison population in the world, greater than China with four times as many people, and 22% of all those incarcerated globally. At 738 in 2006, it has the highest rate per 100,000. Most Western European nations have under 100. Japan has 62. Canada 107. Bolivia under Evo Morales 83, and Venezuela under Hugo Chavez 74.
Justice Department Bureau of Justice Statistics show over 2.4 million imprisoned
Americans at yearend 2008. They include inmates in federal and state facilities,
local jails, Indian, juvenile, and military ones, US territories, and numbers
held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In addition, another 7.3
million are under correctional supervision, and 13 million pass through US jails
annually. Half of them are for non-violent offenses. Half of those are
drug-related. In 1980, 40,000 drug offenders were in prison. Today, it's over
500,000, the result of the "war on drugs," that's part of the war on civil
liberties.
Since 1970, the prison population exploded from under 300,000 to eight times
that number now. In the December 1998 Atlantic, Eric Schlosser called it "The
Prison-Industrial Complex," a recent phenomenon with about 1,000 new prisons and
jails built in the 1980s and 90s, and the trend continues in the new millennium,
not because of more crime, because of getting "tough" on it against more people
getting longer sentences under harsher conditions.
Marc Mauer, author of "Race to Incarcerate," says America locks up people at
five to eight times the rate of other industrialized nations, including many who
shouldn't be there in the first place. Nearly two-thirds are blacks and Latinos.
The vast majority are poor and disadvantaged. One in three black males and one
in six Latino males will be imprisoned at some point in their lives. Black males
are imprisoned at nine times the rate for whites, and in some states up to 26
times. Penalties include "mandatory minimums, one size fits all (and) three
strikes and you're out."
Yet from 1970 - 1994, violent crime rates were stable, and the overall rate
fell. The murder rate is the lowest since 1966, and from 1980 - 2000 it dropped
43%. It costs as much or more to imprison someone as send them to college and
for older inmates three times as much. Higher incarceration rates for longer
periods is unrelated to the crime rate. The prison-industrial complex is one of
America's biggest growth industries, exceeding $60 billion annually, and private
security adds another $100 billion. Crime fighters and prisoners comprise around
4% of the workforce.
Schlosser called America's prison-industrial complex:
"not only a set of interest groups and institutions. It is also a state of mind.
The lure of big money is corrupting the nation's criminal-justice system,
replacing notions of public service with a drive for higher profits."
It borders on the extreme, defiles the rule of law and core democratic notions,
exploits people as commodities, uses incarcerations for profit, a way to create
jobs, punish not rehabilitate, crush the human spirit, lets politicians look
tough and get elected, and according to former New York State legislator, Daniel
Feldman: "When legislators cry 'Lock 'em up!,' they mean (do it) in my
district."
America has more prisoners than farmers. In 2001, writer Vince Beiser in Mother
Jones asked, "How did the Land of the Free become the world's leading jailer?"
Zen Buddhist priest Kobutsu Shindo Kevin C. Malone calls America's prison
industrial complex an "Investment in Slavery," permitted under the 13th
Amendment, Section 1 stating:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United
States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
The result is a burgeoning prison population and building boom to accommodate
it, rural communities begging for them, because of declines in farming, mining,
manufacturing, corporate downsizing, a shift to low-paying service jobs, and a
troubled economy. Besides Wall Street bailouts, foreign wars, and a growing
national security apparatus, what better economic stimulus than to lock up poor
blacks and Latinos, Muslims called terrorists, then target political dissidents;
human, civil and anti-war activists; and courageous opponents of Washington and
corporate malfeasance.
As well-known Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff used to say about America, "What a
country!" He also said in Soviet Russia, the "government control(led)
corporations. In America, corporations control the government," and profiteering
prison-industrial complex ones have plenty of say. Only in America.
Stephen Lendman is a Research
Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and
can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at
sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished
guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network
Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All
programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
Author's Bio: I am a 72 year
old, retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major
national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.