July 14th - Section 2

This section of the report is nowhere near complete (I still need to draw parallels with Madrid v. Gomez, Ruiz v. Johnson and Jones 'El v. Berge) but I felt that the sections that I've excerpted from the letters I've received from inmates ought to be put up as soon as possible.

In this section, I’ve decided to let the letters that I’ve received from prisoners speak for themselves. While reading, it is important to keep in mind that the majority, if not all of these reports are credible (if only because of the frequency with which these sorts of things are reported, as well as the fact that conditions like these have been verified as endemic in the correctional institutions of a number of other states[1]), that inmates have a tendency to downplay their own mental health issues,[2] and also that the type of inmate that decisions in Madrid v. Gomez, Ruiz v. Johnson, and Jones 'El v. Berge were primarily concerned with (i.e. inmates with serious mental illness) are the least likely to be able to formulate a coherent response to a mailed questionnaire.[3] Because there is no actual court case, it was impossible to visit any specific prison and interview the inmates within that prison’s RHU or SMU. These letters come from a number of Pennsylvania’s correctional institutions, and it is my hope that they will provide an accurate picture of Pennsylvania’s correctional practices as well as clearly parallel the types of abuses that prompted judicial action in Madrid, Ruiz and Jones 'El.

Conditions of confinement

Inmate 1: “The cell I was housed in was filthy with urine and feces on the walls, the sink wasn’t hygienic enough to drink out or bathe in. The light stayed on 24 hours a day…”

Inmate 2: “Conditions vary from cell to cell…usually dirty sink, toilet, floor. Peeling paint, leaking water, too cold or too hot…out of cell for 1 hour Monday – Friday for yard. Only access to the outside world is through the mail. DC [Disciplinary Custody] no phone calls. AC [Administrative Custody] one call per month if you beg for it. [What was the lighting in the cell like?] Bright, and night light is on 24/7… I’ve spent many nights naked without mattress or blanket and sheets for days in ant infested cells without heat.”

Inmate 5: “The cell is bare, with a bed, desk, toilet with sink. You are allowed 1 hour exercise period, but you might sign up for that 1 hour period in the morning with your light on. You can write and receive mail and reading [sic] books. The lights stay on all day and night. The inmates make noises all night long. Also you now have a bad case of throwing feces around…this is what troubles me the most I never seen anything like this before where’s another man throws feces and urine on another. This takes place often, so you can imagin [sic] what the unit smells like.”

Inmate 6: “I am sleeping on a mattress that has the cover ripped completely down the side exposing all of the filling which is essentially the same as using the same sheets unlaundered that every other inmate has used that slept on this mattress. Once a week we get to so call [sic] ‘clean our cells.’ We get offered the use of a toilet brush and a small round tub with some diluted disinfectant. That’s it! No broom, no mop, no cleanser, no rags, no paper towels…When they pass this toilet brush…out they use a black milk crate…this milk crate is placed on top of a rolling cart…I noticed…that the guards that serve us our food are using all of the carts for all of the various uses including using the same bacteria infested cart that is used to transport the used dripping toilet brushes on.”

“I have been infected by bacteria…I have been getting…bleeding, pussing sores about my body for no apparent reason other than the poor sanitary conditions…I have no trash container in my cell to place my garbage so I have been just stacking it in the corner by the door. Now there are bugs and mold growing in the corner. I have asked…guards repeatedly for a garbage bag and have been told that there are none.”[4]

Inmate 8: “The cells are about the size of a bathroom. There’s a metal bunk welded into the side wall. Across from the bunk is a desk and stool and a few feet away from that is the toilet and sink. There’s a long skinny window on the back wall which gives you a glimpse of the outside…I actually lived under these conditions for 23 months straight 24 hours a day. This is where I ate at, went to the bathroom at, exercised at and slept at, 24 hours a day and 23 months straight…the lighting fixture is welded to the wall and stays on 24 hours a day. It can definitely cause one sleep deprivation…there’s loud noises around the clock. In solitary confinement no one sleeps it seems. All day and night there’s loud banging, hollering, kicking on doors, fussing and just about every rowdy thing imaginable…”

Inmate 9: Picture staying in a cell and a bunch of insects lives [sic] with you and have no problem crawling on your bed, up your nose etc. And when you complain the exterminator comes around and spray [sic] the insect killer outside your door only…so what happens next is I get…more insects in my cell because the spray chases them from outside to the inside (my cell)…I’m now in a cell…that’s infested with ants, mices [sic] and rats…I’m sleeping on a concrete slab along with a thin mattress. There’s no kind of ventilation except for when the guards chose to open the window outside my cell…the light gives me a headache all the time because of the 24 hour brightness. There’s only a broken toilet that water leaks out of onto the floor. A sink that only cold water comes out of a little bit and the drain is stopped up. A small desk and stool that I place my personal property on because there’s no shelves…”

Mental Stress and Illness

Inmate 1: “My sleep patterns were different…in solitary confinement, due to constant noises and leaving the lights on all day and night, which deprived me of sleep. My mind couldn’t distinguish the difference between night and day! Plus, the guards would every half hour rattle the doors acting like they were making security door checks, but in reality it was done to keep us awake and off balance.”

Inmate 2: “[While in solitary did you ever have an impulse to hurt yourself? Did you act on this impulse?] Yes. I ate my eye-glasses and needed emergency removal… I could not sleep for months.”

Inmate 3: “I have LITERALLY cut open my wrist requiring 8 stitches so that I would go to the SSNU where there was a radio and not to the hole…my night terrors become so intense that I try not to sleep at all…I get no counseling besides someone coming to my door expecting our interaction to be over with in under 5 minutes and for me to share my condition with them and be ridiculed the rest of my days by the inmates within earshot…If I write to the psychiatrist it takes at least two weeks to be seen…by the time I get out of the hole my nerves are so shot that for weeks I can’t sleep, experience motor tics and heart palpitations.”

Inmate 4: “I suffer from paranoia schizophrenia, post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder, I have had these diagnoses since an adolescent [sic]. Now the Department [of Corrections] has decided to change them to the following: Anti-social and borderline personality disorder, borderline intellectual functioning level, adjustment disorder, depressed mood, impulsive disorder. Being in the RHU has caused me major problems because of C/Os [Correctional Officers] and psychologist [sic]…disclosing my issues on the door where other inmates hear and harass me.”[5]

Inmate 8: “Not once did I entertain the thought of doing harm to myself…I have witnessed those type of instances…some [inmates] would slash their wrists, some swallowed large amounts of pills, a couple dudes even hung nooses around their necks. It was like a norm for some…there’s nothing to see a literally mentally ill inmate playing in his feces. Yet they’re quick to say there’s no mentally ill inmates [sic] in solitary confinement. There are guys who keep toilets full of feces. They are the ones who play chemical warfare games…they’ll wait until the guard open [sic] their tray slots and then splash him with feces. These type of things [sic] occur daily…I haven’t been in a general population since ’06…the 3 months I was in population was strange. I would walk with my back to the wall from my block to wherever I was going. I would always position myself so that I could see everything within my proximity.”

Inmate 9: “I’ve gotten bitter over this obvious mental torture…I only gets [sic]…2 hours of sleep a day. I’m losing my vision, can’t stop shaking and I got the jumps. I’ve truly turned into an animal man…”

Inmate 10: “I am going through a crisis involving staff members and unknown rituals upon my person that are alien to me, but believed to be either Santeria, Voodoo-Hoodoo or Black Magic that’s unexplainable, and the only way for me to explain it is to say, there are/is the presence of unforeseen-visible persons in my cell space. I can hear them communicating daily, and they’ve even made threats upon my person. They have entered and exited my body and performed illegal surgical procedures upon my person, both external and internally, i.e., my neck, throat, stomach, lower torso and legs. I have visible surgical incisions all over my neck, arms and legs that are unexplainable and a close examination of facility’s medical files will reveal that I have not had any surgical procedures done upon my person…”[6]

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[1] See, for example, Pugh v. Locke 406 F.Supp 318

[2] Grassian, Stuart. “Psychopathological Effects of Solitary Confinement.” In The American Journal of Psychiatry, 140:11, November 1983, p. 1451.

[3] The questionnaire I used has been attached as an appendix.

[4] This inmate was not replying to the questionnaire.

[5] This inmate attempted suicide.

[6] This inmate was not replying to the questionnaire. It seems clear that he was hallucinating.

Not Much Going On: July 7 - 13

The title says a lot of what I want to say. Things are quiet around here. I had a great stout last Tuesday (East End Brewery Blackstrap Stout). Went out Friday evening with Ian and some people from his lab to the Harris Grill, which has a great happy hour deal (half priced draft beers from 4:30-6:30) as well as really tasty pierogis. This weekend summer league games were rescheduled, so we had two Saturday and two Sunday. It was pretty exhausting. I only sat three points all weekend and played pretty well for being exhausted. Found out that Ian and I didn't make Forge, which makes sense (seeing as the only other time we could play with them would be sectionals and regionals). I also read Newjack by Ted Conover in about three days. It's about his experiences as a corrections officer at Sing-Sing. Really intense and really good. Aside from all that I've started my report for HRC, and I've decided to post sections of it as I finish them. Hopefully I won't bore whoever is still reading my blog to death. At any rate, here's the first one. It's hot off the press (read: unedited) and is just a quick overview of the history of solitary confinement in America.

Solitary confinement is a penal practice that has a long and complex history in America. In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries the United States’ system of punishment for criminals was largely inherited from Europe. The system was based upon corporal and capital punishment: “Before independence, Americans generally flogged, branded or mutilated those felons they did not hang. Except for debtors and such minor miscreants as vagrants and drunkards, people were held behind bars only to await trial or punishment, and not as punishment.”[1] The use of incarceration as a form punishment began in 1682, when William Penn founded the province of Pennsylvania.[2] Penn instituted a criminal code that featured imprisonment, labor, fines and forfeiture in the place of punishments like branding, the stocks and death. In the years after independence prisons gained much support. In theory, they were meant to deter criminals, as well as rehabilitate them by allowing “prisoners to engage in penitent reflection.”[3] By the early 19^th century, two dominant methods of imprisonment had arisen: the Pennsylvania system and the Auburn system.

The Pennsylvania system originated in 1790 at the Walnut Street prison in Philadelphia, and was later instituted throughout Pennsylvania, notably in the large Western and Eastern State Penitentiaries. Prisoners were locked into single cells alone with a Bible, and were allowed to engage in manual labor (e.g. carpentry, weaving, shoemaking and tailoring) within their cells.[4] The Auburn system was developed at its eponymous prison in New York. The new system came about after Auburn prison had attempted to institute a modified version of the Pennsylvania system, where inmates were not allowed to work.[5] The results were disastrous. Gershom Powers, the superintendent of the prison, observed that, “a number of the convicts became insane while in solitude; one was so desperate that he…threw himself from the gallery upon the pavement, which nearly killed him…another beat and mangled his head against the walls of his cell until he destroyed one of his eyes.”[6] In contrast to the Pennsylvania system, the Auburn system allowed prisoners to work and eat together during the day, though silence was strictly enforced. The Auburn system soon became the dominant form of incarceration in the United States; it drove less men mad than the Pennsylvania system and produced more goods that states could sell.

By the late 19^th century though, the Auburn system had fallen out of favor. The system entailed the liberal use of flogging, and was marked by other ignominious practices, like forcing inmates to march in lockstep (with their arms locked to the inmate in front of them). These inhumane aspects led to its unpopularity and eventual reform. America’s distaste for the Auburn system and solitary confinement in general is powerfully demonstrated by In re Medley, a case that the Supreme Court decided in 1890. In Medley, a man convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death challenged the legality of his punishment. Colorado had passed a new law governing the treatment of people who were about to be executed after Medley had murdered his wife, but Medley was still punished according to the new law. The new statute differed from the older one in a number of ways, most notably in that the criminal was held in solitary confinement before the execution. The Supreme Court found that this constituted substantial additional punishment, hence Medley had been subjected to an ex post facto law, and they set him free. In the majority opinion, Samuel Miller reflects briefly on the use of solitary confinement in America:

But experience demonstrated that there were serious objections to it [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.[7]

In Medley, the Supreme Court recognized solitary confinement for what it is: an incredibly harsh punishment that causes dramatic mental suffering and damage, and serves almost no penological purpose.

From the late 19^th century until the 1970s solitary confinement was not used as widely or constantly as it is today. This all changed in the mid-70s with the passage of harsh laws concerning the possession and use of drugs and mandatory sentencing statutes, as well as a distinct shift in penal philosophy away from rehabilitation towards retribution and warehousing.[8] These changes led to overcrowded prisons and a lack of positive incentives (i.e. educational and vocational programming) with which to influence inmates’ behavior. Craig Haney observes, “In systems whose raison d’etre was punishment, it was not surprising that correctional officials turned to punitive mechanisms in the hope of buttressing increasingly tenuous institutional controls.”[9] Solitary confinement became one of administrators’ main tools for influencing and controlling inmate behavior. Isolation is certainly a punishment that can deter infractions, but beyond that it has become a behavior management strategy. Instead of working to rehabilitate inmates and attempting to change them, penitentiaries can now simply lock up troublesome prisoners and forget about them.

This trend is most clearly illustrated by the appearance of a new penal institution: the supermax prison. The supermax system began in October 1983, when two guards were killed at Illinois’ Marion Penitentiary and the entire prison was put on lockdown. Inmates were simply shut in their cells and all communal activities were abolished. The lockdown was never lifted. The growth of supermax prisons has been staggering. As of 2006, there are “at least 57 supermax prisons that house approximately 20,000 inmates.”[10] It is important to note that the vast majority of maximum-security prisons have their own segregation units where inmates are subjected to much the same treatment that a prisoner in a supermax prison would experience.

The circumstances of incarceration in modern supermax prisons and segregation units are shocking. Peter Smith writes,

[C]onditions typically include solitary confinement twenty-three hours each day in a barren environment, under constant high-tech surveillance. Inmates are sometimes able to shout to each other but otherwise have no social contact…Communication with the outside world is minimal. Visits and phone calls are infrequent and are severely restricted if allowed at all…The physical contact available to an inmate…may for several years ‘be limited to being touched through a security door by a correctional officer while being placed in restraints or having restraints removed.’ These facilities typically claim to operate a regime of behavior modification, but most provide few program activities such as work or education.[11]

Later in this article I will expound more fully on the physical conditions of solitary confinement, as well as its psychological effects. Suffice it to say here that this sort of isolation, experienced over a long period of time, cannot fail to produce mental distress, resulting in neurosis and even psychosis. It is also important to bear in mind that isolation is often not the only ordeal that prisoners must weather while in solitary confinement. Verbal and physical abuse, cleanliness of the facilities and inadequate medical care are only a few of the other hardships of prison.

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[1] Kunen, James S. “Teaching Prisoners a Lesson.” In The New Yorker, July 10, 1995, p.35.

[2] Lewis, Orlando Faulkland. The Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs. P.10

[3] Conover, Ted. Newjack. New York: Random House, 2000. P. 173

[4] Lewis, 30

[5] Conover, 173

[6] From Powers, Gershom. General Description of Auburn Prison, 83. Found in Lewis, 82.

[7] In re Medley, http://supreme.vlex.com/vid/in-re-medley-20057606

[8] Haney, Craig. “Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and ‘Supermax’ Confinement.” In Crime Delinquency, 2003, 128

[9] Ibid, 128

[10] Mears, Daniel P. and Watson, Jamie. “Towards a Fair and Balanced Assessment of Supermax Prisons.” In Justice Quarterly, Volume 23, Number 2, June 2006. P. 232.

[11] Smith, Peter Scharff, “The Effects of Solitary Confinement on Prison Inmates: A Brief History and Review of the Literature.” In Crime and Justice, 2.

Tempe and How We Live: July 2 - 5

I woke up awfully early Thursday morning (5:50 am), head still pounding from the night before (red wine and brandy while watching 'Taken' at Schenley, followed by Irish poker), and caught the 6:30 bus to Pittsburgh's Airport. I boarded my flight and flew to Phoenix via Minneapolis to spend the weekend with Mara. Despite the weather (average temperature of 105) and the general nature of Tempe, Phoenix and Scottsdale we managed to have an excellent time. Spent much of the day indoors with air conditioning or out by the hotel's pool. Highlights included the Desert Botanical Gardens, which were great, though absolutely exhausting in the heat, the Four Peaks Brewery and Restaurant which had a pretty legit American IPA, and my first In 'N Out Burger experience (grilled cheese, animal style). We didn't venture into Phoenix, so I can't reflect on it, but Tempe and Scottsdale were pretty awful. Tempe is a town that is clearly not built with walking in mind. The blocks and streets are huge and there is basically nothing in the town. One street (Mill St.) has some bars and restaurants, but aside from that it's a pretty dead town. All residential and small offices. Scottsdale is more tourist friendly, but everything there is either a kitschy souvenir shop or a chain. The whole area doesn't seem to have any culture or identity of its own (though its certainly tried to adopt the Native American culture for the sake of commodifying it). Instead, it's a disorienting and faceless mess of things you could find anywhere else, all uncomfortably situated in an unbearable environment. Despite that, it was still fun and totally worth it. On Sunday I managed to catch the end of the Federer-Roddick match on TV and then was almost bumped from my plane (which actually would've been awesome, the airline would've had to pay me $500, basically refunding the cost of my tickets for the entire trip, and get me another flight that night). Instead I got into Pittsburgh at 6:40 and caught the bus home only to find that our internet troubles had returned.

On the bus back from the airport I found myself thinking about Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. Below I've posted one of main passages describing it.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness

and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once

more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and

every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your

life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider

and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal

hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of

dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon

who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would

have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this

thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you.

The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more, and innumerable

times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed

would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than

this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

The obvious interpretation of this passage is that it is a sort of thought experiment, a test that we ought to subject all of our decisions and actions to. Nietzsche seems to be encouraging us to throw caution to the wind and live our lives in the most thrilling and pleasurable way possible. This jibes well with other sentiments of his. It occurred to me that this message is much the same to the one imparted by the phrase "you only live once." The parallel struck me as particularly odd. How can it be that believing you only live once and believing that your life recurs can lead to the same conclusion. Clearly in both instances you only have one life to live, (though in one of them you get to live it again and again), but it is still curious. What then leads to caution? I suppose a belief in rebirth or an afterlife may, but it is clear that not only religious people have an tendency to be inactive and careful. I think that caution may be a product of all of our social ties, to friends and family. None of us exist in a vacuum, and if we did, then it might make sense to take all the risks we wanted to do and do absolutely ridiculous things. In reality though, we feel that we have obligations to others, and these obligations tend to force us to avoid doing things that are too dangerous or outlandish.