Supermax: Guantanamo Down The Street

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My awareness of the “prison industrial complex” about inmates with mental illnesses in supermax prisons started with a post from Lazersedge, one of the highly thought-provoking bloggers here at MMA. Musings From the Edge: The Eternal Night, a poem, served as the locus of my curiosity.

This stanza well sums up the prison industrial complex nightmare inmates suffer daily.

Hearing cries wanting for respite
Turmoil thunders it rattles in the night
Shouting everywhere it penetrates the head
Words to lead and those to be led

Only two days after we exchanged comments, a staff writer at Alternet published a post detailing the stuff of nightmares.

I was stunned at my complete ignorance about America’s prison system. The scenarios inmates experience and described can only be termed as Bosch-like horrors.

Granted, many prisoners are socio- and psychopaths who might generate a knee-jerk, “who cares” reaction from most people. The abuse and torture in prisons begs at least some scrutiny. This is one of those “chicken or the egg” questions: are prisoners somewhat sane when they become incarcerated? Or, does prison turn inmates into socio- and psychopaths?

Mental illness occurs rapidly in what seems little difference between the iron maiden, the rack, and the SHU. The term “correctional facility” is a euphemism which needs closer inspection. There’s nothing “correctional” about a supermax.

A brief Google search quickly provides a frightening glimpse into the inferno in which inmates live. The more sites one browses, the stronger the impression that much of the tortuous practices that occurred at Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib were honed within the confines of America’s Borders.

What occurs in American prisons is, simply, a terrifying nightmare. Inmate torture and lack of adequate medical and psychological care is an unimaginable horror. Whether some inmates deserve this maltreatment is open to question.

The edited text of the following post appears at Alternet, “Americans Face Guantanamo Like Torture Everyday In A Super-max Prison Near you relates specifically to a Maine supermax. To make matters worse, the author noted that possible worse scenarios occur in other prisons. Prison reform is an issue that need to occur—immediately.

Please note that much of the source material is an edit from the Alternet article, and is credited as such, concerning the Maine State Prison in Warren, ME. However, I include similar references to other sites, especially those pertaining to isolation wards or secured housing units (SHUs).


The Alternet post describes common cell extractions in Maine’s supermax. noting that the practice of “cell extraction” is not the worst example that occurs: “They beat the shit out of you…” [the inmate stated. He] … “They push you, knee you, poke you,… slam your head against the wall and drop you on the floor while you’re cuffed.”

… James… has been beaten all his life, first by family members: “I was punched, kicked, slapped, bitten, thrown against the wall.” He began seeing mental-health workers at four and taking psychiatric medication at seven, said he was bipolar and had many other disorders. When a doctor took him off his meds at age eighteen, he got into “selling drugs, robbing people, fighting, burglaries.” He received a 12-year sentence for robbery.

Of the four years James had been in prison… he spent all but five months in solitary confinement. The isolation is “mental torture, even for people who are able to control themselves,” [James] said. It included periods alone in a cell “with no blankets, no clothes, butt-naked, mace covering me.” Everything James told me was confirmed by other inmates and prison employees.

The Obama administration… plans to shut down the Guantánamo detention center and ship its inmates to one or more supermaxes in the United States, as though this would mark a substantive change… inmates suffer weeks, months, years, or even decades of mind-destroying isolation… Prisoners may be regularly beaten in cell extractions, and they receive meager health services. The isolation frequently leads to insane behavior including self-injury and suicide attempts.

[Five cell extractions once occurred in Maine’s supermax] in a single day…. “hollering guards wearing helmets and body armor charge into the cell. The point man smashes a big shield into the prisoner. The others spray mace into his face, push him onto the bed, and twist his arms behind his back to handcuff him, connecting the cuffs by a chain to leg irons. As they continue to mace him, the guards carry him screaming to an observation room, where they bind him to a special chair. He remains there for hours.”

The post continues,”As described by prisoners and guards and vividly revealed in a leaked video (the Maine prison records these events to ensure that inmates are not mistreated), an extraction is the supermax’s normal, zero-tolerance reaction to prisoner disobedience… as minor as protesting bad food by covering the cell door’s tiny window with a piece of paper. ”

… an inmate spends 23 hours a day alone in a 6.5’x14′ space… Mental-health care usually amounts to a five-minute, through-the-steel-door conversation with a social worker [not a psychologist or a psychiatrist] once or twice a week…. A Wisconsin study found that 3/4 of the prisoners in one solitary-confinement unit were mentally ill. In Maine, over half of supermax inmates are classified as having a serious mental illness.

In 2007, Michael James was tried on 10 assault charges for biting and kicking guards and throwing feces at them… But prison officials and the state attorney general’s office saw the verdict as another kind of landmark: never before in Maine had a convict been committed to the mental hospital after being tried for assault on guards.

Inmate Michael Chasse “describes an SMU inmate [James] who constantly tried to cut himself because “he was so frustrated with the ways officers treated him… That kid has gone nuts since he was put in here. I’ve seen him get beat up. I’ve seen two cops jamming his hands in a tray slot.”

He tells of the psychological effects of being locked into his cell for 23 hours a day: There is a noise that comes from the air vents. The sounds start to seem like voices. I have built imaginary relationships with those white noises.

[Attorney Joseph] Steinberger wrote to Maine’s governor—John Baldacci, a Democrat—begging him to intervene and send James to the hospital:

He continually slits open his arms and legs with chips of paint and concrete, smears himself and his cell with feces, strangles himself to unconsciousness with his clothing…. He also bites, hits, kicks, spits at, and throws urine and feces on his guards.

His behavior was never in dispute, but the governor declined to intervene.

“The most widely accepted legal definition of torture is in The UN Convention Against Torturd Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty to which the US is party and is therefore U.S. law…. [by] definition, torture is treatment that causes ‘severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental,’ inflicted by officials for purposes of punishment or coercion.”

“Severe pain and suffering as punishment are the norm in supermaxes. … Even in the careful words of diplomacy and when only mental suffering is considered, supermax conditions, especially solitary confinement of prisoners for extended periods, have increasingly been described by UN agencies and human rights organizations as cruel, inhuman, degrading, verging on torture, or outright torture.

Even prison guards and officers experience psychologically deleterious effects working in isolation wards. Sgt. Gary Harkins notes that he was on great terms with inmates in general population. But when they got sent to segregation, [inmates] would no longer even look at him… something changes,” he says. “They become hostile. They become withdrawn.

[W]hen he thinks about solitary now, from outside the prison’s walls, he says he finds himself worried as much about the unit’s effect on prisoners as he is about its effect on officers… “Those people are going to be your neighbors some day,” Harkins says. “And if our system is maintaining people in a negative, antisocial way… we’re not doing society any good.”.

Solitary confinement is by far the worst torture in the supermax. Human minds fare poorly in isolation, which “often results in severe exacerbation of a previously existing mental condition or in the appearance of a mental illness where none had been observed before,”

Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist and authority on solitary confinement… believes supermaxes produce a syndrome characterized by “agitation, self-destructive behavior, and overt psychotic disorganization… primitive aggressive fantasies, paranoia, and hallucinations. Consensus among scholars concerned with solitary confinement…. [and stated to] a legislative committee [note] that Maine’s supermax treats its inmates worse than its peers in many states.

Alternet also provides a brief history of the practice of solitary confinement:

British and other Europeans used solitary confinement starting in the mid-19th Century, taking as models the American penitentiaries that had invented mass isolation in the 1820s. Europe largely gave it up later in the century because, rather than becoming penitent, prisoners went insane. A shocked Charles Dickens, after visiting a Pennsylvania prison in 1842, called solitary confinement “immeasurably worse than any torture of the body. Americans gave it up, too, in the late 1800s, only to resurrect it a century later.

Wardens claim supermaxes decrease prison violence. False. A study published in The Prison Journal in 2008 finds “no empirical evidence to support the notion that supermax prisons are effective… when enraged and mentally damaged inmates rejoin the general prison population or the outside world… a new population of prisoners who, on account of lengthy stints in isolation units, are not well prepared to return to a social milieu…. frequently released from solitary confinement directly onto the street—“may be time bombs waiting to explode,” criminologist Hans Toch writes.

“Supermax prisons are expensive, ineffective, and they drive people mad.” … So what can be done? How does society adequately and successfully define prison reform? Charles Manson spent many years in recidivism, revolving in and out of incarceration door before the Tate-LaBianca butchery.

It gets worse. The Prison Litigation Reform Act, a law signed by President Bill Clinton restricts an inmate’s right to sue corrections officials, an individual prisoner has little ability to mount a court challenge to his placement or prison conditions… And on the rare occasions when prisoners make it to court, they usually have to represent themselves. Unlike at Guantánamo, lawyers from prosperous Manhattan firms are not lining up to offer services pro bono to penniless supermax inmates. [Now, I have another reason for my antipathy towards Clinton.]

As far back as 2004, SF Gate reported that:

For six years, Jason Treas lived in a world of one….
no physical contact with another living being…. just three face-to-face conversations during those years through a glass partition. He never spoke on the phone. He never saw a blade of grass or a bird from the bare-walled, windowless room in which he spent 22-1/2 hours a day… The background noise to his world of one was the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the shouts of other inmates whose faces he couldn’t see.

At the end of the six years, Treas was dropped off in San Francisco on an April afternoon last year with the clothes on his back and $200 in his pocket. “It was sensory overload,” Treas said over lunch Monday at a Mexican restaurant on Mission Street. “I was so nervous I thought I was going to throw up.”

He had migraines for weeks from the sun. He was frightened in crowds. He had no job. His father was a drug addict. His mother had disowned him. He fully understood, now that he was without a job or the skills to function normally in society, why so many men end up back in prison.

The foregoing is only a minuscule part of the emotional anguish inmates suffer. Perhaps too often, inmates suffer at the hands of some guards whose behavior can only be described as sadistic, or perhaps sociopathology.

In any case supermax torture wasn’t instituted because of a utilitarian calculation about dollars and cents. “The object of torture is torture,” wrote George Orwell.


End of redacted Alternet post combined with additional research concerning SHUs and isolation.

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Dorothy Anderson

I want to know what you think and why, especially if we disagree. Civil discourse is free speech: practice daily. Always question your perspective.
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Michael John Scott
13 years ago

I have spent time in America’s prisons, not as a prisoner, but as an “observer with privileges.” I have consulted and taught corrections administrators and officers. I knew (know) hundreds of inmates and all of them deserved to be where they are. Remember only the violent and unruly end up in super max, and they are placed there for the safety of the officers and other inmates, those who still deserve a chance.

Never once did I witness, or hear about “torture.” Inmates who do not comply with rules cannot be convinced to do so with cupcakes. It takes brute force. The discipline that follows is isolation. There has to be discipline or everyone will be be acting out. There have to be consequences for misbehavior.

Now, understand that the people who are in super max are the scum of the earth. They have raped your mother, murdered your husband, sodomized you, and let your children watch. They are as evil as they come, but they are not “tortured.” They are required to follow rules.

What happened at Abu Graib does not happen in America’s prisons. The regulation and control are too tight. The oversight too strict. Any incidents would be isolated and not widespread despite the “Shawshank Redemption.”

As to the “guards” more appropriately referred to as “corrections officers” they are well trained. They attend academies lasting up to 6 months and then often a year of probation.

Despite that one cannot guarantee that the human being will always act with “love.” I have investigated the occasional act of brutality, after a raging, spitting inmate threw feces. I have investigated those things. Are people trained to have no emotions? Are we not supposed to get angry?

So what do we do with these scumbags? There are some that just need to die. That is the alternative to super-max. They need to die, painlessly of course, with a bullet in the back of the head. The alternative is super-max. They cannot be released. They will rape, murder, torture and dismember your family, your neighbor’s family or just some poor bastard that stopped in to but a cup of coffee. I have no sympathy for these monsters, for I have seen them up and close.

Finally as to “cell extractions” I ask any reader how they can effectively neutralize an inmate who is in an 8×10 cell, and ready to kill when you come in the door? Of course you have to use force. They are screaming, kicking, biting and fighting. Extracting healthy, muscular and wired sociopaths is not an easy task.

That being said I salute those who still campaign for the rights of all human beings, even the seriously evil ones. There are much worse things. Finally, and as you mentioned Sis, it all comes back to the wallet.

Peace 🙂

dp1053
Reply to  Michael John Scott
13 years ago

I also have to wonder how an average sized corrections officer is supposed to control a pissed-off 300lb monster that has nothing to do all day except pump up and build muscle. Can’t these muscle-bound morons be put to some kind of productive work?

Michael John Scott
Reply to  dp1053
13 years ago

Those that end up in the super max wings of institutions are there because they pose a threat to less dangerous inmates. They refuse to work and spend their long days trying to figure out how to kill each other and corrections officers.

Reply to  dp1053
13 years ago

Prison labor does still exist, but it will depend upon the jurisdiction, the institution, and, as Mr. Mad points out, the willingness of the inmate to work.

Reply to  Michael John Scott
13 years ago

MadMike, I agree with your posting point-for-point. You bring up a great point with the following:

“Finally as to “cell extractions” I ask any reader how they can effectively neutralize an inmate who is in an 8×10 cell, and ready to kill when you come in the door?”

Supermax prisons are rarely used, so as much as I hate to say it, to me the treatment of those in supermax is a less significant story than that of the millions kept under the watch of other aspects of our correctional system. While I agree that the strategies for “cell extractions” will appear particularly brutal for the common reader, there is a reality to imprisonment that Mike points out well: “Inmates who do not comply with rules cannot be convinced to do so with cupcakes.” As I used to see it in the context of child-rearing–as the regulating body, you always need to hold the move for check-mate. Obtaining compliance behind bars requires that you always have something worse to threaten inmates with, and (as with parenting) you need to be able to follow through on those threats where compliance isn’t granted. The difference between prison and parenting, of course, is the population being dealt with–if only the “you’ll lose all of your littlest pet shop toys” threat would work with inmates! As the hardest-of-the-hardened criminals are funneled to harsher and harsher penalties, society needs to hold up some pretty ugly threats to gain compliance.

To me, the largest concern with supermax is the type of system that we’ve cornered ourselves into, by becoming so reliant upon incarceration in the first place. We take people who have issues, and the worse we perceive them to be, the more we put them into conditions that will make them even worse. It’s an ugly spiral, and while “there’s got to be a better way,” we just haven’t found that way yet.

oso
13 years ago

Thank you Stella.
I believe the US has more people locked up than any country in the world, and assuming Americans are no worse than anyone else then there’s something radically wrong here.

I agree that it can be difficult to generate sympathy for prisoners, but fact is there are a lot of decent people who made some mistakes and got caught up in the system.

Superior post, mi amiga!

Michael John Scott
Reply to  oso
13 years ago

It is true O-man that we incarcerate more prisoners than anywhere in the world. It is because we have good law enforcement and lots of crime for them to solve.

It is also true that many, many inmates deserve a second chance, but not those who spend their lives in super max. They are there for a reason. Fortunately, it is only a very small percentage of inmates who deserve such an honor, despite what one may see on the news.

Reply to  Michael John Scott
13 years ago

I agree with each component of your comment individually if not in totality. I have ample respect for the quality of our law enforcement, but believe it to have little bearing on our incarceration rates.

We dohave lots of crime–violent crime in particular, relative to other nations. Of course, violent offenders have been declining as a portion of our incarcerated population, with more space going to drug and property offenders–and, except for minor declines in the past couple of years, our incarcerated population had continued to increase over the last 20 years despite substantial declines in our crime rates (including violent crime).

For all of our crime, and for the high quality of most of our LE, the incarceration rates can only be traced back to our sentencing policies, and law enforcement crackdowns–often on minor/drug offenses. Of course, 35% of prison admissions in 2009 were actually parole violators and not new commitments, and the BJS doesn’t make clear whether this even includes probation revocations…but I hear nobody gives a sh*t about community corrections. 😉

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