Torture In Your Own Backyard

If Dostoevsky was right, that "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons," the United States has ceased to be civilized. When a country imprisons more than 2 million people, and when it manages to be torturing more than 20,000 of those prisoners through long term solitary confinement, something is wrong. Very, very wrong. And remarkably, the torture is thoroughly overlooked.

Torturing? Yes. Not waterboarding. Not stress positions. No. I’m talking about long term, unrelenting solitary confinement. Solitary confinement not for days, but for years, even for decades. Solitary confinement that literally drives prisoners crazy. Solitary confinement that is torture plain and simple.

In 1934 the US Government opened Alcatraz to hold the worst of US, federal prisoners. NPR explained what solitary confinement at Alcatraz's D block (pictured below) was like:

Most inmates spend many hours outside in the yard and on required work details. But a few dozen are kept in "D Block," the prison’s solitary-confinement hallway. One cell in particular is called "The Hole" -- a room of bare concrete except for a hole in the floor. There is no light, inmates are kept naked, and bread and water is shoved through a small hole in the door. Although most inmates only spend a few days in the hole, some spend years on D Block. Conditions are better than in The Hole -- inmates have clothes and food -- but they are not permitted contact with other inmates and are rarely let out of their cells. The most famous inmate on D Block is Robert Stroud, known as the "Birdman of Alcatraz," who spends six years there.

What's it like to be incarcerated in such a place? It’s not much different now from how it was more than 75 years ago at Alcatraz. In Beard v. Banks, 548 U.S. 521 (2006) the US Supreme Court described Pennsylvania’s Long Term Segregation Units (LTSU), the current prison lingo for solitary confinement:

The LTSU is divided into two levels. All inmates are initially assigned to the most restrictive level, level 2. After 90 days, depending upon an inmate's behavior, an individual may graduate to the less restrictive level 1, although in practice most do not. ...

The [3 units] all seriously restrict inmates' ordinary prison privileges. At all three units, residents are typically confined to cells for 23 hours a day, have limited access to the commissary or outside visitors, and (with the exception of some phases of the SMU) may not watch television or listen to the radio...

Prisoners at level 2 of the LTSU face the most severe form of the restrictions listed above. They have no access to the commissary, they may have only one visitor per month (an immediate family member), and they are not allowed phone calls except in emergencies... In addition they (unlike all other prisoners in the Commonwealth) are restricted in the manner at issue here: They have no access to newspapers, magazines, or personal photographs.... They are nonetheless permitted legal and personal correspondence, religious and legal materials, two library books, and writing paper... If an inmate progresses to level 1, he enjoys somewhat less severe restrictions, including the right to receive one newspaper and five magazines... The ban on photographs is not lifted unless a prisoner progresses out of the LTSU altogether...

Death Row cell at Polunsky Unit, Texas.

Is holding someone for a long period of time in these conditions torture? If that’s not already clear, it is. In a March, 2009 New Yorker article, Atul Gawande effectively argues that destroying people’s mental health through prolonged solitary confinement is torture plain and simple. Gawande notes the evidence that solitary confinement drives prisoners into insanity:

It is unclear how many prisoners in solitary confinement become psychotic. Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist, has interviewed more than two hundred prisoners in solitary confinement. In one in-depth study, prepared for a legal challenge of prisoner-isolation practices, he concluded that about a third developed acute psychosis with hallucinations. The markers of vulnerability that he observed in his interviews were signs of cognitive dysfunction—a history of seizures, serious mental illness, mental retardation, illiteracy, or... a diagnosis such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, signalling difficulty with impulse control. In the prisoners Grassian saw, about a third had these vulnerabilities, and these were the prisoners whom solitary confinement had made psychotic. They were simply not cognitively equipped to endure it without mental breakdowns.

Click here to read this feature in full.

Source: David Seth, Daily Kos, January 12, 2010