Supermax

[Are_grits_groceries]

Isolating the Menace In a Sterile Supermax

<snip>
The marquee inmates -- including Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker; "shoe bomber" Richard C. Reid; Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber; FBI agent turned traitor Robert Hanssen; and Terry L. Nichols, convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing -- wait out their days in cellblocks the warden leads reporters quickly past on the first media tour since the Florence "supermax" opened 13 years ago.
<snip>
"My major mission is inmates who were disrupting the population in other federal prisons."
<snip>
Not everyone is. Critics argue that, with their enforced isolation, supermax prisons, "like the sensory deprivation environments that were studied in the '60s, tend to induce psychosis," said Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif., who has examined scores of prisoners in state supermaxes.

Those inmates "are, on average, the most severely psychotic people I have seen in my entire 25 years of psychiatric practice," Kupers once testified.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/29/AR2007092900928.html?sid=ST2007093000318

If the men from Gitmo are put in Supermax, they aren't going anywhere. If they go into the isolation units, they may wish they were back at Gitmo. It is a torture in and of itself. Do the people in Congress have any idea what the penal system is like? Duh - that was a dumb question. They are probably only concerned with prisons if they are going to be put in one.

[ForrestGump]

1. I'm very confused

Are these characters the Symbionese Liberation Army?

[annabanana]

2. yer killin' me!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[ForrestGump]

3. No I'm not.

It's Enhanced Illustration.... :P

[surrealAmerican]

7. They're just dangerously groovy.

[csziggy]

4. In 1829 Easter State Penitentiary was the first prison built on the idea of solitude and silence

As tourists flocked to Philadelphia in the 1830s and 1840s to see this architectural wonder, a debate grew about the effectiveness and compassion of solitary confinement. Was it cruel to hold these men and women without outside visitors, without books or letters from home, without contact with the outside world? Accounts vary.

Alexis de Tocqueville visited Eastern State Penitentiary in 1831 with Gustave de Beaumont. They wrote in their report to the French government:

Thrown into solitude... reflects. Placed alone, in view of his crime, he learns to hate it; and if his soul be not yet surfeited with crime, and thus have lost all taste for any thing better, it is in solitude, where remorse will come to assail him.... Can there be a combination more powerful for reformation than that of a prison which hands over the prisoner to all the trials of solitude, leads him through reflection to remorse, through religion to hope; makes him industrious by the burden of idleness.."

Charles Dickens did not agree. He recounts his 1842 visit to Eastern State Penitentiary Chapter Seven in his travel journal, American Notes for General Circulation. The chapter is titled "Philadelphia and its Solitary Prison:"

In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who designed this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentleman who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing....I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye,... and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment in which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

The critics eventually prevailed. The Pennsylvania System was abandoned in 1913. In some countries in Europe and Asia the separate system continued until the post-Second World War period.
http://www.easternstate.org/history/sixpage.php

The efforts to keep prisoners completely silent led to horrific abuses. They were hooded when removed from their cells so they had no concept of the plan of the prison. A torturous gag was used on prisoners who broke the silence. The isolation and quiet drove some prisoners insane.

[Are_grits_groceries]

5. I had never heard of this.

I'm not surprised that Dickens could see what was really happening though.

[csziggy]

8. Eastern State is a favorite location for ghost hunters

Supposedly lots of the prisoners still are there.

[CanonRay]

6. Most of them were very psychotic before they got to Supermax

[arcadian]

9. So they were homicidal when they went in.

Now they are even more psychotic and homicidal and probably wanting to get some revenge should they ever escape. Greaaaaaaaat.

[MindPilot]

10. On the Alcatraz tour you can spend a few moments in a solitary cell

Once the door closes it is instantly disorientating and profoundly disturbing. It only takes a few seconds to get a feel for the hell it was for the prisoner. The darkness is absolute; the door is completely sealed so there is not a single photon of light gets in. But you can hear perfectly; it is is said that when the wind was right, the prisoners in solitary could hear the people partying on South Beach across the Bay.

I was in there for less than a minute, but it felt like a lifetime. Yes, I would call solitary confinement torture.

[KharmaTrain]

11. I Went To College Near There...

This was before Menard was a Supermax, but still one of the most isolated prisons in the country. One evening, a group of us were at a nearby state park. Out of nowhere we saw a dozen heavily armed men come up to us...Federal Marshalls carrying some high-powered gear and told us we had to leave. We were at least 10 miles from the prison (surrounded by nothing but forest and swamps) and someone had made a break. The next day we read in the local paper that a murderer had snuck out but didn't make it more than a mile before he was recaptured...spending a very cold and wet night with the snakes and bugs.

They rebuilt Menard since then...it's where Manuel Noriega now calls home and John Ghotti did as well. I recall a local once saying that if the guards didn't get 'em and the animals or the posse didn't, the local farmers were more than capable of defending themselves.