As Populations Swell, Prisons Rethink Supermax

[RestoreGore]

Is placing someone in solitary confinement for twenty years constitutional? It certainly isn't humane nor does it reflect well on a system that is supposed to be better than this. We are not reforming, we are making more resentful angry inmates who cannot adjust to the outside world.
~~~~~
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5587644

As Populations Swell, Prisons Rethink Supermax
by Laura Sullivan

July 27, 2006 · A growing number of prisoners are spending years in solitary confinement in prisons across the country. These prisoners eat, sleep and exist in their cells alone, with little, if any, physical contact with others. Experts say there are more than 25,000 inmates serving their sentences this way. A handful of them have been in isolation for more than 20 years. Almost every inmate in isolation will be released back into the public one day. But there are a few prison officials who are rethinking the idea of isolation -- and wondering if there might be a better way.

One of them is Don Cabana. He began his career in corrections the way most people did 30 years ago in the South: On the back of a horse, a shotgun in one hand and 100 prisoners below him, picking cotton. The inmates were prisoners at a place called Parchman, a prison deep in the farmlands of Mississippi. "Parchman was like any other prison: Nobody ever cared about it or cared what went on there," Cabana says. "And there's no question inmates were beaten and abused. I would go so far as to say some were probably even murdered."

Locking Down a Lawless Prison Environment

For almost a century, Parchman was notoriously violent. It was known as a place where inmates did hard time. By the time Don Cabana became warden in 1981, things had changed at Parchman. Much of the prisoner abuse had subsided, but there were new problems. It was overcrowded, underfunded and full of bored, violent inmates -- the result of an explosion in gangs and drug crime. Assaults on staff were increasing. Instead of worrying about the guards killing the inmates, Cabana says he worried about the inmates killing his guards.

"I had three officers stabbed one morning by one inmate," he says, "and the only reason he stabbed them is because he was trying to elevate his status in the Aryan brotherhood. Damn near kills all three of them. You know, you take your staff being injured by these people very personally, because you feel like you have failed somehow. And a warden's worst nightmare is losing a staff person."

For Cabana, that was the last straw. He pulled the inmate into his office and shut the door. "I sat there and I said, 'Well, Bubba. I tell you, you've made it to the big time,'" Cabana says, describing his conversation with the inmate. "'Are you prepared for all the benefits?' And he said, 'Well, like what?' And I said, 'I'm going to lock this place down so tight and so long that you'll never see the sunshine. And you see, I'm going to do it to a thousand inmates in here, not just you.'" That's just what Cabana did.

snip

Cabana says he didn't have any trouble getting money to build the Supermax prison, or getting state lawmakers to support the idea. And for a while after it was completed, the facility seemed to work well. Cabana says the threat of going to long-term isolation was making the rest of the inmates in general population behave.

But then, Cabana says some things started to trouble him. Inmate behavior got worse, in ways that seemed almost unbelievable. Inmates were smearing themselves with urine and feces and throwing it at the officers. "Some inmates were crazy, and wouldn't know they were throwing urine at somebody, others were just mean and doing it out of pure spite," Cabana said. "But many of them did it out of utter frustration."

snip

"Inmate hauls off and spits at you -- yeah, you want to slap the total crap out of them into the next cell," Cabana says. "Problem is, that takes you down to his level, and we're supposed to be better than that. And as a society, one of the best measures of how far a society has come is what their prisons are like. I think what we're doing in Supermax is, we're taking some bad folks, and we're making them even worse. We're making them even meaner."

snip

"Prisons have always had prisons within prisons," Cabana says. "I mean, every prison has its jailhouse for the guys you have to lock up. But the numbers of people we're incarcerating under Supermax conditions in this country -- it's just run away from us. That's not how it's supposed to be."

Like prison officials in Oregon, Wisconsin and California, Cabana says he found that building an isolation unit is a lot easier than taking one apart.

[Selatius]

1. Instead of building bigger prisons, maybe we should also answer the root problems surrounding crime.

Like poverty or social breakdown.

[RestoreGore]

2. Absolutely. But that makes too much sense and isn't profitable n/t