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Atul Gawande, Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?

The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture? [...] Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the “soul-destroying loneliness,” as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact. [...] If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has? [...] The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.

[...] Is there an alternative? Consider what other countries do. Britain, for example, has had its share of serial killers, homicidal rapists, and prisoners who have taken hostages and repeatedly assaulted staff. The British also fought a seemingly unending war in Northern Ireland, which brought them hundreds of Irish Republican Army prisoners committed to violent resistance. The authorities resorted to a harshly punitive approach to control, including, in the mid-seventies, extensive use of solitary confinement. But the violence in prisons remained unchanged, the costs were phenomenal (in the United States, they reach more than fifty thousand dollars a year per inmate), and the public outcry became intolerable. British authorities therefore looked for another approach. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, they gradually adopted a strategy that focussed on preventing prison violence rather than on delivering an ever more brutal series of punishments for it. The approach starts with the simple observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence. So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed “Close Supervision Centres,” prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, “contact visits,” and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to track the results and enable adjustments based on the data. The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in “extreme custody” than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.

MetaFilter, Everything You Bever Wanted to Know About the American Prison-Industrial Complex

“I’ve gone into this in greater detail before, but it is worth remembering that, of our prison population of over 3 million, less than ten percent were convicted by trial before a jury. We’ve filled our prisons not by means of a public and transparent due process, but by backroom and off-record interrogation, by deals brokered in private and under duress.”

Bureau of Labor Statistics, How the Government Measures Unemployment:

Excluded are persons under 16 years of age, all persons confined to institutions such as nursing homes and prisons, and persons on active duty in the Armed Forces.

Christopher Beam, How Do Prisons Deal with Overcrowding?

Tight quarters lead to higher levels of violence between prisoners.

National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, Executive Summary:

More than 7.3 million Americans are confined in U.S. correctional facilities or supervised in the community, at a cost of more than $68 billion annually. [...] Air Force veteran Tom Cahill, who was arrested and detained for just a single night in a San Antonio jail, recalled the lasting effects of being gang-raped and beaten by other inmates. “I’ve been hospitalized more times than I can count and I didn’t pay for those hospitalizations, the tax payers paid. My career as a journalist and photographer was completely derailed. . . . For the past two decades, I’ve received a non-service connected security pension from the Veteran’s Administration at the cost of about $200,000 in connection with the only major trauma I’ve ever suffered, the rape.” [The Bureau of Justice Statistics] conducted the first wave of surveys in 2007 in a random sample of 146 State and Federal prisons and 282 local jails. A total of 63,817 incarcerated individuals completed surveys, providing the most comprehensive snapshot of sexual abuse in prisons and jails to date. Four-and-a-half percent of prisoners surveyed reported experiencing sexual abuse one or more times during the 12 months preceding the survey or over their term of incarceration if they had been confined in that facility for less than 12 months. Extrapolated to the national prison population, an estimated 60,500 State and Federal prisoners were sexually abused during that 12-month period. [...] Sexual abuse is not an inevitable feature of incarceration. Leadership matters because corrections administrators can create a culture within facilities that promotes safety instead of one that tolerates abuse. Certain individuals are more at risk of sexual abuse than others. Corrections administrators must routinely do more to identify those who are vulnerable and protect them in ways that do not leave them isolated and without access to rehabilitative programming. Few correctional facilities are subject to the kind of rigorous internal monitoring and external oversight that would reveal why abuse occurs and how to prevent it. Dramatic reductions in sexual abuse depend on both.

AP, Governor Delays Ohio Execution After Vein Troubles:

The team began working on [Romell] Broom, in a holding cell 17 steps from the execution chamber, at about 2 p.m., four hours after his execution was originally scheduled. That initial delay was due to a final federal appeals request.  After the team spent nearly an hour trying to find a workable vein, Broom tried to help them bring him a quicker death. He turned over on his left side, slid rubber tubing designed to clarify his veins up his left arm, then began moving the arm up and down while flexing and closing and opening his fingers. The execution team was able to access a vein, but it collapsed when technicians tried to insert saline fluid.  Broom then became visibly distressed, turning over on his back and covering his face with both hands. His torso heaved up and down and his feet shook, as he appeared to be crying. He wiped his eyes and was handed a roll of toilet paper, which he used to wipe his brow.  He sat up at the end of the bed and talked with his execution team. The team had been asking Broom whether he wanted a break, but he chose to push ahead, as did the execution staff, prisons director Terry Collins said. Collins then insisted on a break and contacted the governor to let him know about the difficulties.

Broom, who did not have any witnesses present, requested that one of his attorneys, Adele Shank, come to the witness area. She asked to speak with Broom but was told that once the process started, it’s protocol that attorneys can’t have contact with their client.  “I want to know what Romell wants,” Shank told a prison official, who told her that he was being cooperative.  “He’s always cooperative,” responded Shank. “I want to know what he wants me to do.”  At about 3:20, the team tried to insert shunts through veins in Broom’s legs as he sat upright on the table. He looked up several times during the process and appeared to grimace. A member of the execution team reached over and patted him on the back.  Roughly five minutes later, the team returned to Broom’s arms to again try to access a vein and get the saline solution to work. [...] Collins said the team would try to determine, before Broom’s next scheduled execution date, how to resolve the problem with finding suitable veins.  A medical evaluation Monday determined that veins in Broom’s right arm appeared accessible, while those in his left arm were not as visible.

David Grann, Trial by Fire:

There is a chance that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

All articles continue at links.  We all have to pick our battles, or die trying to fight on all fronts.  Prison reform isn’t as popular a topic as recycling, global warming, animal rights or same-sex marriage.  But I wish it were more popular.  I wish it was the subject of Michael Moore’s next film.  I wish it was discussed by the next set of candidates running for the Presidency of the USA.  I’ve got my ideas, if anyone is listening.  Start by ending prohibition.  Next release any prisoner with no previous legal troubles who is in prison only due to prohibition.  Then release any prisoner with a prior record but who is in prison expressly due to prohibition.  If I’m reading the statistics right, that would reduce the prison population by twenty percent.  That’s a budget increase of twenty percent to lessen prison rape, offer work opportunities or just about anything else.  I’d ban the death penalty in all states in all cases – there’s a wad of money (and lives) saved that can be put to better use.  I’d negate mandatory sentencing laws and allow judges to act as judges.  I’d see how other countries are handling things and copy what works.  Anybody listening?