New Video: Dr. Terry Kupers on Solitary Confinement and Mental Health

April 24, 2013 By 6 Comments

kupersDr. Terry Kupers, Institute Professor at the Wright Institute in San Francisco and Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, is among the foremost national experts on the mental health effects of solitary confinement. Dr. Kupers delivered the keynote address at the Strategic Convening on Solitary Confinement and Human Rights, sponsored by the Midwest Coalition on Human Rights, on November 9, 2012, in Chicago, Illinois.

In his address, which is presented in the four videos below, Dr. Kupers provides a comprehensive overview of the psychological damage inflicted on people subjected to prolonged solitary confinement, detailing how use of the practice qualifies as an intentional human rights abuse. He also addresses the use of confinement in supermax prisons and the lacking quality of and inaccessibility to mental health care to those held in isolation (people who clearly urgently require adequate counseling to cope with the extreme distress of their isolation). Finally, Dr. Kupers touches on the detrimental impact of sexual abuse that takes place in detention facilities.

 

 

 

Filed Under: corrections industry, featured posts, human rights, mental illness, politics of punishment, prison health care, psychological effects, sexual assault, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons, torture, video Tagged With: , , , ,

Opposing the Architecture of Isolation: Architects Against Solitary Confinement

April 15, 2013 By 9 Comments
Guest Post by Raphael Sperry

Raphael Sperry is an architect, green building consultant, teacher, and outspoken advocate on the role of architecture in social justice issues. He founded and directs the “Alternatives to Incarceration / Prison Design Boycott Campaign” of the non-profit Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) and has presented his research at numerous professional association conventions and architecture schools. He teaches the Green Architecture studio at Stanford University’s Architectural Design program and has championed sustainability strategies for a wide variety of institutional and commercial projects. Sperry was named a 2012 Soros Justice Fellow for the project he describes in the following essay, which originally appeared on the website of the Open Society Foundations.

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Photo: Christoph Gielen, Untitled XVI Arizona, 2010.

Photo: Christoph Gielen, Untitled XVI Arizona, 2010.

When I say that I’m an architect researching criminal justice, many people think that I want to design “better” prisons. In fact, I want architects to stop designing supermax prisons altogether. As the incoming president of the small non-profit organization Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, I have just launched a campaign asking my mainstream professional organization, the American Institute of Architects (AIA), to amend its code of ethics to ban the design of spaces intended for execution and prolonged solitary confinement.At its root, this is a human rights campaign. The human rights community agrees that the death penalty should be ended and that prolonged solitary confinement is a form of torture. AIA’s code of ethics already calls on architects to “uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors,” and so  you might think that this would be a relatively simple amendment. But this ethics code is not currently enforceable; a new 500-bed solitary isolation prison is now out for design bids in Arizona and as recently as 2010, the State of California redesigned and rebuilt their death chamber. I am hopeful that AIA will do the right thing, but know that there is a fear of challenging government and general misconceptions about the public’s view of the death penalty and harsh treatment of prisoners. Many architects will need to more fully understand the issues before things can change.

I have begun contacting chapters of the AIA and other architecture and design organizations, looking for opportunities to speak to their members and encourage their decision-makers to consider endorsing our campaign. AIA is a member-oriented organization, but architects hold public licenses and have public responsibilities. We care about public opinion.

Professional responsibility is a major theme of this campaign. Architects are responsible for, among other things, protecting public “health, safety, and welfare” in the buildings we design. It shouldn’t be asking too much to ensure that our buildings aren’t intended to hurt or kill members of the public. In this respect, I take inspiration from doctors and nurses. Their professional associations prohibit members from participating in executions or torture. Medical professionals understand that they cannot agree to government requests to hurt or kill their patients; it would violate their ethics. I expect that public respect for architects will increase as we expand our own commitment to human rights.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: corrections industry, guest posts, human rights, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , ,

Lawsuit Filed Against Solitary Confinement of 800 “Seriously Mentally Ill” in Pennsylvania

March 18, 2013 By 3 Comments
RHU cell of prisoner Matthew Bullock, who committed suicide in 2009.

RHU cell of Matthew Bullock, who committed suicide in 2009.

The Disability Rights Network of Pennsylvania  (DRNP) has filed a lawsuit against John Wetzel, the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, charging that the confinement of prisoners in Restricted Housing Units (RHUs) amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment” of those diagnosed as “seriously mentally ill.” The suit seeks an end to long-term segregation of such individuals and seeks an order that DOC prisoners “receive constitutionally adequate mental health care.”

According to the lawsuit, people in the RHUs  are “locked in extremely small cells for at least 23 hours a day on weekdays and 24 hours a day on weekends and holidays. Typically, the lights are on in the cell all the time. The prisoners are denied adequate mental health care and prohibited from working, participating in educational or rehabilitative programs, or attending religious services.”

Prisoners in the RHU are generally held alone, notes the lawsuit, though even in cases when they are assigned a cellmate, this may be “as deleterious to their mental health as solitary confinement” if the cellmate is “psychotic or violent.”

Placing people in such conditions, can create a “Dickensian nightmare,” in which prisoners “are trapped in an endless cycle of isolation and punishment, further deterioration of their mental illness, deprivation of adequate mental health treatment, and inability to qualify for parole.”

The lawsuit provides profiles of 11 men and one woman housed in the RHU, which serve to illustrate the widespread use of solitary confinement against prisoners who have been diagnosed as having “serious mental illnesses.” A man identified as “Prisoner #1″ is described in the lawsuit as having been diagnosed with a delusional disorder with paranoid features and a borderline intellectual diability. Initially placed in a Special Needs Unit, in which prisoners receive psychiatric treatment, he was frequently placed in the RHU following incidents precipitated by delusions. Despite expressing suicidal thoughts before and during his confinement in the RHU, he remained in the RHU until he committed suicide by hanging on May 6, 2011.

“Prisoner #8″ is a 28-year old man at State Correctional Institution-Green (SCI-Green) who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, a psychotic disorder, a paraphilia, and a personality disorder. According to the lawsuit, he claims to receive “messages from the television and from dead people.” The lawsuit states that he has expressed suicidal ideation and has been placed in the RHU after being deemed by the Department of Corrections a “danger to himself and others.”

The lawsuit charges that Wetzel “knows or is deliberately indifferent to the fact that the DOC’s treatment of individuals with mental illness, including the practice of segregating them for long periods of time in RHUs, can cause grave harm to their mental health.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: corrections industry, Eighth Amendment, lawsuits/litigation, mental illness, Pennsylvania, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , ,

Tracking the Rise of Solitary Confinement in America———-and of the Struggle Against It

March 1, 2013 By 1 Comment

marion lockdown_demoThe use of long-term solitary confinement was born in the United States in the late 18th Century, at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail and later its Eastern State Penitentiary. It was largely abandoned after it was found to cause madness and death, and was used only sparingly for a century and a half. The widespread use of long-term solitary was reborn in 1983, in what came to be known as the Marion Lockdown. Following the murders of two prison guards at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, the entire prison was put on lockdown status–and never taken off. Prisoners were held in round-the-clock solitary confinement, and Marion became the model for “control unit prisons”–the supermaxes and Special Housing Units that were built in large numbers in the two decades following the lockdown.

A new book by Nancy Kurshan, published by the Freedom Archives in San Francisco, details the history of the movement that rose up in response in the form of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown (CEML), which Kurshan co-founded in 1985 and which eventually turned into a broader campaign against isolated confinement. Out of Control: The Fifteen Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons, is available online in an abridged version, and the book can be purchased from the Freedom Archives.

Earlier this month, Angola 3 News published a long interview with Nancy Kurshan. The first few questions and answers are reprinted below; the full interview can be read on the A3 News site.

Angola 3 News: Your new book chronicles fifteen years of organizing against control unit prisons, from 1985-2000. Can you begin the interview by explaining exactly what a control unit prison is?

Nancy Kurshan: There are at least 2 ways to answer that question. One is to describe the daily workings. The other is to elucidate the underlying dynamics.

There are variations from prison to prison, but generally speaking, a control unit prison is one in which every prisoner is locked away in their own individual box about 23 hours a day under conditions of severe sensory deprivation. The prisoner eats, sleeps and defecates in the windowless cell. Meals come through a slot in the door. In some cases the prisoner may be out of the cell a couple of times a week for exercise, but in other circumstances the exercise area is even more limited and is attached to the cell itself. Most control unit prisons have little access to education or any recreational outlets.

Usually, control units severely restrict the prisoner’s connection not just with other prisoners, but with family and friends in the outside world. At Marion, only family members could visit, upon approval, and only for a small number of visits per month. The amount of time allowed per visit was severely restricted, and there was no privacy whatsoever and no contact permitted between prisoner and visitor. Visiting took place over a plexiglass wall and through telephones. Guards were always within earshot. The prisoner had to be searched before and after, sometimes cavity searched. The visitor had to undergo a body search as well. The prisoners were brought to the visit in shackles.

Regarding the underlying dynamics, the intent is to make the prisoner feel that his or her life is completely out of control. That is not an unintended consequence. The purpose of the control unit is to make the person feel helpless, powerless and completely dependent upon the prison authorities. The intent is to strip the individual of any agency, any ability to direct his or her own life. A control unit institutionalizes solitary confinement as a way of exerting full control over as much of the prisoner’s life as possible.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, corrections industry, federal prisons, political prisoners, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , ,

Solidarity and Solitary: When Unions Clash With Prison Reform

February 21, 2013 By 21 Comments

tamms protestOn January 4, 2013, Tamms Supermax in southern Illinois officially closed its doors. The prison, where some men had been in solitary confinement for more than a decade, had become notorious for its brutal treatment of prisoners with mental illness–and for driving sane prisoners to madness and suicide. The closure of Tamms, under order of Governor Pat Quinn, was celebrated as a victory by human rights and prison reform groups, and by the local activists who had fought for years to do away with what they saw as a torture chamber in their own backyards.

The major force that had opposed the closure of Tamms–and indeed, delayed it for many months–was the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. AFSCME challenged Quinn’s order through its legislative allies, stalled it through the courts, and mounted a public campaign to keep the prison open. The battle over the future of Tamms became the most visible and contentious example of a phenomenon seen, in one form or another, around the country: Otherwise progressive unions are taking reactionary positions when it comes to prisons, supporting addiction to mass incarceration. And when it comes to issues of prisoners rights in general, and solitary confinement in particular, they are seen as a major obstacle to reform.

With more than 1.6 million members nationwide, AFSCME is generally viewed as a liberal-minded organization that played an important part in developing the trade union movement in the public sector. It was during a march in support of an AFSCME strike in Memphis that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Today AFSCME is seen as a prime labor force behind Obama’s presidential victories, a great backer of health care reform, and, in a time of labor’s decline, the biggest organizing union in the AFL-CIO.

In a commentary in the Chicago Sun-Times, scholar and activist Stephen F. Eisenman of the group Tamms Year Ten pointed out that in the 1960s and 70s, “AFSCME’s leadership understood that workers’ rights and human rights were inseparable.” Then-president Jerry Wurf, he writes, “combined compassion with organizing zeal. When the big psychiatric hospitals, such as New York’s Creedmoor, were being decertified, he did not argue to keep them all open. Instead, he fought to ensure that de-institutionalized mental health patients received adequate community and home care. Because he knew these hospitals were hellholes, he was willing to sacrifice some union jobs for the good of people with mental illnesses. But Wurf lost that battle. The national recession of the 1970s intervened, and a generation of patients were turned out in the streets without proper support. These are precisely the people who now fill our nation’s jails and prisons.”

Today, in contrast, AFSCME fights to keep these prisons open even when no jobs appear to be at stake. From the start, all of the union’s members working at Tamms were guaranteed placement in other prisons, and no jobs were lost when the supermax closed.  But the union took the position that conditions at Tamms–which had been widely denounced as cruel, inhumane, and ineffective–were necessary to maintaining prison safety and security, as well as keeping jobs in southern Illinois. In response, Tamms Year Ten mounted protests in which prisoner’s family members held signs stating, “Torture Is a Crime–Not a Career,” ”My Son Is Not a Paycheck,” and “We Support Unions That Support Human Rights.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: California, civil liberties/civil rights, corrections industry, cost/budget issues, featured posts, Florida, Illinois, Maine, New York, politics of punishment, private prisons, psychological effects, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , ,

The End of Tamms Supermax

January 9, 2013 By 1 Comment

tamms-chicago-4-224x300As the new year began, the notorious Tamms state supermax in southern Illinois closed its doors forever. The closure marked the end of a decade-long effort that combined legal and political pressure with press exposes and tireless grassroots organizing. One excellent recap of this effort and its remarkable outcome was published by In These Times, here. Two more can be found on ACLU’s Blog of Rights, here and here. The second piece, quoted below, describes the role played by the men who were buried alive in Tamms.

Put simply, men were sent to Tamms to disappear.

Tamms was sold to the public as necessary to control the “worst of the worst” prisoners in Illinois. Yet when it opened in 1998, the majority of prisoners had virtually no disciplinary history at all. Rather, Tamms was populated by men who had sued the Department, filed grievances, and otherwise complained about illegal conduct by prison officials—wardens were looking for a way to get rid of these headaches. Other men transferred to Tamms had long histories of mental illness—which had never been treated in prison. Many were sent to Tamms because someone had claimed, at some point in the past, that they were gang leaders—even though most had never been found guilty of any gang activity. When the Uptown People’s Law Center challenged the placement of our clients in Tamms, we were told that these men were not entitled to a hearing, and would not be told why they had been sent to Tamms.

Some of these men have spent the last 15 years in complete and total solitary confinement at Tamms.

Tamms officially closes its doors today, first and foremost because the men sent there did not disappear. Rather than buckle under the extreme psychological pressure of solitary confinement, they banded together, fought back, and reached out and educated and organized their families and friends…

Like other “supermax” facilities, Tamms was designed to ensure that prisoners could be housed in complete isolation—never coming in contact with another prisoner, and only rarely coming in contact with staff. There is no dining hall; there is no chapel; there is no library; there are no classrooms; there is no yard. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are brought to prisoners in their cells—passed through a slot in a steel door. Medical and mental health care is generally provided through the cell door—with no privacy, and minimal ability for medical professionals to examine or even conduct a meaningful conversation with the men they are supposed to be caring for.

In a brave act, the men at Tamms initiated a prison-wide hunger strike in 2000. They asked for such simple things as shoes to wear outside that would protect their feet; the right to clean their own showers; and for other activities to productively occupy their time. The vast majority of prisoners refused meals the first day; dozens refused meals for a week; three lasted over 30 days…

Two of the last men out in December, 2012, were also two of the first men to arrive at Tamms in March, 1998. They survived almost 15 years in total isolation. While closing Tamms is a tremendous victory, we cannot forget the terrible price paid by human beings as a result of this 15 year experiment in torture.

For more background, see “Trapped in Tamms,” the groundbreaking series published in the Belleville News-Democrat, as well as our earlier piece on Tamms in Mother Jones.

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, corrections industry, cost/budget issues, Illinois, lawsuits/litigation, psychological effects, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , , , , ,

Tamms Supermax: Report Reveals More Guards Than Prisoners, Soaring Costs

December 4, 2012 By 1 Comment

The Belleville News-Democrat known for a 2009 exposé that helped rouse opposition to conditions at Tamms Supermax, has now provided new ammunition in the longstanding battle to close the notorious prison. In addition to being both unnecessary and abusive, Tamms is incredibly inefficient, according to a new story by George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer.

Tamms Supermax, which is part of the Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois, holds all its inmates in solitary confinement, which was the purpose of the facility’s design. After years of activist opposition and legal wrangling, it is now two-thirds empty. According to the News-Democrat:

Tamms has 208 guards and supervisors in its maximum-security unit, or C-max, to handle 138 prisoners, for a security-staff-to-inmate ratio of 1.5-to-1. At Alcatraz in the 1940s, the ratio was 1-to-3, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

The Tamms security staff also clocked at least $884,000 in overtime since about this time last year, according to state payroll records for a one-year period ending Nov. 12. Overtime was accrued despite the fact that inmates in the solitary confinement supermax unit are held in their cells 23 hours a day and have no contact with other prisoners.

In addition, there are 16 food supervisors earning an average of $71,600 a year working at Tamms. That’s the same number of food supervisors as at the Pontiac Correctional Center, which houses around 1,700 maximum- and medium-security inmates.

In all, there are 300 employees for the entire Tamms operation, which includes an adjacent minimum-security camp with 89 inmates and about 13 guards, with an annual payroll of approximately $18.7 million, according to figures from the Illinois Department of Corrections. . . .

At the current 138 C-max inmate population level, it costs approximately $85,000 just to guard one maximum-security prisoner per year excluding overtime. . . .

Most Illinois prisons have a per-inmate annual cost of between $15,000 and $24,000.

Governor Pat Quinn has sought to close the facility to save money in a state with an ongoing budget crisis, but efforts were stalled when the guards’ union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), filed a lawsuit claiming that closing the prison would make conditions unsafe at other prisons. However, according to the news story, a state arbitrator who was agreed upon by both sides in the lawsuit ruled that closing Tamms would not increase danger to prison guards. Currently, state legislators are considering whether to restore funds to keep Tamms open, which would require them to override Quinn’s veto.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: corrections industry, cost/budget issues, Illinois, politics of punishment, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , ,

Bonnie Kerness: Pioneer in the Struggle Against Solitary Confinement

November 8, 2012 By 7 Comments
Guest Post by Lance Tapley

In 1986 Ojore Lutalo, a black revolutionary in the Trenton State Prison — now the New Jersey State Prison — wrote to Bonnie Kerness’s American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) office in Newark. His letter described the extreme isolation and other brutalities in the prison’s Management Control Unit, which he called a “prison within a prison.”

“I could not believe what he was telling me” about the MCU, she says. She reacted by becoming “this lunatic white lady” calling New Jersey corrections officials about Lutalo.

Kerness immediately went to work trying to stop MCU guards from harassing prisoners by waking them at 1 a.m. to make them strip in front of snarling dogs leaping for their genitals — to arbitrarily have them switch cells. She got this practice stopped.

Lutalo’s letter also began to open her eyes to the torture of solitary confinement, which in the mid-1980s was just starting to spread across the country as a mass penological practice. Coordinator of the AFSC’s national Prison Watch Project, Kerness had worked on prison issues since the mid-1970s. Now she became an anti-solitary-confinement activist. In 2012, she has been one longer and more consistently than, possibly, anyone else.

“I try not to use the word ‘pioneer’ lightly,” says David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, “but it certainly applies to Bonnie. She did the groundwork for the progress and success we are now having.”

Corey Weinstein, a California physician who also was a pioneering activist against solitary confinement, says Kerness made a huge contribution early on by bringing a human-rights vision to the effort. It provided “the intellectual framework that we could grasp onto” to understand what was happening.

Reflecting on how difficult it has been for solitary confinement to be publicly recognized as torture, Stuart Grassian, a Massachusetts psychiatrist — another trailblazer who is credited with identifying long-term isolation as the cause of a devastating psychiatric syndrome — observes: “How frightening it is to see people choose not to see what’s in front of them.”

Many years ago Bonnie Kerness chose to see what was in front of her.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, corrections industry, featured posts, guest posts, human rights, New Jersey, political prisoners, politics of punishment, psychological effects, race, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Unlock the Box: The Fight Against Solitary Confinement in New York

October 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Photo: Francisco Quinones

An important new report on solitary confinement was released today by the New York Civil Liberties Union, titled Boxed In: The True Cost of Extreme Isolation in New York’s Prisons. Based on a year of research, correspondence with more than a hundred prisoners, and multiple open records requests, this report offers a detailed and powerful picture of how solitary confinement is used and abused in New York; it is a must-read for anyone concerned with this issue. A new Boxed In website also features video and documents, and a listing of events happening in New York City this week (including a Town Hall meeting in Harlem with elected official, advocates, and survivors of solitary, moderated by SW’s Jean Casella).

To mark the release of the report we published an article today on the website of The Nation, which discusses not only Boxed In, but also the rise of activism around solitary confinement in New York on both the state and city levels. Some excerpts from the article appear below.

On the first chilly morning in September, several dozen demonstrators gathered in front of a limestone skyscraper on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan. Some wore orange jumpsuits, and two of them held a broad banner with the hand-painted words, “Solitary Is Torture.”

The subject of the protest was the abuse of prisoners—not at Guantanamo, Bagram, or some distant black site, but on Rikers Island, less than ten miles away. The protesters, members of a new advocacy group called the New York City Jails Action Coalition (JAC), argue that conditions there–particularly solitary confinement—constitute torture in their own backyard. The target of the protest was the New York City Board of Correction, which oversees conditions for the 13,000-odd men, women, and children who inhabit New York City’s jails on a given day, and whose monthly meeting was taking place inside.

According to the City’s own figures, the number of isolation cells at Rikers has risen to more than 1,000 and is still growing. The JAC also points to the existence of special solitary confinement units on Rikers Island, designed to hold teenagers and people with mental illness.

“This type of treatment is cruel and inhumane to any human being, especially growing adolescents,” said Lisa Ortega, mother of a 18-year-old with psychiatric disabilities who was placed in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement on Rikers for weeks at a time, amounting to several months, when he was 16. “The damage done is irreversible.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, corrections industry, due process, featured posts, New York, psychological effects, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Tamms Supermax Prison Closure Temporarily Halted

September 10, 2012 By 9 Comments

On September 4th, Alexander County Circuit Court Judge Charles Cavaness  temporarily halted Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s plan to close the Tamms supermax prison, where hundreds of inmates have been held in solitary confinement. The ruling came days after an arbitrator ruled that the Governors plan was in violation of union contracts. Prison union employees with the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees filed a lawsuit to block the closure of Tamms. The AFSCME has argued that closing the supermax facility would “destabilize the entire prison system, worsen dangerous overcrowding and put the safety of employees, inmates, youth and the public at risk.”

Critics have countered that Tamms currently holds only about 180 inmates, and that many of them would be more accurately described as “the sickest of the sick” in terms of their mental health rather than “the worst of the worst.”

Governor Quinn has cited budgetary concerns as chief among his reasons for closing down Tamms. Despite only housing approximately 400 inmates (half of whom in the supermax unit), Tamms has cost taxpayers over $20 million annually to operate.

One former Tamms inmate, Brian Nelson, described his experience at Tamms this way,

I spent 12 years in solitary confinement and I was never told why I was placed in solitary. I am a human being and every day I still struggle with the trauma being held in that gray box. I wake screaming at night. I can’ get it out of my head some days. Solitary confinement in my opinion is worse than being beaten. That I spent twelve years in such conditions in America is appalling.

On August 8th, Tamms inmates, represented by Alan Mills and Nicole Schult of the Uptown People’s Law Center, filed a motion urging the court to allow inmates to present evidence of the negative psychological impact of supermax incarceration. [Read more...]

Filed Under: corrections industry, cost/budget issues, Illinois, lawsuits/litigation, psychological effects, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , ,
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