Jessica Pupovac, Alternet reports:
Imagine living in an 8-by-12 prison cell, in solitary confinement, for eight years straight. Your entire world consists of a dank, cinder block room with a narrow window only three inches high, opening up to an outdoor cement cage, cynically dubbed, "the yard." If you're lucky, you spend one hour five days a week in that outdoor cage, where you gaze up through a wire mesh roof and hope for a glimpse of the sun. If you talk back to the guards or act out in any way, you might only venture outside one precious hour per week.
You go eight years without shaking a hand or experiencing any physical human contact. The prison guards bark orders and touch you only while wearing leather gloves, and then it's only to put you in full cuffs and shackles before escorting you to the cold showers, where they watch your every move.
You cannot make phone calls to your friends or family and must "earn" two visits per month, which inevitably take place through a Plexiglass wall. You are kept in full shackles the entire time you visit with your wife and children, and have to strain to hear their voices through speakers that record your every word. With no religious or educational programs to break up the time or elevate your thoughts, it's a daily struggle to keep your mind from unraveling.
I am a twenty year correctional officer. Supermax prisons are a necessity because some inmates simply refuse to cooperate within the system and are a threat. An inmate who continuously assaults staff and other inmates has to be put somewhere. I freely admit that there are some abuses in prison, but it more rare than the media would portray, and the vast majority of inmate in these units have earned their way into them by repeated actions that are a threat to security.
You may be right, Darrin, and I certainly don't want to discourage you from posting here, because this is the kind of comment we all need to see. I am sure that Supermax is a response to a need, and I know that many prisoners really are a threat. But there are a number of problems with the current system.
First, while Supermax may be convenient, it's not a psychologically sound methodology. Nothing is being done to fix the problem of recalcitrant prisoners -- it's just a question of throwing more money at the private prison industry and beating our chests that we're "tough on crime," whatever the hell that means. That money would probably be better spent elsewhere.
Second, some people are sent to Supermax who should not be there because they are not the hopeless cases you mean. There is no effective legal process to judge their being sent there and there is no transparent review process to get them back out. To compound the problem, the people in charge lie freely to cover their asses whenever they deem that necessary. So this is not an institution worthy of being called American. And that should be fixed.
The reason this institution is unAmerican is that it does not respect the prisoners as human beings. It assumes that torture will show them why they should knuckle down. And H. sapiens often doesn't react well in those situations. It doesn't work.
But the authoritarian mind will always think force works -- if it doesn't work, you must not have been using enough force. We see that faulty reasoning pattern again and again in the newspaper. This is simply one more instance of that defective thinking, and that's why we at QuestionAuthority included this news item in this blog.
So, Mr. Pate, I thank you for your contribution, and I respect your feelings on the matter, and I am fully prepared to believe that there are plenty of human beings who, for the good of society, need to be put into concrete holes in the ground and forgotten. But until I see statistics from trustworthy sources that abuse is "more rare than the media would portray" (hard to believe, since the media rarely notes the fact that 1 in 100 Americans is imprisoned), or that the "vast majority of inmates in these units have earned their way into them", I will respectfully decline to believe these statements.