wow--anyone have PP's here?? :-{
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SUPER-MAXIMUM SECURITY PRISONS
CONTROL UNIT PRISON - SECURITY HOUSING UNIT - SUPER-MAX

This article was put together with information from; The National Campaign to Stop Control Unit Prisons;Shadow Figures: A Portrait of Life on Death Row by Suzanne Donovan; Inmate Protest Continues - Terrell Unit by Michelle C. Lyons; The Prison Reform Activist Center; and The Committee to End the Marion Lockdown.

Super Maximum Security. Sounds safe doesn't it? Certainly no member of ...after seventeen years... wants to see more crime victims, or correctional officers and prisoners being hurt or killed, but are Super Max prisons going too far?

The Super Max is the most secure prison in the Nation. A $60 million, state-of-the-art, high-technology fortress of steel, concrete, and barbed wire. It is where the worst of the worst are shipped when society decides they can no longer be tolerated. It is a place where these most violent offenders are strictly controlled; everyone is watched; everyone is monitored.

To call the Super Max cold and unfriendly would be a profound understatement. Visitors to one of the highest-security prison in the Nation first notice the fences--12-foot fences crowned with razor wires. They see the six guard towers, and the rolls of razor wire, and the armed guards who are not only authorized to use their weapons, but are instructed to shoot to kill. To enter the facility itself, the walls of which are reinforced with seven layers of steel and cement, visitors must pass through metal detectors. Their hands are stamped with a secret code in ultraviolet dye--that is to keep inmates from escaping by impersonating visitors.

A control unit prison is in a state of permanent lockdown, a usually-temporary condition used to control and suppress disruptions within a prison by severely restricting prisoners' rights. More than simply fulfilling "security needs," control units employ sophisticated methods of behavior modification which not only controls violence but any form of resistance at all. The creation of control units has not reduced the level of violence within general prison populations. In fact, assaults on prison staff nationwide rose from 175 in 1991 to 906 to 1993.

While the specific conditions in control unit prisons vary, the goal of these units is to disable prisoners through spiritual, psychological, and/or physical breakdown. This goal is accomplished through systematic programs of oppression, including:

Years of isolation from both prison and outside communities while being housed in solitary or small group isolation. Prisoners are kept in solitary confinement for 22-23 hours a day, in cells that are usually 6 feet by 8 feet. Physical contact is prohibited during visits. Phone calls for prisoners generally cannot exceed ten minutes a month. No congregate dining, exercise, or religious services are permitted. In Florence, prisoners are shuffled through remote-controlled electronic doors to their destination, without ever seeing another human being.

Extremely limited access to services such as education, recreation, worship, or vocational training.

Physical torture such as forced cell extractions*, strap-downs, hog-tying, beating after restraint, and provocation of violence between prisoners. *"Cell extraction" is the term for the forcible removal of a prisoner from a cell.

Mental torture such as sensory deprivation, forced idleness, verbal harassment, mail tampering, disclosure of confidential information, confessions forced under torture, and threats against family visitors.

Sexual intimidation and violence, usually against women prisoners by male guards, using strip searches, verbal sexual harassment, sexual touching, and rape as a means of control.

Prisons are often built near environmental hazards. Prisoners have gotten cancer and lead poisoning from contaminated water. At least one control unit is in an area with dangerously high levels of uranium radiation. Oregon built it’s newest prison about 15 miles from the Umatilla Army Depot storage bunkers for chemical weapons including WWII style mustard gas.
A survey by the Federal Bureau of Prisons found that thirty-six states now operate some form of super-maximum security prison or unit within a prison.

The Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison in California is built to hold 1,056 prisoners in near-total isolation. Prisoners are confined to their eighty square foot cells with solid steel doors for twenty- two and one half hours a day. They are allowed out only for a ninety minute ``exercise'' period alone in an empty concrete yard the size of three cells with twenty foot high walls and metal screens overhead. Guards open the sliding doors by remote control and use loudspeakers to direct the prisoners in and out. Prisoners moved off the cell-block for any reason are shackled and flanked by two guards wielding truncheons. Except for the sound of a door slamming or a voice on a speaker, the SHU is silent.

A priest hired by the prison delivers communion through a small, knee-high food slot in a solid steel cell door. ``If you ain't wrapped too tight, 23-hour lockdown can be enough to make you explode,'' says the priest. Guards are armed with ``nut- guns,'' wide-bore guns that fire wildly caroming, acorn-sized ``nuts'' at prisoners from close range. ``It's a miniature cannon,'' the priest explains. ``The recommended technique is to fire at the floor so that the acorn ricochets.'' Prisoners hit by the nuts can be maimed. ``One guy lost his eye, and since I arrived here three years ago, an acorn took off a guy's nose and plastered it to his cheek''

Contact with the outside world is severely limited for men at the SHU and MCF in Indiana’s Super-Max facilities. Visits take place in a small cubicle with the handcuffed and shackled inmate separated from visitors by plexiglass. They talk via telephone, and can make no physical contact. Daily visits are allowed to MCF prisoners, who also have regular access to telephones. At the SHU visits are allowed only once every 14 days and phone calls twice monthly. All phone calls must be collect, making them very expensive for the recipients. These constraints make it difficult for the men to maintain connections with people on the outside, deepening their isolation.

Terrell Unit is part of a new super-max prison in Texas. The cells on death row are designed for one inmate. They are 6’ x 10’ with a solid steel door. Inmates spend 23-24 hours/day in their cells. When they have recreation, they are alone in the yard. They do not attend work programs, are not allowed TV and only those on top disciplinary status have radios.

The maximum security prisons known as the Ellis and Estelle units are also in Texas. Estelle is the first stop for newly condemned prisoners. The men under death sentence then go to Ellis for processing. Most of them will never leave Ellis again until their scheduled execution, when they take the van ride downtown to the death chamber at "the Walls," the system's oldest prison. The average length of time between conviction and execution in Texas is now more than nine years; it's not uncommon for an inmate to live on the Row for a decade or more.

The majority live out their time in individual cells, 5 feet by 9 feet, equipped with a 6-foot bunk, a steel sink, and a toilet. There's no air conditioning. There is no exercise equipment on the Row. The men clean their own cells. They are issued clean pants and a shirt every three days, and underwear, socks, and a towel every day. Showers, a 10-minute daily ritual, are taken alone.

Those who choose to can work a regular four-hour shift at the garment factory or at a handful of other jobs; some are barbers or Death Row porters, who help serve food to men in lockdown. They are moved to the H wings, where most of them live in double cells, 10 feet by 9 feet, with another man. When a prisoner's execution date arrives, however, he has to leave the work program and move to a higher security Administrative Segregation wing until five days after his stay of execution, if he has received such a stay.

One of the biggest concerns raised about the super-maxes is the length of time which some men are confined in them. IDOC regulations have kept prisoners at MCF for a minimum of two years, and three years at SHU. HRW found at least three prisoners who had been at MCF since it first opened. These lengths of time, in conditions described by some as "sensory deprivation", may be far too long. The American Correctional Association characterizes isolation for "excessively long periods" as "damaging to human beings and counterproductive as a safety measure." Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School who has extensively studied solitary confinement, says it "can cause severe psychiatric harm." Federal Judge Thelton Henderson, whose landmark ruling condemned the infamous Pelican Bay prison in California, concluded that prolonged solitary confinement "may press the outer bounds of what most humans can psychologically tolerate."

In fact, under the rules, a prisoner convicted of a minor crime could end up in a super-max because of violating a variety of prison rules which endangered or threatened no one! The due process safeguards in the civilian court system are denied to inmates charged with violating the disciplinary code in prison. When the consequences of these hearings are so severe, it is easy to understand why inmates clamor for greater safeguards.

Most of the men confined in these facilities will eventually be released. Their experiences while imprisoned not only provide them with few, if any, tools to help them function effectively in society, but for many has embittered them in frightening ways. The psychological scars they carry greatly increase the possibility that they will carry out future acts of violence. "People will be twice or three times as bad when they are released from these facilities," says State Representative Charlie Brown of Gary, one of the few critics of the super-maxes in the state legislature.

There is no transition for inmates whose sentences expire at the MCF or SHU. They are given no opportunity to interact with other inmates or live in a less restrictive environment. Men who have been incarcerated for long periods of time in ordinary prisons have a difficult adjustment on their hands. Releasing men directly from such isolation is asking them to accomplish a nearly impossible task.

Carp was told that "each year 80 inmates are released right from super-max onto the streets." While HRW knows of no studies of what happens with such men, there is strong anecdotal evidence that the results are deadly.

Our Constitution is supposed to provide safeguards against “cruel and unusual punishment”. Is there any other way to characterize building design and the treatment given to prisoners in a Super-Max facility?

Is this the best system we can devise to deal with our prison inmates? I think if we try a little harder, we could come up with a model that will keep us safe, and still treat our prisoners humanely.

Yes a dear friend of mine is at Two Rivers in Umatilla...I also have a pal at Florence..
They both like to joke a lot about it-it helps to keep them sane..

Smilez... where did you find this information?

It sounds completely insane, I've never heard of such a prison, it seems like something you would only see in a Sci-Fi movie about the future. I guess the New World Order is upon us...

And Wishes... how did you find your Pals at these places, were they listed here on WAP or did you find them another way? I would love to write to one of the female inmates at one of these kind of facilities. You can email me if you want to, address is in my profile.

Matt

matt i sent you the link via email... These are horrifying facilities!

You got that right Smilez... absolute power corrupts absolutley.

Matt

..i mean who wouldn't crack under these conditions!!

I have a PP who was just transferred to Folsom here in CA which is not as bad as Pelican Bay but the ltrs I've got from him, since his transfer he became extremely depressed...it took 2 months for his property to get transferred, he couldn't write a ltr; they wouldn't allow stationery, stamped envelopes, nothing in. I felt so helpless, he is extremely intense and has told me about at least 1/2 dozen "incidents" with violence during the time we've been writing, he says it's like permanent Ad Seg and from what I've heard, it is as bad as this article sounds. :-(

while i agree that article makes supermax prisons sound horrible, some perspective is needed..virtually no one is sent directly from court to a supermax, an inmate ends up there do to his behavior(i know of no supermax female prisons)..the states first mission is to see that the inmate serves his time in a safe enviroment..remember attacks by inmates on other inmates out number attacks on guards 1000-1..if an inmate is attacked by another inmate and injured, who is going to be sued? the inmate or the state? obviously the state must remove those inmates from the general prison population which refuse to follow the rules or show violence..to not do so would subject the state to even more lawsuits..typical supermax inmates include those with escape attempts, attacks with weapons, use of feces or urine in attacks, or refusal to take medication for psychological problems..we have a supermax federal prison here in Illinois which has housed some infamous prisoners such as John Gottie etc..they are in their cells 22 1/2 hours a day..they can have color tv with cable..they are allowed use of the phones up to 4 times a week for 20 mins.they get normal mail etc..they are served their meals in their cells and they shower alone and go to a recreation facility alone..some might consider it cruel to deny them contact with other inmates, but if they kill a loved one of yours who would you sue, the inmate or the state? again the point to keep in mind is they end up in supermax due to their own actions 98% of the time..point wsa made these people will possibly be released one day, well if they cant follow rules in a controlled society which prison is, how can they handle it in the free world? we make our own destinys i truly believe

*smiles*...many good points playboy!!

i got a few supremaxes , yeah its deep in there , mail keep em happy !