And Americans would be surprised to learn that supermaxes are not just for “the worst of the worst,” as prison wardens like to say. They contain mostly nonviolent prisoners. Supermaxes are often used as punishment for prison infractions — and, frequently, punishment when a prison administrator simply doesn’t like an inmate. Especially, they contain mentally ill people who find it impossible to not talk back.
Supermaxes are also used for political purposes. In the notorious ADX, the federal supermax in Colorado, and in state supermaxes, many prisoners are spending lengthy sentences in solitary confinement not because they can’t function in a prison general population but because of their politics. At ADX, Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly H. Rap Brown, the black militant; and al-Qaida operative Zacarias Moussaoui are being punished with solitary in addition to their life sentences. These people, therefore, are political prisoners. In Maine, I found the most politically active prisoners in the Supermax.
The United States is a party to the UN Convention Against Torture. Under that treaty, torture is official treatment that causes “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental,” when it is inflicted as punishment or for coercion. Dictionary definitions are similar, except torture obviously can be inflicted by other than officials. Prisoners call supermax conditions “no-touch torture.” In any case, supermaxes fit all the definitions.
The mental destruction of Jose Padilla, the Islamist American citizen whom the US has held in solitary confinement for years, is well known. Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, formerly at Harvard, has researched the mental damage solitary confinement inflicts upon healthy people. But what of the many mentally ill prisoners shoved into the supermaxes? In them, Professor Grassian told Time magazine this year, “We’re taking criminals who are already unstable and driving them crazy.”
How many mentally ill people are in supermaxes? I am still researching this question, but the number is extremely high. A US Justice Department study in 2006 says that upwards of two-thirds of all prisoners report mental-health problems. Why? “Over the past 40 years, the United States dismantled a colossal mental health complex and rebuilt — bed by bed — an enormous prison.” That is from criminologist Bernard Harcourt in a January 2007 New York Times op-ed piece entitled “The Mentally Ill, Behind Bars.”
Although many mentally ill people may be in prison for small-time burglary or drug trafficking, their illness often results in their being put in the supermax. There, as they get worse, they get sentenced again and again for assault on guards — perhaps to a life sentence on the installment plan. Finally, their behavior may become suicidal. In the Maine State Prison, all the suicides in recent years have been in the Supermax.
It is mass torture
How many human beings are Americans treating this way? I am still researching this number, too. In her recent book, Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison, Lorna Rhodes cites a source that claims in the year 2000 there were 42,000 American prisoners in this kind of confinement. An Urban Institute survey in 2004 found 44 states had supermaxes housing 25,000 inmates. As a working average, I use 35,000. Alongside this quantity, the several hundred prisoners at Guantánamo seem few.
