More than they need to be reformed, supermaxes need to be torn down. Thirty years ago they didn’t exist; they are unneeded, just as the Soviet gulag and Nazi concentration camps were unneeded. Should the concentration camps have been reformed?
So how to get rid of the supermaxes? As a former political organizer, I hold to the convergence theory of social action: Attacks on many fronts should converge with a clear, simple message on a specific, practical outcome.
One front is the legal battle. Citing international law in this battle is another front. Even if the international prohibitions against torture can’t be enforced very easily in this country, the citing of this law could heighten public consciousness — and public shame. The same result could occur if groups reported American prison cruelty to the UN Committee Against Torture, which enforces the Convention Against Torture. Some organizations are already engaged in this effort.
Here’s another possible front in the battle: Why not encourage the use of other countries’ law against us? Some countries have “universal jurisdiction.” In Europe, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is being pursued in court for encouraging the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Why shouldn’t jurists in other nations pursue the United States for the torture of prisoners in our supermax system?
Perhaps there needs to be a national organization to undertake legal battles specifically against supermaxes. It also could lobby for legislation to shut them down and create alternatives.
But, given that we live in the media age, and given where Americans are coming from, every legislative and legal effort needs to be accompanied with a news-media campaign that insists Americans must end this immoral — and counterproductive and expensive — system of mass torture. This campaign will not be easy. Especially on this subject, much needs to be done to wrench the news media from their traditional absorption with repeating what officials say. I began my coverage of the abuse in the Maine Supermax when a political activist was unable to interest the state’s daily newspapers in the subject, so he went to me.
Even when a reporter is interested, coverage is difficult. The Supermax ghosts are invisible because they are kept from view. Reporters are not allowed inside the Maine Supermax, and after my stories began appearing the state Corrections Department banned me from the prison altogether.
Those who struggle for change must be realistic. The public now is indifferent or hostile toward prisoners. There has always been indifference and hostility toward them, of course — and there always will be, in some quarters — but a special, recent harshness has poisoned the country. The historical development of supermaxes cannot be untangled from the development of the American prison madness as a whole — just as changes to, or the eradication of, the supermax system will implicate many prison reforms. I have only begun to try to understand why the imprisonment mania has raged in the US, but I remember when it began, soon after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, when the country veered sharply to the right under skillful leadership.
New leadership on the federal level could take us in a different direction. In the 1999 Report of the United States to the UN Committee Against Torture, the US notes that American laws enable federal authorities to pursue correctional officials, in criminal or civil cases, for prisoner abuse.
