PHOTO: Hugo Pinell, 1982.
Solitary Watch Confronts Torture in US Prisons
--An interview with James Ridgeway and Jean Casella
By Angola 3 News
Prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison in
California have announced that they are beginning an indefinite hunger strike
on July 1, 2011 to protest the conditions of their imprisonment, which they say
are cruel and inhumane. An online
petition has been started by supporters of the strikers. While noting that
the hunger strike is being "organized by prisoners in an unusual show of racial
unity," five key demands are listed by California Prison Focus:
1) Eliminate group punishments; 2) Abolish the debriefing policy and modify
active/inactive gang status criteria; 3) Comply with the recommendations of the
US Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisons (2006) regarding an end to long
term solitary confinement; 4) Provide adequate food; 5) Expand and provide
constructive programs and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates.
Notably, Pelican Bay is "home' to the only US prisoner known to have spent more
time in solitary confinement than the 39 years that Herman Wallace and Albert
Woodfox of the Angola 3, have spent--since April 1972. Imprisoned now for a
total of 47 years and held at Pelican Bay since 1990, Hugo Pinell has been in continuous solitary
for over 40 years, since at least 1971--probably even since the late 1960's.
Pinell was a close comrade of Black Panther leader George Jackson, who had
organized a Panther chapter inside California's San Quentin Prison, similar to
the prison chapter organized by the Angola 3 in Louisiana.
Journalist Kiilu Nyasha writes
that on Aug. 21, 1971, the day of George Jackson's
assassination, "three prison guards and two inmate trustees were also
killed. Subsequently, six prisoners, including Hugo Pinell, were singled out
and put on trial. Reminiscent of the slave auctions, they were each forced to
bear 30 lb. of chains in a Marin courtroom after being charged with numerous counts
of murder and assault." They became known as the San Quentin Six. Johnny Spain,
the only defendant to be convicted of murder, was released in 1988, making
Pinell the last of the San Quentin Six behind bars, despite having being
convicted of a lesser assault charge (read more).
Robert King, of the Angola 3, released in 2001 after 29 years in solitary, has
expressed support for Pinell, saying that he "is a clear example of a
political prisoner." In January 2009, Pinell was denied parole for the
ninth time, despite a clean record with no-write ups for the past 25 years.
Now, in 2011, with 27 years of "clean time,' Pinell is eligible for parole onceagain, but his hearing has been postponed for six months and is expected later
this year.
For decades now, human rights activists have
criticized the infamous Pelican Bay supermax prison. Journalists James Ridgeway
and Jean Casella, co-founders of the new Solitary
Watch website, are similarly critical of conditions at Pelican Bay, and
they argue that the treatment of prisoners at Pelican Bay is a reflection of a
widespread human rights crisis throughout the US prison system.
Angola 3 News: How did you first become interested in the issue of
solitary confinement and ultimately become inspired to start Solitary Watch?
Solitary Watch: We started Solitary Watch because this issue grabbed us
by the throats. The solitary confinement of tens of thousands of prisoners may
be the most grievous mass human rights violation that's taking place on
American soil, yet it's been largely concealed from and ignored by the public,
and seriously under-reported by the press.
Solitary confinement is a hidden world within the larger hidden world of the
prison system, and prisoners in solitary are an invisible and dehumanized
minority within the larger population of prison inmates in general--who also
remain remarkably invisible and dehumanized, considering that they now number nearly
2.3 million and constitute one in every 100 adults in this country.
We don't mean to sound self-righteous about any of this, because until two
years ago we were as ignorant about this subject as anyone. Like so many other
people, we were outraged by the abuses taking place at Guantanamo or Abu
Ghraib, yet we knew relatively little about the abuses happening here at home,
in our own prisons and jails. What changed that was Jim's
reporting for Mother Jones on the Angola 3. To discover that there were men
who had been living isolated in 6 x 9-foot cells for nearly 40 years--well, that
clearly shocked the conscience.
That was the beginning of our education. We began to learn more and more about
this torturous netherworld of solitary confinement that exists, in one form or
another, in every state of the union. And we discovered that there were
activists and lawyers and scholars and prisoners' families and even a handful
of journalists out there who were trying to draw attention to the issue, but no
centralized, comprehensive source of information.
A3N: Can you please briefly tell us about your background before
Solitary Watch?
SW: Jim has more than 40 years of experience as an investigative
journalist, and Jean has been an editor for independent media and run small
nonprofit organizations. It seemed like together we had the skills we needed to
start up a web-based project that would serve as an information clearinghouse
on solitary confinement, as well as a forum for whatever original reporting we
might do on the subject. And we've been fortunate enough to get some funding
from several generous
donors. That was the genesis of Solitary Watch, which went online a year
and a half ago.
A3N: What is a SHU?
SW: SHU is just one of many euphemisms prison systems have developed to
avoid using the term "solitary confinement." In California, it stands for
Security Housing Unit; in New York it is Special Housing Unit. Elsewhere we see
Special Management Units, Behavioral Management Units, Communications
Management Units, Administrative Segregation, Disciplinary Segregation--the list
goes on. There are nuances of difference among them, but they all consist of
23- to 24-hour-a-day lockdown. Most of these systems--including the federal
Bureau of Prisons--deny that they use solitary confinement, even while they have
tens of thousands of prisoners locked alone in their cells for months, years,
even decades.
A3N: When was the first SHU made?
SW: Solitary confinement was actually invented here in the United
States, in the early 19th century in Philadelphia, as a supposedly humane
alternative to things like floggings and hard labor. Prisoners were locked up
alone, with absolutely nothing to do but contemplate their crimes, pray, and
supposedly become "penitent"--thus the term "penitentiary." Of course, nothing
like that happened. The U.S. Supreme Court looked at conditions in the
Philadelphia prison in 1890 and found that "A considerable number of the
prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition,
from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became
violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the
ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover
sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the
community."
For nearly 100 years after that, solitary confinement was rare; the famous
Birdman of Alcatraz spent six years in solitary, and that was unusual. Things
really began to change in 1983, when two guards at the federal prison in
Marion, Illinois, were killed by inmates on the same day. That was the
beginning of the notorious Marion Lockdown, where prisoners were permanently
confined to their cells without yard time, work, or any kind of rehabilitative
programming.
A3N: How have they developed since?
SW: Other prisons followed suit, and in 1989 California built the first
supermax--Pelican Bay. There was a supermax boom in the 1990s, and today, 40
states and the federal government have supermax prisons holding upwards of
25,000 inmates. Tens of thousands more are held in solitary confinement in
lockdown units within other prisons and jails. There's no up-to-date nationwide
count, but according to best estimates, there are at least 75,000 and perhaps
more than 100,000 prisoners in solitary confinement on any given day in
America.
Solitary confinement has become the disciplinary measure of first resort,
rather than of last resort. Today you can be placed in solitary confinement not
only for violence, but for any form of "insubordination" toward prison
officials. Others are put there for having contraband--which includes not only
drugs but cell phones or even too many postage stamps. Still others--including
many of the juveniles in adult prisons--end up in solitary for their own
"protection" because they are targets of prison rape. A lot of the men in
Pelican Bay's SHU are there because they've been "validated" as gang members,
based on the say-so of inmate "snitches" who are rewarded for informing. The
reasons are countless, and sometimes absurd. In Virginia, a group of
Rastafarian men was in solitary for a decade because they refused to cut their
dreadlocks, in violation of prison rules.
A3N: What are effects of the SHU on prisoners' health and well-being?
SW: As one prisoner at the Tamms
supermax in Illinois said, "Lock yourself in your bathroom for the next 10
years and tell me how it will affect your mind."
If it weren't already obvious enough, research conducted over the last 30 years
confirms solitary confinement has an extremely damaging effect
on mental health. One study found that a single week in solitary produced a
change in EEG activity related to stress and anxiety. There's evidence
that long-term isolation profoundly alters the brain chemistry, and that longer
stretches in solitary produce
psychopathologies--including panic attacks, depression, inability to
concentrate, memory loss, aggression self-mutilation, and various forms of
psychosis--at a considerably higher rate than other forms of confinement. Yet
we have prison systems that insist they are placing prisoners in solitary so
that they can "learn self-control," and many cases where inmates are released
directly from long-term isolation onto the streets. Unsurprisingly, they have a
notably higher recidivism rate than other prisoners.
It's important to acknowledge, also, that a huge number of prisoners who are
placed in solitary suffer from underlying mental illness. After 40 years of
cuts to funding for mental health care, prisons and jails in general--and
solitary confinement cells in particular--have become America's
new asylums. Prisoners are placed in solitary for being disruptive, when
what they are doing is simply exhibiting the untreated symptoms of mental
illness. One report by Human Rights
Watch found that in prison systems around the country, one-third to
one-half of the prisoners held in solitary were mentally ill. Other studies
have found that two-thirds of all prison suicides take place in solitary
confinement.
There has been less research done on the physical effects of solitary
confinement, but evidence from recent court cases suggests a relationship to
things like extreme insomnia, joint pain, hypertension and even damage to the
eyesight--which makes sense when you are talking about not being able to walk or
look more than ten feet in any direction for years or decades on end. We will
clearly see more evidence of health damage as more and more prisoners grow old
in long-term solitary confinement.
A3N: The hunger strike at Pelican Bay will begin on July 1, and the
strikers have made five
demands. Do you think these policies being protested are violations
of international human rights standards? Of domestic US laws?
SW: First, we want to say what a remarkable document this is,
remembering that it was written by a group of men who are largely unable to
communicate with one another or with the outside world, and who have limited
access to research materials. It's a tribute to their perseverance and
dedication to their cause, as well as their courage.
Second, we should emphasize how measured and reasonable their set of demands
is. It draws heavily on the findings of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in
America's Prisons, which was a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission that
studied U.S. prisons and jails. As one of its three major findings on prison
conditions, the Commission said that the growing use of "high-security
segregation" was counterproductive and often cruel. The Pelican Bay hunger
strikers have adopted the recommendations of the Commission for reforming and
limiting the use of solitary confinement. Beyond this, they are simply asking
for an end to group punishment and guilt by association, which are used to
confine prisoners to the SHU indefinitely. And finally, they are asking for
decent, nutritious food. This is hardly a radical agenda.
There's no doubt that solitary confinement, as it's practiced in the United
States at Pelican Bay and elsewhere, stands in violation of international human
rights standards, including the UN
Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment, and the UN's Basic
Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners. Recently, the European Court of
Human Rights delayed
the extradition to the United States of several British terrorism suspects,
because of the possibility that they would be sentenced to life in a supermax
prison, which was deemed to violate the European Convention on Human Rights (read
more).
Unfortunately, U.S. courts have been more reluctant to take a stand against
solitary confinement. We are not Constitutional scholars or even lawyers, but
to us it would seem obvious that long-term solitary, at least, violates
Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. However, the courts, with a
few exceptions, have not found that to be the case. The exceptions for the most
part have to do with prisoners with mental illness.
In a few cases, courts have found that holding prisoners in solitary violates
their Constitutional right to due process, since they can be placed in
isolation based on a system in which prison officials act as prosecutors,
judge, and jury. Prisoners have no real opportunity to defend themselves, and
no way to "earn" their way out of solitary through good behavior. That's
certainly the case at Pelican Bay, and it's one of the things the hunger
strikers are protesting.
At the moment there are two important cases pending in federal court, which
claim that long-term solitary violates the Constitution. One is the case of the
Angola
3, now in their 40th year of solitary in Louisiana; the other is the case
of Thomas
Silverstein, who has spent 28 years in extreme solitary confinement in
federal prison under a "no human contact" order.
A3N: Looking beyond these specific demands, what are some other
characteristics of the Pelican Bay SHU?
SW: California is particularly bad when it comes to holding prisoners in
solitary confinement indefinitely based on highly questionable determinations
of gang status, which as we said are often based on a system of snitchin g in
return for various rewards. Otherwise, conditions in Pelican Bay are
similar to those in most supermax prisons and SHUs.
These prisons have made a science out of isolation. The cells usually measure
between 60 and 80 square feet, and those cells are a prisoner's entire world.
They are fed through slots in the solid steel doors, and if they communicate
with prison staff, including mental health practitioners, that also takes place
through the feeding slot. If they're lucky they get to exercise one hour a day,
alone, in a fenced or walled "dog run," and leave their cells a few times a
week to take a shower--in shackles, of course. In some cells the lights are on
24 hours a day, and there's round-the-clock video surveillance.
Prisoners may or may not be permitted to have visits. They may or may not be
allowed reading and writing materials, art supplies, or other things to help
them pass the time, and they may or may not have television, with close-circuit
programming supplied by the prison. At ADX, the federal supermax in Florence,
Colorado, they have black and white televisions that actually had to be
specially retrofitted for the Bureau of Prisons, reputedly because they didn't
like the PR implications of prisoners having color TV.
In fact there's a lot of concern about inmates being perceived as having it
"too easy"--so they often don't have air conditioning in summer or enough heat
in the winter, and the food is barely adequate. Some states still use "the
loaf"--made of a tasteless puree of foods--as punishment.
PHOTO: Hugo Pinell, 2001.
A3N: For over 40 years, Hugo Pinell has been in solitary confinement,
most recently at Pelican Bay. Considering the political context of solitary
confinement in Pinell's case, as well as that of the Angola 3, what do you
think this says about how prison authorities have used solitary confinement as
a political tool against prisoner activists and organizers? Is the practice
widespread?
SW: There's no doubt that solitary confinement is widely employed
against prisoners who are perceived as representing any kind of threat to the
absolute power and control of prison authorities. This is true even if inmates
are seeking to organize for positive change and even if they are completely
nonviolent.
In the case of Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, the two still-imprisoned
members of the Angola 3, and of Hugo Pinell at Pelican Bay, we are talking
about men who have had virtually clean disciplinary records for several
decades, and who are now in their sixties. The fact that they continue to be
held in solitary confinement clearly has everything to do with their
involvement as prison organizers.
We have the warden of Angola, Burl Cain, saying
under oath in a deposition that Wallace and Woodfox have to be kept in
solitary because they are still "trying to practice Black Pantherism," and if
he let them into the general population they would "organize the young new
inmates" and "have the blacks chasing after them." And we have a prisoner
in California being sent
to the SHU simply for having reading materials written by George Jackson
and contact information for Hugo Pinell.
But you don't have to be associated with the Black Panthers, or indeed any
organized political group, to be punished for prison activism. In
Massachusetts, an inmate named Timothy
Muise was sent to solitary after he tried to expose a sex-for-snitching
ring run by guards at his prison; they said his offense was "engaging in or
inciting a group demonstration or hunger strike." A prison journalist in Maine
named Deane
Brown was isolated and eventually shipped out of state for sending
broadcasts called "Live from the Hole" to a local radio station.
Solitary confinement is routinely used to punish prison whistleblowers, and to
suppress nonviolent dissent and free expression.
A3N: How well do you think both the mainstream and progressive media
have covered the issue of solitary confinement in prisons?
SW: Well, there has actually been some outstanding reporting on this
subject in the mainstream media. Of course there's dreadful stuff as well, like
the "Lockup" and "Lockdown" TV series. But as far as print media goes, there
are a few of cases where journalism helped spur grassroots movements against
solitary confinement. We are thinking, in particular, of the investigations by George
Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer on Tamms supermax in Illinois, by Lance
Tapley on Maine State Prison, and by Mary
Beth Pfeiffer on suicides in New York's SHUs.
Atul Gawande's 2009 article in the New Yorker was excellent, as well.
In the progressive media, there's been some powerful reporting by Anne-Marie Cusac in The
Progressive, Jeanne
Theoharis in The Nation, and Glenn
Greenwald at Salon. And of course, Mother Jones has been extremely
supportive of Jim's reporting on the Angola 3 case, and on the broader issue of
prison conditions as well.
The problem we have with media coverage is that there isn't nearly enough of
it. And it doesn't get anything close to the attention it deserves or produce
the kind of outrage it should, considering the fact that this is one of the
major domestic human rights issues of our day. Our impression is that the
media--including, to a lesser extent, the progressive media--is simply reflecting
how effectively prisoners have been marginalized in our society.
A3N: Today, in the post-9/11 so-called "War on Terror" era, do you
think that the US public supports the use of torture against US prisoners?
SW: We do think that the public is tolerating the torture of
prisoners--some because they don't know about it, others because they simply
don't care. But we'd actually like to turn your question around, because we
believe that a tolerance for the torture of U.S. prisoners helped to produce a
tolerance for the torture of foreign terrorism suspects, rather than vice
versa. The "War on Crime" predates the "War on Terror," and places like Pelican
Bay and ADX Florence made it that much easier for Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib
and Bagram to exist.
To discuss what produced this tolerance for torture in the first place, we need
to return to the point we made at the beginning of this interview: Prisoners
are today by far the most dehumanized members of our society. This has been the
case to some extent historically, but the dehumanization has grown more intense
since the advent of the War on Crime, which dates back to the 1960s but really
heated up in the 1980s and 1990s. For at least the last 30 years, politicians
from both parties have been cynically exploiting public fears about crime to
win elections, and the prison population has grown by leaps and bounds with
tacit public approval.
Racism clearly plays a role in all of this: A highly disproportionate number of
prisoners are African American, and a majority of people today accepts the mass
incarceration and abuse of black prisoners just as a majority once accepted
racial segregation and before that slavery. Again, it comes down to depriving a
certain group of people of their full humanity. Once you do that, it becomes a
lot easier to deprive them of their basic human rights, not to mention their
civil rights.
A3N: Strategically speaking, how do you think supporters of human
rights can best use media-activism to challenge the powerful forces currently
trying to convince the US public that torture is good policy? What are key
points that we should be making?
SW: When it comes to solitary confinement, we probably need to emphasize
different key points with different audiences. For those people who already
have a firm opposition to all torture, we simply need to share information
about the nature and widespread use of solitary confinement, and try to bring
this issue out of the shadows and into the public square. The American Friends Service Committee
has shown real leadership on this issue, and more recently the ACLU and the National
Religious Campaign Against Torture have been trying to draw attention to
solitary confinement, so that's a positive development. We need to encourage
people to see the torture of all U.S. prisoners as a human rights issue just as
pressing as the torture of Bradley Manning, or of the captives at Guantanamo or
Abu Ghraib--because torture is torture, and if you believe this, it shouldn't
matter whether or not the victim has committed a crime.
For those who think that prisoners are criminals who deserve whatever they get,
we can still emphasize the fact that solitary confinement is not only cruel,
but also costly and counterproductive. It can cost two to three times as much
to keep a prisoner in a supermax, rather than in the general prison population.
And it simply doesn't "work," in that it makes prisoners more likely to
re-offend.
A3N: You have just released the first print edition of Solitary
Watch. What are your future plans for this? Anything else coming up that we
should be looking for?
SW: We launched the
print edition, which includes just a small selection of our stories,
because we began receiving letters from prisoners nearly every day, telling us
about their own situations and asking for information. Prisoners, of course, do
not have Internet access, so we needed to become more than just a web
publication.
In addition, we're going to be publishing a series of fact sheets on different
aspects of solitary confinement; we've just posted the first one, and there are
many more to come. We just began shooting our first video interviews with some
survivors of solitary confinement. Along with the writings we publish under "Voices from Solitary," we
hope the videos will help provide a forum for a group of people who actually
know what it's like to be buried alive.
(This article was
first published by Alternet
on June 14, 2011. Permission is granted to reprint if Alternet is cited as the
original source.)
--Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the
Angola 3. Our website is http://www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news
about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which
spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism,
repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.