By John Ballard
Before the holiday distractions begin I need to get something off my chest that has been nagging me over a week. Last week someone linked a New Yorker piece, Hellhole by Atul Gawande, describing what happens to a prisoner subjected to long-term isolation. Gawande, you might remember, is the doctor from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who penned an important piece comparing Medicare costs and outcomes of two towns in Texas, which became obligatory reading for everyone on staff in the White House during the health care reform debates. Writing in March, 2009, Dr. Gawande lays out the numbers and costs of long-term solitary confinement, driving home two unmistakable conclusions: The practice is torture by any reasonable interpretation of that word, and the United States employs the practice more than any other country in the world, including those maligned as perpetrators of human rights abuses.
At eight and a half thousand words the article prints out to ten or twelve pages. There is no way for a few snips in a blog post to convey the full seriousness of what he says, but sometime before now and the end of the year it would make excellent material for reading and reflection as we wait for bad weather to pass and news stories to resume content other than holiday fluff, sports events and the endless end-of-year lists that clutter the media. This is serious stuff, recently brought to mind by the plight of Bradley Manning, the unheralded hero who is really at the core of Julian Assange's Wikileaks notoriety.
In September, 1986, after several months of sharing a cell with another hostage, [Terry] Anderson was, for no apparent reason, returned to solitary confinement, this time in a six-by-six-foot cell, with no windows, and light from only a flickering fluorescent lamp in an outside corridor. The guards refused to say how long he would be there. After a few weeks, he felt his mind slipping away again.�I find myself trembling sometimes for no reason,� [Terry Anderson] wrote. �I�m afraid I�m beginning to lose my mind, to lose control completely.�
One day, three years into his ordeal, he snapped. He walked over to a wall and began beating his forehead against it, dozens of times. His head was smashed and bleeding before the guards were able to stop him.
Some hostages fared worse. Anderson told the story of Frank Reed, a fifty-four-year-old American private-school director who was taken hostage and held in solitary confinement for four months before being put in with Anderson. By then, Reed had become severely withdrawn. He lay motionless for hours facing a wall, semi-catatonic. He could not follow the guards� simplest instructions. This invited abuse from them, in much the same way that once isolated rhesus monkeys seemed to invite abuse from the colony. Released after three and a half years, Reed ultimately required admission to a psychiatric hospital.
�It�s an awful thing, solitary,� John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam�more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. �It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.� And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.
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One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn�t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn�t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.
Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California�s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners �begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind�to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,� he writes. �Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,� becoming essentially catatonic.
Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with �irrational anger,� compared with just three per cent of the general population.* Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy. Many prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fantasies.
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The main argument for using long-term isolation in prisons is that it provides discipline and prevents violence. When inmates refuse to follow the rules�when they escape, deal drugs, or attack other inmates and corrections officers�wardens must be able to punish and contain the misconduct. Presumably, less stringent measures haven�t worked, or the behavior would not have occurred. And it�s legitimate to incapacitate violent aggressors for the safety of others. So, advocates say, isolation is a necessary evil, and those who don�t recognize this are dangerously na�.
The argument makes intuitive sense. If the worst of the worst are removed from the general prison population and put in isolation, you�d expect there to be markedly fewer inmate shankings and attacks on corrections officers. But the evidence doesn�t bear this out. Perhaps the most careful inquiry into whether supermax prisons decrease violence and disorder was a 2003 analysis examining the experience in three states�Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota�following the opening of their supermax prisons. The study found that levels of inmate-on-inmate violence were unchanged, and that levels of inmate-on-staff violence changed unpredictably, rising in Arizona, falling in Illinois, and holding steady in Minnesota.
Prison violence, it turns out, is not simply an issue of a few belligerents. In the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness�a nice formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn�t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens. Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United States now has five per cent of the world�s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.
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Is there an alternative? Consider what other countries do. Britain, for example, has had its share of serial killers, homicidal rapists, and prisoners who have taken hostages and repeatedly assaulted staff. The British also fought a seemingly unending war in Northern Ireland, which brought them hundreds of Irish Republican Army prisoners committed to violent resistance. The authorities resorted to a harshly punitive approach to control, including, in the mid-seventies, extensive use of solitary confinement. But the violence in prisons remained unchanged, the costs were phenomenal (in the United States, they reach more than fifty thousand dollars a year per inmate), and the public outcry became intolerable. British authorities therefore looked for another approach.
Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, they gradually adopted a strategy that focussed on preventing prison violence rather than on delivering an ever more brutal series of punishments for it. The approach starts with the simple observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence.
So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed �Close Supervision Centres,� prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, �contact visits,� and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to track the results and enable adjustments based on the data.
The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in �extreme custody� than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.
Toward the end he says this...
...The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America�s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture....
Steve's focus on American exceptionalism is timely and significant. Even though a majority of Americans are blind and deaf to the consequences it is important for those of us able to see past that blindness and denial to continue the thankless work of patient argument and persuasion. Invective, rage, sarcasm and helpless resignation are counterproductive. The coming year will challenge all the better angels of our nature to resist becoming that which we most hate -- angry red-faced protesters who alienate rather than convert our adversaries. Patience, reason, organization and constraint are the qualities that work best. There is a time and place for confrontation, but only after all other tactics have failed.
My reflections today are inspired by Johann Hari's list of five under-appreciated figures of 2010.
- Bradley Manning
- Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
- Senator Bernie Sanders
- Wajehaal-Huwaider and other Saudi women
- The people of Kalahandi, India, whom he calls the real N'avi
Hari's writing and list are also important, but he was right to begin with Bradley Manning. All indications are that this man is being subjected to torture in the form of solitary confinement. There is no way to know how his story will end, but Dr. Gawande makes it clear that over time the result of long-term solitary confinement, even tempered by occasional human contanct and interaction, is psychotic breakdown.
The plight of Bradley Manning is neither an abstraction nor a circumstance over which we have no control. Unlike the damages of natural disasters, civil unrest in distant lands or disease outbreaks, Bradley Manning's confinement and treatment have your name and mine on the label. Unless we all make some small gesture toward ameliorating the situation, we all will share in whatever injustice befalls him. Small gestures do not need to be newsworthy. Simply bringing up his name and situation to someone not in the know can become a twig into the fire. Even pricking curiosity in an ignorant mind counts for a lot.
Sometime between now and the end of the year everyone can think of some way to advance the twin causes of bringing an end to long-term solitary confinement in general and assisting in the defense of Bradley Manning.
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