December 1999
Supermax's new cruelty
The implementation of the concept of control unit prisons (or supermax),
administrative segregation and other innocuous-sounding special housing
units (SHU) has progressed at an alarming rate. Since the early-1980s
lockdown at Marion, Ill., which set the tone for the supermax concept,
nearly every state in the U.S. has completed or begun a supermax project.
All states use some type of administrative segregation to incapacitate
prisoners above and beyond general segregation time.
Unlike segregation, which is used for supposed infractions of prison rules
and is subject to a modicum of due process, segregating prisoners
administratively is considered to be a "non-punitive" punishment by
prisoncrats and, as such, not subject to the general due process
requirements. A prisoner does not have to violate a prison rule to be
placed in administrative segregation or a control unit facility. Simply the
prospect of a future rule violation is sufficient.
It is ironic that the same isolation and abuse suffered by prisoners in
this alleged "non-punitive" status in such facilities as Pelican Bay (Cal.)
and Tamms (Ill.), to name but two, were once deemed "cruel and unusual
punishment" in the mid-1800s in the U.S., a time when the electric chair
and the gas chamber were just starting to come into fashion as "humane"
alternatives to hanging. The theory behind a supermax or SHU is that it
will somehow re-educate or modify the behavior of a prisoner who is deemed
a security risk.
Now called "correctional adjustment" or "behavior modification," it is a
concept which finds many parallels in history when specific groups in power
wished to silence anyone daring to challenge or question the authority of
the ruling class. The Inquisition, Nazi concentration camps, and the gulags
and sanitariums of the former USSR were all designed with the re-education
process in mind, a process accomplished by brutal isolation, torture-both
physical and psychological-or death.
The U.S. has a sordid history of confinement and segregation based upon
such factors as race and political affiliation. Seven percent of the U.S.
population is Black males, yet almost half of the prison population is
comprised of Blacks. Cultural bias and disparity does not stop at the
prison gate. Over 90% of the prisoners in the control unit of the MCAC in
Maryland are Black.
It is not hard to see the parallels between COINTELPRO of the 1960s and
'70s, and the use of control units in the 1980s and beyond. Pre-emptive
"non-punitive" action to segregate suspected gang leaders or members,
prison activists, prison revolutionaries and prison paralegals is much like
the racial and cultural profiling which is promulgated in the community.
When pre-emptive "collective punishments" are meted out and ignored because
of the status of the recipients, we have taken the first step to a
totalitarian culture. In the 1930s first it was the prisoners, then the
insane, then Gypsies, then Jewish citizens, then the whole of Europe and
the world which suffered the collective punishments and class repression of
policies which profiled peoples and cultures, then subjected them to the
most brutal treatment based upon a concept of superiority and the need to
"purify" a culture and country of its "criminals."
Those who would reject the likelihood of such an occurrence need look no
further than Rwanda, Kosova and East Timor. They need look no further than
out their back windows to the sprawling complex of electronic wizardry
which has replaced the rack and thumbscrew. Compare that complex to
pictures of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. The only thing
missing? The gas chambers and furnaces, at least for now.
-Prisoner, USA
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