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Madness in Maximum SecurityWhen scholars get a look
inside America's secretive prisons, they find chaos
By PETER
MONAGHAN
When America's
overflowing prisons boil over, or when television shows such as
HBO's prison drama Oz presume to portray the grim conditions
inside them, members of the public may think they get a picture of
what the institutions are like.
Wrong, say criminologists and
other social scientists who study incarceration.
And yet,
academics allow, over the last two decades, they, as much as the
public, have had little opportunity to observe prisons from the
inside because access has become more tightly controlled. "Most
criminologists have never been inside a prison," says Jeffrey Ian
Ross, an associate professor of criminology, criminal justice, and
social policy at the University of Baltimore.
At a time when
Americans are discovering, through reports from Iraq, just how grave
abuses can become when hidden from view, such secrecy in prisons is
unsettling, scholars insist. The situation for scholars is a far cry
from that in the 1960s and 1970s, when sociologists and
ethnographers worked in prisons and produced many ethnographies and
analyses. By the 1990s, those became as rare as escapes from
Alcatraz used to be.
Scholars say that less-glamorized and
more-accurate information is urgently needed because prison has
become home to vastly more Americans than ever before. Between 1980
and 1998, the number of people in state and federal prisons
ballooned from 329,821 to 1,302,019 -- a higher percentage of
the population than in any other country, and far higher than in
most.
The vast majority of prisoners are young, nonviolent,
first-time offenders. Half of them are African-American, and half a
million of them are released to the general population each year.
Most reoffend, and many spread illnesses they caught while
incarcerated. "The prison system is in many ways becoming a petri
dish for the spread of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and hepatitis," says
Donald F. Sabo, a professor of social sciences at D'Youville
College.
Despite the need to study the problem, scholars face
"bureaucratic rationalization of prison management," which has made
access almost unattainable, says Meda Chesney-Lind, a professor of
women's studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa who has published
widely on youth and adult imprisonment. "Administrators take courses
in this, in how to deal with the press, or the public," she says.
"There has been more management, and that has become antithetical to
letting researchers into facilities."
Lorna A. Rhodes, author
of the just-released Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the
Maximum Security Prison (University of California Press), is one
of the few researchers who have managed to get past such
restrictions and gain a clearer picture of the nature and effects of
incarceration.
Her book is the result of several years of
fieldwork, which began thanks to a friend who worked as an officer
at a state penitentiary and helped her gain access. After winning
the confidence of prison staff, Ms. Rhodes, who is a professor of
anthropology at the University of Washington, was able to repeatedly
interview prisoners, uniformed guards, mental-health workers, and
administrators. She was helped, too, by her participation in a
now-unusual instance of cooperation between a corrections system and
academic researchers -- the Correctional Mental Health
Collaboration between the University of Washington and the
Washington State Department of Corrections -- which was active
from 1993 to 2002.
The researchers wished, says Ms. Rhodes,
to provide a better picture of maximum-security life than the
popular stereotypes. "I stay away from, for example, descriptions of
people's tattoos," she observes, "and stony faces, and things like
that. I feel like that would be replicating something that we
already have enough of."
But even without details like those,
the picture of life inside America's maximum-security prisons that
emerges in Total Confinement is harrowing. In the
institutions, says Ms. Rhodes, whose previous book, Emptying
Beds: The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit (University of
California Press, 1991), was based on observation of psychiatric
hospitals, it can be hard to tell what is madness and what is not.
Out of Control?
In her book, Ms. Rhodes
concentrates her attention on "control units" -- the "super
maximum" wings within maximum-security prisons, cordoned off by
razor wire. They house inmates removed from the general prison
population for breaches of prison regulations or for fighting or
harming other prisoners or officers.
These units emerge as,
to say the least, hell holes -- black boxes within black boxes
where prison officials can make criminals who often are too mentally
disturbed to live peaceably in regular cell blocks "disappear," as
she puts it.
Control-unit prisoners spend 23 hours or more a
day in 8-by-10-foot cells with one frosted window in the shape of a
slit. They must withstand constant day-and-night clamor, raving
neighbors, ghastly food, racial and other taunts, including
encouragement to commit suicide, and predatory aggression, not
always at the hands of other inmates. Rape is widespread, as it is
throughout the prison system.
The routines and severe forms
of constraint of control units, augmented increasingly by electronic
surveillance, are so harsh that prisoners cannot be considered
"rational actors," Ms. Rhodes argues. In fact, many inmates who are
not mentally ill become psychotic under the strain of isolation. The
conditions often provoke fear of all other human beings, or
antagonism toward them, and prisoners respond with violence or other
infractions that prolong their punishment.
Such responses can
strike outsiders as inexplicable. Many prisoners smear feces on cell
walls, or on themselves. Others take to storing their own body
wastes and blood, and fashioning them into projectiles that they
throw through meal slots at guards.
Inmates commonly describe
this as "a particularly satisfying form of resistance," reports Ms.
Rhodes. It contaminates guards with "a kind of contagion" that makes
them "at least momentarily, disgusting themselves," she says. And
because guards generally do not know which prisoners are suffering
from AIDS, hepatitis, or other infectious diseases, an element of
terror creeps in.
Such behaviors are so prevalent, says Ms.
Rhodes, that she wonders whether the ratcheting up of control
overwhelms prisoners' self-regulation. In that light, she suggests,
such overtly disgusting and irrational acts can be interpreted as "a
willful -- perhaps even too sane -- deployment of
the most obvious of weapons."
Ms Rhodes observes that the
battle to keep order amid such disruption -- and keep down the
soaring costs of incarceration as well -- has led prison
officials to a "preoccupation with a technologically elaborate
efficiency." Innovations such as computer-controlled locking and
surveillance systems, and such tools of the prison trade as pepper
spray, incapacitating stun guns, and increasingly severe
"violent-prisoner restraint chairs," which shackle an inmate's
limbs, torso, and head, have become the weapons of choice in this
war.
Prison officials, in writing about conditions in
maximum-security wings, frequently acknowledge their shortcomings
but say they are trying to correct them. As one report on the Iowa
prisons puts it, they try to "focus on stabilizing, socializing, and
reintegrating the offender back into an appropriate general
population setting."
But some human-rights organizations,
like many scholars, have had harsh words for prison conditions. In
recent years, Human Rights Watch has assailed corrections systems in
the United States for mistreating and neglecting the one in six
prisoners who the organization says are mentally ill, and who are
three times as numerous as the mentally ill in hospitals. Human
Rights Watch also says that prison officials have displayed a
"wholesale disregard" for inmates' right to protection from
rape.
Ms. Rhodes says that although the ideal of
individualism underpins the history of Western prisons and
psychiatry, control-unit prisoners who are mad, or who are driven
mad, have little chance to earn their way out of the units with good
behavior. Prison officials say "individual choice" will determine
punishment or reward, but the control they maintain is so severe
that prisoners are largely deprived of personal choice, and often
lack the ability to make choices because they are
psychotic.
Prison administrators and guards, she notes,
constantly assert that prisoners choose to do what they do,
from committing crimes to attacking prison guards. But the
understanding of "choice" has a social context, she says. After
several American prison riots in the 1970s and 1980s, for example,
notions of choice intensified as a rationale for prisons, with a
simultaneous withdrawal of explanations attributing behavior to
childhood abuse or other social factors.With the rise of
consciousness of "victim's rights," among other forces, she says, it
has become "almost scandalous" to imply that anything but personal
failings may underlie a criminal behavior, "unless there's a medical
reason."
"And even then," she adds, "you have to be really
floridly psychotic before that will kick in."
When inmates
are first admitted to prisons, officials make determinations about
whether they are "mad or bad": Are they rational-choice makers who
have done wrong and will or may do so again, at any opportunity? Or,
rather, do they represent an ongoing risk because they are
psychotic? Narrowing the choice to those two options poses a
problem, Ms. Rhodes writes: "An overly expansive definition of
illness would threaten to shift many prisoners from the bad into the
mad category, not only diluting punishment to an unacceptable
extent, but also underscoring the lack of facilities for
treatment."
Even after most admittees have been designated as
"bad," usually because they exhibit "antisocial personality
disorder," the rest -- schizophrenics and other "mad" inmates
-- still must be admitted, and housed in conditions where their
madness surely will worsen, or under which their ranks will
swell.
Making that more likely is that both the mad and the
bad often end up in solitary confinement. Despite the pain of, say,
being zapped with stun guns, or forcibly removed from their cells,
prisoners fear solitary confinement more than anything else, Ms.
Rhodes reports. With good reason: Now, as it has done throughout
penal history, solitary confinement drives prisoners mad.
All
maximum-security punishments exact a more subtle, but still harsh
outcome, she says. They inject prisoners into a "mutually
reinforcing cycle" in which, in the eyes of prison staff and even
other inmates, they "come to represent a shadow side of human
nature." Then, because they signify danger, harsher and harsher
confinement seems guards' only reasoned, risk-minimizing recourse,
says Ms. Rhodes. Tainted prisoners who are not currently violent are
designated as "violent potential" and become "simply bodies to be
stored."
Put simply: Once in the control unit, you are lucky
to get out.
The Other Side of the Bars
The
specter of philosopher Michel Foucault hovers over Ms. Rhodes's
book. Due to his writings on madness, discipline, and punishment,
most notably Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
(reprinted in paperback by Vintage in 1995), the prison provides
metaphors in much modern academic writing.
But, Ms. Rhodes
says, the application of Foucault's thought to prisons is tricky.
"Unlike all the places where Foucault's metaphors are used for how
power works," she observes, "when you're in a supermax prison,
you're in the place that is working the way he wrote about it
-- and yet in other ways, it isn't." Most obviously, she says,
prisons are not just metaphors of imprisonment. They are
imprisonment.
Projects that grapple with such
complexities are essential if policy makers and the public are to
become better informed about the realities of prisons, says Mr. Ross
of the University of Baltimore. In Convict Criminology
(Wadsworth, 2002), he and his fellow editor, Stephen C.
Richards, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at
Northern Kentucky University, set out to provide what he calls "a
missing piece in the puzzle of understanding prisons and
corrections" by collecting writing that includes several articles by
ex-convicts. While former correctional officers, parole officers,
and the like are well represented in the ranks of criminology, the
field has heard little, until now, of the experience of academics
who have been sentenced to time behind bars.
Mr. Richards did
three years, including time in two maximum-security prisons, on
first-offense marijuana charges that he says were baseless. Mr.
Ross, who once held a job assessing the mental competence of
prisoners about to stand trial, says "some respected criminologists
have that kind of history, but most have been in the closet." Every
week, he says, he hears from academics or aspiring academics who
were once convicts, debating whether to admit to their
pasts.
The ex-convict authors in Convict Criminology,
by treating their own experiences as empirical data for
criminological study, replace fantasies with reality, says Mr.
Ross.
So what, then, is an appropriate and realistic balance
of punitive and psychiatric responses to extreme prison behavior?
That is the question, says Ms. Rhodes.
What is clear,
she says, is that the task of achieving such a balance is not easy
for prison guards. Many of them buy into the rhetoric of the
"warehouse prison," she says, because it is they who suffer the
assaults, as well as stigmatization outside the prison, once friends
and acquaintances learn of some of their experiences. They also have
little ability to improve conditions, working as they are in
low-paying jobs that often are the only alternative to flipping
burgers in rural communities. And in a further complication, says
Ms. Rhodes, while friends on the outside say that "we should just
shoot them all," they inevitably also sympathize with some of
prisoners, whom they know.
She came away from her research
with empathy for prison workers. They suffer from severe job stress.
They must deal with inmates whom they quickly learn not to trust,
not knowing which they can trust. Even if inclined to support or
protect ill or oppressed prisoners, they lack the means to do so.
And, she says, "they are entangled in issues that would be very hard
to sort out."
Civilizing Incarceration
At the
end of her book, Ms. Rhodes describes a project in the control unit
of a maximum-security prison where officials cleaned the walls of
racist graffiti, made renovations so that it would be more difficult
for prisoners to throw feces at staff members, and directed
administrators to walk the tiers once or twice a week talking to
inmates and dealing with problems. Educational programs were
introduced.
Four years later, the unit was experiencing
dramatically less violence and use of force on prisoners. Many
inmates who had seemed to be doomed to spend their lives in control
units managed to graduate back to the general prison
population.
The existence of so many control units where "no
redemption of any kind is possible," says Ms. Rhodes, is "a failure
of imagination." Change, over all, is very slow in coming, she says:
"I think people are quite locked into their own visions."
The
best hope for less self-defeating attitudes about prisons, prison
construction, harsher sentencing laws, and the incarceration boom,
she says, is that legislators and the public will come to realize
that "we can bankrupt ourselves doing this. There are diminishing
returns. You get some drop in crime rates after your first large
boost in incarceration, but when you start locking up a lot of petty
drug criminals, you're not getting very much for your money."
Nationwide, state and local incarceration costs almost $40-billion
each year, she notes.
Legislators in some states, says Ms.
Chesney-Lind, are realizing the huge cost of mass imprisonment, both
in terms of what cannot be paid for when prison budgets are so large
-- higher education, for example. In social terms, legislators
"are looking at the incarceration of nonviolent offenders, and are
asking, 'Did we mean to punish them as if they were violent
offenders? What about criminalizing drug addiction as if it was a
crime rather than a public-health issue?'"
When it comes to
imprisonment, she says, "no one else in the developed world has
followed our lead."
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Section: Research & Publishing
Volume
50, Issue 41, Page A14
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