If, as it has been said, nothing tells more about a society than its treatment of its prisoners, the current proliferation of supermaximum-security prisons across the country speaks eloquently of the fears and attitudes about crime held by Americans at the close of the century.
This minimum-contact, “supermax” concept is epitomized in the formidably named United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) here, perhaps the most magnificent prison ever custom-built for society’s most maleficent criminals.
Inmates call it the Alcatraz of the Rockies. Advocates call it an unfortunate but necessary component of control for an increasingly violent prison population.
Critics call it a concept that didn’t work when used in 19th Century America, is in danger of overuse now and may say far more about the people on the street than it does about the inmates behind bars.
“The question isn’t who these prisoners are, the question is who we are,” said Ben Wolf, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Institutionalized Persons Project in Illinois. “We are the ones who make the decisions on how to treat them. Prisons are a reflection of our values. We already know who these prisoners are and what their values are. The question is: What are our values?”
The growing popularity of this costly penal approach, particularly at the state level since 1990, represents the culmination of a profound reversal in American attitudes toward corrections. For most of this century, rehabilitation was the overarching goal, following what criminologists call the medical model of diagnosing, treating and curing an inmate.
By 1980, however, frustrated by increasing crime and a rising number of drug-related convictions, society began to adopt a more punitive stance, underscored by such developments as mandatory minimum sentencing, the removal of exercise equipment from prisons, the barring of Pell grants for inmate higher education and, finally, the construction of entire prisons primarily dedicated to solitary confinement.
Culturally, changing social attitudes and politics also play their parts.
“I think we as a nation are becoming more punitive, and I think we seem to have a real faith in punishment as something that will work to deter crime. I think the greater thing is that we just want to get retribution and revenge,” said Kevin Wright, a professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Constructed from local tawny stone and rosy rock, nestled into the arid landscape of the remote high desert, the triangular, two-story, high-tech ADX is almost invisible.
So are its 417 male inmates: many spend 23 of every 24 hours double-locked behind a green steel door and a barred grate inside an 8-by-12-foot cell with gray concrete furnishings and stainless steel toilets, sinks and showers.
Some of them spend the day’s remaining hour alone as well, exercising in a small concrete recreation area and subjected to strip searches when leaving and re-entering their cells.
All services are brought to them in their cell or in their unit, from religious services broadcast on television to law books transported from the law library.
Except for the guards who lead them, handcuffed and sometimes shackled, on the rare occasions they leave their cells, there is no direct human contact.
“One of the fundamental effects it has is on the human senses: sight, touch, smell, taste. It restricts your world, puts it in a vise really,” said Raymond Luc Levasseur, 51, an inmate serving a 40-year sentence for a series of bombings and attempted bombings during the 1970s.
Speaking through a microphone set in a seamless plexiglass window, he said: “Most of these guys are coming out. How much abuse do you want to put on a person you’re going to be with in an elevator someday or get into an argument with at an intersection? This is America. What kind of country do you want to live in?”
John Hurley, warden at ADX, observed that the shift in emphasis from the “medical model of rehabilitation to a more reality-based approach” of corrections reflects society’s desires. He referred to the current carrot-and-stick behavior-modification program, under which prisoners earn incrementally greater mobility and privileges through good behavior but are forced to start over again if they misbehave.
“Obviously, public policy is affected by what you and I as citizens of this country think is right,” he said.
According to a 1995 survey conducted by the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University, when asked if the government needed to put a greater effort into rehabilitating or punishing and putting away those convicted of violent crimes, the vast majority of respondents opted for punishment. No matter the category of respondent–broken down by gender, race, age, education, income, region, political affiliation or type of community–the desire to emphasize punishment never dipped below 52 percent of those queried.
In fact, the U.S. locks up a higher proportion of its citizens than any other industrialized country. On the federal level alone, there were 20 prisons holding 30,000 inmates in 1980, compared with 94 prisons with 100,000-plus inmates and a $3.3 billion annual budget today.
Wright believes economics eventually will stem the supermax tide. Compared with an annual cost per prisoner of about $35,000 at a state maximum-security prison, the cost of housing one in a state-run supermax is about double. At ADX, where prisoners cost more than $71 a day to house, costs are somewhat curbed by grouping the ADX within a four-prison complex.
Opened in late 1994, the 490-bed ADX cost $60 million. Still one of a kind at the federal level, it replaced the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Ill.–which locked down permanently after rioting in 1983–as the nation’s most secure federal prison.
“The notion that ADX is the future of corrections is entirely wrong. It is reserved only for the most predatory and violent inmates,” said Todd Craig, chief spokesman for the federal Bureau of Prisons, noting that supermax inmates account for only 0.5 percent of the total 100,000-plus federal prison population. “ADX is an anomaly, not a trend. But it’s an important anomaly that allows us to operate the rest of the system safely.”
ADX may be an anomaly in the federal prison system, but its model clearly has become a trend in state corrections, where the percentage of the total prison population in supermax tends to mirror the federal percentage but can reach as high as 20 percent in such states as Mississippi.
There already are some 60 ADX-style state facilities. Most of them, such as the $73 million, 4-month-old supermax in Tamms, Ill., have opened since 1990; more are on the way.
The extreme isolation central to the supermax concept has been a point of controversy not only among human-rights activists but also among criminologists and corrections professionals.
Few deny the need for some facility designed to separate those who pose a danger to prison staff and other inmates. However, many question whether only appropriate people are being put into these prisons and whether the often high level of physical and sensory deprivation is justified in the service of security.
“To build these supermaxes is one thing, but we’ve gone out of the way to torture these guys and deprive them of human contact in a way that cannot be justified,” said the ACLU’s Wolf.
Stuart Grassian, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and expert on the effects of solitary confinement, agrees.
“My conclusion is that prolonged solitary confinement causes severe psychiatric harm, even among people who had previously suffered no severe psychiatric problems. A certain number of inmates will actually become delusional, paranoid, hallucinating, incoherent, agitated and confused,” to the point that they may start consuming their own feces or parts of their bodies, he said.
The Bureau of Prisons has conducted a study on the mental health of supermax prisoners but has not released the results. Thus, to date, “We have no indication that inmates have suffered negative mental-health effects as a result of being confined in the ADX,” bureau spokesman Todd Craig said.
A 28-year veteran of corrections, ADX warden Hurley has little doubt that everyone he hosts deserves to be there. “I always say, we don’t send out invitations. You earn your way here.”
While a few high-security prisoners, such as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, may be remanded directly from the courthouse to the ADX, most prisoners there, as at most supermax facilities, are referred as a result of violent behavior toward staff or other inmates at previous institutions or because they have ties to gangs, organized crime, terrorist groups or drug networks.
For those in the most stringent lockdown units, a review is performed before they are admitted or released to a lower-security setting.
One such inmate is Maulana Modibo Eusi, who has been in one of the most secure units in the ADX for the last 18 months after being implicated in an assault on a guard. Eusi, who started life as John McTush on the South Side of Chicago, has been in and out of reform schools, jails and prisons since he was about 12, he said.
Currently serving a 90-year sentence for armed robbery, murder and burglary, Eusi, a soft-spoken, bearded and bespectacled man of 49, believes there’s trouble ahead for supermax graduates.
“Believe me, I think it’s a mistake to de-emphasize rehabilitation and emphasize locking them up and warehousing them. Ultimately, most of them are going to come out and they’re going to do the same things they did before. Only this time, they will be more sophisticated and willing to hurt people.”
