Guantanamo and Prison Reform

Marc Ambinder, in a post on the prospect of moving Guantanamo detainees to supermax prisons, says:

The issue isn't whether terrorists or detainees will escape from Supermax prisons. They won't.

Here's a real issue: the supermax facilities aren't generally accepting new clients these days. They're full. And none are expanding.

And -- there's a real question about dignity (assuming you believe that terrorists ought to be treated like humans) in supermax facilities that is just now gaining the attention of policy-makers. The answer may be that isolation may be the only way to prevent Al Qaeda from forming cells inside the prison, and there may be no other place to put them.

This is one of those occasions when both Democratic and Republican partisans oversimplify and don't do justice to the complexity of the question at hand.

That last link is to an excellent article from the New Yorker that examines whether solitary confinement is torture. Dr. Atul Gawande, the author, begins by discussing the developmental importance social contact for baby rhesus monkeys and human children. He goes on to discuss the experiences of hostages, like John McCain and Terry Anderson, who spent seven years as a prisoner of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

He missed people terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”

He was stiff from lying in bed day and night, yet tired all the time. He dozed off and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved activity of almost any kind. He would watch the daylight wax and wane on the ceiling, or roaches creep slowly up the wall. He had a Bible and tried to read, but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He observed himself becoming neurotically possessive about his little space, at times putting his life in jeopardy by flying into a rage if a guard happened to step on his bed. He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all the mistakes he’d made in life, his regrets, his offenses against God and family.

His captors moved him every few months. For unpredictable stretches of time, he was granted the salvation of a companion—sometimes he shared a cell with as many as four other hostages—and he noticed that his thinking recovered rapidly when this occurred. He could read and concentrate longer, avoid hallucinations, and better control his emotions. “I would rather have had the worst companion than no companion at all,” he noted.

In September, 1986, after several months of sharing a cell with another hostage, 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,” he 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.

Dr. Gawande asks, "If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?" Proponents of prolonged isolation claim that it provides discipline and controls prison violence. They see isolation as a necessary evil. However, the evidence suggests that the use of solitary confinement does not reduce prison violence, which, according to Dr. Gawande, is caused by the overcrowded conditions in US prisons and by the cancellation of work and education programs "out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless." The combination of overcrowding and idleness are a "nice formula for violence." Dr. Gawande points to the experience of Great Britain as a promising alternative:

Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, they gradually adopted a strategy that focused 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.

Fortunately, the movement for prison reform is gaining some political traction in the US. In March, Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) introduced legislation that would reform the entire criminal justice system in the United States, including prisons.