Demoralization rolls downhill: If the guards are demoralized by what they perceive as an incompetent and adversarial management, the inmates are incomparably more so. Even though prison guards are in a de facto managerial position vis a vis prisoners, they do not see themselves in any kind of leadership capacity, and so continually violate the managerial norms that people in our society expect leaders to uphold. Leaders generally take a “we’re all in this together, let’s make the best of it” approach when exhorting their followers to give their best for the common good, because people tend to willingly, even eagerly, go the extra mile for things for people they trust and admire and for causes they think are generally worthwhile. In a prison, the guards tend to see their roles as more akin to that of a master in a master-slave relationship. Rather than taking a “we’re all in this together” approach they tend to open with, “I am in charge and I am going to force you to do what I say; moreover, I am going to do this to you against your will.” This, like slavery itself, is a form of humiliation, and it completely and utterly destroys any sense of common purpose, goodwill, or desire to cooperate the prisoners may have had. And, of course, productivity suffers as demoralized and humiliated prisoners seethe with resentment and find creative ways of sabotaging the project at hand and otherwise resisting without getting into more trouble than they can handle.
There are, of course, practical limits to which guards can be high-handed martinets. No prison can run for very long without the cooperation of the prisoners because the inmates do so much of the essential labor in and around the prison. What the inmates don’t do the free staff and the guards have to do, and since the guards consider any task a prisoner would do beneath them, they are generally in no mood to exert themselves in such tasks for any prolonged length of time. Hence, the impulse to be high-handed and autocratic tends to be checked by practical considerations, such as a desire to avoid having to do the “lowly” menial work of prisoners themselves. Also, if prisoners are abused to a point where they don’t see any benefit to setting aside their personal grievances for the duration of the work day, eventually one inmate will assault another, causing an incident that often precipitates a general lockdown. The less incentive prisoners have to preserve the general peace, the more riot-prone the whole situation becomes as prisoners are reduced to bickering and fighting amongst themselves. However, when productivity is of primary concern, officers tend to employ conventional managerial strategies involving empathy and respect. And, to the degree they genuinely respect the prisoner’s dignity, they tend to be rewarded with productivity—not high productivity (this is prison after all), but a relatively smooth level of job performance that everyone can live with.
Unfortunately, in the demoralized institutional culture of the prison, any autocratic dickishness at the top seems to roll down the ranks until it lands on a prisoner. Indeed, the guards will sometimes play a game in which they will taunt prisoners to see how abusive and disrespectful they can be before a prisoner strikes back. Even female guards compete to show off how macho and “tough” they are. On certain low security level yards, especially where there are a high proportion of parole violators and other short-timers being processed through, the prisoners will put up quite a bit of abuse in order not to blow off their parole date. Unfortunately, this sort of thing often takes precedence over getting things done.
For example, I know of one situation where the institution was on lockdown due to an epidemic. The staff had brought about 30 prisoners in from the adjoining ranch to have their pictures retaken. One of the officers decided that they should all stay and help make sandwiches because the normal kitchen crew was ill. But instead of asking them to volunteer, the ranking officer, a lieutenant, began to rudely address the assembled prisoners threatening to send them to the hole “for refusing to program” if they did not “volunteer” for the task. The prisoners, who had just come from jobs where they were used to being treated with a modicum of respect, were disgusted by the lieutenant’s histrionics; this is not the way you ask people for a favor. They exchanged eye-rolling glances to one another but didn’t say anything, since they hadn’t actually been asked anything.
Everyone knew that writing up disciplinary actions on 30 prisoners would be far more work for the guards than making the sandwiches, which they would still have to make. Besides, the prisoners were already following orders, so the charges would never stick, even in the improbable event that there were 30 empty beds in Ad Seg. Many of these inmates worked in jobs where they would be missed, especially since there would be no one to fill in behind them due to the epidemic. The monetary losses could be substantial if cows didn’t get milked and subsequently went dry. As the guards began to ponder the costs of escalating the matter further, the clearer it became that doing so would become a huge debacle. Fortunately, a quick-thinking sergeant asked the inmates politely if they would volunteer, they instantly agreed and made quick work of the task.
However, it could just as easily have gone the other way, as it very frequently does. The lieutenant hadn’t thought things through before he so impetuously put his ego on the line. If one of the inmates had made a smart-alecky remark that would have made the lieutenant look foolish if he backed down, he would very likely have escalated the situation regardless of the cost to the institution or the inconvenience to all concerned. This is one of the reasons why prisons tend to be such dysfunctional organizations. These kinds of arrogant power plays frequently occur and, when they do, they take precedence over the task at hand. They force a showdown in which humiliated prisoners feel compelled to defend their dignity and honor regardless of the cost. And, in so doing, they create unnecessary flashpoints that disrupt the organization at every turn, sometimes escalating into situations that disrupt the entire institution. So, when the guards pit their honor against that of the prisoners’, they choose a win-lose scenario in which they are arrogate pride to themselves at the expense of the prisoners, over a win-win scenario in which everyone walks away with mutual respect. In other words, they tend to see humiliating prisoners as the “tough,” honorable and macho thing to do, and managing prisoners with consideration and respect as “coddling,” solicitous, and “soft.”
Making enemies: It is, of course, difficult to manage people constructively when you view them with utter contempt. This is what happens when you view “criminals” as having forfeited the right to any human compassion, dignity or rights of any kind. The core of this belief is that prisoners deserve no consideration because they are “lawbreakers” who, by virtue of having broken the law, have shown by their actions that they are opposed to society and its core values, and are therefore people of bad character. A necessary assumption of this belief system is that all of society’s laws, even the regulatory ones, mark a boundary between good and evil; that the law is written for the good for the whole society and that it does pursue political agendas, such as racism, party advantage, or the temporary exigencies of “law and order” politicians. For example, it is assumed that the law does not impose unreasonable penalties simply to make politicians look “tough” on crime; nor does it have any ulterior motives, such as disadvantaging certain minorities, or excluding certain classes of “undesirables” from full citizenship. And, once it is assumed that the law is neutral and good, it is further assumed that when people transgress the law, it is because they are fundamentally and essentially evil. Hence when someone offends in a minor way, it is just as bad as if they offend in the worst possible way. Shoplifting is as bad as murder or treason because it is an expression of the same essential evil. No rehabilitation is possible because repentance and forgiveness do not enter into the equation; one little sin and one is as good as eternally damned.
There is an additional complex of assumption about justice; namely, that every criminal has a victim; that this victim cries out for vengeance; and until the criminal is brought down and made low, this victim can never be healed or come to “closure.” Here, the “criminal” is seen as having been arrogant in placing his needs and wants over the rights of his victim. Fitting justice demands that he learn the error of his ways; that he be humbled for his arrogance; that he receive his comeuppance; that he suffer at least what his victim suffers, so that he knows what it feels like to be a victim, so that he will no longer victimize others either out of fear of being victimized himself, or because his ignorance is now corrected and he understands that it is wrong to treat others in a way he would not wish to be treated. Here, the punishers feel that it is their moral duty to punish—to humiliate those who transgress the law.
The problem is that while fitting justice may demand that the arrogant be brought down and humbled, it is quite something else to degrade someone to a sub-human status and hold them there. This is the crux of the matter: when punishment goes beyond chastising and humbling the arrogant, it creates a new victim who feels justifiably aggrieved and genuinely so. This victimization feels especially unjust when it is done extra-judicially, without limits or due process in the name of the law. The sense of injustice surrounding this victimization is compounded when the “criminal” in question has no victim, where his crime is a matter of civil disobedience (as are drug crimes), or where the crime is so petty that it is a stretch to send him to prison in the first place (as the bulk of property crimes are).
As a society, we are extraordinarily ambivalent about what goes on in prison. We have always had prisons so we assume that they must serve some necessary function. We are told that they protect us from bad people, but how can that be if prison only makes them worse. We give prisons the benefit of the doubt, that it is necessary to have bad places, where bad men do bad things to evil men, just so long as we don’t have to know the details. When we hear of some particularly odious sex offender going to prison where he may very well be raped, there is part of us that inwardly gloats. If we thought about it, we wouldn’t feel as comfortable about the same fate being inflicted on someone who shoplifted or was mentally ill. There is a part of us that recoils from overt sadism. Indeed, it is the very essence of our instinct for justice, the same instinct that causes us to want the arrogant be humbled. The problem is that we suspend this consideration when it comes to people we don’t approve of—often people we don’t even know, but have grown up learning to fear and hate—or people we find nuisances, like derelicts, aggressive panhandlers and the mentally ill. In this respect, prisons become the mirrors of our collective hatreds and annoyances—our racism, ethnocentrism and class biases—some of which we are proud of, and others that we can scarcely acknowledge even to ourselves.
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of racists and sadists who find their way into prisons, where they can manipulate the rules and the situation in order to victimize others under the color of law.
There is also the “Lucifer Effect,” the corrupting effect of power itself: Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, set up a
famous experiment in which two groups of male volunteers drawn from the University and given psychological tests in order to ensure that they were psychological normal. They were then randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group would play the role of prison guards, the other would be prisoners.
To everyone's astonishment, the two groups quickly came to act like their real-life counterparts. The prisoners became despondent; some broke down. In less than 36 hours, one had to be released because of extreme depression, disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying and fits of rage. Over the next three days, three more prisoners were let go because they exhibited similar symptoms of anxiety. A fifth prisoner was discharged when he developed a psychosomatic rash over his entire body, an apparent reaction to the rejection of his parole appeal by the mock parole board.
The guards' behavior was even more disturbing. All flexed their power to one degree or another. They made the prisoners obey trivial, often inconsistent rules and forced them to perform tedious, pointless work, such as moving cartons from one closet to another or continuously picking thorns out of blankets… The inmates were made to sing songs or laugh or stop smiling on command; to curse and malign one another publicly; to clean out toilets with their bare hands. They were required to sound off their numbers repeatedly and to do endless push-ups, occasionally with a guard's foot or that of another prisoner on their backs.
The inmates became so engulfed in the situation that, during the mock parole board hearing, a majority of them said they would forfeit the money they were owed in exchange for release. Had they forgotten they were in an experiment in the psychology building at Stanford University, not a real prison, and were owed their daily salary whether they quit or not? Even Zimbardo became myopically trapped in his role as warden. He began worrying more about malingering prisoners and the prevention of prison breaks than about the wave of insanity his experiment had set in motion. When a woman Zimbardo was involved with who had recently received her doctorate and was helping out with the project finally made him realize how far out of hand things had gotten, the study was aborted. It had lasted just six days and nights. –Robert Levine
The guards began humiliating and psychologically breaking down the inmates simply because they could. “They steadily increased their coercive aggression tactics, humiliation and dehumanization of the prisoners,” Zimbardo
recalls. "The staff had to frequently remind the guards to refrain from such tactics," he said, and the worst instances of abuse occurred in the middle of the night when the guards thought the staff was not watching. Moreover, some of the guards were observed to undergo a kind of Jekyll and Hyde transformation as they started their shifts, transforming from “pleasant, charming, funny and smart” to a swaggering sadist talking with a false Southern accent. “It is especially important to hear how the worst of the guards justified his evil as wanting to see how far he could torment them before they stood up for [their] dignity, and rebelled against the brutality of the guards. They did not, and thus they deserved what they got. And suppose they did rebel? Would that have pleased him, and then would he say he was glad to see they had spunk and dignity, and so would no longer torment them? I doubt it; they lose no matter what they do.” Within days, those guarded and those doing the guarding had both ceased to function as normal, morally conscious members of society. The “prisoners” began dissociating and obeying orders with blank stares. They became emotionally volatile and started behaving in ever more antisocial and manipulative ways, thus justifying in the guards’ minds, their own brutal responses. The “guards” gradually shifted from the “functional” and ostensibly purposeful violence of controlling the prisoners to being straightforwardly sadistic. “It’s not that we put bad apples in a good barrel,” Zimbardo explained to reporters in the wake of the
Abu Ghraib revelations, “We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches.”
Unfortunately, when things get out of hand in a real prison there is typically no one there with a detached perspective with both the authority and the presence of mind to call a “time out.” Rather, it’s more like The Lord of the Flies, without any adults to arrive in the nick of time. As a consequence, the guards tend to get trapped in a reactive style of management in which they meet every perceived challenge to their authority with crackdowns and punishments. These only serve to denigrate the prisoners further, causing the prisoners to feel justifiably aggrieved and victimized, motivating them to strike back to assert their dignity and avenge their grievances. The result is an asymmetrical vendetta which effectively precludes any return to a proactive “leadership” style of management, in which the correctional officers appeal to prisoners as fellow human beings and try to find common ground and ways where they can make the best of a bad situation.
If prisoners are insubordinate, confrontational, and constantly on the edge of open revolt, it is because they have been mismanaged. It does not matter whether the prisoners are of good or bad character, if you treat anyone arrogantly and unfairly, betray their trust, insult their dignity, taunt them and harass them, they will resist you to their utmost of their ability—especially when they feel as though their backs are against the wall. It is the guards, not the prisoners, who are in control of the institution. It is therefore the guards who choose the managerial style and set the overall tone of the institution. Anyone will become disrespectful if you treat them with disrespect; anyone will become rebellious if you try to subjugate them; anyone will become conning and manipulative if you treat them in bad faith. If you treat people as if they have no legitimate concerns, they have no reason to care about your concerns. If you treat them as if everything they say is a lie, they have no reason to listen to anything you have to say. If you treat them as if they have no honor or self-respect, they have no reason to give you the satisfaction of doing what you want without screwing it up or short-changing you in some way.
On the other hand, when you treat people with respect, they will tend to respect you in return. When you listen to people’s concerns and treat them as if they matter, people will listen to you and respond to your concerns. When you treat people consistently and fairly and allow them to improve their lot, people begin to value their relationship with you, and will go out of their way to keep a good thing going. To the extent that anything works in prison (and little does), it works because there is a meeting of the minds and a confluence of interest between the prisoners and the custodial staff. Hence, mutual respect and the good will and common ground that flow from it form the basis of the correctional officer’s first line of control. When mutual respect is lost, it becomes harder and harder to control the inmates and the situation deteriorates. So, when officers have to resort to punishment and crackdowns, it is because they have previously mismanaged the prisoners and lost their respect. For better or worse, respect cannot be commanded; it has to be earned. And it is earned by consistently acting in good faith. It is furthered and maintained by using the managerial tools of leadership—finding common ground, appealing to people’s better natures and interests held in common, positive reinforcement, fairness, resolution of grievances, negotiation, mutual accommodation, and compromise.
Resistance to professionalization Since the 1970s, most states have tried to professionalize their prison guards. They now call them “correctional officers” and have attempted to inculcate this new management philosophy and its leadership techniques in their academy training. Indeed, best practices prescribe that correctional officers review and pass certifying exams this material on annually. It is also officially codified in their rules, regulations, and department operations manuals. However, the “big stick” theory of management and its medieval philosophy of aggressive coercion is so ingrained in the culture of the prison that this professionalism frequently doesn’t take. In California, for example, Title 15 explicitly states that inmates and correctional officers “shall treat one another with mutual respect.” There is even an Inmate Appeals (grievance) process that is supposed to enable inmates to ensure that the officers do so. There are additional rules that are supposed to protect the inmates from arbitrary discipline, particularly against retaliation if they complain. There is also a provision for limited inmate self-governance. Unfortunately, in California, the Inmate Appeals process and Inmate Advisory Councils have been turned into shams, so the rules that protect inmates are ignored with impunity.
Prison guards who see their role as primarily one of subjugating prisoners find any limitation on their power an anathema. It simply cannot be allowed for a prisoner to get what he wants. Because once prisoners get the idea that they can get results by working within the system, they will use the system to reform the system by holding the guards accountable to their own rules. They will go on to insist that the guards to treat them with professionalism, fairness and respect—and fix all the other things that are broken—the hot water, the medical system, the arbitrary punishment, the lack of rehabilitation, etc., etc. They will become “demanding” and “uppity” about their rights, and the guards will be “forced” to run the prison’s delivery systems the way they are supposed to be run, rather than using the food, the water, the laundry, the medical system, the work incentive program, and even the toilet paper as instruments of punishment. Prisoners have a strong interest in the efficient running of the prison. It could be a fertile common ground for a meeting of the minds and a constructive peace. But it only takes a few guards who prefer conflict to cooperation to derail the whole process. At the first little setback they say, “See, we tried doing it by the book but it didn’t work; they are not human beings like us; the only thing they understand is brute force.” But, of course, they never viewed prisoners with anything but contempt. In the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation it isn’t difficult to find signs where guards have cynically crossed out Rehabilitation, or they abbreviate it as CDCr, or when they wish to be really derisive
DORC, or the Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections.
The guards tend to slough off their professional training; they disregard the official rules and regulations; they set themselves up as local petty potentates, at odds with their own management and the elected government—all to feed their addictions to power. Like bullies, sadists, slavers and wife-beaters everywhere, they get satisfaction out of degrading others. They have no trouble finding reasons to punish, and they have no end of rationalizations about how “the bitch deserved it.” They also actively set about damaging those they punish; beating them down, humiliating them and holding them down; destroying their ability to act and think for themselves; telling them it’s all their own fault; making them passive and dependent; and using any assertion of their own volition or personhood as a pretext for further punishment. It’s the perfect cover, since nobody seems to care if “criminals” are victimized.
They know what they are doing is wrong, which is why they have a code of silence and have created a wall of secrecy about what goes on in prison. They constantly lobby for laws that exclude the press from prisons; they black-ball and muzzle chaplains; they corrupt and stonewall investigations; they dismantle the inmate grievance and self-governance processes; they routinely retaliate against anyone who complain, file lawsuits, organizes or challenges their power in any way; they interfere with prisoners who try to write about conditions in prison, and so on. Unfortunately, the mistreatment that goes on is not only illegal and immoral, it is counter-productive. It is rehabilitation in reverse. The guards become an ever-present reminder of 1) how the Department of Corrections has become a captive of the prison guard union; 2) how the prison guard union has become the most powerful special interest group in state politics; 3) how it runs the prisons according to its own punitive conservative ideology; 4) how this conservative ideology “just so happens” to involve building not only more prisons but more punitive prisons; 5) how this prison growth just so happens to economically benefit prison guards in terms of job security, promotions and overtime; 6) how this has corrupted lawful authority in America to serve a narrow right-wing political class; 7) how the criminal justice system has become politicized in ways that subjugate whole classes of people based on race, class, national origin and political party; 8) how this “law and order” politics is based on a culture of manipulation and fear; and 9) how, if one is a minority or an outsider, one can come to see the dominant white culture, when it brings all its knowledge and expertise to bear on one’s subjugation, as a malevolent force in the world. These injustices don’t merely destroy a person’s good will; they sicken and disgust to such a profound degree that those who are subject to them lose all interest in contributing to society. They create grievances that harden into grudges, and make enemies where none existed before. And it all begins with a fundamental act of disrespect.
The punishment of prisoners is supposed to have limits. An eye for an eye, for example, is supposed to place a limit on personal and state vengeance. Punishment is supposed to chastise and humble the arrogant, not cripple the person or become a permanent way of life. A year in prison is no trivial punishment. The time taken out of one’s life is significant. Add to that the extreme poverty and privations of prison, the loss of business opportunities and permanently impeded social advancement and the loss is even more considerable. Prison is not supposed to be a blank check for bullies and sadists. It is not supposed to be a long, drawn-out, soul-destroying rape—especially when you consider that the vast bulk of offenders are not dangerous scary people, but rather ordinary people who have committed relatively minor property crimes, drug offenses, are mentally ill, or have violated some technical condition of their parole. Even more serious violent offenders should not be punished without limit. Prison should not dehumanize a person; it should not destroy a person’s health or sanity. It should not degrade a person for years on end, rendering them so dysfunctional and “prisonized” that they become unable to function in conventional society—unable to parent, hold down a job, or get off parole.
Prison guards know full well that it is wrong to humiliate and degrade people; nonetheless, they deliberately damage inmates in order to increase the likelihood that they will recidivate. It is against their training and their rules and regulations. It is against the public interest to make prisoners worse. The golden rule, Kantian ethics, and our American tradition of natural and constitutional rights all demand respect for human dignity and prohibit the subjugation of one human being by another. Therefore, prisoners are within their rights to resist the humiliation, torture and undignified treatment they receive. And, right-wing ideology notwithstanding, the human rights movement—the ethos of the entire modern world—supports them in this.
Cultures of resistance. It’s very difficult for the guards, who are belittled, demeaned and punished in the course of their own discipline, to know how to manage prisoners in constructive ways. There is, of course, their training, but this is no match for Zimbardo’s “Lucifer Effect,” made all the more potent by having years to spiral out of control and become entrenched in the institutional culture. After all, the sort of people who are inclined to become prison guards are typically not very educated people who are inclined to think independently and critically; nor are they people who get the “big picture”; who can look at an organizational mission statement and break it down into major and subsidiary goals, policies, programs, projects, timelines, action plans, orders and guidelines. Rather, they tend to be authoritarian people who expect every situation be governed by some rule which they can learn and follow by rote. To accommodate them, everything in prison has been simplified, routinized, deskilled and turned, as far as possible, into an assembly line process. Consequently, any disruption tends to become a calamity, which is generally met with varying degrees of overreaction, crackdowns and the promulgation of new local rules. Over time, these rare and one-off events create a labyrinthine array of layers upon layers of archaic, obsolete, and often contradictory rules and prohibitions, which persist indefinitely because there is no mechanism for rescinding them, even if there was anybody with a big enough picture, the authority and the motivation to do so. As a consequence, the “rule of law” tends to become a rather arbitrary and one-sided affair, with those in power making “the rules” up as they go along.
In the absence of outside oversight or the self-corrective effect of a working inmate grievance process, prisoners become subject to all sorts of arbitrary discipline: group punishments, random punishments, overboard and undeserved punishments—all of which create an environment in which there is no particular incentive to be “good.” Prisoners are punished no matter what they do. There is no particular reason to “play it safe,” so many decide to “go for the gusto,” do what they like, and let the guards catch them if they can. After all, the only real boundaries are the rules that the guards enforce. When guards engage in selective rule enforcement, inconsistent rule enforcement, group punishment and random punishment, they exercise their authority in bad faith. In such an environment, there is no particular reason for the inmates to respect their authority, unless it is to feign respect in order to build trust that can be exploited or betrayed it later. In this respect, the contingencies of reinforcement (or the selection pressures on behavior) tend to bring out the worst in people—duplicity and guile, manipulativeness, hedonism, opportunism and short-sighted impulsiveness and thuggishness.
When the guards have taken away your last treasured possession, you learn not to become too attached to anything. When you talk to your fellow prisoners and discover that most of them have been to prison many times before—most of them on technical parole violations for things that aren’t even crimes, it becomes very clear how little you actually have to lose. Pretty much the only thing you have left is your dignity and your self-respect, and you become quite determined that they are not going to take that away from you, no matter what. Having given up any hope of a normal life—any rehabilitation or reintegration into conventional society—many prisoners come to see themselves as “convicts.” Instead of collapsing in to a state of depression and demoralization at the prospect, they join the convict culture of resistance, and engage in a collective asymmetrical struggle against their common oppressor. In other words, the prisoners develop their own code of honor—don’t snitch off your fellow convicts; ride your own beef; do your own time; be a man (be brave in the face of overwhelming force and threats); don’t cooperate with the hacks; and a “don’t take shit from anybody” attitude, least of all the totalitarian regime of the prison. If something isn’t nailed down, one is almost obligated to “liberate” it. Malingering, dawdling, circumventing procedures, smuggling and deliberately screwing things up become a hobby, a vocation, an art form, and an occupation. You lose your fear of punishment. And when the guards try to stare you down with their mean piggish eyes, you learn to give them such a look of withering hatred that they forget about taking things out on you and move on to softer prey.
The Nigger Factory. The blacks bump fists and call each other “nigga” in an act of solidarity which symbolizes not only their hatred of the prison and the racist white society that sends them there in such disproportionate numbers, it signals their solidarity in hatred of the whole of white culture—its intellectualism, its etiquette, its reverence for knowledge—indeed, everything it stands for. After the Tuskegee experiment, where the U.S. Public Health Service allowed 399 black men to die of untreated syphilis, many blacks are skeptical of white people and their motives. In prison—where racism is unimaginably blatant and unrestrained—black people’s worst fears about whites are constantly realized. The result is such a profound disgust with white culture that prisonized blacks come to reject any form of intellectualism. This includes such things as turn-taking in conversation; following topics and developing logical arguments; abstract reasoning in general; making distinctions between facts and opinions, or suspicions and evidence; entertaining speculative reasoning and “what-if” scenarios; or anything else that smacks of “book learning.” To show their contempt for white culture blacks in prison deliberately morph the English language in ways to make it sound profoundly “ignorant,” “slovenly” and “black” to white ears. They deliberately drop consonants; they use grammar “incorrectly”; and generally make up their own rapidly changing “slang” words their own private language of “Ebonics.”
In other respects, they act the way whites expect “niggers” to act; only they exaggerate for effect, throwing the stereotypes of their spoiled black identity back in whites’ faces. It becomes a kind of in-group banter, much the same way gay men in the 1950s use “camp” to parody the effeminacy that the surrounding culture expected homosexuals to manifest. However, unlike gay camp and its projections of spoiled masculinity, these projections of “negritude” are not intended to deflate the negative stereotypes by puncturing them with humor. Rather, they are intended to rub white people’s noses in it, as if to say, “I have become your worst nightmare; now you have to live with me and all my angry tribe.” Becoming a nigger and confirming white people’s worst stereotypes of black people, may not be the best way to win white people over in the long run, but the fear and disgust you inspire is empowering in a perverse sort of way. Besides, being sensitive to white people’s fears is the least of your problems when you are black and in prison. And, as for furthering the cause of black people, what has the civil rights movement or the black establishment done for black prisoners lately? Excuse me for saying so, but if the black community wants to do something about angry, hardcore, in-your-face black men emulating their worst racial stereotypes, they need to address the carceral state and the prisons which support this kind of class apartheid. Now that we have a black Attorney General, this is more likely to happen now than in generations.
Whites in prison are only slightly less alienated. Nonetheless, they call one another “wood,” and “peck” have their own shibboleths to express their “white trash” solidarity. For example, in prison it is a mild insult to call someone an “inmate,” since “inmate” connotes someone who accepts the authority of the guards and the prison as legitimate and cooperates with them on that basis. The term “convict” is reserved to refer someone who “knows what time it is” and does not accept the guard’s abuses of power as legitimate, and stands with his fellow convicts in opposition to them. Some whites cultivate their own swastika-splashed scary stereotypes. But, despite all the shaved heads and White Pride tattoos, a surprising number secretly like hip-hop and its angry message rejection of the dominant culture and its police. And for the same reason: they are beginning to understand that they too are an expendable class that can be used as fodder for the prison-industrial-complex and the convenience of “law and order” politicians. It’s the prisons that put the trash in “white trash.”
The presumption of moral unworthiness: Contrary to popular belief, only a minority of convicted felons are strongly and exclusively committed to a criminal career when arrested and sent to prison. John Irwin, in “The Felon,” a sociological study of California prisons in the 1960s, describes how the process of being arrested, tried, and imprisoned inevitably tears a person away from the orderly roles and relationships that sustain his social world, leading to its eventual collapse. During this collapse, the person typically experiences extreme disorientation, remorse and regret, as he struggles to fit the pieces of himself back together in an attempt to restore himself to dignity in his own eyes, and in the eyes of those who matter to him. In California, before a person can be sentenced under the Penal Code, he must be evaluated by a probation officer who is supposed to review the circumstances and motivations surrounding the defendant’s crime; his age, character, education and criminal history; his stability, motivation, capacity for introspection and change; his attitudes toward people, authority; and his prospects for modifying the factors contributing to his offending. In the 1960s, only the most committed criminals were ever sent to prison. The rest were given probation, often in combination with restitution and community service. However, ever since rehabilitation went out of vogue in the mid-1970s, probation officers simply rubber-stamp the prosecutor’s sentencing recommendation. Since 2004, even first time offenders with stable, productive lives and pro-social attitudes are sent to prison on simple drug possession charges.
According to Irwin, there is a similar period of disorientation and remorse when the person firsts gets to prison. In the1960s, these first few weeks would be an intensive period of observation and evaluation during which it would be determined whether the person’s criminality was due to 1) an emotional disturbance or mental health disorder; 2) whether he was basically normal but had fallen in with the wrong crowd; 3) whether he had gotten himself into an untenable situation and “did what he had to do” to get out of it; or 4) whether the person’s criminality was due to an ingrained psychopathic or sociopathic personality, where the person knows the difference between right and wrong, but is either too impulsive or hedonistic to care about and respect the rights of others.
These evaluations are no longer done, because now, everyone is simply assumed to be in category four and, therefore, morally unworthy of redemption and rehabilitation. Here, the prisoner is expected to rebuild his personality and his self-esteem in an institution whose every rule and procedure is based on the assumption that he is immoral, can’t be trusted, and is therefore unworthy of any dignity and respect. In this respect, the culture of resistance that defines convict life is often the only viable compromise for a person struggling to reintegrate themselves into a social world with a modicum of mutual esteem. Ask yourself, how many times would you be able to put up with being hauled off to prison on some parole violation technicality, or how many times would you put up with officious jackbooted goons throwing the contents of your house on the front lawn before you turned against them in implacable hatred?
The destructiveness of random punishment: Random punishment is particularly psychologically destructive. It blurs the connection between specific acts and the punishment which follows. The punishment generalizes to the entire self, which comes to be experienced as bad or unlovable. The punishment is received as a punishment of the self rather than for an act. Children who are shamed and punished in this way grow up to be
abusive adults. Punishment shatters one’s relationship with the punisher. In this case, random punishment sets the prisoner fundamentally at odds not only with the actual officers that punish him, and the institution, but with the whole society that the guards and the prison represent. It destroys the prisoner’s sense of being a worthwhile human being; it destroys his sense of connection and engagement with society and its values. Unless the prisoner has unusual internal resources, he comes to see himself not only as an outcast but beyond the pale of redemption. He becomes demoralized; which is to say, he no longer subscribes to the higher purposes and altruistic values of his society. The idea of voting, recycling, or even picking up after himself in consideration of the next guy, only fills him with cynicism and disgust. He loses interest in improving himself; he turns to immediate self-gratification; he stops caring for anyone but himself; he becomes part of the demoralized, disempowered, disenfranchised, outcast culture of the prison; and he begins to think like a convict, and then like a criminal. And, after a while, he actually becomes one.
Unfortunately, this only plays into the guard’s—and the public’s—perceptions of prisoners as “dirt bags,” “niggers,” “animals,” and “scum.” The guards assume that the problem is the defective moral character of the prisoners, when in fact it is the state of war between them—a state of war brought on by undeserved, excessive and random punishment. The guard’s response to any perceived challenge to their authority is to escalate the war further. Here, the formula is, “Find out what the prisoners want and take it away from them.” Make everything, absolutely everything, a point of contention. If an indigent inmate wants to write home, deny him the five postage-paid envelopes that the regulations say he is due. If he is still engaged in legal work on his case, deny him ready access to law books, writing materials, copy machines, or place such onerous restrictions on them that they are effectively denied. Take the cardboard backing off his pads of paper and give him a 4” pencil with no eraser and no sharpener. Find little excuses to take away prisoners books and newspapers. If inmates want to sit quietly and meditate or practice yoga, take their room away from them. Take away their tobacco, their weights and weight rooms, their conjugal visits, their art supplies, and their packages from home. Prevent them from making phone calls and
receiving visitors.
Turning the prisoner’s ambitions, dreams and work-ethic against him. If the inmate likes to read or study, take away his books, or put him in a class where he is forced to read something he has no interest in. Confiscate his library books and then bill him for the full cost of the book claiming that he caused it to be lost. If the inmate wants to work, make sure it is at a job that he doesn’t like. Make the task as pointless and unenjoyable as possible; don’t train him and continually find fault with him when he fails to perform up to expectations. Make him feel as though work is a form of punishment which is being imposed on him against his will. If he signs up for an apprenticeship program that has to log, say, 1,700 hours in order for him to get his certificate, make sure that he gets bounced out of his position 40 hours shy of completion. Or tell him you are going to mail him his certificate, but don’t. Deny him the fruits of his labor. Tell him that there is a rule somewhere that makes it impossible to pay him for all the hours he has worked; find reasons not to give him the raises he would automatically be due. Post a huge sign displaying the hundreds of thousands of dollars the enterprise has made off of his labor, so that he feels appropriately exploited when he gets his 25 cent an hour paycheck. Always know just what to say to win a person over, and then say exactly the opposite. Make him want to throw his tools down in disgust. Assign him a task like cleaning the officer’s gym, but tell him he can’t use the equipment even though there is no specific rule against this. Then, leave him unsupervised for hours at a time, and bust him for using the equipment a week before he is supposed to go home and give him an extra month on his sentence. Also, whenever you want to feel especially macho or self-important, bark at him in ways that make him fantasize about stabbing you in the neck. (And then seem genuinely surprised and indignant when he does so.)
It is not the same everywhere, but there has been a gradual movement away from controlling inmates through work incentives, personal interaction and relationships toward a reliance on brute force, steel and technology. As result, hostilities have escalated between prisoners and their captors. The prisons have responded by “hardening” the guards with vests, deadly collapsible metal batons,
tasers, restraint chairs, and evermore concentrated forms of pepper spray. The guards come to feel invincible and entitled to use their tasers, cattle prods and chemical weapons not just in the cases of life-threatening confrontation for which they were designed, but to scoot prisoners along, and as
punishments for disobedience and, when they are in the mood for it, outright
torture. This is not an exaggeration. Amnesty International USA has documented
270 taser-related deaths between 2001 and 2007, and many more
non-lethal uses of tasers to
discipline and punish prisoners who
don’t move quickly enough when ordered, or instead of wrestling prisoners down to gain physical control over them. Likewise, there are many similarly documented cases of using chemical weapons to
discipline and torture prisoners. These have not made the guards safer. On the contrary, guards prefer not to walk among the prisoners and interact. Instead, they have withdrawn to their podiums, command posts and watch towers. Their contact with inmates is further limited by reliance on video “eye in the sky” surveillance cameras, and shouting commands at prisoners over the PA system.
“Treated as de facto war zones, prisons, especially the crop of super-maximum-security-institutions—supermaxes—that have opened up since the 1980s, become war zones, with prisoners and staff engaged in a perpetual, albeit unequal, arms race. Treated as enemy combatants, even many initially nonviolent inmates end up getting swept into the culture of brutality. When prisoners don’t come out of their cells after being ordered to do so, or don’t return their food trays, extraction teams gas them and drag them out with overwhelming force. When gangs fight on the prison yards, entire prisons can be locked down for weeks or months at a time, their inmates allowed out of their cells for less than an hour a day. When mentally ill inmates disobey orders or behave in the erratic, bizarre, self-destructive manner typical of people suffering from diseases such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, guards frequently respond with beatings, the firing of TASER stun guns or other “nonlethal weapons,” and use four-and five-point restraint devices to hold down these individuals. Often when this happens, prison administrators hold hearings and decide to place the disruptive inmates into secure housing units—prisons-within-prisons where inmates are held for long periods of time in virtual isolation. The conditions inside these buildings have been described by psychiatrist Stuart Grassian as producing a “devastating psychological impact,” somewhat akin to the mental collapse experienced by many prisoners of war when kept in solitary confinement for extended periods of time.” (Sasha Abramsky in “American Furies” pp. xx-xxi.)
The Banality of Torture: For those who think that by ending waterboarding and closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay that we have turned the page on torture, think again. On any given day in America there are 20,000 prisoners undergoing the torture of solitary confinement in the country’s supermax prisons. In addition, there are a similar number of prisoners in Segregated Housing Units (SHU’s) and Administrative Segregation (Ad Seg) and jail cells colloquially referred to as “the hole.” Out of sight, out of mind, the inexorable logic of exclusion fulfills itself, with all of the usual rationalizations: They are the “worst of the worst,” it really “isn’t so bad” because we lay no hand on them and leave no physical mark, and besides, they “wouldn’t be there if they didn’t have it coming.”
The media’s natural tendency is to focus on the most visible and sensational forms of brutality. However, this focus on
physical brutality—beatings, gassings, electrical shocks, sleep deprivation, starving, waterboarding—tends to trivialize the far more common, insidious and psychologically destructive forms of torture built into the everyday life of the prisoner. To people who feel the press of schedules and obligations of everyday life, the prospect of being alone with nothing to do may seem like an inconsequential form of punishment, and perhaps even a leisurely respite of peace and quiet. But for those who are forced to endure the reality of
solitary confinement, where the mind has nothing to do but operate on itself, words can scarcely express the sense of profound sense of horror and helplessness as lack of stimulation drains the mind of its content, and it begins to lose coherence and collapse in on itself. Time and self become distorted; thoughts run in annoying circles like the repetitive tunes played by old ice cream trucks; hallucinations come unbidden; noises startle and touch off anxious ruminations that magnify one’s phobias; little things become overwhelming. People, who can scarcely sit still for even a few minutes, cannot imagine the extent to which solitary confinement is torture, and this is what makes it a favorite of torturers everywhere.
Torture, or in CIA language “coercive interrogation,” is a set of techniques designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation and shock in order to force them to make concessions against their will. The guiding logic is to create violent ruptures between prisoners and their ability to make sense of the world around them. First, the senses are starved of any input (with hoods, earplugs, shackles, total isolation), then the body is bombarded with overwhelming stimulation (strobe lights, blaring music, beatings, electroshock).
The goal of this “softening up” stage is to provoke a kind of hurricane in the mind: prisoners are so regressed and afraid that they can no longer think rationally or protect their own interests. It is in that state of shock that most prisoners give their interrogators whatever they want—information, confessions, a renunciation of former beliefs. One CIA manual provides a particularly succinct explanation: “There is an interval—which may be extremely brief—of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world.” –Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
One might well ask what purpose it serves to reduce a prisoner to a state of gibbering imbecility, shattering his personality and reducing him to a state of childlike helplessness. In an interrogation, there is something that his captors want. The subject can theoretically signal his captors as to when he has had enough by giving the information they seek. But in a supermax or a SHU, there is no comparable moment of surrender, no moment where he can “give up” and cease resistance, after with the torture will cease, because the torturers are not after anything in particular. The practitioners of long-term solitary confinement are not interested in using the principles of reward and punishment to train the prisoner to comply with orders; or even to impress upon them the futility of resistance. They are engaged in the destruction of the very core of the prisoner himself. They seek to destroy not only his dignity and his self-respect, but his ability to resist by destroying his very capacity to engage in volitional action.
In the 19th Century (and among some religious fundamentalists still today) there is something called the strict father model of child rearing, which is in distinct contrast to the nurturant parent model, in which leading pedagogues counseled parents that breaking the will of their child was necessary to the rearing of obedient underlings:
The father has authority to determine the policy that governs the family. He has moral authority and his commands are to be obeyed. He teaches his children right from wrong by setting strict rules for their behavior and by setting a moral example in his own life. He enforces these moral rules by reward and punishment. The father also gains his children’s cooperation by showing love and by appreciating them when they obey the rules. But the children must not be coddled, lest they become spoiled. A spoiled child lacks the appropriate moral values and the moral strength to and discipline to live independently and meet life’s challenges. The mother has day-to-day responsibility for the care of the household, raising the children, and upholding the father’s authority. Love and nurturance are a vital part of family life, but they should never outweigh parental authority, which is an expression of love and nurturance—tough love. As the children mature, the virtues of respect for moral authority, self-reliance, and self-discipline allow them to incorporate their father’s moral values, empowering them to be self-governing and self-legislating. –Lakoff and Johnson, as quoted in Linder
This style of childrearing was deemed appropriate and even necessary to socialize children into hierarchical societies in which they would be expected to accept their place as underlings in the social order, where everyone was to know and accept their subordinate place. It is no longer appropriate in the modern globalized world, where people are expected to regard one another and conduct themselves as equals. But the method didn’t work even as prescribed: The result was a weakening, not a strengthening of the child.
Evidence from three areas of psychological research—attachment theory, socialization theory, and family violence studies—shows that the strict father model “…tends to produce children who are dependent on the authority of others, cannot chart their own moral course very well, have less of a conscience, are less respectful of others, and have no greater ability to resist temptations.” Thus the strict father model tends to produce people with
authoritarian personalities; that is to say, personalities characterized by rigid, stereotypical thinking, intolerance, superstition, insecurity, excessive conformity, submissiveness to authority, and willing to
blindly follow orders, irrespective of their moral content.
And that is when the strict father model is applied as directed. In prison, the prisoner is certainly regressed to a childish state, but there are no rewards, no showing of love or appreciation when the child/prisoner obeys the rules; there is only an absence of punishment. There is no moral example to speak of in the example of the prison guard. Rather, you have a cold, distant and abusive authority figure who punishes impersonally and randomly without consistent distinction between right and wrong. To the extent that this experience succeeds in modifying the personality, it tends to achieve the worst possible result. It tends to produce people who are beaten down, but who in their
humiliated fury are consumed with vengeful fantasies, paranoia, or cruelty. They are less empathetic and desensitized to conventional notions of right and wrong. Hence, there is nothing correcting about this kind of punishment; it victimizes the person that greatly increases his potential for victimizing others.
The entire social organization and architecture of the supermax is designed to assert a regime of absolute control over the prisoner. This is accomplished by reducing the prisoner’s life to a series of “choices” in which the prisoner is faced with only two options: comply or get hurt. Thus, when it comes down to a decision to, say, return his meal tray (something he would normally do willingly without a second thought), this now becomes a contested terrain, a battle of wills, a theater of war in the guards’ take up as a campaign of Good against Evil. Should the prisoner disobey, he does not merely fail to comply, he “chooses” to “go to war” with the staff. This precipitates an emergency “situation” which, under the rules and customs of the prison, calls for a heavily armored “cell extraction” team that gases the prisoner through a slot in the door, tasers and beats him into submission, and then adds time to his solitary confinement in order to make him further regret his “decision” to resist.
From the guard’s point of view, this “willingness” to “go to war” despite its obvious futility and the inevitability of dire punishment, can only be explained by the prisoner being in the grip of an inexplicable and incorrigible Evil. Indeed, even the prisoner’s madness—his confusion, his psychotic babble, his head-banging and self-mutilation, and smearing himself with feces, are all interpreted as acts of hostility and resistance—i.e., as “manipulative” attempts to gain to gain concessions from staff by appealing to their sympathy and common decency. And in a sense they are. They prisoner is “resisting” the attempts of his captors to deprive him of his essential humanity, his dignity, his self-respect, his ability to engage in volitional action; he is, quite simply, asserting the last remaining remnant of his will to live. The guards have developed such an array of
cognitive distortions that they read even prisoner’s suicide attempts and his desperate appeals for mercy, as acts of “
asymmetrical warfare” and, therefore, as further evidence of his essential “evil” and “otherness.”
It should go without saying (but since we have become so morally compromised as a nation I feel compelled to say it anyway) the guard’s “all stick and no carrot” war against the inmates is morally repugnant and shocking; it runs not only contrary to the norms of civilized society but everything we know about managing people, training animals and modifying behavior. It is not merely torture, it is torture without any practical objective and, therefore, without any purpose or limits. To reduce a person to a state of abject and utter dependency; to regress him to a state of childlike helplessness; to compromise his sanity and judgment, and then to punish him for “misbehaving” is so unjust that boggles the mind. But to go even further, to deprive the person of any means of extricating himself from this torture; to deny him any hope of it ending; any means of redress, or even the knowledge that their agonizing screams are being heard—is absolutely unconscionable and wrong. To put someone in a position where the only way they can protest, assert their dignity or their personhood is through a nominal act of “disobedience,” which unleash a sensory hurricane of punishment, made all the more overwhelming by the period of sensory deprivation that precedes it—is so fundamentally inhuman and unjust that calls into question the humanity of those who perpetrate it.
And that is not even the full horror of it. Under normal conditions a person’s sense of self is automatically sustained through the push and pull of social interaction. But in solitary confinement, where there is only a routinized, impersonal environment to interact with, the environment takes on a threatening and hallucinatory quality as one’s thoughts and one’s sense of self lose their normal boundaries. The more autonomy one surrenders by complying, the more difficult it becomes to tell where the self ends and the environment begins. As the boundaries of the self break down, the person’s paranoia, delusions, and hallucinations threaten to overwhelm and engulf his personality.
As
Lorna A. Rhodes observes, “Prisoners describe a preoccupation with the pervasive cameras, distorted auditory effects connected to the high noise level, and fantasies of poisoning or of evil influences from towers and booths. Staff appear as robots or as persecuting and demonic figures liable to launch a personal attack at any moment.” Unless the person can assert himself in some way, his personality loses coherence and unravels. So, it is out of psychological survival, not out of an unfathomable appetite for evil, that the prisoner “chooses” to “misbehave.” To resist, and especially to protest the horrific injustice of being driven to this brink, not only affirms the boundaries of one’s self, it reconstitutes oneself as a moral being. It is a reassertion of one’s honor and dignity, one’s right to exist, one’s right to defend himself as a person and not a thing. To unleash the terrible punishments that typically follow someone’s “disobedience” to this regime on someone who is so psychologically vulnerable is an unspeakable crime, since it attacks the person’s very will to live in a way calculated to drive him to suicide.
The worst of the worst. It’s always the same old story, whenever the privileged first class-citizens want to justify the exclusion and segregation those it consigns to second-class citizenship, it invokes imagery that they are protecting themselves from the worst of the worst. Fifty years ago, we didn’t mince words about it; we called them “chinks,” “spics” and “niggers,” and everyone knew the “niggers” were the worst of the worst. In the post civil rights era, we don’t use such terminology anymore, but the people who complain about “political correctness” still think in those terms. Basically, they are complaining about not being talk openly about how they yearn to go back to the “good old days” of America’s apartheid—of legalized discrimination, segregation and Jim Crow—when white people were undisputedly on top. In the post civil rights era, such talk would appear bigoted and reactionary and, well, un-American; so we speak about our segregationist ideas in the coded language of “law and order,” where the same cast of racial groups and foreigners has morphed into “criminals” and “illegal aliens.” We are now even willing to sacrifice poor white folks to preserve the illusion that we are a color-blind society. Of course, the “worst of the worst” are the same people they always were, only instead of keeping them in their place on the other side of the tracks; we now put them in prison, where they provide good jobs for the privileged classes who guard them and exploit their cheap labor both in prison and afterwards.
The phrase “the worst of the worst” is inevitably used to describe “problem” prisoners. Just as poverty is seen as the personal moral failure of individuals, rather than as a matter of discrimination and social policy, so too “problem” prisoners are conceived as the individual failings of morally defective human beings, not the system to which they are subject. The “worst of the worst” suggests that only those who have committed particularly heinous crimes prior or during incarceration are subject to further isolation in supermax facilities or Administrative Segregation. In reality,
supermax placement is rarely determined by the crime for which an inmate is sentenced and can result not only from serious offenses committed in prison but also from mental illness, need for protection, the accumulation of multiple minor infractions, or membership in “threat” groups. Any natural leader; any prisoner who organizes other prisoners; any prisoner who complains on behalf of his fellows, or who files Inmate Appeal or a lawsuit, or helps other prisoners to do so, runs a various serious risk of being placed in a disciplinary situation where they are needled and provoked until they “misbehave,” whereupon they are subject to even more punishment until they “misbehave” again and again, until they are locked down 24/7 in a supermax. Quite often these decisions are made by administrative fiat for reasons of convenience and retaliation, rather than for misconduct requiring a disciplinary hearing, as would normally apply in cases of increased punishment. Once the option of isolation in solitary confinement exists, it tends to be normalized as a “common sense” fix for inadequate mental health care, overcrowding, “uppity” inmates, and failure to adequately protect prisoners in the general population.
The supermax, with all its high technology surveillance and control of the prisoner, gives the impression of that something of value is being accomplished with “incorrigible” and violent criminals with specialized expertise and facilities. In fact, it simply takes prisoners who acting out and
decompensating because they have been poorly managed and subjects them to the worst possible management, literally destroying their sanity, altering their personalities in ways that make them less social, less attuned to conventional morality, less able to control themselves, and therefore even more unmanageable, all the while blaming it on the irredeemable and intrinsic evil of the individual. In other words, they needle and provoke prisoners beyond endurance, and then, when they attempt to restore their psychological equilibrium through protest, violence, or “disobedience,” they systematically and mercilessly crush them, saying it was the prisoner’s own unfathomable evil that made necessary for them do so. The machinery of isolation brings the full force of the prison’s apparatus of security and control to bear on the task of stripping these prisoners of the elements that sustain their personhood and citizenship, leaving them not only traumatized and broken, but a stigmatized second-class citizen fit only for menial drudgery.
Supermax proliferation is also supported by the contemporary spread of "war" imagery and militarism into the prison complex. In what Jonathan Simon, following James Gibson (1994), describes as the "New War," "small units ... fight a comparatively low-level but almost continuous war, largely devoid of fixed positions or territory.... New Wars allow for temporary victories and defeats." Simon suggests that the assumptions of the New War "are reflected in the obsession with crime" and contribute to the idea that both crime and war are "the products of evil individuals motivated by ultimately demonic forces" (Simon, 2001: 110, 112). The supermax participates in this imagery, both because its inhabitants can be represented as demonic and because it allows for "temporary victory" over individual prisoners while remaining always open to the admission of new candidates as "wars" (on drugs or terrorism, or between prisoners and prison staff, or among inmate groups) ebb and flow elsewhere in the system. This approach is one of tactics in which the emphasis is not on long-term goals for prisoners but rather the day-to-day suppression of even the appearance of resistance. As Kateb notes, "The ideal enemy is bellicose, perhaps inflamed, but manageably so" (1997: 898). Supermax is thus an element in a militarized response with the premise that both domestic and foreign enemies deserve extreme measures and must be placed beyond the reach of empathy or law. The prisoner is "manageable" so long as more effective technologies of control--mechanical, impersonal and absolute--can be made available. –Lorna A. Rhodes, “Supermax as a technology of punishment.”
This is a war in which the armed might of the entire nation is pitted against a single defenseless human being. It is obscene. And yet we allow it to continue because we have been reassured that this form of incarceration is rational, necessary, and effective. It is none of these things.
The
effects of solitary confinement have been known for over a century. Indeed, by 1890, in In re Medley, 10 S.Ct. 384, the United States Supreme Court explicitly recognized the massive psychiatric harm caused by solitary confinement: “This matter of solitary confinement is not ... a mere unimportant regulation as to the safe-keeping of the prisoner .... [E]xperience [with the penitentiary system of solitary confinement] demonstrated that there were serious objections to it. A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.” Deprived of a sufficient level of environmental and social stimulation, individuals will soon become incapable of maintaining an adequate state of alertness and attention to the environment. Indeed, even a few days of solitary confinement will predictably shift the electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern towards an abnormal pattern characteristic of stupor and delirium. Dr. Stuart
Grassian, a psychiatrist whose observations have been cited in a number of federal court decisions, discusses the neuropsychiatric effects of solitary confinement:
Most individuals have at one time or another experienced, at least briefly, the effects of intense monotony and inadequate environmental stimulation. After even a relatively brief period of time in such a situation, an individual is likely to descend into a mental torpor—a “fog”—in which alertness, attention and concentration all become impaired. In such a state, after a time, the individual becomes increasingly incapable of processing external stimuli, and often becomes “hyperresponsive” to such stimulation; for example, a sudden noise or the flashing of a light jars the individual from his stupor, and becomes intensely unpleasant. Over time, the very absence of stimulation causes whatever stimulation is available to become noxious and irritating; individuals in such a stupor tend to avoid any stimulation, and progressively to withdraw into themselves and their own mental fog.
An adequate state of responsiveness to the environment requires both the ability to achieve and maintain an attentional set—to focus attention—and the ability to shift attention. The impairment of alertness and concentration in solitary confinement leads to two related abnormalities.
The inability to focus, to achieve and maintain attention, is experienced as a kind of dissociative stupor—a mental “fog” in which the individual cannot focus attention, cannot, for example, grasp or recall when he attempts to read or to think.
The inability to shift attention results in a kind of “tunnel vision” in which the individual’s attention becomes stuck—almost always on something intensely unpleasant—and in which he cannot stop thinking about that matter; instead, he becomes obsessively fixated upon it. These obsessional preoccupations are especially troubling. Individuals in solitary easily become preoccupied with some thought, some perceived slight or irritation, some sound or smell coming from a neighboring cell, or—perhaps most commonly, by some bodily sensation—tortured by it, unable to stop dwelling on it. I have examined countless individuals in solitary confinement who have become obsessively preoccupied with some minor, almost imperceptible bodily sensation, a sensation which grows over time into a worry, and finally into an all-consuming, life-threatening illness.
In solitary confinement, ordinary stimuli become intensely unpleasant, and small irritations become maddening. Individuals in such confinement brood upon normally unimportant stimuli, and minor irritations become the focus of increasing agitation and paranoia.
Moreover, solitary confinement is especially debilitating in people with subtle neurological or attention deficit disorder, or individuals with psychopathic personality disorders, who appear to experience a chronic under-arousal of their central nervous system, leading them to have a pathological need for external stimulation. When such vulnerable individuals are exposed to conditions of solitary confinement, they are especially likely to experience states of florid psychotic delirium. Individuals with more stable personalities and stronger cognitive function fare better, but they still experience a degree of stupor, difficulties with thinking and concentration, obsessional thinking, agitation, irritability and difficulty tolerating external stimuli. EEG studies have corroborated these findings. A substantial proportion of those who suffer from mental illness, or who are marginally retarded, or who tremble on the brink of those conditions, tend to respond unfavorably and with increasing resistance to punitive controls.
Supermax prisons also have a debilitating and dehumanizing effect on prison guards, as Lorna Rhoads explains:
In the resulting “war” between disturbed prisoners and staff, structural power is expressed in direct force that ultimately overwhelms the prisoner. Correctional workers and prison industry advertising, however, frame the situation as a never-ending series of skirmishes with rational and “cunning” adversaries. Within this frame, even extreme acts of self-harm can be conceptualized as manipulation.
Officers and other supermax workers are far less constrained than prisoners, but they share some of negative conditions of these environments. They are separated from others in the system and inserted into a clockwork operation that in many ways resembles factory work; they too experience a noisy, pressured, and unpredictable environment. The power they exert over prisoners is intrusive and intimate, yet they are enjoined to psychological distance. In ways that parallel, to a lesser degree, the effects on prisoners, they may become depressed, violent, or excessively preoccupied with the technical and tactical aspects of their jobs. The interruption of "emergencies" into their routines can seem a disproportionate threat, an opportunity to alleviate boredom by making use of the available array of emergency response tools, or an invitation to "get away with" the use of excessive force. Under these circumstances the specialized tools of control become objects of desire, symbolizing status, safety, and a kind of industrialized consumerism. In a parallel kind of institutionalization, staff develop an eagerness for "war," a numbing of emotional response, and a diminished capacity for empathy with implications for their outside lives as well as for the prisoners in their charge.
Quite often these prisoners are released directly onto community—placed literally on the street—with no transition or preparation. Some do not even make it out of the bus station before attempting to score drugs or reoffending in some way. Given the hair-trigger conditions that become part of their terms of parole, even so
Demonizing Black Women
Nonetheless, the crack-baby myth persisted even after it began to be scientifically discredited. As a story it had a kind of irresistible “demon spawn” lure to it which, because it violated our sacred notions of motherhood, would draw us into an engrossing state of moral outrage. As such, it was the kind of story which makes everyone feel superior. Even the crack-addicted mothers could look at the stories and feel some small satisfaction that they at least were not as bad as the media was portraying them. But, more importantly, the crack baby myth seemed to invite people to take some sort of stand on what should be done about it. Those on the left could advocate more public social programs to meet the crisis, while those on the right could advocate more punitive drug legislation aimed at solving the problem by punishing the drug-addicted mothers they saw as responsible for it. Like the myth of the black “welfare queen” driving from welfare office to welfare office in her pink Cadillac, picking up welfare checks under different fraudulent names, the crack baby myth was also as false. Nonetheless, it evoked people’s rage against “freeloaders” and “welfare cheats,” diverting attention away from the huge government tax brakes and subsidies that the Republicans were handing out to their friends, and focusing it instead on a group that people like to blame for everything—Blacks who, according to the myth, had no work ethic, sat around all day smoking crack and having sex, and unleashing their unholy spawn on the rest of us. 
Quite often there is an expensive course of counseling involved, and fines which, if they are not paid in full and on time, can result in violation of probation and prison time. There were 388,260 people on probation in California at the end of 2005—up from 280,560 in 1995, the largest increase of any state in the country.
It is difficult to imagine a system more prone to abuse. Any time a woman gets fed up with her parolee spouse or boyfriend, all she has to do is break a few windows and, when the police come, tell them the boyfriend did it. If you want to get rid of your ex-girlfriend’s current boyfriend, all you have to do is call his parole officer and tell him you saw him smoking dope, or he had a knife, or “he scares me,” or he made “terrorist threats,” and away he goes, with very little if any investigation. Owe someone money? Just pick up the phone. Need sweatshop labor? Just make a deal with a parole officer. If your workers don’t like being cheated out of their overtime, or if they start talking union, just pick up the phone and they are instantly replaced.
We built prisons like no society has ever done before, and overfilled them—in California, to double their designed capacity. We gave up any pretense of rehabilitation in favor of punishment, based on hazy assumptions about deterrence—i.e., that if you could only alienate, exclude, antagonize, rape and stigmatize people enough, somehow the horror of it all would terrorize people into being better, more socially upright, more law-abiding citizens. We returned tens of thousands of beaten-down, emotionally traumatized and socially dysfunctional men to their communities without any preparation, education, economic prospects, or social capital of any kind. And then, when the resources of those communities became stressed beyond the tipping point and they imploded in disorder, we militarized the police and sent them in—ostensibly to crack down on the gangs that had grown up around a drug trade that our own prohibitionist policies had made so irresistibly profitable—but also, to reinforce the processes of social sorting and surveillance that make inner-city ghettos so inescapable. The police behaved—and still behave—like an occupying army. That is to say, they treat ghetto residents like a conquered people—invading their homes on a number of legal and quasi-legal pretexts; traumatizing them with shock and awe tactics; humiliating them with disrespectful treatment; intimidating them with their heavily armed presence; taking reprisals against any show of resistance; snatching breadwinners from their families on the flimsiest of parole violation technicalities, and generally creating ever deeper chaos and dysfunction in their wake.
This ideology of punishment is itself situated within a larger ideology of apocalyptic struggle and its rhetoric of war—the War of Good against Evil. This is a longing for a renewed and purified world in which Good will finally triumph over Evil, and the human agents of Evil will either be physically annihilated or otherwise disposed of; that the elect will thereafter live as a collectivity, in unanimous agreement and without conflict on a transformed and purified earth. This is the same ideology that nourished the butchers who led the Inquisition and the Crusades; the Conquistadores who swept through the New World; the Puritans who believed that God had had called them to cast out Satan and remove the Native Americans in a campaign of Manifest Destiny; the exterminations perpetrated by the Nazis; the torturers in the clandestine prisons of Argentina during the Dirty War; and the Serbian thugs with heavy machine guns and wraparound sunglasses who stood over the bodies of Muslims they had slain in Bosnia.
With the election of Barack Obama, the closing of Guantanamo, the ending of torture abroad, the ending of extraordinary rendition and secret prisons around the world, we have taken the first step back from the long road of moral compromise. In order to make it back to a respectable decency, we have to reexamine the moral compromises we have made—and continue to make—in our prisons at home. We have to face the ideology of punishment wherever it appears, and undo the inhumanity, the degradation and institutionalized torture being conducted in our names. The suspension of the “ordinary rules of decency” could not have succeeded without the mechanisms of outside monitoring—the press, lawyers, human rights organizations and religious organization being denied access to the institution. As long as the reality that is created inside prisons is immune from critical evaluation, challenge, and debate, and exempted from normal forms accountability, there is no way to correct the destructive norms that have been created inside.
In 1970, there were 
Likewise, Mike Males, a Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, reports on the “
Michael Lynch, in his book 
In other words, we treat the mild sex offender who pats a little girl on the fanny over her clothing in a public video arcade (who would not even know that she had been “victimized” had it not been for her alert older brother) with the same unrestrained vengeance that we fantasize about applying to Richard Allen Davis, the psychopath who brutally murdered Polly Klaas. Davis was also a repeat offender, and was held up as an example of why we need three-strikes laws. Now we have three-strikes in California, but 57% of them are doing life for petty nonviolent crimes like stealing a slice of 