Forget Abu Ghraib! We've Got Our Own Dirty Little Secret!

The penitentiary is our own invention. Nowhere else in the world—prior to 1816—did an institution exist like the Auburn Penitentiary in upstate New York. So innovative was the penitentiary concept that Alexis de Tocqueville wangled a research assignment from his government in France to study this phenomenon among correctional institutions. Of course, Tocqueville's study of U. S. prisons was eclipsed by his Democracy in America. Unfortunately, the penitentiary concept has disintegrated into chaos. If this is (fair & balanced) penology, so be it.

[x Chronicle of Higher Education]
Madness in Maximum Security
When scholars get a look inside America's secretive prisons, they find chaos
By PETER MONAGHAN

When America's overflowing prisons boil over, or when television shows such as HBO's prison drama Oz presume to portray the grim conditions inside them, members of the public may think they get a picture of what the institutions are like.

Wrong, say criminologists and other social scientists who study incarceration.

And yet, academics allow, over the last two decades, they, as much as the public, have had little opportunity to observe prisons from the inside because access has become more tightly controlled. "Most criminologists have never been inside a prison," says Jeffrey Ian Ross, an associate professor of criminology, criminal justice, and social policy at the University of Baltimore.

At a time when Americans are discovering, through reports from Iraq, just how grave abuses can become when hidden from view, such secrecy in prisons is unsettling, scholars insist. The situation for scholars is a far cry from that in the 1960s and 1970s, when sociologists and ethnographers worked in prisons and produced many ethnographies and analyses. By the 1990s, those became as rare as escapes from Alcatraz used to be.

Scholars say that less-glamorized and more-accurate information is urgently needed because prison has become home to vastly more Americans than ever before. Between 1980 and 1998, the number of people in state and federal prisons ballooned from 329,821 to 1,302,019 -- a higher percentage of the population than in any other country, and far higher than in most.

The vast majority of prisoners are young, nonviolent, first-time offenders. Half of them are African-American, and half a million of them are released to the general population each year. Most reoffend, and many spread illnesses they caught while incarcerated. "The prison system is in many ways becoming a petri dish for the spread of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and hepatitis," says Donald F. Sabo, a professor of social sciences at D'Youville College.

Despite the need to study the problem, scholars face "bureaucratic rationalization of prison management," which has made access almost unattainable, says Meda Chesney-Lind, a professor of women's studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa who has published widely on youth and adult imprisonment. "Administrators take courses in this, in how to deal with the press, or the public," she says. "There has been more management, and that has become antithetical to letting researchers into facilities."

Lorna A. Rhodes, author of the just-released Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison (University of California Press), is one of the few researchers who have managed to get past such restrictions and gain a clearer picture of the nature and effects of incarceration.

Her book is the result of several years of fieldwork, which began thanks to a friend who worked as an officer at a state penitentiary and helped her gain access. After winning the confidence of prison staff, Ms. Rhodes, who is a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, was able to repeatedly interview prisoners, uniformed guards, mental-health workers, and administrators. She was helped, too, by her participation in a now-unusual instance of cooperation between a corrections system and academic researchers -- the Correctional Mental Health Collaboration between the University of Washington and the Washington State Department of Corrections -- which was active from 1993 to 2002.

The researchers wished, says Ms. Rhodes, to provide a better picture of maximum-security life than the popular stereotypes. "I stay away from, for example, descriptions of people's tattoos," she observes, "and stony faces, and things like that. I feel like that would be replicating something that we already have enough of."

But even without details like those, the picture of life inside America's maximum-security prisons that emerges in Total Confinement is harrowing. In the institutions, says Ms. Rhodes, whose previous book, Emptying Beds: The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit (University of California Press, 1991), was based on observation of psychiatric hospitals, it can be hard to tell what is madness and what is not.

Out of Control?

In her book, Ms. Rhodes concentrates her attention on "control units" -- the "super maximum" wings within maximum-security prisons, cordoned off by razor wire. They house inmates removed from the general prison population for breaches of prison regulations or for fighting or harming other prisoners or officers.

These units emerge as, to say the least, hell holes -- black boxes within black boxes where prison officials can make criminals who often are too mentally disturbed to live peaceably in regular cell blocks "disappear," as she puts it.

Control-unit prisoners spend 23 hours or more a day in 8-by-10-foot cells with one frosted window in the shape of a slit. They must withstand constant day-and-night clamor, raving neighbors, ghastly food, racial and other taunts, including encouragement to commit suicide, and predatory aggression, not always at the hands of other inmates. Rape is widespread, as it is throughout the prison system.

The routines and severe forms of constraint of control units, augmented increasingly by electronic surveillance, are so harsh that prisoners cannot be considered "rational actors," Ms. Rhodes argues. In fact, many inmates who are not mentally ill become psychotic under the strain of isolation. The conditions often provoke fear of all other human beings, or antagonism toward them, and prisoners respond with violence or other infractions that prolong their punishment.

Such responses can strike outsiders as inexplicable. Many prisoners smear feces on cell walls, or on themselves. Others take to storing their own body wastes and blood, and fashioning them into projectiles that they throw through meal slots at guards.

Inmates commonly describe this as "a particularly satisfying form of resistance," reports Ms. Rhodes. It contaminates guards with "a kind of contagion" that makes them "at least momentarily, disgusting themselves," she says. And because guards generally do not know which prisoners are suffering from AIDS, hepatitis, or other infectious diseases, an element of terror creeps in.

Such behaviors are so prevalent, says Ms. Rhodes, that she wonders whether the ratcheting up of control overwhelms prisoners' self-regulation. In that light, she suggests, such overtly disgusting and irrational acts can be interpreted as "a willful -- perhaps even too sane -- deployment of the most obvious of weapons."

Ms Rhodes observes that the battle to keep order amid such disruption -- and keep down the soaring costs of incarceration as well -- has led prison officials to a "preoccupation with a technologically elaborate efficiency." Innovations such as computer-controlled locking and surveillance systems, and such tools of the prison trade as pepper spray, incapacitating stun guns, and increasingly severe "violent-prisoner restraint chairs," which shackle an inmate's limbs, torso, and head, have become the weapons of choice in this war.

Prison officials, in writing about conditions in maximum-security wings, frequently acknowledge their shortcomings but say they are trying to correct them. As one report on the Iowa prisons puts it, they try to "focus on stabilizing, socializing, and reintegrating the offender back into an appropriate general population setting."

But some human-rights organizations, like many scholars, have had harsh words for prison conditions. In recent years, Human Rights Watch has assailed corrections systems in the United States for mistreating and neglecting the one in six prisoners who the organization says are mentally ill, and who are three times as numerous as the mentally ill in hospitals. Human Rights Watch also says that prison officials have displayed a "wholesale disregard" for inmates' right to protection from rape.

Ms. Rhodes says that although the ideal of individualism underpins the history of Western prisons and psychiatry, control-unit prisoners who are mad, or who are driven mad, have little chance to earn their way out of the units with good behavior. Prison officials say "individual choice" will determine punishment or reward, but the control they maintain is so severe that prisoners are largely deprived of personal choice, and often lack the ability to make choices because they are psychotic.

Prison administrators and guards, she notes, constantly assert that prisoners choose to do what they do, from committing crimes to attacking prison guards. But the understanding of "choice" has a social context, she says. After several American prison riots in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, notions of choice intensified as a rationale for prisons, with a simultaneous withdrawal of explanations attributing behavior to childhood abuse or other social factors.With the rise of consciousness of "victim's rights," among other forces, she says, it has become "almost scandalous" to imply that anything but personal failings may underlie a criminal behavior, "unless there's a medical reason."

"And even then," she adds, "you have to be really floridly psychotic before that will kick in."

When inmates are first admitted to prisons, officials make determinations about whether they are "mad or bad": Are they rational-choice makers who have done wrong and will or may do so again, at any opportunity? Or, rather, do they represent an ongoing risk because they are psychotic? Narrowing the choice to those two options poses a problem, Ms. Rhodes writes: "An overly expansive definition of illness would threaten to shift many prisoners from the bad into the mad category, not only diluting punishment to an unacceptable extent, but also underscoring the lack of facilities for treatment."

Even after most admittees have been designated as "bad," usually because they exhibit "antisocial personality disorder," the rest -- schizophrenics and other "mad" inmates -- still must be admitted, and housed in conditions where their madness surely will worsen, or under which their ranks will swell.

Making that more likely is that both the mad and the bad often end up in solitary confinement. Despite the pain of, say, being zapped with stun guns, or forcibly removed from their cells, prisoners fear solitary confinement more than anything else, Ms. Rhodes reports. With good reason: Now, as it has done throughout penal history, solitary confinement drives prisoners mad.

All maximum-security punishments exact a more subtle, but still harsh outcome, she says. They inject prisoners into a "mutually reinforcing cycle" in which, in the eyes of prison staff and even other inmates, they "come to represent a shadow side of human nature." Then, because they signify danger, harsher and harsher confinement seems guards' only reasoned, risk-minimizing recourse, says Ms. Rhodes. Tainted prisoners who are not currently violent are designated as "violent potential" and become "simply bodies to be stored."

Put simply: Once in the control unit, you are lucky to get out.

The Other Side of the Bars

The specter of philosopher Michel Foucault hovers over Ms. Rhodes's book. Due to his writings on madness, discipline, and punishment, most notably Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (reprinted in paperback by Vintage in 1995), the prison provides metaphors in much modern academic writing.

But, Ms. Rhodes says, the application of Foucault's thought to prisons is tricky. "Unlike all the places where Foucault's metaphors are used for how power works," she observes, "when you're in a supermax prison, you're in the place that is working the way he wrote about it -- and yet in other ways, it isn't." Most obviously, she says, prisons are not just metaphors of imprisonment. They are imprisonment.

Projects that grapple with such complexities are essential if policy makers and the public are to become better informed about the realities of prisons, says Mr. Ross of the University of Baltimore. In Convict Criminology (Wadsworth, 2002), he and his fellow editor, Stephen C. Richards, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at Northern Kentucky University, set out to provide what he calls "a missing piece in the puzzle of understanding prisons and corrections" by collecting writing that includes several articles by ex-convicts. While former correctional officers, parole officers, and the like are well represented in the ranks of criminology, the field has heard little, until now, of the experience of academics who have been sentenced to time behind bars.

Mr. Richards did three years, including time in two maximum-security prisons, on first-offense marijuana charges that he says were baseless. Mr. Ross, who once held a job assessing the mental competence of prisoners about to stand trial, says "some respected criminologists have that kind of history, but most have been in the closet." Every week, he says, he hears from academics or aspiring academics who were once convicts, debating whether to admit to their pasts.

The ex-convict authors in Convict Criminology, by treating their own experiences as empirical data for criminological study, replace fantasies with reality, says Mr. Ross.

So what, then, is an appropriate and realistic balance of punitive and psychiatric responses to extreme prison behavior? That is the question, says Ms. Rhodes.

What is clear, she says, is that the task of achieving such a balance is not easy for prison guards. Many of them buy into the rhetoric of the "warehouse prison," she says, because it is they who suffer the assaults, as well as stigmatization outside the prison, once friends and acquaintances learn of some of their experiences. They also have little ability to improve conditions, working as they are in low-paying jobs that often are the only alternative to flipping burgers in rural communities. And in a further complication, says Ms. Rhodes, while friends on the outside say that "we should just shoot them all," they inevitably also sympathize with some of prisoners, whom they know.

She came away from her research with empathy for prison workers. They suffer from severe job stress. They must deal with inmates whom they quickly learn not to trust, not knowing which they can trust. Even if inclined to support or protect ill or oppressed prisoners, they lack the means to do so. And, she says, "they are entangled in issues that would be very hard to sort out."

Civilizing Incarceration

At the end of her book, Ms. Rhodes describes a project in the control unit of a maximum-security prison where officials cleaned the walls of racist graffiti, made renovations so that it would be more difficult for prisoners to throw feces at staff members, and directed administrators to walk the tiers once or twice a week talking to inmates and dealing with problems. Educational programs were introduced.

Four years later, the unit was experiencing dramatically less violence and use of force on prisoners. Many inmates who had seemed to be doomed to spend their lives in control units managed to graduate back to the general prison population.

The existence of so many control units where "no redemption of any kind is possible," says Ms. Rhodes, is "a failure of imagination." Change, over all, is very slow in coming, she says: "I think people are quite locked into their own visions."

The best hope for less self-defeating attitudes about prisons, prison construction, harsher sentencing laws, and the incarceration boom, she says, is that legislators and the public will come to realize that "we can bankrupt ourselves doing this. There are diminishing returns. You get some drop in crime rates after your first large boost in incarceration, but when you start locking up a lot of petty drug criminals, you're not getting very much for your money." Nationwide, state and local incarceration costs almost $40-billion each year, she notes.

Legislators in some states, says Ms. Chesney-Lind, are realizing the huge cost of mass imprisonment, both in terms of what cannot be paid for when prison budgets are so large -- higher education, for example. In social terms, legislators "are looking at the incarceration of nonviolent offenders, and are asking, 'Did we mean to punish them as if they were violent offenders? What about criminalizing drug addiction as if it was a crime rather than a public-health issue?'"

When it comes to imprisonment, she says, "no one else in the developed world has followed our lead."

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INCARCERATION MULTIPLICATION



After decades of oscillation, the number of Americans


behind bars skyrocketed during the last 20 years.
 

Rate per 100,000 population

'30

  104

'40

  131

'50

  109

'60

  117

'70

  96

'80

  138

'90

  297

'00

  470

 

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Justice,
Bureau of Justice Statistics; U.S. Census Bureau

Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education