Six by Ten

by Mateo Hoke

  As political scientist Amy Lerman argues, “Prison is not a ‘behavioral deep freeze’ and incarceration is not merely a period of incapacitation.”130 Instead, it is itself a place of intense socialization. Or in the case of the supermax, anti-socialization. One client, a petite man in his early twenties, was in punitive segregation for two weeks for head-butting an officer. He was angry at himself for “playing their game.” “What was the breaking point?” I asked. The young man stiffened, “When he told me, ‘I’m going to put a bullet hole in your daughter’s head and fuck her.’”

  I once asked a captain at Northern what he understood his job to be. He didn’t hesitate. “To keep my guys safe.” He didn’t need to say who “my guys” were: the men (and a few women) in uniform. Then I asked how he knew when a prisoner was ready to leave Northern. “I just know,” he said. I pressed him, “How?” He paused. “When he’s broken.” I wanted to ask, “How broken is broken enough? And how broken is too broken?” But I didn’t.

  The cruel irony is that some people will break too far, resorting to acts of desperation that the prison deems disruptive and manipulative. I have met men who inserted razors, paper clips, metal battery sleeves—anything that will cut flesh—into the soft hollows of their arms and legs, in the words of one prisoner, “just to feel something.” Others banged their heads to the point of unconsciousness, one man wearing a scarred lump on his forehead so pronounced and permanent he looked like a unicorn that had shed its horn.

  And yet, somehow, humanity persists.

  Within Northern’s concrete, pockmarked walls, I have witnessed acts of deep connection and everyday kindness. On visits to meet new clients, I regularly hear, “I don’t have it so bad, you really need to check on this other guy.” One accomplished jailhouse lawyer, who somehow managed to train himself in the law from a cell at Northern, teaches other prisoners basics of civil procedure and administrative process. He wants them to be able to “fight with the pen, not the sword,” as he tells me. A middle-aged client teaches a young man on the other side of the wall how to play chess. They carefully draw out two mirror chess boards, spending hours making moves with numbers and letters, like the old Battleship game. The older man claims he’s just glad to have an opponent, and a rookie at that, but in subsequent visits he fusses like an elderly aunt over the young man’s choices.

  The supermax seeks to unmake prisoners’ worlds by putting their pain beyond the reach of human understanding. What follows, then, is the task of retelling and rebuilding.131 And through words—the narratives in this book, the letters to lovers and friends outside the walls, the poems and songs that no concrete box can hold—the people who survive supermax remake the world. For themselves. For all of us.

  Hope Metcalf is the executive director of the Schell Center for International Human Rights and a lecturer at Yale Law School.

  Appendix V. Solitary Confinement:

  Where Reform Is Headed

  Amy Fettig

  I am a civil rights attorney and many of my clients are cutters. They slice their arms and legs, hands and feet, and sometimes their stomachs. A few will push straws or sticks into their penises or slice up their scrotums. Some will swallow small, sharp objects that rip them up inside. When we meet I notice the raw, red crisscrosses on their arms and wrists. They will often wear long-sleeve shirts and self-consciously tug at the cuffs in a vain attempt to cover the ongoing carnage wreaked on their bodies. But I know the real carnage is in their minds. I also know that they cut just to feel something, anything at all, because physical pain and blood are somehow better than the terrible numbness of their isolation. They cut to feel human.

  You might think my clients are prisoners of war held in some terrible foreign hellhole, or perhaps captives of fanatical terrorist cells. But all of them are in solitary confinement in US prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centers. In the United States, almost nobody survives solitary confinement undamaged, and many don’t survive at all. I think of Kalief Browder, arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack at sixteen and put into solitary for two of the three years he spent in jail before being released to the community after charges were dropped.132 The pain and suffering of those years in jail overwhelmed him, and he took his own life. I think of my client Mariam Abdullah, who was also placed in solitary as a kid. We found her in an isolation cell during a prison inspection in Arizona, a confused and scared seventeen-year-old. We tried to get her out immediately, before it was too late—she seemed to be unraveling in isolation—but the state refused. Instead, they sent her to an adult supermax prison. The pain and desperation she must have felt in that small, lonely cell haunts me. She was dead within weeks.

  Solitary confinement costs the lives of tens of thousands of men, women, and children. On any given day in the United States, the best research suggests there are approximately eighty thousand to a hundred thousand people held in solitary confinement in prisons across the country.133 And that figure does not even include the thousands of other people subject to solitary in local jails and juvenile detention centers.

  Like my clients, these people will be shattered by the extreme social isolation and environmental deprivation inflicted by solitary confinement. Yet solitary confinement is a routine—even mundane—practice in American correctional facilities. Its use is pervasive across every state and jurisdiction in the country and commonplace in federal facilities as well. For correctional professionals it is a primary “tool” in the “toolbox” of prison management. In fact, when questioned about the use of solitary confinement, the inevitable answer from corrections staff is that they could not possibly run a “safe” prison without it. But such a response begs the question of what kind of institution requires that people be hurt in order to operate effectively? And why should the American people support any such institution run in their name?

  The truth is that we’ve supported such horrors before—our “peculiar institution” of slavery was treated with the same routinized, bureaucratic indifference to obvious human suffering and cruelty by the vast majority of Americans for much of our history. In the case of solitary confinement, there is likewise a long, well-documented cultural history of its horrors starting with an eighteenth-century report on American prison conditions by Alexis de Tocqueville condemning the practice, followed by Charles Dickens’s stunning nineteenth-century critique of solitary confinement in Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary in his travelogue American Notes for General Circulation. In it Dickens states, “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”134 By 1890, the Supreme Court described how even short stints in solitary left people “violently insane.”135 In modern times, decades of research and advances in brain science confirm what common sense and basic humanity made plain centuries earlier: solitary confinement is torture.

  By any measure the use of solitary confinement in US correctional institutions is a human rights crisis. And yet, up until very recently, few Americans paid any attention to this horrific practice taking place in their own communities and government institutions. Fortunately, the times are changing.

  Over the past several years, momentum for reform of solitary confinement and the creation of alternatives to its practice in our prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centers has grown at an enormous rate. In many ways, the reform movement’s success at capturing the attention of the media, the public, and state and national leaders is unprecedented for any campaign seeking to end inhumane prison conditions. In the last few years alone, both former president Barack Obama and justices of the Supreme Court have publicly condemned the practice. President Obama even took affirmative steps to push reform by changing policies and practices in the federal Bureau of Prisons and banning the use of solitary confinement on kids held under federal jurisdiction.

  In a historic op-ed in the Washington Post, President Obama denounced the practice of solitary confinemen
t in the United States: “How can we subject prisoners to unnecessary solitary confinement, knowing its effects, and then expect them to return to our communities as whole people? It doesn’t make us safer. It’s an affront to our common humanity.”136 These are powerful words—and likely the first time in US history that a sitting president has called out our inhumane prison conditions. While many might expect backpedaling in the Trump administration, the trajectory for reform at the federal and state level has thus far been unaffected by the regressive nature of the current regime. This is likely because the national reform movement is simultaneously driving systems reform, exposing the harms solitary inflicts on incarcerated people, and focusing on broad-scale culture change.

  This current momentum against solitary confinement is no accident. It is the result of long-term investment by a number of groups, savvy organizing, multipronged strategies, innovative corrections management, and intensive and simultaneous engagement with leaders at the local, state, national, and international level. The result is that in state after state and the federal system, both corrections officials and the public are embracing more humane and effective alternatives to isolation. Some reforms have been halting and piecemeal, others more thoroughgoing. Some are driven by legislation or litigation, others by policy or budget.

  A significant driver of this movement for change is access to more information about the practice of solitary confinement. For too long this practice existed in the shadows of the American criminal justice system—widely acknowledged but rarely discussed. Many systems did not—and many still do not—collect basic data on how many people are in solitary, for what reason, and for how long. This lack of transparency and accountability extended to the public’s knowledge of the practice. Indeed, prior to 2010 there were few media reports on solitary confinement in the United States, despite its pervasive use and corrosive impacts. This began to change with the formation of Solitary Watch, a web-based, single-issue journalism site that creates and collates print and online reporting on solitary confinement and efforts to reform the practice. At the same time, advocacy campaigns nationwide are diligently working to engage media attention through human rights reports, arts collaborations, utilization of social media, local op-eds by community leaders, and engagement with the editorial boards of major news media. As a result of these strategies, the questions of whether solitary confinement is inhumane, inflicts suffering and permanent damage, costs too much, and does nothing to rehabilitate prisoners are now emerging fully in the mainstream media and public discourse. In late 2017, Oprah Winfrey even toured a solitary confinement prison to explore the need for reform.

  There is no question that the exposure of solitary confinement as a dire human rights issue in the United States is critical to ending the practice. As a leader in the American Civil Liberties Union’s campaign to stop solitary in prisons, jails, and youth detention centers, I am especially grateful that survivors of solitary, their families, and people who work in corrections have raised their voices and told their stories in important books like Six by Ten and other mediums so that Americans can know and understand what we have collectively wrought in our criminal justice system. It is not a pretty story, but it must be heard to be understood.

  In the next ten years, the reform movement expects to work state by state and at the federal and international level to enforce limits and outright bans on the use of solitary. This will require different strategies, depending upon the culture of each state. We will have to litigate in some places, while supporting legislation and policy reform in others. Engaging with and supporting corrections professionals to change their culture and reject the use of solitary confinement as a one-size-fits-all approach to prison management will also be a key for success. As will promoting alternatives to the use of solitary confinement, along with greater transparency and accountability for all prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centers.

  Right now the lack of transparency and public oversight in our places of correction and detention means that conditions within a prison can deteriorate to an extent that imperils the lives and human rights of those who both live and work there without anyone on the outside being aware of what is happening. This is especially true because the public’s and the media’s right of access to these institutions is extremely limited, and too often, corrections officials are extremely reluctant to open their doors. The result of this overwhelming lack of transparency and accountability in corrections is a complete lack of public outrage about what happens behind bars. In order to stop solitary, we must throw the proverbial prison doors open and look inside with bravery, compassion, and a determination to support the human rights of all. We need light, light, and more light! And we need projects like Six by Ten that provide some of the critical rays of sunshine needed to illuminate our dark places.

  In the long road toward realizing human rights for all in our complex modern society, one of our first steps is to question the status quo in our criminal justice system. But before we can hope to even understand what the status quo represents, it is necessary to take the time to hear, read, and process the experiences and stories of those directly impacted by that system. Once we learn from their experiences and example, we must add our voices to their call for change—because we are all part of “the system” and, ultimately, the “system” is us.

  Amy Fettig is the deputy director of the ACLU National Prison Project.

  Appendix VI. Five Demands of the 2011

  California Prisoner Hunger Strike137

  The Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition formed in 2011 to amplify the voices of California prisoners on hunger strike. In July of that year, the prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP) began what became a historic hunger strike to protest the cruel, inhumane, and tortuous conditions of their imprisonment and to improve the treatment of SHU-status prisoners throughout California. At least 6,600 prisoners across the state joined in solidarity with the Pelican Bay hunger strikers’ demands.

  The hunger strikers, led by Todd Ashker, developed the five core demands below. The hunger strike ended when a California lawmaker promised to hold hearings on the conditions within California SHUs. Ashker was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging conditions at the Pelican Bay SHU that resulted in a 2015 settlement that ended the practice of indeterminate solitary confinement, among other changes.

  End Group Punishment & Administrative Abuse. This is in response to PBSP’s application of “group punishment” as a means to address individual inmates’ rule violations. This includes the administration’s abusive, pretextual use of “safety and concern” to justify what are unnecessary punitive acts. This policy has been applied in the context of justifying

  indefinite SHU status, and progressively restricting our programming and privileges.

  Abolish the Debriefing Policy, and Modify

  Active/Inactive Gang Status Criteria. Perceived gang membership is one of the leading reasons for placement in solitary confinement.

  The practice of “debriefing,” or offering up information about fellow prisoners particularly regarding gang status, is often demanded in return for better food or release from the SHU. Debriefing puts the safety of prisoners and their families at risk, because they are then viewed as “snitches.”

  The validation procedure used by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) employs such criteria as tattoos, reading materials, and associations with other prisoners (which can amount to as little as greeting) to identify gang members.

  Many prisoners report that they are validated as gang members with evidence that is clearly false or using procedures that do not follow the Castillo v. Alameida settlement, which restricted the use of photographs to prove association.

  Comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 Recommendations Regarding an End to Long-Term Solitary Confinement. CDCR shall implement the find
ings and recommendations of the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons final ٢٠٠٦ report regarding CDCR SHU facilities as follows:End Conditions of Isolation (p. 14). Ensure that prisoners in SHU and Ad-Seg (Administrative Segregation) have regular meaningful contact and freedom from extreme physical deprivations that are known to cause lasting harm (pp. 52–57).

  Make Segregation a Last Resort (p. 14). Create a more productive form of confinement in the areas of allowing inmates in SHU and Ad-Seg [Administrative Segregation] the opportunity to engage in meaningful self-help treatment, work, education, religious, and other productive activities relating to having a sense of being a part of the community.