Torture on American Soil? Three Glimpses at Our Fractured Prison System

As many as 100,000 in the equivalent of solitary confinement. Almost $3 million in bribes to put kids behind bars. And, finally, a solution. Is this the bailout we really need?

By John H. Richardson

He met me in the empty cafeteria in chains, and the guards chained him to the table. Then they left us alone.

His name was Luis Felipe. Born in Cuba in 1962, he came to the United States on a fishing boat and ended up in prison for shooting his girlfriend. He founded the New York chapter of the Latin Kings in 1986. Soon he was ordering murders from his prison cell. By the time I arrived at the Schuylkill federal prison tointerview him, he'd been in "Supermax" lockdown for years — twenty-three hours a day in a tiny cell with no human contact. He sat with a desperate stillness, as if he was afraid of the mysterious, explosive power humming away inside him. He hid his cuffed hands under the table. And he had a bad twitch — he would blink once or twice in rapid succession, as if he was adjusting to some sort of bright light. It never stopped.

Watching him was exactly like watching a caged animal pace back and forth. Except he was human, which made it almost unbearably pathetic. But he was a vicious killer. So I wrote the story and put it out of my mind.

As the subject of torture became a national controversy and important public figures began discussing exactly how much isolation or sleep deprivation would cross the line, the image of that chained and twitching man returned a few times, but it never occurred to me to chase down the idea. Fortunately, a reporter named Atul Gawande has done so in a remarkable piece called "Hellhole." Published in last week's New Yorker, Gawande's story tracks studies of the effects of prolonged isolation on monkeys, prisoners of war, and terrorist hostages, then branches out to include Supermax inmates who have spent years in solitary.

Gawande turns up shocking facts: The feds built the first Supermax prison in 1983. By the end of the 1990s there were 60 of them. There are now 25,000 inmates in Supermax prisons, and another 50,000 to 80,000 in "restrictive segregation units" that are pretty close to solitary confinement.

The Supermax idea was sold on the hope of reducing prison violence. As Gawande admits, it makes intuitive sense: "If the worst of the worst are removed from the general prison population and put in isolation, you'd expect there to be markedly fewer shankings and attacks on corrections officers." But it didn't work. Studies of the violence rate show no correlation between the use of isolation and reduced violence, perhaps because prison violence has real causes such as overcrowding. In contrast, Gawande presents England's decision in the 1980s to stop using solitary confinement and try the opposite — more human contact instead of less, more opportunity to work and study instead of none. "The results have been impressive," Gawande writes. "The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in 'extreme custody' than there are in the state of Maine."

On a more positive note, now that putting a teenager in a juvenile prison can cost up to $200,000 a year, states around the country are starting to rethink the "zero-tolerance" fad that swept our nation in the last few decades. Last week the New York Times reported on the "Missouri Model," a reform effort that calls for "rehabilitation in small groups, constant therapeutic intervention and minimal force." There's no barbed wire. Kids live in groups of ten in small cottages. They have sofas and stuffed animals and even a cottage dog.

According to Tim Decker, head of the Missouri Youth Services, the violence has left the system. Why? Because if you were a kid who caused trouble before, "you would have guards drag you into isolation." But that just made the kid defiant and resentful while teaching him nothing practical about how to control his anger or work out problems through compromise and negotiation. By embedding kids in a small, well-supervised community, Missouri's group approach teaches them responsibility to others. "Perhaps most impressive," the Times concludes, "it has the lowest recidivism rates in the country."

Let's repeat that: "Perhaps most impressive, it has the lowest recidivism rates in the country."

Then, from Pennsylvania, there's the spectacular "jailing kids for cash" story. Two corrupt judges named Mark Ciaveralla and Michael Conahan conspired to shut down the county juvenile hall so the state would sign a contract with a private youth prison owned by one Greg Zapalla and run by their good buddy Robert Powell. The judges then took $2.6 million in bribes to lock up thousands of teenagers for offenses like creating an Internet parody of a high-school assistant principal. They talked about tough love and morals and standards and spent the money to buy a fishing boat in Florida they named Reel Justice. And the really amazing part? All of the other judges and prosecutors and state officials in Pennsylvania had no idea what was going on.

Or so they say. But when I talked recently to Bob Schwartz, the community organizer who exposed the scandal with a lawsuit, he was skeptical. "I don't think anybody was completely surprised when the truth came out," he said.

The silence was especially surprising given the extreme intimacy among Pennsylvania public officials. As Schwartz pointed out, "Greg Zapalla is the son of the former chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the brother of the Allegheny County District Attorney. But he claims he has no knowledge of any of this stuff and is not a target."

Most of the kids didn't have defense attorneys to stand up for them. But what about people who were in the courtroom, the clerks and bailiffs and decent ordinary citizens?

"That's another great mystery for us," Schwartz told me. "On courts that are not always open to the public, we rely on the court officials. But those folks didn't step forward."

Why not?

"I don't know; maybe they were looking at their feet at the time."

Despite all this evidence of torture, failure, and social corruption — every time a prison union or local politician fights a prison closing, they're soul mates to Ciaveralla and Conahan — the lessons of the Missouri Model just don't seem to sink in. It reminds me of the one book that probably influenced me more than any other, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Although he was a crazy man with a spectacularly annoying writing style, Foucault exposed the lie at the heart of our "intuitive sense" that sparing the rod will lead to a life of crime. And, more importantly, he linked that lie to the vast social and economic power it gives to politicians, prosecutors, police, prison officials, and authority figures of all kinds.

Then, on Thursday, the march of folly continued when Hillary Clinton admitted the drug war wasn't working — and gave Mexico three new Black Hawk helicopters to help them keep on losing. A day earlier, eight states announced plans to force welfare recipients to take drug tests. How dare they take our money before curing all their bad habits?! But will those eight states pass a law that forces all the bankers taking bailout welfare to test for the cocaine they snorted before making all those crazy trades? Somehow, I don't think so.

Perhaps Jim Webb can pull off another courageous legislative miracle and pass the new National Criminal Justice Act. But, as Dostoevsky said, you can judge a nation's soul by looking at its prisons. And these have not been happy glimpses.