There are three orienting facts that render mass incarceration in the United States an ethical problem worthy of our deep consideration. First, the rate of incarceration has grown dramatically over the last 40 years so that today there are 2.2 million people in prison or jail, and another 5 million on probation or parole. This means that 1/32 adults in the USA are under state supervision. Second, the application of incarceration is disproportionately applied to the poor, people of color, and other vulnerable populations. Research shows that 85-90% of those in the criminal justice system fall below the poverty line, and the experience of incarceration only impoverishes people further. The consequences of having a criminal record are harsh and debilitating, ranging from family disruption, social alienation, and disenfranchisement. In these ways and others, the current situation of crime and punishment represents a dramatic moral challenge. Finally, victims of crime are themselves poorly served by the current system, often ignored or sidelined in the machinery of punishment. This course seeks to discover alternatives to the current systems of crime and punishment in order to imagine a more inclusive, just and moral society.
Lisa Guenther: "How do prisoners end up in solitary confinement, and what happens there?"
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来自 Vanderbilt University 的课程
Justice, Mercy and Mass Incarceration
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从本节课中
The Rise of the Prison
This module takes up the question of the rise of the prison, and its expressions in contemporary USA. How did the Prison Industrial Complex arise, and why has it taken the form it has?
与讲师见面
Graham ResideAssistant Professor
Vanderbilt University Divinity School
Solitary confinement is the practice of extreme isolation in
prison that has been normalized across
the United States and in many other parts of the world,
but that has increasingly come under fire by critics,
many of whom are formerly incarcerated themselves.
In my lecture today,
I will talk about solitary confinement and about the history of
this practice and about some of
the current movements to reform the practice in the United States.
So first, what is
solitary confinement and what does a solitary confinement cell look like.
Solitary confinement is defined usually as 22 to 24 hours a day in
a cell that is usually either windowless or has
a small four inch wide window that looks out into an inner courtyard.
The furnishings in the cell have concrete beds,
one concrete bed, a concrete stool and table.
And sometimes prisoners are allowed a television or
radio if they have managed to pay for this themselves.
And it's very expensive usually to buy a prison issued television or radio
because you have to have special clear sighted technology.
And if they have, they can keep this technology if they have managed not to
break any prison rules which is very difficult in solitary as we'll find out.
The cells usually have a toilet with no lid on
them and they're usually illuminated 24 hours a day.
They usually have a shower in the cell so that
the inmate is not required to leave the cell,
but on occasion, depending on the circumstances they may be removed
from the cell to go to the showers.
In recent years we have had access to photographs
of solitary confinement cells in prison such as Pelican Bay State Prison.
But normally the public has not been even allowed to
see what happens in our own prisons because of the,
what wardens and prisons and correctional officers
and directors have stated are security reasons.
But we now have a series of images from
Pelican Bay State Prison and other prisons of solitary confinement cells,
thanks to the collective action of
people who are incarcerated in solitary confinement who have
staged hunger strikes and have managed
to bring about more media access to the prison itself.
If you're confined in a solitary confinement cell,
then your window in the world is usually
a small slot in the steel door called a cuff port,
and you would insert your hands through this,
you would put your hands through this cuff port to
have your hands cuffed and uncuffed to be
taken out of the cell for your up to two hours of time out of the cell.
This is usually the only form of touch that
you would receive if you are in solitary confinement.
At Pelican Bay State Prison,
you would be removed from the cell and then marched down a windowless corridor to
a windowless exercise yard that has
no exercise equipment in it and no windows to the outside.
So just imagine being in a cell with either no windows or a very slim window,
walking down a corridor to another windowless cell and this is your world.
If prisoners are refusing to offer
their hands to be cuffed or uncuffed or if they refuse to return
their meal trays or are disobeying orders
in any sort of order that is deemed to be unacceptable,
they may be removed from their cell by
a correctional Emergency Response Team or CERT team.
Then they may be put in either a restraint chair
or in four or five point restraints on the ground,
so their hands and ankles and
possibly even their head in a helmet would be fastened to the ground,
and they would remain there for hours or even,
some prisoners have been held in restraints for days until they are deemed compliant.
So these are the circumstances that people in
the United States today are currently held in solitary confinement.
How many people are held in solitary confinement in the U.S. today.
Well Charles Samuels Federal Bureau of Prisons director,
stated in a recent hearing on solitary confinement,
we do not practice solitary confinement.
And yet in the Federal Bureau of Prisons,
there is a supermax prison called ADX Florence that has
410 solitary confinement units and one prisoner
there Tommy Silverstein has spent 33 years in solitary confinement.
And so what could Charles Samuels mean when
he says we do not practice solitary confinement.
Well the term restrictive housing is preferred term of
the Federal Bureau of Prisons and of many state correctional departments.
According to our best estimates approximately 80,000
prisoners are held in some form of restrictive housing in the United States today.
But it's difficult to tell because prisons are not required to keep
records and there's no federal oversight of the use of solitary confinement.
Some euphemisms for solitary confinement used in
federal and state corrections departments include disciplinary segregation.
This is when you are put in solitary because you have violated a prison rule.
Administrative segregation, this is when you were put in
solitary confinement because of your administrative status and that might be
because you are considered a gang member or because
you are considered to be in vulnerable in some way.
Trans and queer prisoners are often put in
administrative segregation for their own protection.
Protective custody is the term used for that general practice.
But protective custody, it should be noted is
not usually any different from solitary confinement.
And so people who are put in isolation for their protection do not for
that reason have access to more benefits than
someone who is put in solitary for their punishment.
The common term used to describe
solitary confinement is a security housing unit or special housing unit,
otherwise known as the SHU or intensive management units,
restrictive housing units, communication management units.
And that I think is very telling.
It's about managing the communication of whoever is housed in
that cell with other people in the prison and with the outside world.
Here in Tennessee, we have actually one of
the highest rates of the use of solitary confinement in the United States.
Louisiana has far and away the,
and Utah have the highest rates of the use of solitary confinement.
So how long do people typically spend in solitary. Once they get there.
The United Nations has,
has introduced minimum rules for
the treatment of prisoners and they call these the Nelson Mandela rules.
And so according to the U.N. any more than 15 days in extreme isolation,
can be considered cruel and unusual punishment or torture.
But the average length of time in solitary in
California prisons for example is 6.8 years.
Over a thousand people have been in solitary for over 10 years in
California and 78 people have been in solitary for over 20 years.
In Louisiana the Angola Three for example are three men
who were by all accounts framed for
the murder of a prison guard and they were incarcerated and put in solitary confinement.
Robert King spent 28 years in solitary confinement.
Albert Woodfox was just released last year after
43 years in solitary confinement and Herman Wallace was in
solitary confinement for 42 years until he was released on
compassionate grounds because he had terminal cancer and he died two days later.
So Robert King describes his time in solitary in this way.
"When I walked out of Angola I didn't realize how
permanently the experience of solitary would mark me.
Even now my sight is impaired.
I find it very difficult to judge long distances,
a result of living in such a small space.
Emotionally too I found it very hard to move on.
I talk about my 29 years in solitary as if it was the past.
But in that in truth it never leaves you.
In some ways I am still there.".
So I'll talk a little bit more later about the effects of solitary on people.
But Robert King's testimony of having even his
capacity to see long distances and to perceive the world clearly,
altered in some fundamental way by his experience of isolation is not the exception.
Unfortunately, it's the rule and we can imagine what
the effect of being in a very tight space with no horizons,
no windows onto the outside,
would have on your ability to judge distances.
I know someone here in Tennessee who was in solitary confinement for
six years and after he was released he had lost the ability to speak.
His vocal cords had just shut down.
He had to relearn how to speak because he had not spoken to anyone for that time.
Herman Wallace of the Angola Three engaged in
a really incredible project of
artistic collaboration with an artist on the outside named Jackie Sumell.
And I really highly recommend the film Herman's House,
which charts the collaboration between the two of them.
Basically Jackie heard about the Angola Three and she sent
a postcard to Herman Wallace in prison and
she asked on that postcard a very simple question,
"What kind of a house does a man who has lived in a
six by nine foot cell for over 30 years,
at that time, dream of?"
And so they began with that question and exchanged letters in which Herman sketched
his own cell and sketched the kind of house that he would
want to live in if he were ever released.
And as I said, Albert Woodfox was recently
released after 43 years of solitary confinement.
Now I should say that these three men were each,
they were together engaged in organizing
the first prison chapter of the Black Panther Party when
they were framed for the murder of a prison guard back in 1971.
And so they are considered by Amnesty International and
by many other people to be political prisoners.
So I've talked about how many people are in solitary and
the conditions in solitary and some of the euphemisms for solitary confinement,
but how do people actually end up in solitary?
Well you can end up in solitary confinement because of violence,
engaging in violence such as a fight in prison.
And that's may be what one would typically imagine would
be the grounds for being confined in isolation.
That's important to remember that it's difficult to,
sometimes difficult to avoid a fight.
So if someone instigates a fight with you then the instigator of the fight
will not necessarily be the one who gets punished with
punitive isolation or disciplinary isolation,
both, anyone who's involved in the fight would
be typically put in solitary confinement as a result.
And so it's very difficult especially for vulnerable young and people who, queer,
transgender and nonconforming people who are often
the targets of violence to avoid solitary confinement,
as a kind of additional punishment for the violence,
the interpersonal violence that they are exposed to in prison.
It's important to note also that solitary confinement is not part of someone's sentence.
So you're sentenced to certain time in jail or prison rather by a judge.
But it is an administrative decision within the prison to
put you in solitary confinement and to put you at a certain security level.
And so this is part of the reason why it's very difficult to
regulate solitary confinement because it's not a judicial process.
It is rather an administrative process within the prison
that has very little oversight typically.
And one can always file some sort of complaint,
but if one thinks that one is unfairly isolated,
but the people who will be hearing
your complaint and judging whether it is worthwhile will be
people who are not judges and lawyers but rather administrators within the prison.
Now there's a great project called 15 days and
you can look it up on line fifteendays.org,
that charts some of the examples of actual offenses,
apparent offenses that have landed people in solitary.
For example, not eating your apple or
reckless eyeballing or just looking
at a correctional officer in a way that they did not like.
And so there are all kinds of
prison rules and the judgment of the correctional officer is
typically given more weight than the person who is incarcerated.
Another way that people end up in
solitary confinement is as I mentioned earlier, protective custody,
and so many trans prisoners and
queer and gender non-conforming prisoners end up in solitary,
not because they have violated any prison rules but because
they have been deemed to be vulnerable within the prison.
And typically the only way that
the prison can imagine protecting them is by putting them in isolation.
So who is most likely to end up in solitary?
Overall in the United States we have
stark racial disparity in who ends up in prison in general.
And this disparity is carried over into who ends up in solitary confinement.
So all men have a 1 in 9 chance of ending up in prison at some point in their lifetime.
But black men have a 1 in 3 chance and white women have by contrast,
a 1 in 111 chance of ending up in prison.
These, as I said these racial disparities are carried
over into the security housing unit or the solitary confinement unit.
So for example, in the New York City jail system between 2011 and 2013,
African-Americans were 2.52 times more likely than whites to be put in solitary.
Hispanics were 1.65 times more likely.
If we look at California in 2011,
85% of the prisoners in the Pelican Bay SHU were Latino compared to
only 41% of prisoners in the general prison population who were Latino.
And in Washington D.C. in 2014,
97% of the men in administrative segregation.
So that's the kind of solitary confinement that you land in,
not because of what you have done in prison but because of who you are deemed to be,
the sort of security risk you're deemed to be.
97% of men in that form of segregation were black.
Mental illness and cognitive impairment is more likely to be
interpreted as bad or manipulative behavior in black and brown prisoners.
And we can look for example at
Jonathan Metzl's research on race and mental illness in the protest psychosis,
for broader patterns within which black and brown people
are diagnosed with a mental illness when they are angry about social injustice.
And this translates also into the prison context.
Gang validation is also one of
the ways in which someone might end up in administrative segregation.
And in California until very recently,
gang validation which means a process
by which the prison validates or labels you as a gang member or associate,
could put you in solitary confinement indefinitely.
So if you had a life sentence you could potentially spend
the rest of your life in solitary confinement.
And the criteria for labeling someone as a gang member
or associate were just three items of evidence.
For example, you might have a tattoo or a symbol,
you might have an informant say something
that fingers you as a gang members or associate,
you might have a certain color,
red or blue in your in your cell,
and you might have been overheard saying something to someone.
Three items like that could put you in the position of
being indefinitely held in solitary confinement in California.
And as I'll explain in a moment,
these policies were recently overturned thanks to
the collective action of prisoners at Pelican Bay and across the California system,
who organized hunger strikes to change that policy.
And as I mentioned earlier, queer,
transgender and non-conforming prisoners have higher rates of solitary confinement.
Although it's very difficult to track the exact numbers,
because while race is recorded by the prison,
gender identity and sexuality,
sexual orientation are not necessarily kept track of by the prison system.
But for example Lambda Legal says quote "Solitary confinement
affects many people incarcerated in U.S. jails prisons and detention facilities.
But none so significantly as transgender inmates and immigrant detainees,
involuntarily confined not because of their actions but because of their identities."
And the ACLU says for prisoners and detainees who are lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender and have intersex conditions or are gender nonconforming,
solitary confinement is too often
the correctional management tool used to separate them for the general population.
So what are the typical effects of solitary confinement?
Stuart Grassian and Craig Haney are two psychiatrists who have been expert witnesses
in collection in class action lawsuits against solitary confinement,
alleging that this practice is cruel and unusual punishment.
And they have both in their research,
claimed what is known as SHU syndrome which is a collection of symptoms that
typically arise from long term confinement in
a security housing unit or solitary confinement unit.
So some of the symptoms typical symptoms of
SHU syndrome are affective disorder such as anxiety,
paranoia, uncontrollable rage and depression,
cognitive disorders such as confusion,
inability to focus, over sensitivity to stimuli,
obsessive rumination or just not being able to stop thinking about something going
over and over again again again and again and memory loss.
Also perceptual disorders such as visual and acoustic hallucinations.
So we've already heard about
Robert King's altered perception
of distance and his loss of a capacity to judge distances visually,
but many prisoners in solitary confinement experience hallucinations,
they hear voices or they see shadows.
They are no longer sure if they're alone in
the cell or if there someone in there with them.
They even start to see blurry edges around objects.
They lose the capacity to see an object clearly and to also perceive that
as real and to be able to tell the difference between
a hallucination and an object that is in the world.
And many prisoners also experience physical disorders such as headaches, lethargy,
insomnia, digestive problems, heart palpitations,
fainting spells and bodily aches and pains.
So it might seem at first,
a little bit counter-intuitive to think that
extreme isolation would give you digestive problems or that
being in a cell for six years in a row would lead to a difficulty perceiving the world,
perceiving objects in the world as stable and as
not changing without typical cause and effect.
But I think this is where philosophical understandings of personhood,
help us to understand why extreme isolation isn't just solitude.
It might not even qualify as solitude.
If by solitude we mean a kind of experience of aloneness that helps to give someone
respect from the world or to give them a chance
to recuperate and to be alone with themselves.
In my own work on solitary confinement,
I've argued that solitary confinement is isolation that undermines the capacity
of a relational person to experience both solitude and a shared experience,
an experience of being in the world with other people in shared space.
So in extreme cases of SHU syndrome and and prolong solitary confinement,
we can even see examples of psychotic breakdown, self-mutilation and suicide.
So this is also evidence that isolation is not just boring.
It's not just a kind of time out.
It is a form of,
I would argue torture that undermines
a person's basic capacity to exist as a being in the world,
with an experience of the world that is stable and meaningful.
And we have to ask ourselves whether
anyone's rights or anyone's well-being is served by having people in such condition.
I think the testimonies of people who have undergone solitary confinement have
the most powerful voice to explain what the effects of solitary confinement are.
So Five Omar Mualimm-ak is a man who spent five years in solitary confinement in
New York prisons and the experience
changed him so profoundly that he actually changed his name to Five.
In an article for The Guardian newspaper
Five described his experience in solitary in this way.
This is a long quote, "After only a short time in solitary,
I felt all of my senses begin to diminish.
There was nothing to see but gray walls.
There was nothing to hear except empty echoing voices from other parts of the prison.
I was so lonely that I hallucinated words coming out of the wind.
They sounded like whispers.
Sometimes I smelled the paint on the wall but more often I just
smelled myself revolted by my own scent. There was no touch.
Even time had no meaning in the SHU.
The lights were kept on for 24 hours.
I often found myself wondering if an event I was recollecting had
happened that morning or days before. I talked to myself.
I began to get scared that the guards would come
in and kill me and leave me hanging in the cell.
Who would know something happened to me?
Just as I was invisible so was the space I inhabited.
The very essence of life I came to learn during
those seemingly endless days is
human contact and the affirmation of existence that comes with it.
Losing that contact, you lose your sense of identity.
You become nothing.".
This is I think just such a powerful and eloquent testimony to the harm that
solitary confinement does to a person who is
not just an isolated individual or a mind in a body,
but a relational being in the world that is
wholly intervolved with other human beings and
other objects and shared context
within a world that is not simply a container for human existence,
but the sight of our temporal and spatial existence.
I also want to share
some testimony from solitary confinement at Valley State Prison for Women.
And this is important because women's experience of solitary confinement
does not necessarily unfold in the same way that men's experience unfolds.
Often there's an extra layer of gender based violence and sexual violence that
accompany solitary confinement and that are
the occasion for women being isolated in the SHU.
So these are some interviews by Cassandra Shaler
with women in Valley State Prison for Women,
and these are interviews that she conducted in 1998.
She talked to 52 women in the SHU at this prison in 1998,
40% were black, 21% were Hispanic or Mexican and 5.9% were women of other races.
Angela Tucker, one woman who was incarcerated there said,
"It's like living in a black hole.
Like in a space with no edges, a chasm."
Yvonne Smith said about routine strip searches that were undertaken in the SHU,
"They don't do this because of the safety and security of the institution.
They do it for humiliation.
Some of them really like it.
There's nothing we can do between ourselves and the shower.
No way we can pick anything up.
They are with us, watching us the whole time.
They're just trying to break us down."
And another woman Claudia Johnson said about
the routine strip searches and forced cell extractions.
"It's about humiliation and total loss of dignity.
And I don't care what they call it,
I call it rape".
So one of the many ways that women can end up in solitary confinement is if
they put forth a complaint against
a correctional officer that they have been sexually assaulted.
They are put in isolation putatively to you know,
pending the outcome of the investigation,
but many women regard this as an extra form of punishment and
a disincentive to complain about sexual assault within the prison.
So in my own work I have engaged with the testimonies of
prisoners in solitary confinement in relation
to a philosophical method that is called phenomenology.
And I'll just say a few very brief words about phenomenology and
what I think phenomenology can bring to the discussion of solitary confinement.
So from a phenomenal, phenomenology is
a philosophical method that begins with a description,
a careful description of our lived experience and tries to discern
what the basic structures that make that experience possible and meaningful might be.
So if we think about what phenomenology might look like in
relation to testimony of people who have undergone solitary confinement.
I think what we need to do is listen very carefully to the testimony of
the women interviewed by Cassandra Shaler and the testimony of people like Five,
and to think about what this testimony says about what it means to be human.
It suggests to me that we are not just isolated individuals and we are not simply
a temporal or unchanging individuals who can be put in
one situation or another situation and remain exactly the same under every circumstance.
Rather I draw on concepts such as being in the world from Martin Heidegger,
to think about how we exist as hinged or relational persons whose hinges can be
broken or turned against us in
situations that isolate us from an open ended experience of the world.
And so I think it's only as
a perceiving sensing creature that we can experience sensory deprivation.
It's only as a social being that we can experience isolation as a form of torture.
And so we have to think about both what
solitary confinement does to a human being that is organized relationally,
and also what the implications are for us who are
not incarcerated and who have not experienced solitary confinement,
to live in a world in which we do this to other people who are structured like us.
