In addition to such unconscionable
treatment of prisoners, the government and prison officials disingenuously
attempt to justify these abhorrent conditions by claiming the “worst of
the worst” prisoners require such brutal treatment. However, it is always
the political prisoner, the jailhouse lawyer, the resisters of government
brainwashing - rather than the violent and dangerous prisoner - who end
up in the control unit. Case in point, on September 3, 1997, all death
row prisoners in Arizona were moved to the supermax control unit. Such
a move may appear justified until learning that the vast majority of Arizona’s
death row prisoners have the lowest possible institutional risk score;
that is, they pose the least risk to prison security, even when considering
minimum security prisoners.
In addition to deceiving the public
into believing control units are necessary and house only the “worst of
the worst,” prison authorities are master manipulators of prison conditions
- an environment that provides absolutee control over the lives of prisoners
living assignments, files, medical treatment, food, mail, recreation, and
a host of other prisoner activities. Within this atmosphere, prison officials
relegate prisoners to a self-imposed state of inferiority. There exists
no doubt; the ultimate goal of a control unit prison is to crush the human
spirit. Prior to detailing the methods employed by control units to crush
the human spirit, as well as to reveal the devastation resulting from such
methods, let’s take a brief look at the history of control unit prisons.
History The concept of using isolation and
sensory deprivation in prisons - the main tool used by modern day control
units - began in the 1820’s with the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania (also known as the “Pennsylvania Model” prison). The prevailing
belief in the 1820’s was that solitary confinement would lead to remorse
and rehabilitation, reform through isolation and sensory deprivation. However,
it soon became evident that solitary confinement, isolation, and sensory
deprivation caused mental breakdown and insanity in prisoners.
Soon after the establishment of the
“Pennsylvania Model” prison, in the 1830’s, Charles Darwin was given a
tour and observed that the prisoners seemed “dead to everything but the
torturing anxiety and horrible despair.” Subsequently, in the 1840’s, Charles
Dickens toured the Eastern State Penitentiary and remarked that; “I hold
this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably
worse than any physical torture of the body.” Furthermore, German literature
between 1854-1909 reveals that results of solitary confinement included
hallucinations (visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory in nature), disassociation,
hysteria, agitation, motor excitement with aimless violence, persecutory
delusions, and psychosis (see: J. Ganser, Arch Psychiatry Nervenkr 1898).
Finally, in 1890 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sensory deprivation
and solitary confinement caused violent insanity and condemned the practice.
Therefore, isolation prisons were
harshly criticized throughout the 1800’s, as a consequence of causing rampant
mental illness in prisoners, and in 1913 solitary confinement was officially
abolished.
The story does not end there. In
1962 a professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), Edgar Schein, suggested that physical, psychological, and chemical
techniques could be used on prisoners to deliberately alter behavior and
attitude. Schein was a world renowned expert on psychological coercion,
having done extensive studies of torture and brainwashing techniques used
on American prisoners of war, during the Korean War, by North Koreans and
the Chinese. Schein also proposed isolation, sensory deprivation, to destroy
socialization among prisoners as well as to sever the links prisoners had
to the outside world. Because humans validate their existence, their personality,
through contact with others, isolation has a significant impact on the
human psyche. This form of psychological disorientation, the removal of
others for validation of self, came to be known as the “Muttnik Principle”
(so named by psychologist Nathaniel Braden) and was also called the “Psychology
of Invisibility.”
Building on Schein’s lead, other
psychologists suggested using psychotropic medication to mentally, rather
than physically, isolate prisoners. University of Michigan psychologist
James V. McConnell followed up on this suggestion with an article entitled
Criminals can be Brainwashed (Psychology Today, April 1970). Then Harvard
psychologist B.F. Skinner authored a book in 1971, Beyond Freedom and Dignity,
in which he discussed manipulating the mind like clay.
Continuing along the same path, former
U.S. Bureau of Prisons director, James V. Bennett, suggested that the federal
prison system was the perfect place for human experimentation with brainwashing
techniques. That suggestion led to federal prison psychologist Martin Groder
transferring prison agitators, suspected militants, jailhouse lawyers,
and other nonviolent prisoners to remote prisons to be housed in solitary
confinement. If prisoners became compliant then privileges were granted,
otherwise, the psychological torture continued.
These tactics mirrored Schein’s proposal
of using sensory feedback reduction to create predictable cracks in the
mental defense system of prisoners that could then be filled with government
propaganda. In fact, Jessica Mitford wrote an article, The Torture Cure:
In Some American Prisons it is already 1984 (Harper’s, August 1973), which
detailed results of a laboratory experiment that was designed to test the
effects of sensory deprivation on the human mind:
Sensory deprivation, as a behavior
modifier, was the subject of an experiment in which students were paid
twenty dollars to live in tiny solitary cubicles with nothing to do. The
experiment was to last at least six weeks, but none of the students could
last for more than a few days. Many experienced vivid hallucinations .
. . while in this condition, the students were fed propaganda messages.
No matter how poorly the messages were presented, or how illogical the
messages sounded, the propaganda had a marked effect on the attitudes of
all students - an effect that lasted for at least one year after they came
out of the experiment. The first federal control unit was in Marion, Illinois,
and opened in 1972. Marion was an experimental project, intended for developing
a program to mentally break prisoners. It was totally locked down in 1983
and has remained on lock down ever since - prisoner’s average 22-½
hrs. daily in their cells.
Subsequent to Marion being opened,
various states across America built control unit prisons and by the early
1980’s supermax sensory deprivation prisons began to flourish. By 1996
there were over forty control unit prisons housing some 15,000 prisoners.
Even the federal prison system reentered the scene when opening another
control unit prison (Administrative Maximum ADX) in Florence, Colorado,
in November 1994. Prisoners in ADX are given nine hours of outside recreation
weekly, three hours, three times a week, with one other prisoner. Additionally,
ADX has four stages: (1) isolation cells, (2) getting out of the cell to
mingle with a few other prisoners, (3) going from the cell to recreation
unhandcuffed, and (4) getting a job and better food.
Conditions in Arizona’s supermax
control unit are far worse. There will never be co-mingling with other
prisoners, movement while unhandcuffed, better food, or a job. Recreation
occurs three times a week but only in one hour periods and alone. That
is, prisoners in Arizona’s Special Management Unit (SMU) are locked up
for 165 out of 168 hours, over 98% of the time, each and every week.
Such is the history of sensory deprivation
control unit prisons. We will now turn to methods utilized by control units
and the devastating consequences
Methods Control units attempt to brainwash
and mentally debilitate prisoners through systematic programs of oppression
such as isolation, physical abuse, psychological torture, medical neglect,
and other sinister forms of behavior modification. In the section on control
unit prison history, we learned that many of the current solitary confinement
tactics developed from brainwashing techniques used during the Korean War.
There are also reports that confirm that brainwashing and torture tactics
employed by both the CIA and the KGB have been adopted for use in America’s
control units.
Insofar as these tactics, one of
the most comprehensive overviews resides in Biderman’s Chart on Penal Coercion
(reprinted in 1983 by Amnesty International in the Report on Torture).
The chart is broken into eight sections, with each section having two subsections
(one on Purpose and one on Variants). These sections and subsections will
be presented here along with an additional subsection (SMU) which details
strategies used in Arizona’s control unit.
Section I: Isolation Purpose: To deprive prisoners of
social support from both other prisoners and the outside world, to obstruct
the ability to resist, to develop an intense concern with self, and to
create dependence on captors.
Variants: Use of solitary confinement
through isolation, partial isolation, or group isolation.
SMU: Group isolation occurs through
collective punishment, one prisoner acts up and all prisoners are punished
or rules, affecting all prisoners, are altered. The isolation of prisoners
from outside sources occurs by mail tampering (censorship, delayed delivery,
arbitrarily returning letters to sender, and lost mail), weekly 5 min.
monitored and recorded phone calls, non-contact visits through glass and
without a phone (both prisoners and visitors must stand throughout each
two hour weekly visit in order to barely be able to hear), and routinely
harassing and threatening visitors. Finally, isolation from other prisoners
occurs when prisoners are locked in cells for an average of over 23-½
hrs. a day, never touching or being touched by another person (unless begin
beaten by prison guards), no access to services (education, religion, or
vocation), and forced idleness.
Section II: Monopolization of
Perception
Purpose: To fix attention on one’s
immediate predicament, to eliminate any stimuli competing with stimuli
controlled by captors, and to obstruct all actions not consistent with
compliance.
Variants: Isolation, bright light,
barren environment, restricted movement, and monotonous food. SMU: As far as isolation, see-preceding
section. Florescent lighting remains on for 17-½ hrs. daily which
provides a bright environment (even during the night a “dim” light remains
on). Bland food, no sweet desserts, small portions, and daily sack lunches
constitutes monotonous food. Restricted movement exists when prisoners
are handcuffed behind the back and escorted by a guard whenever leaving
the cell. Finally, a barren environment is provided by the piece de resistance
of control units, sensory deprivation. This includes unpainted walls as
well as no plant or animal life, fresh air, sun, sky, windows, or hobby
craft. The tactics discussed previously - isolation, forced idleness, and
no access to services - also play a role in producing the barren environment.
Section III: Induced Debility
and Exhaustion
Purpose: To weaken both the physical
and the mental ability to resist. Variants: Semi-starvation, induced
illness and exploration of pre-existing injury, sleep depravation, and
prolonged constraint.
SMU: In addition to monotonous food
tactics, semi-starvation occurs from severe restrictions on commissary
purchases (only junk food and sweets, no wholesome foods offered), inability
to obtain adequate nutrition from prison meals, and an extremely sedentary
lifestyle. The failure to provide cold weather clothing during outdoor
exercise in winter or when freezing coolers are on indoors, refusal to
treat illness or provide prescribed treatment, and other medical neglect
all promote physical weakness and mental fatigue. Sleep deprivation occurs
when guards purposely make excessive noise all night (stomping up and down
stairs, randomly opening and closing pod doors, yelling, loud laughing,
and blaring walkie-talkies) and arbitrarily wake prisoners throughout the
night with excuses such as supposed problems with outgoing mail, not enough
skin showing (completely under the covers) or too much skin showing (sleeping
naked), and so forth. Prolonged constraint involves year after year of
isolation, escorted everywhere in restraints, being hog-tied or strapped
down, and being placed in the hole.
Section IV: Threats
Purpose: To cultivate anxiety and
despair.
Variants: Threatening death or harm
and providing reward for partial compliance. SMU: Threatening death or harm may
occur verbally and often actually occurs physically. All too frequently
prisoners are gassed, forcibly removed from a cell, physically beaten,
and then strapped down for hours, even days. Additionally, violence, whether
between prisoners or against guards, is constantly provoked by disclosing
confidential information, starting rumors, or housing prisoners arbitrarily
and, occasionally, around known enemies. There are also strip searches,
cell searches, urine analysis tests, and other forms of harassment. The
use of these tactics against prisoners who maintain any shred of individuality
provides an implied threat to other prisoners in order to force compliance.
Furthermore, to openly refrain from imposing such harassment, in return
for compliance, also sends a message. Such arbitrary use of power is a
key weapon.
Section V: Occasional Indulgence
Purpose: To motivate compliance and
hinder adjustment.
Variants: Occasional favors and fluctuating
attitudes. SMU: The motivation of compliance
via favors includes suspending some policies intermittently upon compliance
by a prisoner. For instance, a complaint prisoner may not be strip-searched,
any cell search would be cursory, or longer and preferred recreation times
are provided. This can also include cessation of verbal harassment and
even congenial small talk. Of course, such arbitrary use of power generates
a fluctuating environment that makes it impossible to know what to expect,
impossible to adjust.
Section VI: Demonstrating Omnipotence:
Purpose: To show the futility of
resistance.
Variants: Confrontation and displays
of absolute control. SMU: The unending demonstrations
of who has the power involve gassing, beatings, and time in the hole. Other
demonstrations of control include not following rules, issuing trumped
up or even totally false disciplinary charges, video surveillance, and
the absence of an exit strategy - for most prisoners, the only way out
of the control unit is to snitch, parole, or die. Of course, for death
row the only way out is to die (after 16 years, average).
Section VII: Degradation
Purpose: To show that the cost of resistance is far more damaging to
self-esteem than capitulation and to reduce prisoners to animal level concerns.
Variants: Preventing personal hygiene, promoting a filthy environment,
invoking demeaning punishment, giving insults and taunts, and precluding
privacy. SMU: Preventing personal hygiene occurs through restricting the items
sold in the commissary as well as by not keeping soap, shampoo, and other
items on the store list in stock.
Forcing prisoners to keep rotting trash in their cells and allowing
the cleaning of cells weekly, at best, and then not providing such essential
tools, like cleanser, creates a filthy environment. Guards, counselors,
and even tours often walk by prisoner’s cells, including when the toilet
is being used - there is no privacy. Insults and taunts occur through verbal
harassment. As for demeaning punishment, this involves many of the aforementioned
tactics such as being strapped down while naked, forcibly extracted from
a cell, body and cell searches, being escorted while in restraints by guards
wearing flak jackets and eye goggles, being subjected to fabricated disciplinary
reports and the consequent penalties, and so forth.
Section VIII: Enforcing Trivial Demands
Purpose: To develop the habit of compliance.
Variants: Enforcement of petty rules. SMU: Trumped up disciplinary charges along with arbitrary enforcement
of rules and/or violating established policies is among the main strategies.
Also, the use of cell searches to seize authorized property. It must be
noted that cell searches involve leaving the prisoner handcuffed in the
shower, clad in only underpants, while a team of guards ransack the cell,
leaving property on the floor or damaged - cell destruction rather than
cell searches.
Results Having learned the methods employed by control unit prisons to brainwash
prisoners, for the purported purpose of compelling compliance, let’s look
at the actual results of sensory deprivation:
The devastation, on human beings, caused by control unit prisons is
horrifying! One of the foremost experts on the results of solitary confinement
- Dr. Stuart Grassian, faculty member aat Harvard Medical School - authored
an article in 1983 (Psychopathological Effects of Solitary Confinement)
in which he linked both the brainwashing of prisoner of war soldiers in
Korea and the prisoners in American control units with the devastating
effects of sensory deprivation. In general, Dr. Grassian described these
effects as causing restlessness, banging on walls, yelling, assaultiveness,
incoherent confessional states, hallucinations, regression, disassociation,
and a withdrawn hyponym state.
As part of his research for the article, Dr. Grassian studied fourteen
prisoners who had been in solitary confinement for an average of two months
at the prison in Walpole, Massachusetts. When reporting the results of
this particular study, in the same 1983 article, Dr. Grassian initially
pointed to the intense effort by each prisoner to minimize the effects
of isolation. However, after diligent digging, Dr. Grassian found that
the following symptoms were common results:
Cutting and self-mutilation, fear of insanity, hypersensitivity to external
stimuli (i.e., lighting becoming very uncomfortable, smells appearing to
be quite strong, noises causing much irritation), perceptual distortions
and illusions, hallucinations, de-realization, massive free-floating anxieties
(leading to panic, fear, and difficulty in breathing), acute confusion
states, partial amnesia, difficulty with concentration and memory, disassociation,
disorientation, fantasy of aggressive revenge (torture and mutilation against
guards), persecutory fear, suspiciousness, paranoia, random violence, and
lack of impulse control.
As an expert witness in the mid-1990’s civil lawsuit case Madrid v.
Gomez, Dr. Grassian conducted another study involving prisoners in isolation.
This study included fifty prisoners in the control unit in Pelican Bay,
California. At the conclusion of this study, Dr. Grassian discovered that
forty of the fifty prisoners (80%) had either massively exacerbated a previous
psychiatric illness or had developed psychiatric symptoms associated with
reduced environmental stimulation (RES) as a result of solitary confinement.
RES is a psychiatric condition characterized by perceptual distortion,
hallucinations, hypersensitivity to external stimuli, aggressive fantasies,
paranoia, inability to concentrate, and poor impulse control.
Insofar as results of solitary confinement, a report by the American
Journal of Psychiatry confirmed that sensory deprivation leads to hallucinations,
anxiety attacks, problems with impulse control, and self-mutilation. Additionally,
as a consequence of personal experience with sensory deprivation in control
unit prisons, the author of this paper has also experienced depression,
delusion, headaches, hypertension, hypersensitivity, and anti-social behavior
and attitude. Finally, in regards to effects of solitary confinement, current
literature (Dr. Grassian, et. al.) reports that sensory deprivation actually
alters the chemical balance in the brain and undoubtedly causes significant
personality changes.
Consequently, by reviewing this author’s personal experience, Dr. Grassian’s
studies, and reports by the American Journal of Psychiatry, we can see
that nothing has changed since solitary confinement was known to cause
mental illness and insanity in the 1800’s. Current studies and reports
are virtually identical to the reports from Germany between 1854-1909 (remember,
the German literature reported psychosis, hysteria, hallucinations, agitation,
motor excitement, disassociation, random violence, and delusions as results
of confinement in isolation).
Conclusion This article has clearly demonstrated that the use of control unit prisons
causes mental breakdown in prisoners. In and of itself, such devastating
results are most tragic, however, even more horrifying is government’s
full knowledge of the destruction they are causing to humans. In the mid-1990’s
Dr. Grassian disclosed the results of his comprehensive studies, involving
the fifty control unit prisoners at Pelican Bay, to both federal and state
governments. Rather than take corrective action, to immediately cease the
commission of such atrocities against human beings, the federal government
enacted the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) in 1996. The PLRA effectively
precludes prisoners from suing for “emotional or mental harm unless they
can also prove physical injury.” That’s right, the government enacted the
PLRA to specifically exclude lawsuits, to fully absolve both government
and prisons from any liability, which results from the knowing and intentional
psychological torture, performed in control unit prisons, and the devastating
consequences. God help us all.
___________________
The author of this article is on death row in Arizona. You may write
to thank him for this major source of information at:
Frank J. Atwood #62887
Arizona State Prison
Box 3400 - SMUII (Death Row)
Florence, AZ 85232