Supermax prisons losing favor as demand shifts
Posted on Sunday, February 5, 2006
GRADY - Curtis Hughes Jr. doesn't look out his window much.
When he does, all he sees, through a cloudy horizontal pane, is the death row cellblock.
His fear of other inmates and correctional officers, he said in a recent interview, keeps him inside his own 7-by-11-foot cell at the Varner Supermax Unit all day, nearly every day. By his own count, he has breathed fresh air in the outdoor exercise yard just eight or nine times in the five years he has been held at the state's highest-security prison.
Hughes has sworn and spit at correctional officers ; he has stacked up about 200 rule violations since entering prison in 1992, but he doesn't fall into a clear category that warrants incarceration at the Supermax, a 468-bed steel-reinforced concrete unit in Grady that cost $ 20 million to build.
Varner Supermax opened in 2000 to hold "the worst of the worst" - prison gang leaders, chronically violent inmates who have assaulted or killed other inmates or correctional officers, or escape risks. Hughes falls into another, less specific category : He just can't seem to keep his mouth shut. Inmates at Varner Supermax are kept inside their small cells for 23 hours a day. They're allowed to exercise alone in a tiny yard five hours each week. Virtually everything else, from angermanagement classes to meals to showers, occurs inside the cells. When an inmate leaves his cell, he is shackled, and two officers accompany him. "It's a shame some inmates act like they do, but they do,"said Dina Tyler, spokesman for the Department of Correction. "That's why we need a supermax."
But critics say "nuisance"inmates like Hughes often are locked up in supermaxes nationwide simply to keep expensive beds full - the units costs taxpayers more to maintain than regular prisons - contrary to the original intent of isolating the most violent offenders from the general population.
"Off the record, [individual state ] prison officials will tell you that they don't have 500 worstof-the-worst, so you start putting other less serious offenders in there to justify the beds,"said Fred Cohen, an attorney appointed by a federal district court to monitor Ohio's supermax prison. "These prisoners aren't even close to fitting the original criteria. Instead, what you're doing is creating the worst of the worst."
More than 30 states, including Arkansas, have supermax prisons housing at least 20, 000 of the nation's roughly 1. 4 million stateprison inmates, with about 450 at the Varner unit.
But the supermax concept is losing some of its popularity across the country - not one has been built for about five years. Virginia, Wisconsin and Michigan have converted supermax prisons to more garden-variety maximumsecurity units.
Ohio, under federal court supervision, is considering joining the trend, which experts attribute to several factors : Supermaxes are much costlier to build than regular maximum-security prisons ; they have become excessively expensive ways to house nonviolent troublemakers and, increasingly, evidence is mounting that the isolation inherent in such institutions exacerbates and even causes mental illness in inmates, most of whom eventually return to society.
While federal courts have consistently ruled it illegal to house mentally ill prisoners in supermax facilities, the state Correction Department's mental-health chief told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that such inmates are being held at Varner Supermax. The lack of secure psychiatric beds elsewhere in the system, he said, practically requires it.
But that situation leaves the state open to lawsuits, warn lawyers who have successfully sued other states for housing mentally ill inmates in supermaxes. Lack of secure space to house the mentally ill, as some states have argued, has never been a successful defense in federal court, they said.
Correction officials across the country, as a result, are being forced to confront a problem that 20 years ago was hailed as a solution to the growth of prison gangs and increases in prison violence - about 13 percent of Arkansas inmates have been identified as gang members. The concept started a building boom that flourished throughout the 1990 s. Arkansas's supermax was one of the last built.
"The bloom is off the rose,"said David Fathi, senior staff counsel for the ACLU's National Prison Project. "It's a fad that has had its day."
Aside from a visit from attorneys working on another inmate's case, Hughes, 36, said that he hadn't had a visitor in six years before his interview with the Democrat-Gazette.
Eligible for parole since February 1998, he doesn't expect to be released until his 20-year sentence for second-degree murder expires in 2011.
Tyler said Hughes is a "perfect example"of someone who needs to be in a supermax. "He's insubordinate, disobedient and very destructive of state property,"she said.
Tyler said it was impossible to say how many nonviolent inmates like Hughes are held in Varner Supermax because "we don't keep records that way."
No inmate is sentenced directly to the supermax, except for those given death sentences. An inmate has to have committed a violent crime in prison, assaulted an officer or another inmate, have tried to escape or present another "reason which the warden feels may constitute a serious threat to the security or good order,"according to the department regulations.
That catch-all reason landed Hughes at the prison in September 2000.
Ideally, Varner Supermax inmates undergo an 18-month program, including anger management, designed to improve behavior. If they follow the rules and complete the required steps, they can progress up five classification levels and be transferred back to a regular prison.
Although they spend virtually all of their time in a cell, they have an opportunity to take General Educational Development classes. Most of the instruction is conducted via videotape that plays on small televisions in each cell.
Often, though, inmates don't complete the program. Hughes is currently at Level 4, the nextto-lowest classification. He has lost many privileges, including the right to a television, his only regular sensory stimulus.
"They play games,"he said of correction officers. "You get to Level 2 and then they bust you back down."
Leaving the supermax is up to Hughes, Tyler said. "He worked his way in. It's up to him to get himself out."
But Hughes' defiance is typical of many supermax inmates, said Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and former faculty member for 25 years at Harvard Medical School who has examined hundreds of inmates in isolation.
"People get stuck. Supermax gets people who really have problems with impulse control, with emotional stability. You put them in these kinds of conditions, those problems inevitably get worse. You get into a cycle of punishment, and they never get out,"he said.
Even worse, Grassian said, they frequently become mentally ill.
The lack of stimulation and isolation inherent in supermax prisons can lead to hallucinations, psychoses and outright psychotic behavior, often leading to chronic mental illness even after an inmate is released, he said.
"If people in the community understood, they'd be terrified and outraged. The correctional system has done everything in its power to make them paranoid and explosive as they can in supermax. That's fine because in there are plenty of COs [correctional officers ] and they're shackled,"Grassian said.
"Put them on a bus to the city and they're totally incapable of managing : They can't stand people, they're jumpy, nervous, afraid of people. They're set up for catastrophic results. I've seen people [in California ] leave there and very quickly commit an act of violence."
Varner Warden Grant Harris dismisses the research showing that supermaxes are hothouses for isolation-inspired mental illness.
"I pretty much think that's a myth. For the most part, they're coming into contact with security every day,"he said.
The Correction Department could not calculate how many inmates have been released into the community from Varner Supermax, but of the 21 former inmates who have returned to prison after being released, four ended up back at the supermax. Tyler said those partial numbers are good news. "It means that the most of them are behaving better, at least while they're incarcerated."
Harris pointed to the success of the behavior-modification program. Since its inception, 163 of 336 inmates - or more than 48 percent - have either transferred back to another prison or been released because their sentences expired. Prison officials, however, can't say exactly how many of those inmates actually completed the 18-month program.
For now, Harris said his beds are full. "It will continue to go on the way it is.... I don't see that trend changing. They might change the name, but it will be same wine, new bottle."Varner Supermax has six cellblocks with 78 single-cells in each block. About 150 correctional officers are assigned to the unit, roughly the same number of officers assigned to the medium-security wing in the same facility that has nearly 600 more inmates. At least 13 mental-health workers also are assigned to the supermax.
The increased staff comes with a hefty price tag. Although federal dollars paid for nearly 90 percent of the unit's construction costs, the state bears the full cost of operating the facility, which comes to at least $ 11 million a year out of an agency budget of $ 247 million.
Partly because of their costs, Cohen calls supermaxes "the white elephants of corrections,"often unnecessary and driven by political pressures, not solid penal theory.
"What happened around the country was that Gov. Jones saw Gov. Smith's supermax and said, 'Why don't we have one of those ?'"he said.
Assessing the full cost of Arkansas' Varner Supermax is difficult because it shares electricity, gas, food, laundry services and personnel with its medium-security wing, Tyler said.
"The cost of the Supermax is probably closer to that of the [Tucker ] Maximum-Security Unit, which is $ 66. 48 (per day, per inmate ),"wrote Tyler in an e-mail, speculating that the prison's newer design might make it cheaper than Tucker. The average cost per day, per inmate systemwide is $ 48. 24.
Since 2001, Arkansas supermax inmates have sued the prison system 86 times alleging civil-rights violations. The numbers have remained steady over the years and make up 16 percent of all 545 lawsuits filed against the Correction Department in the past five years.
Legal challenges to supermax prisons around the country have reached the highest court in the land. The U. S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously last June, in Wilkinson v. Austin, that Ohio's policies for assigning inmates to its supermax met constitutional standards. Federal courts as well have consistently ruled, outside the scope of mental illness, that supermaxes are constitutional forms of imprisonment.
The aftershocks of those rulings, however, are leading to a shift in policy, including written regulations banning placement of mentally ill inmates in isolation, said Cohen, Ohio's court-appointed monitor.
Arkansas does not have a written policy, said Parker, the Correction Department's mental-health administrator. Rather, evaluations are done on a case-by-case basis, which Parker acknowledged isn't always effective.
"There's nothing hard and fast ; it's kind up to the clinician at the [transferring ] unit,"he said. "A lot of times it will happen after they're transferred."
Only four secure beds for mentally ill inmates are available at the Special Programs Unit in Pine Bluff. With approximately 16 percent of prison inmates suffering from mental illness, according to national studies, the state faces a space crunch with its 13, 400 inmates, Parker said.
An additional 30 beds for violent mentally ill prisoners will be available once a special-needs unit at Ouachita River Unit in Malvern is complete within the next five years.
In the meantime, prison officials make do by placing some inmates in single-cells around the system, including Varner Supermax.
"We have to manage those beds,"Parker said, adding that he did not know how many mentally ill inmates are being housed in the supermax. "You can't leave them in the general population."
With that practice, though, the state is inviting a lawsuit over violation of the Eighth Amendment, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment, according to lawyers with the ACLU's National Prison Project.
"This is an area where prisoners are batting a thousand - every single federal court to consider the issue has ruled that housing mentally ill prisoners in supermax facilities is unconstitutional. I think any prison system that continues this practice in the face of this unanimous judicial authority is risking substantial liability,"said Fathi, the senior staff counsel for the project.
The defense that a state doesn't have enough secure beds, forcing it to house prisoners at its supermax, has been tried repeatedly, Fathi said.
"It's never been successful. Security and extreme deprivation are two separable things. You can make sure someone is housed in a secure environment - even a state mental hospital - without it being a supermax,"he said.
The supermax issue caught the attention of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, which held a hearing last July in Newark, N. J. The New York-based Vera Institute, a nonprofit policy research organization, established the bipartisan commission, which plans to release a report this spring, including recommendations on the supermax concept.
"State legislatures have money for a supermax, but they won't provide money for a therapeutic environment, for counseling, for psychiatric evaluations or treatment,"said Alex Busansky, the commission's executive director. "These individuals end up in isolation because administrators decide this is the only tool they have."
Dr. Richard Dudley, a New York forensic psychiatrist and a commission member, said that what he heard during the July hearing was fairly conclusive that such a isolated environment is psychologically damaging.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
