The Pros And Cons Of Super-Maximum Security Prisons
Twenty years ago, super-maximum-security prisons were rare in America.
As of 1996, over two-thirds of states had "supermax" facilities that collectively
housed more than 20,000 inmates. Based on the present study, however,
as of 2004, 44 states had supermax prisons. Designed to hold the
most violent and disruptive inmates in single-cell confinement for 23 hours
per day, often for an indefinite period of time, these facilities have been lightning
rods for controversy. Economic considerations are one reason, supermaxes
typically cost two or three times more to build and operate than traditional
maximum security prisons. A perhaps bigger reason lies in the criticism by
some that supermax confinement is unconstitutional and …show more content…
inhumane.
While proponents and opponents of supermax prisons debate such issues,
a fundamental set of questions has gone largely unexamined:
What exactly are the goals of supermax prisons? How, if at all, are these
goals achieved? And what are their unintended impacts?, For 20 years
the population in prisons in the united states have grown 700%, although
seeing that our population has increased only 20% and the crime
rate has decreased. with a population of more than 2 million, the united states
incarcerate more people per capital than any other country that publishes
statistics on prisons, even Russia. California alone has built 20 more prisons
since 1980, with other states and the Federal government following suit.
Why are so many people in prison? In an atmosphere of fear, economic difficulties,
and persistent racial divisions, prisons have become a popular "solution" to social ills.
"Tough on crime" posturing by politicians has lowered the bar on what gets people
into prison and how long they stay there, and has included vast expansions of prison
space and law enforcement capacity. High security institutions, also known as
United States Penitentiaries (USPs), have highly-secured perimeters
(featuring walls or reinforced fences), multiple- and single-occupant cell housing,
the highest staff-to-inmate ratio, and close control of inmate movement.
Upon arrival at a new institution, an inmate is interviewed and screened
by staff from the case management, medical, and mental health units.
Later, an inmate is assigned to the Admission and Orientation (A&O) Program,
where he or she receives a formal orientation to the programs, services, policies,
and procedures of that facility. A "super-max" facility is the highest-security prison
in the U.S. penitentiary system. It's here that the worst offenders --
or the most endangered ones -- serve their time in near isolation.
Located in Florence, Colo., about 100 miles southwest of Denver is the only
federal super-maximum prison in the United States. The facility inherited the role
of America's top prison from one in Marion, Ill. -- which had become the home
of the country's most dangerous prisoners when Alcatraz closed in 1963.
Florenc'es current inmates include Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and shoebomber
Richard Reid. Zacarias Moussaoui is expected to join them. Riverbend Located In
The State of Tennessee houses all death row inmates with the exception of four.
There are two women who are housed at the Tennessee Prison for Women,
and two male inmates who are assigned to Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex.
All death row inmates are housed in single cells with 24 inmates per pod.
Tennessee's death row is unique to any other in the country in that inmates are
managed by way of an incentive level system. Upon initial entry to death row,
inmates begin at Level C which leaves them in their cell all but one hour per day.
Over time, their good behavior can earn them the opportunity
to work inside the institution and have additional recreation time. Maximum Security Unit
is the control room for one of the maximum security units located at Riverbend. There
are a total of four maximum units at the facility. A control monitor is stationed in this
area 24 hours a day. Their role is to keep a constant watch on the activities of inmates
and staff by way of multiple windows and surveillance cameras. Riverbend houses
approximately 330 maximum security inmates. These inmates spend 23 hours a day in
their cell. The only time they leave is to shower, and to go to the recreation area for an
hour. Correctional Officers monitor the perimeter of Riverbend 24 hours a day from an
access road that surrounds the facility. Five coils of razor wire are attached to exterior
fences to insure inmates do not attempt to escape. Louisiana State Penitentiary at
Angola is America's largest maximum-security prison. The prison sits on 18,000 acres
of farmland-- corn and soybeans are the primary crops. It also has a herd of 1,500 cattle.
Angola is the only prison in America that offers a college degree program on prison
grounds. Folsom state prison located in Represa, California with an inmate population
of 7,246 was one of America's first maximum-security prisons. It's now a medium-
security facility. In 1968, country singer Johnny Cash put the prison and himself
on the map. Cash performed a live concert and released a hit album titled "Folsom
Prison Blues." The prison involved is no less than Pelican Bay State Prison in
Northern California; specifically, its isolation unit called the "SHU," or
Security Housing Unit, where inmates are housed in nearly solitary confinement,
locked in their cells for 22 and a half hours a day, searched regularly for
weapons and their personal effects x-rayed for contraband.Yet members of the
Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, Nuestra Familia and other prison gangs
are able to run thriving criminal enterprises out on the streets from inside the prison,
Anywhere from murder to money laundering, bank robberies, armored-car robberies,
home invasions, drug deals, prostitution," according to Epi Cortina, a former member
of the Nuestra Familia who lived on the SHU for nine years.
Acording to Cortina and
other gang members messages were easy to get out on to the street
because Inmates on the SHU are able to break their isolation and scheme with
one another through a myriad of clever methods, including talking through
storm drains and ventilation pipes, as well as through something called "fishing,"
in which inmates fashion a fishing line from the threads of their underwear,
bed sheets and socks and tie tiny notes onto the end. The inmates
then
slide the notes under the prison doors, hook their lines and reel in each
other's secret messages. Once they communicate with each other, the most effective
way they get their messages to their foot soldiers on the outside is through the
U.S. mail, sending letters is one of their rights guaranteed by law.
Inmates write letters using codes that have been so hard to decipher,
they have been sent to the FBI's cryptologists in Washington. Inmates also embed secret
codes in their intricate prison artwork that is then mailed out to their "homeboys"
on the street. "And so what happens," says Lt. Steve Perez, a senior official at Pelican Bay,
"is that when this [artwork] goes out, if you're not paying attention to
what's happening, if you're not looking for the indicators of how they communicate,
a beautiful piece of artwork becomes a message to have someone killed." Adds Perez,
"These are the most creative, the most ingenious men, deeply committed to
achieving their criminal goals." Law enforcement officials became so alarmed at the
expanding influence of one of the gangs, Nuestra Familia, that it launched
Operation Black Widow, the largest and most expensive investigation of a prison
gang in U.S. history. Investigators turned up 10 hit lists and prevented scores
of homicides that were already in the planning stages, including a plot to
murder two deputy district attorneys in California, says Steve Gruel, the lead
federal prosecutor in the case. In all, Gruel says Operation Black Widow resulted in
the arrest and conviction of some 150 gang members and associates.
But now what to do with them? The gang leaders were already serving life sentences
at Pelican Bay. So Gruel has proposed taking the gang leaders out of the
state prison and scattering them across the country in various federal penitentiaries. "If you take a
[Nuestra Familia] general and put him in Marion, Illinois, or in Minnesota or some other
institution in Arkansas, he's going to be a nobody," Gruel tells Stahl. But one of Gruel's
main informants in the case, Robert Gratton, a former high-ranking member of
Nuestra Familia, disagrees. He says the plan will spread the influence of the gang to other
parts of the country. "Not only are they going to run
[their criminal organization from the new prisons]," Gratton tells Stahl,
"they're going to be able to recruit and they're going to prosper." In fact,
Gratton adds, "it's [already] too late. They've re-established new lines of communication,
new contacts." Pelican Bay's Lt. Steve Perez agrees, saying,
"These men will go out into the federal system and continue to branch out, to create
new gangs and continue their gang activity."
"Prisons have become the nation's primary mental health facilities.
But for those with serious illnesses, prison can be the worst place to be".
Jamie Fellner
Director, U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch
Pelican Bay authorities have had some success getting inmates to flip by
offering them a deal: In exchange for telling how crimes are being hatched
and orchestrated from within the prison, they're given privileges and moved
into a segregated wing off the SHU. But four men who took the deal say
that it's really easy to get messages in and out. Epi Cortina brutally
beat and murdered a fellow gang member. He lived on the SHU for nine years
before he renounced his membership in the Mexican American gang, Nuestra Familia.
Miguel Perez gunned down a witness in a murder trial. He has told
prison officials how his old gang, the Mexican Mafia, dispatches
orders in the visiting rooms. "One of the things we learned was
sign language. So this way if we seen someone, you sign to him,"
says Miguel Perez. "If I used regular sign language, it's easy for you
to go and understand it or pick it up. But we throw our own stuff in."
These men all say they want kids on the street to know that gang life is a sham.
"Loyalty, honor, it's not there," says Miguel Perez. "There ain't no such thing.
I mean, it's something that's fed to you, but it's not true."
The gangs at Pelican Bay are organized like the military, with strict
discipline that includes going to school, but not in the traditional sense.
They go to gang school, learning, for instance, how to make weapons
from materials the state is required to give them. In a prison video,
an inmate demonstrates how he constructed a crossbow out of elastic
from his underwear, writing paper rolled tightly, and a plastic spoon
sharpened into a lethal point. It's made specifically to be fired through the mesh door.
No matter how safe or Super Max prisons are there will still be a lot of inhuman
things goin' on in there and there will always be gangs running the inside and the
outside of the prison, no matter where they transfer the big bosses of the gangs
or to what max prisons they send them, there will try to make there gang even
stronger by recruiting more new members in to the gang.
The best thing that we can do is just keep them together and not try to spread
the virus by sending them to other prisons, we should keep them where
they are and let them finish there sentence in the same prison they came in to.
As of 1996, over two-thirds of states had "supermax" facilities that collectively
housed more than 20,000 inmates. Based on the present study, however,
as of 2004, 44 states had supermax prisons. Designed to hold the
most violent and disruptive inmates in single-cell confinement for 23 hours
per day, often for an indefinite period of time, these facilities have been lightning
rods for controversy. Economic considerations are one reason, supermaxes
typically cost two or three times more to build and operate than traditional
maximum security prisons. A perhaps bigger reason lies in the criticism by
some that supermax confinement is unconstitutional and …show more content…
inhumane.
While proponents and opponents of supermax prisons debate such issues,
a fundamental set of questions has gone largely unexamined:
What exactly are the goals of supermax prisons? How, if at all, are these
goals achieved? And what are their unintended impacts?, For 20 years
the population in prisons in the united states have grown 700%, although
seeing that our population has increased only 20% and the crime
rate has decreased. with a population of more than 2 million, the united states
incarcerate more people per capital than any other country that publishes
statistics on prisons, even Russia. California alone has built 20 more prisons
since 1980, with other states and the Federal government following suit.
Why are so many people in prison? In an atmosphere of fear, economic difficulties,
and persistent racial divisions, prisons have become a popular "solution" to social ills.
"Tough on crime" posturing by politicians has lowered the bar on what gets people
into prison and how long they stay there, and has included vast expansions of prison
space and law enforcement capacity. High security institutions, also known as
United States Penitentiaries (USPs), have highly-secured perimeters
(featuring walls or reinforced fences), multiple- and single-occupant cell housing,
the highest staff-to-inmate ratio, and close control of inmate movement.
Upon arrival at a new institution, an inmate is interviewed and screened
by staff from the case management, medical, and mental health units.
Later, an inmate is assigned to the Admission and Orientation (A&O) Program,
where he or she receives a formal orientation to the programs, services, policies,
and procedures of that facility. A "super-max" facility is the highest-security prison
in the U.S. penitentiary system. It's here that the worst offenders --
or the most endangered ones -- serve their time in near isolation.
Located in Florence, Colo., about 100 miles southwest of Denver is the only
federal super-maximum prison in the United States. The facility inherited the role
of America's top prison from one in Marion, Ill. -- which had become the home
of the country's most dangerous prisoners when Alcatraz closed in 1963.
Florenc'es current inmates include Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and shoebomber
Richard Reid. Zacarias Moussaoui is expected to join them. Riverbend Located In
The State of Tennessee houses all death row inmates with the exception of four.
There are two women who are housed at the Tennessee Prison for Women,
and two male inmates who are assigned to Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex.
All death row inmates are housed in single cells with 24 inmates per pod.
Tennessee's death row is unique to any other in the country in that inmates are
managed by way of an incentive level system. Upon initial entry to death row,
inmates begin at Level C which leaves them in their cell all but one hour per day.
Over time, their good behavior can earn them the opportunity
to work inside the institution and have additional recreation time. Maximum Security Unit
is the control room for one of the maximum security units located at Riverbend. There
are a total of four maximum units at the facility. A control monitor is stationed in this
area 24 hours a day. Their role is to keep a constant watch on the activities of inmates
and staff by way of multiple windows and surveillance cameras. Riverbend houses
approximately 330 maximum security inmates. These inmates spend 23 hours a day in
their cell. The only time they leave is to shower, and to go to the recreation area for an
hour. Correctional Officers monitor the perimeter of Riverbend 24 hours a day from an
access road that surrounds the facility. Five coils of razor wire are attached to exterior
fences to insure inmates do not attempt to escape. Louisiana State Penitentiary at
Angola is America's largest maximum-security prison. The prison sits on 18,000 acres
of farmland-- corn and soybeans are the primary crops. It also has a herd of 1,500 cattle.
Angola is the only prison in America that offers a college degree program on prison
grounds. Folsom state prison located in Represa, California with an inmate population
of 7,246 was one of America's first maximum-security prisons. It's now a medium-
security facility. In 1968, country singer Johnny Cash put the prison and himself
on the map. Cash performed a live concert and released a hit album titled "Folsom
Prison Blues." The prison involved is no less than Pelican Bay State Prison in
Northern California; specifically, its isolation unit called the "SHU," or
Security Housing Unit, where inmates are housed in nearly solitary confinement,
locked in their cells for 22 and a half hours a day, searched regularly for
weapons and their personal effects x-rayed for contraband.Yet members of the
Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, Nuestra Familia and other prison gangs
are able to run thriving criminal enterprises out on the streets from inside the prison,
Anywhere from murder to money laundering, bank robberies, armored-car robberies,
home invasions, drug deals, prostitution," according to Epi Cortina, a former member
of the Nuestra Familia who lived on the SHU for nine years.
Acording to Cortina and
other gang members messages were easy to get out on to the street
because Inmates on the SHU are able to break their isolation and scheme with
one another through a myriad of clever methods, including talking through
storm drains and ventilation pipes, as well as through something called "fishing,"
in which inmates fashion a fishing line from the threads of their underwear,
bed sheets and socks and tie tiny notes onto the end. The inmates
then
slide the notes under the prison doors, hook their lines and reel in each
other's secret messages. Once they communicate with each other, the most effective
way they get their messages to their foot soldiers on the outside is through the
U.S. mail, sending letters is one of their rights guaranteed by law.
Inmates write letters using codes that have been so hard to decipher,
they have been sent to the FBI's cryptologists in Washington. Inmates also embed secret
codes in their intricate prison artwork that is then mailed out to their "homeboys"
on the street. "And so what happens," says Lt. Steve Perez, a senior official at Pelican Bay,
"is that when this [artwork] goes out, if you're not paying attention to
what's happening, if you're not looking for the indicators of how they communicate,
a beautiful piece of artwork becomes a message to have someone killed." Adds Perez,
"These are the most creative, the most ingenious men, deeply committed to
achieving their criminal goals." Law enforcement officials became so alarmed at the
expanding influence of one of the gangs, Nuestra Familia, that it launched
Operation Black Widow, the largest and most expensive investigation of a prison
gang in U.S. history. Investigators turned up 10 hit lists and prevented scores
of homicides that were already in the planning stages, including a plot to
murder two deputy district attorneys in California, says Steve Gruel, the lead
federal prosecutor in the case. In all, Gruel says Operation Black Widow resulted in
the arrest and conviction of some 150 gang members and associates.
But now what to do with them? The gang leaders were already serving life sentences
at Pelican Bay. So Gruel has proposed taking the gang leaders out of the
state prison and scattering them across the country in various federal penitentiaries. "If you take a
[Nuestra Familia] general and put him in Marion, Illinois, or in Minnesota or some other
institution in Arkansas, he's going to be a nobody," Gruel tells Stahl. But one of Gruel's
main informants in the case, Robert Gratton, a former high-ranking member of
Nuestra Familia, disagrees. He says the plan will spread the influence of the gang to other
parts of the country. "Not only are they going to run
[their criminal organization from the new prisons]," Gratton tells Stahl,
"they're going to be able to recruit and they're going to prosper." In fact,
Gratton adds, "it's [already] too late. They've re-established new lines of communication,
new contacts." Pelican Bay's Lt. Steve Perez agrees, saying,
"These men will go out into the federal system and continue to branch out, to create
new gangs and continue their gang activity."
"Prisons have become the nation's primary mental health facilities.
But for those with serious illnesses, prison can be the worst place to be".
Jamie Fellner
Director, U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch
Pelican Bay authorities have had some success getting inmates to flip by
offering them a deal: In exchange for telling how crimes are being hatched
and orchestrated from within the prison, they're given privileges and moved
into a segregated wing off the SHU. But four men who took the deal say
that it's really easy to get messages in and out. Epi Cortina brutally
beat and murdered a fellow gang member. He lived on the SHU for nine years
before he renounced his membership in the Mexican American gang, Nuestra Familia.
Miguel Perez gunned down a witness in a murder trial. He has told
prison officials how his old gang, the Mexican Mafia, dispatches
orders in the visiting rooms. "One of the things we learned was
sign language. So this way if we seen someone, you sign to him,"
says Miguel Perez. "If I used regular sign language, it's easy for you
to go and understand it or pick it up. But we throw our own stuff in."
These men all say they want kids on the street to know that gang life is a sham.
"Loyalty, honor, it's not there," says Miguel Perez. "There ain't no such thing.
I mean, it's something that's fed to you, but it's not true."
The gangs at Pelican Bay are organized like the military, with strict
discipline that includes going to school, but not in the traditional sense.
They go to gang school, learning, for instance, how to make weapons
from materials the state is required to give them. In a prison video,
an inmate demonstrates how he constructed a crossbow out of elastic
from his underwear, writing paper rolled tightly, and a plastic spoon
sharpened into a lethal point. It's made specifically to be fired through the mesh door.
No matter how safe or Super Max prisons are there will still be a lot of inhuman
things goin' on in there and there will always be gangs running the inside and the
outside of the prison, no matter where they transfer the big bosses of the gangs
or to what max prisons they send them, there will try to make there gang even
stronger by recruiting more new members in to the gang.
The best thing that we can do is just keep them together and not try to spread
the virus by sending them to other prisons, we should keep them where
they are and let them finish there sentence in the same prison they came in to.