The Militarization and Madness of Everyday Life

23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement. 584 By Keramet Reiter. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.In 1996, Los Angeles Times revealed that guards in California's 588 maximum-security prisons had been staging gladiatorial contests 589 between inmates. What's more, the contests often occurred in the 590 state's housing units, solitary confinement facilities 591 designed to keep the most dangerous inmates in continuous isola- 592 tion. guards would remotely unlock the cells of rival gang 593 members at the same time, intentionally releasing them into the 594 same space. Five men died when the fights got out of control and 595 guards shot them. 596Scandals like this one erupted with startling regularity in the state's secure housing units. But while inmates' lawsuits led to some modest reforms, the units themselves were not declared unconstitu- tional by the courts or deemed inhumane by the state legislature. Indeed, at Pelican Bay Prison, the state's first supermax facility, prison administrators spent the better part of the 1990s transform- ing what was once an extraordinary practice-round-the-clock iso- lation in an 80 square foot space-into a common one that some inmates would endure for decades. Pelican Bay's construction in 1988 represented an unprecedented expansion and modernization of the state's secure housing infrastructure, all in the name of secu- rity. Inmates' dangerousness, prison administrators argued, war- ranted both the extreme measure and the enormous discretion judges and legislators had given to corrections personnel about how to implement it.The power of that unchecked administrative discretion hovers over the entirety of Keramet Reiter's 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement, a brilliant and path-breaking biography of a prison that critics called a high-tech dungeon. Studying everything from the creation of the prison's blueprints in the 1980s to the response to the appalling scandals that erupted within it after it opened, Reiter finds that legislators elected to rep- resent the people and judges charged with protecting inmates' con- stitutional rights failed to meaningfully monitor the dramatic expansion of an extreme sanction.Drawing on a wide array of legislative, judicial, and journalistic sources, correspondence with prisoners confined in long-term soli- tary, and-most compellingly-oral histories she conducted with prisoners and prison administrators, Reiter offers an engrossing account of the history of Pelican Bay. Without compromising her scholarly orientation, she writes with the clarity, intensity, and acces- sibility of an investigative journalist.The modern history of solitary confinement in California, Reiter argues, begins with the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and their infiltration into the prison. In corrections adminis- trators' minds, prisoners like George Jackson, a Black Panther whose Soledad Brother had made him a hero to the radical left, were responsible for the spiraling violence in California's prisons. Solitary confinement became a way to isolate ringleaders and prevent the conflicts they created.But reactionary backlash against the radical prison movement only did so much. It is not chiefly to blame for the massive expan- sion of solitary confinement, Reiter finds. Hannah Arendt's famous account of the banality of in Nazi Germany is a more apt point of reference (and one she explicitly invokes). The ongoing imposition of solitary confinement is not deliberate or malicious, she explains. [R]ather, it is the culmination of everyday bureau- cratic functioning and path dependency, in which one day of iso- lation becomes thirty days, and thirty days becomes thirty years (p. 5).Importantly, though, evidence in 23/7 and other studies of hyper-modern punishment suggest that banal evil does not stay banal for long (Dayan 2011; Lynch 2000; Smith 2008). …

Agnes Czajka’s article, “Inclusive Exclusion: Citizenship and the American Prisoner and Prison,” considers the proliferation of prisons in the United States, particularly the increasing number of supermaximum security or “camp” prisons, as an example of “the normalization of a state of exception.” In her analysis, Czajka applies Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the camp as “a physical space that is opened when a state of exception becomes the rule.” While the incarcerated and the non-incarcerated form two distinct societies, they are nevertheless intricately entwined. In the case of the supermax prison, however, the degree of exclusion is higher than in standard prisons. Prisoners are isolated from society and each other, reduced to “bare life” in solitary confinement, and their treatment is beyond the scrutiny of social and judicial review. The use of surveillance technology allows for an extraordinary degree of exclusion from human contact: prisoners exist “outside the rubric of citizenship.”

The leading organization of US prison administrators has described the prolonged isolation of individuals in solitary confinement in US jails and prisons as a “grave problem” and called for the...

Between 2011 and 2013, prisoners in California’s Pelican Bay Prison launched three collective hunger strikes protesting long-term solitary confinement. At the height of the third strike, 30,000 prisoners across the state refused food, ultimately forcing California to alter and limit its use of solitary confinement. Collective resistance of this scale is rare in prison, especially in supermax facilities, which attack prisoners’ subjectivity and condition expressions of agency that are harmful to self and others. Through a rhetorical analysis of the imprisoned activists’ accounts of cross-racial coalition building, I argue that prisoners found means to survive and resist social death by restoring a discursive space across cells and by claiming control of their bodies through regimes of self-discipline. I conclude by considering implications for mainstream prison reform discourse.

Keramet Reiter looks at the use of solitary confinement in American prisons and examines the work of activists in trying to end it. She examines the case of Ashker v. Governor of California, a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of 500 prisoners in California who had each been housed continuously in solitary confinement for ten years or more. She also examines whether the case repudiated the practice of solitary confinement, “consigning it to legal infamy.”

This paper details the life stories of young black men, specifically how they negotiate their masculine identities over time. The researcher tracked a group of young black men over a period of nine years, from when they were adolescent boys (between the ages of 13 and 18 years), until they were young adults (between the ages of 23 to 26 years at the time of the writing). The aim of the study was to explore how the participants spoke about their relationships with their fathers as young adolescent boys and how they were now fathers to their own children as young men. At the beginning of the study the participants were given disposable cameras and asked to take 27photos (the total available on the film) under the theme, "My life as a young black man in the new South Africa". The photos undertaken were used to facilitate semi-structured interviews in which the life stories ofwhatitmeantto be a young black man were shared. Between four to fourteen follow-up interviews were conducted with some of the participants. Key themes in the life stories included relationships with mothers, experiences of growing up without fathers, entering the world of work, and being fathers themselves which encouraged them to also reflect about their own relationships with their fathers. It is clear from their experiences that narratives of being a young black man are not static, but continuously change depending on the context, and time. In conclusion, it is argued that these positive voices of masculinities need to be promoted and celebrated.

As of 2005, about 80,000 prisoners were housed in solitary confinement in jails and in state and federal prisons in the United States. Prisoners in solitary confinement are generally housed in a cell for twenty-two to twenty-four hours a day with little human contact or interaction. The number of prisoners held in solitary confinement increased 40 percent between 1995 and 2000, in comparison to the growth in the total prison population of 28 percent. Concurrently, the duration of time that prisoners spend in solitary confinement also increased: nationally, most prisoners in solitary confinement spend more than five years there. The effects of solitary confinement on prisoners have been a source of growing concern, but the question of whether solitary confinement affects public safety and recidivism has received less attention. While lower courts have imposed constitutional limitations on the use of solitary confinement, in the modern era the Supreme Court has never held that the practice is unconstitutional. Therefore, this Note argues for policy reforms to counteract the harmful impact of solitary confinement on public safety and recidivism, informed by the constitutional standards for its use in prisons.

An estimated 84,000 incarcerated individuals face solitary confinement in the United States criminal justice system. Solitary confinement is seen as a cruel punishment, with lasting effects, for incarcerated individuals. Human rights organisations, medical associations, policymakers, and incarcerated people have argued for the discontinuation of solitary confinement. After being in solitary confinement for an extended period, incarcerated people can suffer worsening and future mental health issues, physical health concerns and issues with relationships during and after serving their time in prison. This article reviews the available research and the purpose of the article is to show the detrimental effects solitary confinement has on incarcerated individuals. Clinical and policy implications for prisons that use solitary confinement are discussed to dissuade usage.

Statement of Significance This article aims to summarize relevant literature on the topic of prolonged solitary confinement from the perspective of the medical sciences to outline the detrimental health impacts associated with this practice, evaluate the extent to which the current use of this practice in the United States (US) aligns with the recommendations outlined in human rights literature, and offer recommendations to further regulate the use of solitary confinement in prisons to better align with the rehabilitative goals of the US criminal justice system. This review details the well-studied physical and psychological harms associated with prolonged solitary confinement to support the notion that restrictions should be placed on the use of this practice for the wellbeing of incarcerated individuals. Additionally, it reviews the recommendations for appropriate use of this practice outlined in human rights literature and examines how the contemporary utilization of solitary confinement within US prisons fails to meet these proposed standards. Finally, this article offers specific recommendations regarding the appropriate settings in which solitary confinement should be used, key regulations to limit the extent of its use, and additional measures to minimize harm to incarcerated individuals. The limitations of this study include the decision to pursue a targeted literature review, as opposed to an exhaustive systematic review, which may have excluded specific arguments relevant to this paper’s discussion. Further, the scope of this article was focused on a discussion on the topic of prolonged solitary confinement and did not comment on the separate issue regarding the moral permissibility of the solitary confinement, as a whole. Finally, the cultural differences between the US and other high-income countries may limit the ability to compare models of rehabilitation in correctional institutions between these nations, suggesting that the proposed impact of the chosen recommendations should be interpreted with caution.

Rethinking mental health care for young offenders

In this paper the author extends his account of‘postmodernity and its discontents’ to address questions of crime and penal policy in the contemporary period. It is argued that there is a tendency to maintain order by resort to a‘paradigm of exclusion’ and this pattern is exemplified by a discussion of the significance of the Pelican Bay‘super-max’ prison in California and the more widespread reliance upon mass incarceration that has emerged in recent years. It is argued that the Pelican Bay project is not, as it appears at first sight, a super high-tech version of the Panopticon. On the contrary, the project is shown to lack the key qualities of work-related discipline and re-subjectification that characterized the latter. Instead it operates as a factory of exclusion for people habituated to their status as‘the excluded’. It is a technique of immobilization, one of several measures of‘space-confinement’ that have arisen in response to the postmodern social field and the wasteful, rejecting logic of globalization. The role of prisons in the post-correctional age is shown to be linked to the new forms of anxiety that characterize the populations of postmodern societies, and to the political strategies that express and reinforce these widespread sentiments. Whereas modern liberal societies were organized around a compromise wherein a measure of individual liberty was exchanged for collective economic security, today’s tendency is the opposite of this: a trade off of collective security in exchange for the maximization of individual choice, which in turn, focused by the political process upon the problem of crime and its control gives rise to a logic of exclusion and fortification. This feature of postmodernity is, in effect, symptomatic of a failure to face up to the challenge of existential insecurity generated by our social and economic arrangements.

We examine how solitary confinement correlates with self-reported adverse physical health outcomes, and how such outcomes extend the understanding of the health disparities associated with incarceration. Using a mixed methods approach, we find that solitary confinement is associated not just with mental, but also with physical health problems. Given the disproportionate use of solitary among incarcerated people of color, these symptoms are most likely to affect those populations. Drawing from a random sample of prisoners (n = 106) in long-term solitary confinement in the Washington State Department of Corrections in 2017, we conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews; Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) assessments; and systematic reviews of medical and disciplinary files for these subjects. We also conducted a paper survey of the entire long-term solitary confinement population (n = 225 respondents) and analyzed administrative data for the entire population of prisoners in the state in 2017 (n = 17,943). Results reflect qualitative content and descriptive statistical analysis. BPRS scores reflect clinically significant somatic concerns in 15% of sample. Objective specification of medical conditions is generally elusive, but that, itself, is a highly informative finding. Using subjective reports, we specify and analyze a range of physical symptoms experienced in solitary confinement: (1) skin irritations and weight fluctuation associated with the restrictive conditions of solitary confinement; (2) un-treated and mis-treated chronic conditions associated with the restrictive policies of solitary confinement; (3) musculoskeletal pain exacerbated by both restrictive conditions and policies. Administrative data analyses reveal disproportionate rates of racial/ethnic minorities in solitary confinement. This analysis raises the stakes for future studies to evaluate comparative prevalence of objective medical diagnoses and potential causal mechanisms for the physical symptoms specified here, and for understanding differential use of solitary confinement and its medically harmful sequelae.

We examine how solitary confinement correlates with self-reported adverse physical health outcomes, and how such outcomes extend the understanding of the health disparities associated with incarceration. Using a mixed methods approach, we find that solitary confinement is associated not just with mental, but also with physical health problems. Given the disproportionate use of solitary among incarcerated people of color, these symptoms are most likely to affect those populations. Drawing from a random sample of prisoners (n = 106) in long-term solitary confinement in the Washington State Department of Corrections in 2017, we conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews; Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) assessments; and systematic reviews of medical and disciplinary files for these subjects. We also conducted a paper survey of the entire long-term solitary confinement population (n = 225 respondents) and analyzed administrative data for the entire population of prisoners in the state in 2017 (n = 17,943). Results reflect qualitative content and descriptive statistical analysis. BPRS scores reflect clinically significant somatic concerns in 15% of sample. Objective specification of medical conditions is generally elusive, but that, itself, is a highly informative finding. Using subjective reports, we specify and analyze a range of physical symptoms experienced in solitary confinement: (1) skin irritations and weight fluctuation associated with the restrictive conditions of solitary confinement; (2) un-treated and mis-treated chronic conditions associated with the restrictive policies of solitary confinement; (3) musculoskeletal pain exacerbated by both restrictive conditions and policies. Administrative data analyses reveal disproportionate rates of racial/ethnic minorities in solitary confinement. This analysis raises the stakes for future studies to evaluate comparative prevalence of objective medical diagnoses and potential causal mechanisms for the physical symptoms specified here, and for understanding differential use of solitary confinement and its medically harmful sequelae.

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