Recording Carceral Landscapes

The Security Housing Unit (SHU) is the California designation for a kind of incarceration that goes by other names in other states. The California letters have become the national generic buzzword, which is “SHU” (pronounced ‘shoo’). In California, it stands for Security Housing Unit. In New York, it’s Special Housing Unit, also the SHU. In the federal system, it’s ADX. Essentially, SHU means “super-max”; it’s a control unit. But let’s back up a little bit.

In the old days, prisons used to have a punitive segregation spot called “the hole.” If someone did something bad, they’d get thrown in the hole for a day, or for a month if they were really bad. These holes were dark dungeons. There were no windows. They were cold, prisoners were fed slop, and it would be horrible. But time in the hole would be short-term and it was a response to a specific deed, like an illegal assault or something. Putting people in the hole was a form of punishment for people who were already in prison.

In the early 80s, the violence rate in prisons went sky-high. The prisons were totally out of control, and there were many reasons for it. One of the reasons was massive crowding. A lot of people were being put in prison for relatively minor, drug-related crimes, so there was massive crowding. At the same the Department of Corrections was dismantling rehabilitation, because the right wing had been going on and on about how it was “coddling” prisoners. So there were a lot of idle people in the yards, and there was a lot of violence. At the time, myself and others were testifying in class-action lawsuits that with crowding and lack of rehabilitation, you’re going to get increased violence, an increase in mental breakdowns, suicide, and that kind of thing. Instead of reversing the problem by reducing the number of people in prisons, the California Department of Corrections (CDC) started saying “the reason we’re having so much violence in the yards is not that the prisons aren’t being managed correctly, it’s because we have particularly violent prisoners.” The CDC wanted to throw a lot of people into the hole and throw away the key. They wanted to lock these prisoners up in the hole for a long time. And instead of a few prisoners or a few dozen prisoners, they decided to throw thousands of prisoners into the hole. That is how we got the super-max. Towards the end of the 1980s, they built Pelican Bay State Prison in Northern California and other states built similar units.

The CDC created cells that prisoners were confined nearly 24 hours a day. People would eat in the cell; they were totally isolated from each other; the staff had minimal interactions with the prisoners; there were no programs out of the cell; prisoners are essentially in the cell for 24 hours a day. On top of that, visiting was no longer contact. Visits were only allowed through a plastic slab, and prisoners would have to speak through a speaker or on a phone to the person visiting them. It was a kind of drastic isolation. The other new development was that this kind of isolation would last for years rather than 30 days. Now, for instance, at Pelican Bay we have people who have been there since the place opened around 1989 or 90.

There have always been long-term segregation units in the prisons, but they were secret. Nobody bragged about them; they were the back-wards of the prison. There were similar places in the mental hospitals, out in the back where you’d put people who you didn’t know what to do with. And the people under these conditions would deteriorate – they’d start throwing feces around and smearing themselves with feces, and you’d just lock them up and not go visit them and just shove their food tray down the hallway or something. But in Marion, Illinois in the early 80s (and this is the federal system) a prison officer was killed. The prison was locked down and stayed locked-down through the 80s and into the 90s. In fact, it’s still locked-down. Since that time, the federal supermax has been built. That Marion prison is really the precursor to the supermax. While we had segregation and extreme segregation in just about every state prior to that time, Marion was the first time that it became publicly noted that everyone stayed in their cell 24 hours, they didn’t even have recreation. And, of course, the prison wasn’t built for that kind of thing.

There are two kinds of contrasting philosophies in criminology. One says that if you lock people up like that, then they become crazy and unmanageable. That is the obvious and true analysis. Therefore, you shouldn’t be locking people up in cells like that indefinitely all by themselves. First, it’s cruel and unusual, but second, the prisoners are eventually going to get out, and when they get out they’re going to be broken and not really capable of being around other people any more. That’s my opinion, and that’s the opinion of everyone who I consider a thoughtful criminologist or expert in the field.

The other idea is that there are people who are just incorrigible - the “super-predator” idea, and so forth. According to this argument, the problem with the prisons is not that they’re badly managed and cruel and break people, but rather it’s the idea that there is a new breed of super-criminals, who are incorrigible and ultra-violent, and what we need to do is literally lock them up and throw away the key.

When the incident at Marion happened, the people who espoused this “super-predator” idea got together and decided that what they needed to do was build more prisons just like Marion. That’s where the idea for super-max came from. When they built Pelican Bay, it became the model for the whole country.

Administrative segregation is sort of a catch-all term for putting people into segregation for administrative reasons. And it’s different from state-to-state. For instance, New York doesn’t have AdSeg. AdSeg is a status; there’s not a place called Adseg, there are only SHUs. People on Adseg can be in SHU, people in protective custody can be in SHU. In California, we have a long history of administrative segregation. There’s an AdSeg unit in just about every prison.

AdSeg is basically a unit for people who the administration doesn’t know what to do with. So it can be for people who are about to be put into punitive segregation, which could be a stint in AdSeg or in supermax, or they’re being given protection so they’re put in AdSeg, or they’re considered to be in a gang and are put in AdSeg. At some point, the term became somewhat meaningless; it became the word describing the place where you lock people up. There was always a hole-within-the-hole (for example the “Adjustment Center” at San Quentin in the 70’s), which was for people in the AdSeg wing who were deemed particularly dangerous. In reality, they often weren’t particularly dangerous, they just came up against the authorities. For instance, the political prisoners and the Muslims were put in there, and it became notorious - that’s where George Jackson was killed.

The adjustment center was essentially the precursor of the supermax, it was the hole inside the hole in AdSeg at San Quentin, and the people in the adjustment center were moved to Pelican Bay when it was opened. They were deemed to be the ‘worst of the worst.’ In truth, many of them are not the worst of the worst in terms of being the toughest, the most difficult to manage. A lot of them are, for instance, jailhouse lawyers, they are politically conscious, or they are deemed to be gang-related. The authorities, of course, don’t really know who’s in a gang. But if you were in an adjustment center at a certain point in time when they were building the Pelican Bay SHU, you got transferred to Pelican Bay, or if you were deemed a gang-member you got transferred, and you would stay there until you “debrief”, which means you have to identify other gang people if you want to get out. I know cases where the prisoner tells officers he is not gang-related, and they say something like: “We don’t care about that, if you want to get out of SHU you have to ‘give us’ three gang members, otherwise you’ll never get out of SHU.” When it opened at Pelican Bay, the SHU ended up containing a population of people, many of whom happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, got locked up in the SHU, were given an indeterminate sentence, and were never released. One of the reasons why some of those people are still there has to do with their honor. You’ve got some people who are political, or who stood up to authority, or were wrongly accused, and haven’t done much of anything, but in order to get out they’d have to snitch on other people. Because they won’t snitch, they’ll never get out.

Hugo Pinel and Steve Castillo have been in the SHU since the 1970s.

That’s a complicated question, and there are two parts to that question. Each state puts different people into their supermax. The way it works is that states build supermaxes because it’s popular in the corrections community and helps politicians look “tough on crime.” Often it’s only after the supermax is built that they decide who they’re going to put in there. In a lot of states, they overbuild supermaxes and they end up putting people in supermax without any logic at all. It’s almost random. It’s often whomever the guards don’t like. I have met prisoners in supermax units in several states who do not have serious infractions on their record, and they are unable to tell me why they are in SHU. Often there’s no real criteria. When you ask prison administrators why they put a particular person in the SHU, often they can’t really give a good reason. That’s the truth.It can be people who make it difficult for an inadequate staff to run the corrections system getting consigned to supermax. Jailhouse lawyers often get sent there. Political activists are sent there. People suspected of gang- affiliation get sent there – but often there’s no recourse, and people who are wrongly accused have no effective recourse.

Now gang-affiliation is a strange thing. There are gangs in prison, and particularly in California prisons. But the people who are in the SHU for being gang-related are not always the same people who are in gangs. There’s an overlap, of course, but there are lots of people in supermax who are not in gangs. For example in East LA, where a lot of the “gang-affiliated” prisoners come from, there are barrios. And a barrio is essentially a community. If you are from a certain area, then you’re from such-and-such a barrio , and if you see a friend from your barrio in prison, you give him a ritual handshake. If a guard sees you do that and thinks that someone is in a gang, then they’ll think that the other person is too, and will put them in administrative segregation and possibly the SHU. The authorities then say that they’ve put gang members in the SHU. That’s not actually true. What’s true is that they’ve filled their SHU, and then said that all the people in the SHU are in gangs. But the people in the SHU are not necessarily the people who are active in gangs. A lot of gang-affiliated people are in the general population doing whatever it is that they do, and you have a lot of people in the SHU who are not associated with gangs, have nothing to do with gangs, but might come from a barrio where there is a gang. All they did was shake hands with the wrong guy in the yard. The point is that there’s a huge discrepancy between who the authorities say is in the SHU, which is the ‘worst of the worst,’ and who’s actually there.

Basically, the authorities will do whatever they can get away with in front of the courts and legislatures. A lot of the laws and regulations for supermax come out of a court case from the early 1990s, which was called “Madrid vs. Gomez.” The Madrid case was brought by Bay Area attorneys from the Prison Law Office and other private attorneys. The case was an attempt to declare the entire idea of supermax unconstitutional, because it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. A lot of evidence was presented and Thelton Henderson (a federal judge from San Francisco), presided over the case. Henderson ruled that the plaintiffs did not prove that the SHU itself constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. However, there are certain things about it which are unconstitutional. So for instance, brutal treatment of prisoners is not ok. Housing prisoners with mental illness in the supermax was determined to constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The judge also made some technical rulings about gang-affiliation. He said that it was being done in a random and inconsistent way, and that the state of CA needed to clean up their act. The Madrid vs. Gomez case then became a major legal precedent.

There have been other cases. In Montana, there was a case brought by one prisoner that I testified at, and that we lost at trial. Mark Walker was a prisoner who suffered from Bipolar Disorder, and they were putting him in a supermax (they call it max in Montana) that is almost identical to a supermax in California. We lost at the state court, but the Montana Supreme Court overturned the decision. They actually used the word “torture.” It’s interesting to hear the word “torture” in an American court. “Torture” is the international term – the United Nations and all of the international bodies use a specific definition of torture. Brutalizing and denying mental-health treatment to someone who is seriously disturbed constitutes torture in the international community. Even thought the United States has signed a lot of these treaties, the US doesn’t recognize torture as a category in measuring the level of brutality in a prison. In the US, we have to argue that these conditions are a violation of the constitution because it’s cruel and unusual punishment. I like to point out that “cruel and unusual” and “torture” are the same thing. In the case in Montana, the Supreme Court bridged the gap between the two, saying that putting a mentally ill person in supermax and then brutalizing him while denying adequate treatment violated the constitution of Montana and the U.S. constitution – and it constituted torture. That was a profound ruling that established an equation between cruel and unusual punishment and torture in the legal community (Walker vs. Montana, SUPREME COURT OF MONTANA, 2003 MT 134; 2003 Mont. LEXIS 206 September 5, 2002).The Madrid decision has been applied all over the country. That is, everywhere where a case has come before a court about housing people with mental illness in a supermax facility, the judge has ruled that you have to exclude people with mental illness from supermax confinement.

California has been extremely sleazy in its dealing with legal challenges. For example, let’s look at the Toussaint case, which was in the late 70s and early 80s. One of the things that we argued in that case was that the mission statement of the CDC is to rehabilitate or correct offenders so they can adjust back to their communities. We said that by putting prisoners in these AdSeg places, or by double-celling them in a SHU, the CDC was destroying the prisoners’ chances of rehabilitating themselves, and therefore of succeeding after their release. The CDC responded to that by saying “you know what we’re going to do, we’re going to change our mission statement, and we’re going to get rid of the word ‘rehabilitation.’”

Similarly, from time to time you have an international body like the United Nations or Amnesty International come to California and say “you’re guilty of torture here, look what you’re doing.” If the CDC were interested in running a decent institution and helping people that happen to be their wards, they they’d say “thank you, we’ll attend to that.” Instead, they try to get around it by doing all of the duplicitous things like hiding what they’re doing, or getting around the law that provided the basis for the challenge to what they’re doing.

That’s the odd and unfortunate thing about legal cases. There’s a limit to what the law can do. Legal action is not sufficient to reform the prisons. It’s a very good part of an overall movement to reform the prisons, but what’s needed is mass education about what’s going on in these prisons, and mass activism – people saying that we’re not going to tolerate this any more. And unless you combine the legal approach with the popular approach, any attempt to reform prisons is going to be totally ineffective.

In terms of the legal process, what can be won has already been won. Let’s look at the Madrid case again. That case gets cited in two ways. In Wisconsin, we cited the Madrid case to say “look, it’s been found that you can’t put people with serious mental illness in the supermax.” So in Wisconsin, the judge ruled that way and said that they couldn’t do that in Wisconsin either (Jones ‘El vs. Litscher, U.S. Dist. Ct., Western Dist. Of Wisconsin, No. 00-C-421-C, September 20, 2001). Now, in the Madrid case the judge also ruled that supermax is not on its own cruel and unusual punishment. So in the same ruling, the judge was implicitly saying that it’s ok to lock people up in supermax. Well, that wasn’t the intent of the Madrid case. We were trying to say “it’s not ok, it’s torture.” What happened was that we won some of what we were trying to win and we lost some, and that became solidified in case law. So that we can’t really win more in the subsequent cases.

That’s the limit of the legal struggle. Whenever we win a case, we also lose in a sense. We just settled a case in New Mexico and another one in Connecticut (by “we settled,” I mean that the attorneys settled in favor of the prisoners). In New Mexico, the newly-elected governor said “I don’t want a lawsuit in my state about inhuman conditions in the prisons. Make the case go away.” At that point the ACLU (who were the plaintiff’s attorneys, on behalf of the prisoners) hired Craig Haney and I to meet with the New Mexico Department of Corrections to negotiate what it would take to settle the case. That gave us an opportunity to bring in our wish-list. For instance, we wanted to remove all the people with serious mental illness from the SHU.

We gain little things like that, but every time that we settle for something that we consider a gain, we’re actually creating a ceiling on what the prisoners in the future can gain in a similar situation. So now, when I go into a litigation situation, the lawyers on both sides know what’s possible in the courts. Nowadays, we go into settlements much earlier than I ever remember happening, because the legal precedents governing what is permitted and what isn’t are pretty well established.

Well, that’s easy to answer. The 20th Century was a period of rehabilitation in the prisons. You wouldn’t know that by reading the radical literature. For instance, consider the indeterminate sentence. If you are a sincere reformer of prisons and you want to do something for people who have broken the law, you should train them in a vocation while they’re in prison so they can get out of prison and not break the law again. I believe that there were true reformers, particularly in California in the early part of the 20th Century. If you’re serious about helping people get back into society, you would want to give people an indeterminate sentence. The reason you’d want to give people an indeterminate sentence is to motivate people to behave, to do their program, so they can get out. The idea of “eight to life” was that during those eight years, prisoners were training for some kind of skill in the rehabilitation programs. They were getting an education and they were saying to themselves “I’m gonna get out of here the first opportunity I have.” The indeterminate sentence worked for them.

Now in the sixties – and I believe that this is true, too –people like George Jackson, Black Panthers, and various politically-sophisticated people pointed out that the indeterminate system actually fostered racism. If you were white, you’d get out, but if you were black, you’d probably get a lot of disciplinary tickets from white guards who didn’t understand your culture and were racist, and you probably wouldn’t get out early. If you look at the indeterminate sentencing in that context, people of color are going to be disadvantaged. That was true.

But with the move away from indeterminate sentences, we threw out the baby with the bathwater. The idea was to throw out the indeterminate sentence because it was inherently racist. Well, the problem is that if you live in a racist society, any system you set up is going to be racist. Indeterminate sentencing was replaced by determinate sentences – now if you look at determinate sentence research, for example 3-strikes research, you’ll find that 85% of people who get three strikes are people of color. So the determinate sentence, you can say, is also racist. The truth is that, in a racist society, whatever mechanism you use for sentencing is going to reflect that racism. Getting rid of the indeterminate sentence didn’t do us any good in that regard.

In the 1930s and 1940, prisons were about rehabilitation. Yes, there was a lot of racism; yes, there was a lot of brutality; and yes a lot of people were killed by the guards. But, rehabilitation was also possible. Later in the century, the idea evolved that prisoners were incorrigible, that rehabilitation didn’t work, and that the best way to deal with prisoners was to lock them up and throw away the key. As that evolved as the reigning ideology in the California prisons and the prisons around the country, various self-interested people joined the bandwagon. Along came the guards union. Along came politicians giving inflamed rhetorical speeches about how what’s wrong with our society is not that we’ve messed up our education system, it’s not that we’ve dismantled welfare, it’s not that there are no jobs for poor people. It’s that there’s a bunch of criminals on the street and we should focus public attention on locking up criminals forever. Then there were the people who build prisons – there was a huge prison building boom in the 1980s. All of these people started making more money and gaining more power by causing prisoners to fail. The longer a prisoner stays in prison or, if he gets out, the sooner he gets put back in, the more money and more power these interested groups get. This is the idea of the Prison Industrial Complex: that the prison isn’t really there to rehabilitate the prisoner, prison is there to make the reputation of a politician, or increase the power or the money of these various interests.

At this point, our society started doing irrational things. Right now, crime rates are down, we’re trying to reduce the number of people in prison, and the CDC opened a brand-new maximum security prison in Delano. It makes absolutely no sense unless you make a profit from building prisons, unless you’re making more high-paying jobs for prison guards, or unless you’re trying to sell food services to the prisons. Then it makes sense. We should be trying to build back up the California education system, so not so many people run afoul of the law.

The supermax is the culmination of that “tough on crime” and Prison Industrial Complex ideology. It’s a way to make prisoners fail, fall on their face, and stay in the system. All of our research says that. You put someone with mental illness in an isolation cell, and they’re going to get worse. They’re not going to be able to function anymore, and that’s also true for people without mental illness. Years of isolation is going to cause them to break down.

Not everyone who gets out of supermax is angry and violent. Far from it. Most people who get out of supermax become withdrawn – they’re broken. You have people who are broken by this prison system, especially people coming out of supermax. They’re not particularly dangerous, but they have a very hard time functioning. So some of them do drugs, fail their urine test, and get sent back. The whole system creates a class of perpetual prisoners.

These things are never an accident. They always have a purpose. I want to go on a tangent here. Right now they’re making changes to visiting. Throughout the state, they’re cutting down the number of visiting days which is causing the visiting rolls to be overcrowded. So that people who want to visit their loved ones - their husbands, their wives, their children, their parents - are going and lining up overnight and camping out in order to be able to visit the next day. The state says that this is merely financial. The director of the CDC says “we can’t afford to run visits 7 days a week anymore, we can only run them two or three days.” Well, that’s true and not true. There is a fiscal reality, but there’s a more important point, and this gets to why they built Pelican Bay way up by the border with Oregon.

If you have public knowledge of what’s going on in the prisons, then you can’t be as brutal, and you can’t violate the constitution as readily as when everything is secret. The reason they built Pelican Bay where they did was essentially to enforce secrecy. Those prisoners’ families are going to see them less often; there will be fewer visits. Fewer visits means more secrecy. One of the main ways that we know what’s going on in prisons is that families go to visit and they call up their Assemblyperson or State Senator and say “do you know what’s going on at Pelican Bay? What’s going on here? What’s happening to my son?” If the State Senator gets enough calls like that then they might decide to go up there and have a look. Well, one way that you can cut down on that kind of publicity is to cut down on the number of visits and also cut down on the mail. You can cut down on allowing journalists to go into the prisons. All of those things are going on.

Prof. Craig Haney did a psychology experiment at Stanford where he took a group of students and randomly assigned them to be either guards or prisoners. The experiment was supposed to go on for two weeks or more, but within three days, they had to stop the experiment. The “guards,” who had the keys and the food, became so sadistic towards the “prisoners” that they had to halt the experiment on humanitarian grounds. Prof. Haney showed that if you have a group of people with absolute domination over others, and where the people who are being dominated feel like they have no recourse, then abuse will happen. I’ve always added a third point: the entire event has to occur in total secrecy. At places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay they don’t allow the prisoners to have legal consultation and don’t permit contact with families. The reason is that they can then commit abuse and torture at those facilities and nobody will know. The scandal at Abu Ghraib only happened when the photos leaked out. In prisons, families leak that information.

So the reason that Pelican Bay is so far away and the reason it’s so difficult for families to go visit is because the people who run these facilities don’t want the outside world to know what they’re doing inside. And when the outside world forgets about what’s going on inside, terrible abuses happen. The abuses get worse the more that secrecy prevails.

It’s a very eerie scene up in Pelican Bay. I first went up there in the early 1990s. Pelican Bay was like a bunker. You’re driving through the forest and then you come to a clearing, and there’s white rocks all around it and there’s this concrete bunker. It’s bizarre. It feels like a spaceship just landed in the forest. There’s such sterility inside and such greenery and beauty outside, which the prisoners can’t see.

I firmly believe that if we ignore a particular segment of our population, then our society is inequitable and evil. That is my personal belief. It bothers me as a matter of conscience that there are 2 million people in prison on any given day, and probably 6-10 million in jail or prison in a year (because of the turnover). As a matter of conscience, that makes me extremely anxious and guilty. It makes me ashamed: I’m ashamed that we’re disappearing so many people behind bars. That shadow of the Prison Industrial Complex is over my life. Even when I’m enjoying myself, I’m thinking about the 2 million people who can’t enjoy themselves. It’s not just the 2 million, though. As I said, there’s between 6 and 10 million people going in and out of prison each year. But then there are all the people touched by the prison system, families and children of prisoners, which is a huge population. Children’s lives are being destroyed by the fact that they have a parent in prison. If someone has a father who is in a SHU and they know their father is being tortured and beaten, they can’t go on with their life. They can’t live to their full potential while that’s gnawing at them. You find families broken up, and you have a generational cycle where someone’s parents are in prison, which has repercussions on their livelihood. And there are effects on the community. Communities become completely unstable when so many men and women are in prison.

There are other repercussions. I think that a part of the “American sickness” is that we ignore the plight of various disadvantaged people, while we obsess over various creature comforts. So what you get is the suburban phenomena, the white middle class that ignores the plight of the rest of the population. That suburban happiness is built on very thin threads. It can be disrupted at any moment. You get the illusion of happiness in the middle-class because people know that whatever advantages the middle-class seems to have is based on the brutalization of other people. I think that people actually feel guilty – and I see this in my practice – but they don’t know it. And therefore, they can’t even enjoy the affluence that they have. I think that the fear about this permeates our society. We’ve had revelations about things happening in our society, the torture that occurs, the Corcoran gladiator fights, the rape of women in prison, all that leaks out to the public and everyone does, in fact, get upset about it. People have a gnawing feeling that something is very wrong, and that their seeming-happiness and affluence is built on the back of people who are being brutalized and inequitably treated.