Let Prisoners Keep Their Cellphones

The prevailing assumption is that prison walls are supposed to prevent prisoners from interacting with the free world, including their families. And that there's something about that that's protective of society. So communication by prisoners with the outside world is generally forbidden. This is the case for each of the 2 million prisoners in the US. Computers are banned. Phone calls are close to impossible: talking on the phone system provided by the prison can bankrupt those who receive prisoners' collect calls (collect calls are frequently required and cost $1 per minute or more). Visits are tightly regulated as to duration and frequency and behavior. Furloughs are extremely rare if available at all. And all cellphones are banned. This prevailing idea is easily encapsulated: if you're locked up, you're supposed to be isolated as completely and thoroughly as possible from whatever might be on the other side of the walls. No matter what.

Does this make any sense? Or put another way, is there a real reason why prisoners shouldn't be given full access to cellphones and smart phones while they are incarcerated?

The New York Times notes that cellphones are now common in prison even though they are banned. How common?

At the Mississippi State Penitentiary, which houses about 3,000 inmates, 643,388 calls and texts going in and out were intercepted from July 31 to Dec. 1, 2010.

That's a lot of calls. And a ton of texts. That means that prisoners who were completely isolated weren't any longer. Before the isolation occurred for many reasons. Prisoners and their families couldn't afford the extortionate charges for collect phone calls. Prisoners and their families couldn't afford the cost of transportation to Parchman Farm and a motel room to stay in over night. That meant that many prisoners could serve their entire sentences without a single visit. But now, miraculously those who have cellphones, mostly purchased from guards, had instant access to their families. This is good and humane and compassionate. But that does't matter. The proliferation of cellphones leads those quoted in the Times as if by reflex to raise the black flag of prison anarchy and warn about how extremely dangerous smart phones are in the hands of prisoners, complete with cameo appearance by none other than Charlie Manson:

With Internet access, a prisoner can call up phone directories, maps and photographs for criminal purposes, corrections officials and prison security experts say. Gang violence and drug trafficking, they say, are increasingly being orchestrated online, allowing inmates to keep up criminal behavior even as they serve time.

“The smartphone is the most lethal weapon you can get inside a prison,” said Terry L. Bittner, director of security products with the ITT Corporation, one of a handful of companies that create cellphone-detection systems for prisons. “The smartphone is the equivalent of the old Swiss Army knife. You can do a lot of other things with it.” ...

In Oklahoma, a convicted killer was caught in November posting photographs on his Facebook page of drugs, knives and alcohol that had been smuggled into his cell. In 2009, gang members in a Maryland prison were caught using their smartphones to approve targets for robberies and even to order seafood and cigars.

Even closely watched prisoners are sneaking phones in. Last month, California prison guards said they had found a flip phone under Charles Manson’s mattress.

But most prisoners aren't Charles Manson. Far from it. Most long for contact with their children, their families, their partners. And most don't have any criminal plans in keeping that contact alive. Just as they don't have criminal plans when they have their infrequent visitors. Take this for example:

The recent rise in smartphones raises larger issues for prisoners and their advocates, who say the phones are not necessarily used for criminal purposes. In some prisons, a traditional phone call is prohibitive, costing $1 per minute in many states. And cellphones can help some offenders stay better connected with their families.

Mike, the Georgia inmate who was part of the recent strike, said he used his to stay in touch with his son.

“When he gets off the school bus, I’m on the phone and I talk to him,” he said in an interview on his contraband cellphone. “When he goes to bed, I’m on the phone and I talk to him.”

How is that contact harmful?

Easy, cheap contact with one's family is unequivocally good. Being able to talk to one's kids is very important. Especially when the family is poor, lives hours away, and cannot afford the trek to make a scheduled visit. One would think that prisons should welcome the phones the same way decades ago they welcomed television as a pacifying, de-stressing benefit to prisoners and staff alike.

In fact, the phones may have been responsible in large part for the success of the recent Georgia Prison strike. The Times reports:

The Georgia prison strike, for instance, was about things prisoners often complain about: They are not paid for their labor. Visitation rules are too strict. Meals are bad.

But the technology they used to voice their concerns was new.

Inmates punched in text messages and assembled e-mail lists to coordinate simultaneous protests, including work stoppages, with inmates at other prisons. Under pseudonyms, they shared hour-by-hour updates with followers on Facebook and Twitter. They communicated with their advocates, conducted news media interviews and monitored coverage of the strike.

It wasn't necessary to have a full scale riot to get the prisoners' points across the walls to those on the outside. Nobody had to be taken hostage. Nobody had to be threatened. Would cellphones have prevented Attica? I don't know. But not one person was killed or injured in Georgia.

Torture In Your Own Backyard

Cell Block D, Alcatraz

If Dostoevsky was right, that "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons," the United States has ceased to be civilized. When a country imprisons more than 2 million people, and when it manages to be torturing more than 20,000 of those prisoners through long term solitary confinement, something is wrong. Very, very wrong. And remarkably, the torture is thoroughly overlooked.

Torturing? Yes. Not waterboarding. Not stress positions. No. I’m talking about long term, unrelenting solitary confinement. Solitary confinement not for days, but for years, even for decades. Solitary confinement that literally drives prisoners crazy. Solitary confinement that is torture plain and simple.

Join me in Special Housing.

As early as 1890, the US Supreme Court recognized the pernicious effects of solitary confinement. Justice Miller wrote In Re Medley, 134 U.S. 1 60 (1890):

A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.

So we're not dealing with forecasts here. It was clear a century ago that solitary confinement was cruel, that it was hurtful, and that it would absolutely ruin the mental health of a person who was confined. These were not theoretical predictions of the results of solitary confinement; these were reported observations.

In 1934 the US Government opened Alcatraz to hold the worst of US, federal prisoners. NPR explained what solitary confinement at Alcatraz's D block (pictured above) was like:

Most inmates spend many hours outside in the yard and on required work details. But a few dozen are kept in "D Block," the prison’s solitary-confinement hallway. One cell in particular is called "The Hole" -- a room of bare concrete except for a hole in the floor. There is no light, inmates are kept naked, and bread and water is shoved through a small hole in the door. Although most inmates only spend a few days in the hole, some spend years on D Block. Conditions are better than in The Hole -- inmates have clothes and food -- but they are not permitted contact with other inmates and are rarely let out of their cells. The most famous inmate on D Block is Robert Stroud, known as the "Birdman of Alcatraz,” who spends six years there.

It's not a long jump from Alcatraz to the present. In 2005, Daniel P. Mears, an associate professor at Florida State University, conducted a nationwide study(big file, pdf) and found that there were then 40 states operating Supermax or control-unit prisons, which collectively hold more than 25,000 U.S. prisoners, in solitary confinement. This is a huge population. And every single person in it is being given the same toxic, dangerous, tortuous treatment.

What's it like to be incarcerated in such a place? It’s not much different now from how it was more than 75 years ago at Alcatraz. In Beard v. Banks, 548 U.S. 521 (2006) the US Supreme Court described Pennsylvania’s Long Term Segregation Units (LTSU), the current prison lingo for solitary confinement:

The LTSU is divided into two levels. All inmates are initially assigned to the most restrictive level, level 2. After 90 days, depending upon an inmate's behavior, an individual may graduate to the less restrictive level 1, although in practice most do not. ...

The [3 units] all seriously restrict inmates' ordinary prison privileges. At all three units, residents are typically confined to cells for 23 hours a day, have limited access to the commissary or outside visitors, and (with the exception of some phases of the SMU) may not watch television or listen to the radio...

Prisoners at level 2 of the LTSU face the most severe form of the restrictions listed above. They have no access to the commissary, they may have only one visitor per month (an immediate family member), and they are not allowed phone calls except in emergencies... In addition they (unlike all other prisoners in the Commonwealth) are restricted in the manner at issue here: They have no access to newspapers, magazines, or personal photographs.... They are nonetheless permitted legal and personal correspondence, religious and legal materials, two library books, and writing paper... If an inmate progresses to level 1, he enjoys somewhat less severe restrictions, including the right to receive one newspaper and five magazines... The ban on photographs is not lifted unless a prisoner progresses out of the LTSU altogether...

Is holding someone for a long period of time in these conditions torture? If that’s not already clear, it is. In a March, 2009 New Yorker article, Atul Gawande effectively argues that destroying people’s mental health through prolonged solitary confinement is torture plain and simple. Gawande note the evidence that solitary confinement drives prisoners into insanity:

It is unclear how many prisoners in solitary confinement become psychotic. Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist, has interviewed more than two hundred prisoners in solitary confinement. In one in-depth study, prepared for a legal challenge of prisoner-isolation practices, he concluded that about a third developed acute psychosis with hallucinations. The markers of vulnerability that he observed in his interviews were signs of cognitive dysfunction—a history of seizures, serious mental illness, mental retardation, illiteracy, or... a diagnosis such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, signalling difficulty with impulse control. In the prisoners Grassian saw, about a third had these vulnerabilities, and these were the prisoners whom solitary confinement had made psychotic. They were simply not cognitively equipped to endure it without mental breakdowns.

You can, of course, read Grassian’s Report (pdf).

To be clear, driving prisoners insane through long term solitary confinement is torture.

In 2000, and again in 2006, the United Nations Committee Against Torture condemned the kind of isolation imposed by the U.S. government in federal, state and county-run supermax prisons, calling it "extremely harsh." "The committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to," they stated, "the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

source

The usual “justifications” for solitary confinement cannot bear scrutiny. As Gawande writes,

The main argument for using long-term isolation in prisons is that it provides discipline and prevents violence. When inmates refuse to follow the rules—when they escape, deal drugs, or attack other inmates and corrections officers—wardens must be able to punish and contain the misconduct. Presumably, less stringent measures haven’t worked, or the behavior would not have occurred. And it’s legitimate to incapacitate violent aggressors for the safety of others. So, advocates say, isolation is a necessary evil, and those who don’t recognize this are dangerously naïve.

The argument makes intuitive sense. If the worst of the worst are removed from the general prison population and put in isolation, you’d expect there to be markedly fewer inmate shankings and attacks on corrections officers. But the evidence doesn’t bear this out. Perhaps the most careful inquiry into whether supermax prisons decrease violence and disorder was a 2003 analysis examining the experience in three states—Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota—following the opening of their supermax prisons. The study found that levels of inmate-on-inmate violence were unchanged, and that levels of inmate-on-staff violence changed unpredictably, rising in Arizona, falling in Illinois, and holding steady in Minnesota.

And there are available, effective alternatives to solitary confinement. Gawande writes:

So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed “Close Supervision Centres,” prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, “contact visits,” and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to track the results and enable adjustments based on the data.

The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in “extreme custody” than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.

One would think that with 25,000 people in solitary confinement there would be a gigantic tidal wave of litigation about the subject. But that hasn’t happened. I can offer a few reasons for this.

First, the US Supreme Court has since Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78 (1987), given great, uncritical deference to prison administrator’s opinions about how their prisons should be run. You will note that it is their prison, not yours. This means in practical terms that the warden’s assertion that some people are so dangerous that they need to be in solitary confinement so that the prison can function, will be accepted, and contrary opinions and innovations will be rejected.

Second, the prison industrial complex has been booming for decades because of the excessive number of people confined in the US and the desire to isolate prisoners, something that requires more prisons and more guards and more administration and more spending.

Third, the Courts, even when confronted with massive, proven injuries caused by solitary confinement in a Supermax prison, have rendered themselves unwilling to intercede and powerless. In Madrid v. Gomez a federal judge found conditions at Pelican Bay Prison in California "may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable. But, and this is the important but he ruled that there was no constitutional basis for the courts to shut down the unit or substantially to alter it. The Court had to defer to the state’s views about how to treat prisoners.

Prisoners, of course, don’t have any power to change these conditions. They have no money. They are routinely excluded from voting. They don’t have an alumni association. Prisoners’ families are mostly poor and disenfranchised. Prisoners cannot change these conditions.

And we? The prison’s walls keep the prisoners in, but they also keep us out. We don't know what's going on. We might not even care. We really need to have a serious discussion about what is going on behind the walls in our names. But we haven’t managed so far even to start that dialogue. That's a pity.

Free Aung San Suu Kyi!

Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi

Enough is enough. The NY Times reports that the Myanmar government has yet again extended Aung San Suu Kyi's dentention:

Myanmar's military government has renewed the detention of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

A government official said that Suu Kyi's detention was officially extended Tuesday afternoon. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

It was not immediately clear if the extension was for six months or one year. The extension became official when an official drove to her house to inform her of it, he said.

Suu Kyi has been in detention continuously since May 2003, most of the time under house arrest.

She has been confined without trial for more than 12 of the past 18 years.

This Wiki helps with the background:

Aung San Suu Kyi /snip born 19 June 1945 in Rangoon, is a pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma, and a noted prisoner of conscience and advocate of nonviolent resistance. /snip Suu Kyi won the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. In 1992 she was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru peace prize by the Government of India for her peaceful and non-violent struggle under a military dictatorship. She is currently under detention, with the Burmese junta repeatedly extending her detention. According to the results of the 1990 general election, Suu Kyi earned the right to be Prime Minister, as leader of the winning National League for Democracy party, but her detention by the military junta prevented her from assuming that role.

Further details Here and Here.

Myanmar showed in the wake of the recent natural disaster that its government and its policies are far beyond the influence of other countries or organizations of countries. And other countries have repeatedly failed either, as individuals or in groups, to speak up for Aung San Suu Kyi:

The Burma Campaign UK today condemned world leaders for failing to speak out about the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi in the run-up to her detention expiring today. It was reported today that her detention had been extended again, with some reports saying the detention is for another six months.

“It is shameful that Ban Ki-Moon went to Burma and failed even to utter her name,” said Mark Farmaner, Director of the Burma Campaign UK. “He is playing into the regime’s hands. The UN is crawling on its knees before the regime, afraid to speak the truth in case it affects aid access deals, which the regime is already breaking in any case.”

The Burma Campaign UK also dismissed suggestions that there is any significance to the regime extending her detention for six months instead of one year. At the start of her current period of house arrest in 2003 her detention was for six months at a time.

The regime is once again breaking its own laws by extending her detention for a total of more than five years. The State Protection Law 1975 under which she is held only allows the regime to detain her for a maximum of five years.

The Burma Campaign UK has a page with links to action steps.

It is unacceptable for Aung San Suu Kyi's detention to continue. She should now be freed. I'm not holding my breath until nations across the globe speak out in her behalf.