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    Control Units and Supermaxes: A National Security Threat
    Control Units and Supermaxes: A National Security Threat
    Control Units and Supermaxes: A National Security Threat
    Ebook125 pages2 hours

    Control Units and Supermaxes: A National Security Threat

    By Joseph

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    About this ebook

    Unbeknownst to the majority of the public, isolation chambers in prisons have proliferated over the past few decades to the point where 100,000 people or more are being held in long-term solitary confinement on any given day in the United States. Even less known by the average citizen is the serious threat supermax prisons and control units pose to the country as a while. They not only severely affect those entombed inside them, but also the guards who work in them, and the communities those prisoners and guards return to. Control Units and Supermaxes: A National Security Threat details those affects and threats as well as the experiences of several states’ efforts to reconsider the practice.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJoseph
    Release dateJun 13, 2016
    ISBN9781310306389
    Control Units and Supermaxes: A National Security Threat
    Author

    Joseph

    Mr. Dole is currently serving a life-without-parole sentence after being wrongfully convicted. He continues to fight that con¬viction pro se. He has been continuously incarcerated since 1998. He spent nearly a decade of his life in the notorious Tamms Supermax Prison in complete isolation. Tamms was shuttered in 2012 after an intense campaign by human rights groups and the families and friends of prisoners who were confined and tortured there. Mr. Dole’s first essay, which won him first place in a prison writing contest, was included in the book “Lockdown Prison Heart”(IUniverse, Inc., 2004).Since then he has written a number of articles, essays, poems, research papers, and legislative proposals, two of which were catalysts for Illinois legislation (a bill and a resolution). He has won four different PEN America Writing Awards for Prisoners.He has been published in Stateville Speaks Newsletter, Prison Legal News, The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (Vol.20,No.2, 2010), Graterfriends Newsletter, The Insider Magazine, The Mississippi Review, The Public I Newspaper, as well as numerous places on-line such as www.realcostofprisons.org, PrisonLawBlog.com, and SolitaryWatch.com. Most recently an essay of his was included in the anthology “Too Cruel, Not Unusual Enough” ( www. theotherdeathpenalty. org ).Mr. Dole is both a jailhouse journalist and a jailhouse lawyer, as well as a watchdog fighting to ensure that Illinois agencies are in compliance with the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.He is also a member of the National Lawyer’s Guild. Mr. Dole has educated himself by taking dozens of correspondence courses and reading hundreds of books.You can contact Mr. Dole via snail mail at the following address, and he will respond to all letters he receives:Joseph Dole K84446Stateville Correctional CenterP.O.Box 112Joliet, IL 60434

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      Book preview

      Control Units and Supermaxes - Joseph

      Control Units and Supermaxes: A National Security Threat

      By Joseph Rodney Dole, II

      Control Units and Supermaxes: A National Security Threat

      Smashwords edition

      Copyright © 2016 by Joseph Rodney Dole, II

      Smashwords License Statement

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters are totally from the imagination of the author and depict no persons, living or dead; any similarity is totally coincidental.

      Self-Published at Smashwords with assistance from

      MIDNIGHT EXPRESS BOOKS

      POBox 69

      Berryville AR 72616

      (870) 210-3772

      MEBooks1@yahoo.com

      http://www.MidnightExpressBooks.com

      -DEDICATION-

      This book is dedicated to all those (like Tamms Year Ten) who fight to end long-term solitary confinement, and to all those suffering in isolation chambers around the country and world. It is especially dedicated to all those who continue to resist oppression, fight for their rights, and demand to be treated humanely.

      -INTRODUCTION-

      .

      Beginning in the 1960s, control units, then later supermax prisons, popped up from coast to coast as if part of a fast food franchise.

      There was almost no outcry over this. Little known outside of correctional circles, barely a peep was uttered in opposition. Analyzing the costs versus the benefits of building them was unheard of. Nor did anyone consider any moral, ethical, or humanitarian downsides of building them.

      Recently however, more and more conscientious people are starting to realize that there are, in fact, great risks associated with building these facilities and isolating thousands of people (men, women, and children), some for decades. People are now recognizing that, rather than being the legitimate security tool they were billed as, they actually pose a significant threat to society.

      -DEDICATION-

      -INTRODUCTION-

      -HISTORY-

      -NUMBERS -

      -CONDITIONS-

      -THREAT TO INMATES-

      -THREAT TO STAFF-

      -THREAT TO SOCIETY-

      -GROWING ACKNOWLEDGMENT-

      -STILL MUCH FURTHER TO GO-

      -CONCLUSION-

      -WORKS CITED-

      -ABOUT THE AUTHOR-

      -ABOUT THE COVER ART & ARTIST-

      -HISTORY-

      In 2007, the International Psychological Trauma Symposium was held in Istanbul, Turkey. It adopted The Istanbul Statement on the Use and Effects of Solitary Confinement, which lists four criminal justice circumstances around the world in which solitary confinement is used:

      As…a disciplinary punishment for sentenced prisoners; for the isolation of individuals during an ongoing criminal investigation; increasingly as an administrative tool for managing specific groups of prisoners; and as judicial sentencing. In many jurisdictions solitary confinement is also used as a substitute for proper medical or psychiatric care for mentally disordered individuals (Istanbul Statement, 2007:p.63).

      Solitary confinement has existed in some form or another for centuries. Citing the American Encyclopedia, the United States Supreme Court noted in an 1890 opinion that the first plan adopted [using solitary confinement as punishment for crime]...was the solitary prison connected with the Hospital San Michele at Rome, in I703(In re Medley, 1890:p. 167-168, 386). Similar to the isolation units today, the Court noted that it too was little known (Ibid.). America began its first experiments with solitary confinement shortly after the birth of the country. In 1787, solitary confinement was used in the Walnut Street Penitentiary in Philadelphia (Ibid.). Just three years later, [i]n 1790, legislation authorized the construction of 16 small individualized cells at Walnut Street...where prisoners were kept in isolation (Friedmann, 2012:p.l).

      According to Sharon Shalev, who compiled A Sourcebook On Solitary Confinement, it was the Boston Prison Disciplinary Society which helped devise the ‘Separate’ or ‘Pennsylvania’ system of solitary confinement (Shalev, 2008:p.l0). Under this system, prisoners were held in solitary confinement and segregated from each other almost all of the time, including during meals. The Pennsylvania System was intended to induce penitence and reformation by providing prisoners with time alone to contemplate their sins (Friedmann, 2012:p.l). Philadelphia was also home to America’s first prison exclusively dedicated to solitary confinement (Tietz, 2012:p.3). This was the Eastern State Penitentiary which was built in 1829 and served as a model for more than 300 prisons in the United States and Europe (Ibid.).

      After decades of experience with solitary confinement though, people realized that instead of its intended role of helping to ‘cure the disease of crime’, solitary confinement was creating illness in prisoners (Friedmann, 2012:p.l0). This played a central role in the dismantling of the isolation prisons on both sides of the Atlantic by the late 19th Century (Ibid.). Although solitary confinement was still used as a management tool of the prison system, entire prisons dedicated to isolation didn’t reappear until the latter half of the 20th Century.

      The impetus for the return of prisons using large-scale isolation - the efficacy of which had been disproven decades earlier - was manifold.

      The return began with the control unit. Basically, the control unit is a prison inside a prison where all inmates are in solitary confinement of one kind or another (Kamel and Kerness, 2003). As Bonnie Kerness noted in WIN Magazine, one of the first control units was established in the late 1960s (Kerness, 2009:p.21). It was located in San Quentin Prison’s 0 Wing (Ibid.). It is commonly misreported that the first such unit was at the Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois in 1972 (Magnani, 2008). This can be attributed to how well these units are kept hidden from the public. Marion established their infamous H-Unit, made up of cruel boxcar cells (Kerness, 2009:p.21), after a guard was killed that year (Magnani, 2008). Numerous other states such as New Jersey and Massachusetts also established similar control units in existing prisons around the same time (Kerness, 2009:p.21).

      The rationale for these units was that a small portion of the prison population was uncontrollably violent and had to be kept isolated and secured to protect both staff and other inmates. Once established though, prison administrators expanded the criteria to include: anyone they label as a gang member; jailhouse lawyers who garner the animosity of the administration by filing grievances or lawsuits in order to protect their civil rights; anyone they think might commit a staff assault; inmates who require protection from other inmates; illegal immigrants; and inmates who continuously break prison rules. More often than not, the latter are mentally ill people who are incapable of following such a strict regimen. Most people still think of only men being subjected to isolation, but America spares neither women nor children this punishment. Although placing children in solitary confinement is a violation of international law (Clark and Maki, 2014), the practice is all too common in the United States (Liebelson, 2015). From California to Florida, hundreds of women also languish in solitary confinement (Law, 2014: p.12). Often it is because they are victims of sexual assault by guards (Ibid.: p. 14). When they report the assault, they are labeled trouble-makers as part of the cover-up and isolated in retaliation. Therefore, solitary confinement can go by many names - - Disciplinary Segregation, Administrative Detention,

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