They Call Them "Control Units"
by Dan Pens
The name Alcatraz still reverberates in the American psyche
as the toughest prison ever built. The infamous Alcatraz federal prison
was purchased from the military by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and
converted into a prison for "the worst of the worst." Alcatraz
prisoners were utilized to work (under contract to the War Department),
producing items for the military. But on weekends and evenings they were
allowed to stroll in a large outside recreation yard. There they could play
baseball or basketball, enjoy the view of the bay, play cards, or just sit
and talk with friends. They also regularly gathered in an auditorium to
watch movies. Compared to prisons of its day, life in Alcatraz was indeed
grim. Compared to the worst that prisons have to offer today, however, it
was idyllic.
In 1983 federal prisoncrats revived the phrase "the worst of the worst
" to justify a permanent lockdown at the federal prison at Marion,
Illinois. BOP officials called Marion the "new Alcatraz." Unlike
the old Alcatraz, however, Marion prisoners were locked in their tiny cells
23 1/2 hours a day. Soon after Marion went on permanent lockdown, the BOP
began transferring "the worst of the worst" from other federal
prisons to Marion. It became a prototype for a new style of prison management.
They call such prisons "Control Units" or "SuperMax"
prisons.
In 1983 California opened Pelican Bay Prison, the first modern state-of-the-art
Control Unit prison designed from the ground up. About 1,500 prisoners are
isolated in Pelican Bay's two Security Housing Units (SHUs). The physical
layout of the SHU was specifically designed to reduce visual stimulation.
The cells are windowless concrete tombs with a solid steel door. One prisoner
fairly described the SHU as like being "in a space capsule where one
is shot into space and left in isolation."
Opportunities for social interaction with other humans is essentially eliminated.
Food trays are shoved through a slot in the door three times a day. Because
of the prison's location on the extreme northern border with Oregon, few
prisoners receive visits from loved ones from down state. Visits are conducted
with the prisoner shackled behind a thick glass partition. SHU prisoners
are allowed no phone calls.
If Marion was the prototype for Control Unit management, Pelican Bay became
the prototype for Control Unit design and construction. According to the
American Friends Service Committee's national office in Philadelphia, PA,
more than 40 Control Unit prisons house more than 15,000 prisoners nationwide,
including the new federal prison in Florence, Colorado, glibly referred
to as the "Alcatraz of the Rockies."
The Florence Control Unit is called Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX).
Prisoners are housed in "boxcar" cells. The walls are solid concrete.
The front wall of the cell is standard prison bars, but three feet beyond
that is another thick concrete wall with a solid steel door in it. Prisoners
have virtually no contact with each other and often spend years in total
isolation.
In 1990 prisoners in Pelican Bay's SHU filed lawsuits against the harsh
conditions of their high-tech dungeon. The lawsuits were consolidated into
a class action suit and counsel was appointed. The suit contested a litany
of brutal conditions: serious medical and mental health-care deficiencies;
routine beatings and torture with stun guns; high-velocity rubber dum-dum
bullets fired into their cells, prisoners "hog-tied" or chained
to their toilets. In addition, however, the very design/management concept
of the SHU was challenged. Lawyers representing Pelican Bay prisoners claimed
that the SHU Control Unit itself was "cruel and unusual." Expert
witnesses, psychiatrists and psychologists, testified that "When human
beings are subjected to social isolation and reduced environmental stimulation,
they may deteriorate mentally and in some cases develop... perceptual distortions,
hallucinations, hypersensitivity to external stimuli, aggressive fantasies,
overt paranoia, inability to concentrate, and problems with impulse control....
This series of symptoms has been discussed using various terminology; however,
one common label is 'Reduced Environmental Stimulation' or RES."
The court ruled in 1995 that "many, if not most, inmates in the SHU
experience some degree of psychological trauma in reaction to their extreme
social isolation and the severely restricted environmental stimulation in
the SHU." The court went on to say, however, that "we are not
persuaded that the SHU, as currently operated, violates Eighth Amendment
Standards [prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment] vis-a-vis all inmates."
The court said that SHU imprisonment was improper for certain subgroups
of prisoners, consisting of the "already mentally ill, as well as persons
with borderline personality disorders, brain damage, or mental retardation,
impulse-ridden personalities, or a history of prior psychiatric problems
or chronic depression. For these inmates, placing them in the SHU is equivalent
to putting an asthmatic in a place with little air to breathe. By stopping
short of declaring Control Unit imprisonment cruel and unusual in and of
itself, this federal court set a legal precedent that allows the continued
entombing of "the worst of the worst" in Control Units across
the country.
Who are these "worst of the worst"? That phrase, as described
by one federal ADX prisoner, is "a soundbite which condenses nigger,
spic, white trash, jobless, homeless, useless underclass into one dehumanizing
phrase." Prison officials routinely describe the worst of the worst
as violent, predatory prisoners who have proven to be a "management
problem." In reality, though, the most troublesome "management
problems" are often dissenters, political organizers, activists, prison
union organizers, and especially jailhouse lawyers.
Former Marion warden Ralph Aaron, who has since become an opponent of Control
Unit prisons, once said: "The purpose of the Marion Control Unit is
to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in the society
at large."
Ray Luc Levasseur, a federal prisoner, political activist and longtime Control
Unit captive, is one such "management problem" with a revolutionary
attitude. He wrote in Prison Legal News about his experience at Marion and
then at Florence ADX: "Whether in this prison or elsewhere, the majority
[of Control Unit prisoners] have been subjected to police assaults, beatings,
gas, clubs, prolonged restraints, drugs, anal probes, degradations, harassment,
psychological abuse, rape and mistreatment of all sorts. The U.S. calls
this 'torture' when referring to other governments."
Like some states, Washington doesn't have a "SuperMax" prison
per se. Nonetheless, there are two Control Units, referred to as "Intensive
Management Units" (IMUs), one located inside the prison at Shelton
and the other in Walla Walla. They are literally "prisons within prisons."
Each IMU contains 120 isolation cells where prisoners are entombed around
the clock.
Many prisoners are tossed into Control Unit waste bins for the remainder
of their sentences. They are then released directly into the community.
Residents of Crescent City, California, the small town adjacent to Pelican
Bay Prison, lobbied the California Department of Corrections to transport
released Pelican Bay prisoners back to their home counties. They had previously
been given a bus ticket and unleashed on Crescent City, committed mayhem,
and thereby reinforced the "worst of the worst" propaganda.
One Control Unit prisoner wrote that citizens who become victimized by Control
Unit alumni should ask themselves the following: "Will the billions
spent on state-of-the-art SuperMax prisons buy back the lost lives of those
whom they thought they were protecting with their tax dollars? It won't.
The funds that could have been invested in human services and community
development were pissed away down bottomless sinkholes of violence, heartache,
and the illusion that repression will provide security."
Efforts to stem the tide of Control Unit proliferation through litigation
have so far proven fruitless. Courts have given the Constitutional Seal
of Approval to Control Units. Any reversal of the trend to rely on ever
more repressive forms of imprisonment such as Control Units will likely
only occur as a result of political activism and organizing of both prisoners
and free citizens-or as a result of a bloody uprising and massacre such
the Attica rebellion which took place 25 years ago. Attica should never
happen again.
The high incarceration rate in the U.S. is a shame, not a success. Control
Unit torture of prisoners is a crime, not a solution.
Dan Pens is co-editor of Prison Legal News. A free sample of PLN is available
upon request by writing to Dan Pens #279308, P.O. Box 888, Monroe, WA 98272-0888.
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