Pubdate: Thu, 03 Jan 2013
Source: Chico News & Review, The (CA)
Copyright: 2013 Chico Community Publishing, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.newsreview.com/chico/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/559
Author: Robert Speer

TORTURE IN OUR PRISONS

Solitary Confinement Can Drive Men Mad

One of the positive consequences of California's fiscal distress has 
been its reconsideration of its over-reliance on prisons. State 
officials and the public at large have begun to realize that, when 
schools and universities and programs for the poor and elderly are 
being cut, it makes no sense to pay $44,000 a year to imprison, say, 
a low-level drug dealer.

In 2011 the Legislature, responding to federal court mandates to 
lessen overcrowding in the prisons, passed AB 109, the so-called 
"realignment" bill. It mandates counties no longer send offenders 
convicted of nonviolent, nonsexual and nonserious crimes (drug 
dealing, for instance, or burglary) to state prison and instead put 
them in jail-or, as it's being called, "county prison."

One of the assumptions of AB 109 was that counties would develop 
creative ways to deal with the influx by focusing on enhanced 
probation services, rehabilitation programs and improving pre-trial 
processes that allowed arrested people to remain out of jail pending 
trial. (Statewide, about 70 percent of jail inmates are there because 
they can't afford bail.)

So far realignment has worked better in some counties than in others, 
but overall progress is being made. A recent study by the Chief 
Probation Officers of California finds, for example, that an 
increasing number of judges are applying split sentences to low-level 
offenders, requiring them to spend half their sentences in jail and 
the other half in a community program or under probation, where they 
can be helped to re-enter society.

In November 2012 voters joined the reform movement by supporting 
Proposition 36, which changed the state's so-called "three strikes" 
law to require that the third strike be for a serious or violent 
felony before a mandatory 25-years-to-life sentence could be imposed. 
No longer will someone be sentenced to die in prison for, say, shoplifting.

There's another part of the prison system that desperately needs 
change-its use of solitary confinement. More than 3,000 prisoners are 
held in isolation in what are called Security Housing Units, or SHUs, 
which are essentially prisons within prisons. Separated from the 
mainline population, SHU inmates are confined alone for 22 1/2 hours 
a day in cells measuring 9 feet by 9 feet with no windows or access 
to fresh air. The inmates receive no meaningful human contact, work, 
rehabilitation or group activity of any kind.

More than 200 of these prisoners have spent longer than 15 years in 
the SHU, and 78 have been there more than 20 years. Amnesty 
International says the conditions amount to "cruel, inhuman and 
degrading treatment in violation of international law."

Many of the prisoners go mad. Others deteriorate physically from lack 
of exercise and natural light, chronic asthma and severe insomnia.

Most SHU inmates are there because they're suspected of being gang 
members. The only way they can get out is to "debrief"-that is, 
inform on other prisoners. But that would invite gang retaliation, even death.

Solitary confinement originally was meant to be a short-term 
punishment for violations of prison rules. In the SHUs, it's become 
long-term torture. It's not worthy of a compassionate society.
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