Pubdate: Wed, 1 Sept 1999 Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (WI) Copyright: 1999, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Contact: 414-224-8280 Website: http://www.jsonline.com/ Forum: http://www.jsonline.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimate.cgi Author: Richard P. Jones, of the Journal Sentinel staff HIGH-TECH PRISON DESIGNED FOR 'TOUGHEST OF THE TOUGH' Penitentiary In Boscobel Readied For November Opening Boscobel - The accommodations are so austere, so stark, you enter the cell clinging to your thoughts of the world outside. The floor measures 6 feet by 12 feet. In one corner, secured to the wall, is a combined stainless steel sink-and-toilet with an unbreakable mirror above it. In the adjacent corner, a small shower head is visible on the wall. Below it, there's a floor drain. Your bunk is a concrete slab on masonry block. There you can lie on a mattress, look out a 6-inch-by-6-inch window at the top of one wall, and see nothing but a utility corridor and a skylight that's fogged to obscure blue skies by day and stars at night. There's no clock, no radio, no television. Just a camera lens focused on you, alone in this concrete vault virtually all day. When the heavy, steel-paneled door slides shut, it is the last of 10 barriers, including a lethal electrified fence, between you and a law-abiding public. Welcome to Wisconsin's new "supermax" prison. Built at a cost of $47.5 million, the penitentiary, to open in November, is a unique, high-tech approach to an age-old problem: What do you do with violent criminals who persist in violent behavior when they are already in prison? Wisconsin is among the last states to build such a prison. But this bunkerlike structure, nestled in a clearing of pines a couple of miles from the lower Wisconsin River in Grant County, draws on the experience of the federal government and more than 30 other states that have built ultrasecure penitentiaries for the worst offenders. "It is unique in its design, as far as a facility in Wisconsin, and as far as I know, in the United States," said Daniel Stephans, the state official who supervised the project's design and construction. "I'd be surprised if you'd find anything quite like this any place else." What sets this prison apart from others, Stephans said, is chiefly its high-tech features. They include a biometric system that scans hands to positively identify inmates, staff and visitors; a video visitation system (no face-to-face visits will be allowed); motion detectors and surveillance cameras to record nearly every move; and a central command post that employs computers to control movement through every secure door. Alone but for One Hour The prison can hold as many as 509 inmates, all in solitary cells. For one hour a day, they will be allowed out of their cells, one at a time, to exercise alone in a room not much bigger than their cells. As always, they will be handcuffed, shackled and escorted by at least two guards. Inmates will begin their stay in a unit at the bottom of the prison system. If their behavior improves, conditions will, too, but only slightly. They can graduate to a cell with a bit more space, a small shelf serving as a desk, and a TV monitor with closed-circuit programming. The plan is for the inmates to eventually earn their way back to the old prison system. But whatever the threshold, the prison at any level is at once comforting and frightening. For crime victims and the general public, it is the best testament yet to law and order. For even the most hardened criminals, it will be harsher than anything they've ever experienced. Beginning Tuesday through Sept. 12, the public will get a chance to tour the new prison in this remote corner of southwestern Wisconsin. As many as 50,000 people are expected to accept the invitation from the state and this city of nearly 2,900, a community known until now as the birthplace of the Gideon Bible and the wild turkey capital of Wisconsin. Exactly when inmates will arrive is up to state lawmakers. The budget impasse in Madison has prevented the state from hiring the nearly 245 people still needed to run the prison, but Corrections Secretary Jon Litscher this week asked for emergency funding from the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee. If the committee grants the request, Warden Gerald Berge said, the prison will begin accepting inmates in mid-November, one month later than anticipated. And when it does open, officials say, the prison will give them a tough tool to deal with the system's worst troublemakers. "Prisoners are going to have to obey the rules and regulations. If they don't, they can work themselves through the chain into supermax, and they're not going to like that," Gov. Tommy G. Thompson said. "It's not a nice place. It's for the toughest of the tough. It's for those people that have committed really heinous crimes. I think that it's needed for our prison system." Although the penitentiary is being sold as a prison for Wisconsin's worst criminals, Berge said it wasn't necessarily built for the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world. Were he alive today, serial killer Dahmer might be destined for the prison, but more for his own safety. Rather, Berge said, the prison is for inmates such as Christopher Scarver, who beat Dahmer and another inmate to death at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage in 1994. Upon their arrival, inmates will be locked in cells with the bare minimum - personal hygiene items, any legal papers and books allowed by law and a Bible, perhaps. They'll remain there for a few days, until prisoners understand what is expected of them and until the staff can determine their needs. Ultimately, inmates will be able to return to the general inmate population, Berge said. "We would anticipate that the length of stay here at this whole facility would be between a year and three years," he said. "Some people might make it faster than that. Frankly, some people won't make it - hopefully, a small number of inmates that, for their own reasons, whatever, are not going to graduate from here." However, a psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard Medical School in Boston and is an expert on isolation and sensory deprivation's effects, said he doubts any inmate will leave better for the experience, or that citizens will be safer because of the ultrasecure prison. Isolation's Effects The psychiatrist, Stuart Grassian, said that for starters, the cruelest, most calculating inmates in prisons are smart enough to avoid "supermax." He said the majority of inmates destined for Boscobel probably suffer from mental illness, and the rest likely will become psychotic. "When you get to the worst of the worst, you're not getting to the James Cagneys of the prison system," he said. "What you're actually getting to, more or less, is the population that belongs in a state hospital." As part of his research, Grassian followed inmates who experienced solitary confinement, served their time and returned to society. He said some of them turned to him for help. "This isn't making the community safe. This isn't getting tough on crime. This is getting tough on us," he said. "These folks get out - 95% of all people in prison get out - and you're just making them the most sickest, most impulse-ridden, most enraged, paranoid, impaired human beings. And then you're just putting them right back into the community." Berge said inmates with serious mental illness go to the Wisconsin Resource Center in Oshkosh. But he said the Boscobel prison would not automatically exclude convicts with mental health problems. Berge also said he was very aware of the psychological harm solitary confinement can have. "We clearly acknowledge, we understand that that's a potential, but the impact of that depends upon how intensive the solitary confinement is," he said. "We take lots of measures to counter that, to ensure that we're on sort of the moderate to upper end of that scale." The first inmate's arrival is weeks away, but already Berge, the corrections secretary and the governor have come under fire for the open house. Sen. Gwendolynne Moore (D-Milwaukee) objected to what she viewed as a gala garden party offering refreshments and souvenirs. "Were I governor, and I were there to open up the prison, I'd probably be there with tears in my eyes," Moore said. Moore, a black lawmaker, noted the racial disparity in the prison system. She said violent criminals must be punished, but she said cities such as Boscobel are relying on young black males from Milwaukee's impoverished inner city to create jobs. "The raw material for economic development (is) young minority males," she said. "We should be outraged that we have to beg for everything we need, and mostly what we contribute is this fodder, fuel for some small community's economic survival." Thompson said he doesn't consider the opening of the prison as a festive occasion. "Everybody would love to be able to say we don't have to have prisons, but being what society is, you have people that don't conform to societal norms, and you have to have some place to place them," he said. "And this is for the toughest of the tough. It's not a nice place. It's not for celebration. It's for doing what is necessary to protect our citizens, as well as our guards, and other inmates in the institutions." - --- MAP posted-by: Derek Rea