Here's something people might find more trustworthy:
http://www.diggers.org/freecitynews/_disc1/00000052.htm
Interview with Christian Parenti on the US Prison System
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Jensen: Let’s talk about the shus the Security Housing Units in California prisons. I don’t think most people know about them.
Parenti: They have different names in different states. Basically, they’re "supermax" lockdowns, prisons within prisons where inmates are kept in isolation or sometimes with one cellmate twenty-three hours a day. They live behind solid metal doors. Their only contact with the world is by way of a slot used to pass them their meals and through which their hands are cuffed before they go out on the exercise "yard" a concrete floor and four concrete walls, with only a slice of sky above or for their biweekly showers. Prisoners in these units are allowed only an hour or two of access to the law library each week and similarly limited access to telephones. They have no jobs, no educational programs, and can visit their families only through bulletproof glass, over bugged intercoms. They’re watched twenty-four hours a day on closed-circuit tv, for years on end.
Like much of our current criminal-justice system,
supermax units are a product of the crisis of the sixties. They have earlier antecedents in Quaker prison reforms that advocated silence and isolation, and also in "the hole" the dark room that prisoners are sent to in old prison movies. What’s changed is that now people sometimes spend their entire sentences in the shu, and the dark rooms have, in some cases, become sterile white boxes with canned air, electronic voices, and endless fluorescent light.
These modern isolation cells emerged in response to the prison-yard rebellions and prisoners’-rights movements of the sixties and seventies. At San Quentin, the first such units were called "adjustment centers" and were where the warden threw "incorrigible" nationalists, communists, and self-styled pows. Nowadays, there are two ways you can get sent to the shu. The first is if you’re found guilty of violating the prison’s rules, such as by possessing drugs or weapons. Then you can be given what’s called a "determinate sentence," which means you’re put in isolation for a term of months or years. The other way you can be sent to the shu is if you’re "validated" by the administration as a gang member. You then receive an "indeterminate sentence," which means you’re in the shu until either you die, your prison sentence ends, or you snitch on other gang members.
Jensen: I’ve worked with prisoners who were in the shu as long as eighteen years.
Parenti: That happens all the time.
Jensen: And to be validated as a gang member is an administrative decision, totally nonjudicial.
Parenti: That’s right. And it can be incredibly arbitrary. In the shu, you’ll find both serious gangsters and the political leaders of the prisoners. You’ll also find jailhouse lawyers self-taught legal advisors who write writs and sue on behalf of themselves and other prisoners. The shu is full of brilliant legal minds who’ve been beating the California Department of Corrections against all odds with their lawsuits.
And now a new class is ending up in the supermax units: jailhouse doctors. A lot of prisoners who are hiv-positive have gotten indigent subscriptions to the New England Journal of Medicine, and some of them have become experts on hiv. These jailhouse doctors are helping other prisoners some of whom can’t read to take care of themselves, telling them which combinations of drugs work and demanding new treatments from the prison medical staff, many of whom know less about hiv than these inmates. That causes trouble. In prison, the staff must be right, and the prisoners must be wrong. So you often find jailhouse doctors being labeled gang members and ending up in the shu.
The public is sold the shu and other lockdowns as tools to protect prisoners and guards from "supercriminals," but the truth is that they actually destabilize the prison environment. If you take the knowledgeable, respected convicts away, you’re left with a bunch of young hotheads struggling for control and influence. So the removal of convicts to the shu actually leads to more violence.
Now, you might think it seems counterproductive for prison administrators to foster violence. But on a certain level, it makes perfect sense.
Jensen: How so?
Parenti: Because infighting makes things easier for the guards. A former prisoner who’s now a jail warden told me explicitly that if you’ve got two hundred people on a tier, it’s a lot easier to control them if the tier is split into five mutually antagonistic factions. Prison administrators generally have a real interest in keeping prisoners at each other’s throats, because then they’re directing their violence toward one another, as opposed to directing it toward the staff or organizing to demand better treatment.
Jensen: This reminds me of something I recently read in the paper: that, because of violence on the yard, wardens want more state money for devices that can detect weapons inside people’s bodies. So, in a sense, prison unrest leads to greater funding.
Parenti: Exactly. There are so many ways that intra-inmate violence serves the interests of prison administrators.
The notion of devices to look inside people’s bodies also makes me think of the way criminal-justice surveillance insinuates itself into our lives; how fear is seeded throughout the culture until we all become institutionalized. French philosopher Michel Foucault came up with the notion of a "carcereal society," wherein we are subject to constant supervision by anonymous managers. His thesis is that, with the rise of capitalism, industrialization, and the modern nation-state, societal control has shifted away from spectacular assaults on the body, such as public executions, and toward interior methods getting subjects to regulate themselves by internalizing authority. For Foucault, this shift is not evidence of improving human rights or moral progress, but rather of increasingly effective and pernicious mechanisms of social regulation.
And his thesis is true, to some extent, but what we’ve seen in the U.S., with the rise of our incipient police state, is in some ways a return to the spectacular uses of terror.
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