If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, \u201cthe degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons\u201d then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.(Illustration by Mr. Fish)<\/p>\n
Bonnie Kerness and Ojore Lutalo, both of whom I met in Newark, N.J., a few days ago at the office of American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch, have fought longer and harder than perhaps any others in the country against the expanding abuse of prisoners, especially the use of solitary confinement. Lutalo, once a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, first wrote Kerness in 1986 while he was a prisoner at Trenton State Prison, now called New Jersey State Prison. He described to her the bleak and degrading world of solitary confinement, the world of the prisoners like him held in the so-called management control unit, which he called \u201ca prison within a prison.\u201d Before being released in 2009, Lutalo was in the management control unit for 22 of the 28 years he served for the second of two convictions\u2014the first for a bank robbery and the second for a gun battle with a drug dealer. He kept his sanity, he told me, by following a strict regime of exercising in his tiny cell, writing, meditating and tearing up newspapers to make collages that portrayed his prison conditions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe guards in riot gear would suddenly wake you up at 1 a.m., force you to strip and make you grab all your things and move you to another cell just to harass you,\u201d he said when we spoke in Newark. \u201cThey had attack dogs with them that were trained to go for your genitals. You spent 24 hours alone one day in your cell and 22 the next. If you do not have a strong sense of purpose you don\u2019t survive psychologically. Isolation is designed to defeat prisoners mentally, and I saw a lot of prisoners defeated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lutalo\u2019s letter was Kerness\u2019 first indication that the U.S. prison system was creating something new\u2014special detention facilities that under international law are a form of torture. He wrote to her: \u201cHow does one go about articulating desperation to another who is not desperate? How does one go about articulating the psychological stress of knowing that people are waiting for me to self-destruct?\u201d<\/p>\n
The techniques of sensory deprivation and prolonged isolation were pioneered by the Central Intelligence Agency to break prisoners during the Cold War. Alfred McCoy, the author of \u201cA Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror,\u201d wrote in his book that \u201cinterrogators had found that mere physical pain, no matter how extreme, often produced heightened resistance.\u201d So the intelligence agency turned to the more effective mechanisms of \u201csensory disorientation\u201d and \u201cself-inflicted pain,\u201d McCoy noted. [One example of causing self-inflicted pain is to force a prisoner to stand without moving or to hold some other stressful bodily position for a long period.] The combination, government psychologists argued, would cause victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and accelerate psychological disintegration. Sensory disorientation combines extreme sensory overload with extreme sensory deprivation. Prolonged isolation is followed by intense interrogation. Extreme heat is followed by extreme cold. Glaring light is followed by total darkness. Loud and sustained noise is followed by silence. \u201cThe fusion of these two techniques, sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain, creates a synergy of physical and psychological trauma whose sum is a hammer-blow to the existential platforms of personal identity,\u201d McCoy wrote.<\/p>\n