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Research Summary: Supermax prisons exist, according to the policy's driving logic, to address serious disorder problems by isolating people who cause serious disorder. Criticisms of supermax, however, suggest that its use is driven by factors aside from serious disorder problems and that transfers to supermax have a degree of arbitrariness. The current paper uses 10 years of data on one state prison system to disentangle the relationship between "disorder" and supermax utilization by examining (1) the association between a facility's level of serious disorder and supermax transfers (prison‐level analysis), (2) the association between a person's level of serious rule breaking and oppositely, "nuisance" behaviors, and the odds of a supermax transfer (individual‐level analysis), and (3) whether the influence of a person's behavioral record on the odds of supermax depends upon contextual factors (prison‐by‐individual interaction). The results suggest that a facility's level of serious disorder does strongly correspond with its reliance on supermax and that indicators of serious rule breaking, and not minor forms of it, are strongly associated with a person's odds of experiencing a supermax transfer. However, a person's misconduct record has a weaker association with the odds of a supermax transfer in facilities that are more disorderly. Policy Implications: The findings highlight the importance of prison context for dictating who experiences supermax and raises questions about whether prison systems have a uniform "bar" for supermax transfers. This in turn suggests a need for prison systems to reevaluate individual pathways to supermax and consider whether there are consistent metrics used for supermax placements. More broadly, the finding that context shapes who is transferred to supermax raises questions about the fundamental policy logic and suggests a need to investigate other solutions to disorder problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite persistent depictions to the contrary, coercion pervades the modern work experience and, in many significant respects, is underwritten by the power of the state. This article outlines some of the ways in which long-standing interventions by Canadian (and British) states continue to affect workplace relations today. To appreciate the scope of this effect, it is necessary to trespass across a number of disciplinary boundaries to include topics such as immigration, deportation, political policing, the legal foundations of employment law, the continuing influence of the British Poor Laws, and the role of prisons and prison labour in helping to regulate work standards. States acted to support proletarianization in a comprehensive way, but their tendency to favour large-scale, "labour-saving" building projects has often undermined the actual effectiveness of their efforts at social control. These patterns still haunt prison policy, as I will show toward the end of the article in discussing the Toronto South Detention Centre. Malgré les protestations persistantes du contraire, la coercition imprègne l'expérience de travail moderne et, à de nombreux égards importants, elle est garantie par le pouvoir de l'État. Cet article décrit certaines des façons dont les interventions de longue date des États canadiens (et britanniques) continuent d'affecter les relations de travail aujourd'hui. Pour apprécier la portée de cet effet, il est nécessaire de franchir un certain nombre de frontières disciplinaires pour inclure des sujets tels que l'immigration, la déportation, la police politique, les fondements juridiques du droit du travail, l'influence continue des lois britanniques sur les pauvres et le rôle dès prisons et du travail pénitentiaire pour aider à réglementer les normes de travail. Les États ont agi pour soutenir la prolétarisation de manière globale, mais leur tendance à favoriser les projets de construction à grande échelle et « économes en maind'œuvre » a souvent sapé l'efficacité réelle de leurs efforts de contrôle social. La politique pénitentiaire est toujours hantée par ces schémas de coercition, comme on le verra clairement vers la fin de l'article dans notre discussion sur le Centre de détention du Sud de Toronto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Archives of Criminology / Archiwum Kryminologii is the property of Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Legal Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The use of solitary confinement is one of the most pressing issues facing American Corrections. Due to the legal, financial, and moral costs and issues associated with solitary confinement, a great deal of research has focused on developing best practices for its use. However, to date there has been no examination of whether these best practices are being implemented in the Midwestern United States. This article seeks to fill that void with an exploratory look at the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes violence in the law seriously, scrutinizing three sites engaged in violent subject production and resistance: the Guantanamo Bay detention center, supermax prisons in the US, and European refugee camps. The concepts of martyring and torturing serve help to untangle the dynamics of the law's violence. The violent subject production techniques used in these sites are discussed as torture practices that aim to reproduce the dominant subjectivity. As the law has often proved unable to fully address the situation of the detainee, the prisoner, and the refugee, hunger striking as martyring is discussed as a way to deconstruct hegemonic subjectivity and to force the law to face its own violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on several years of bringing students on a tour of a maximum security prison, I posit the prison (tour) as a live performance that is only legible through distinct but interlocking registers of presence. I argue that the prison (tour) positions and assembles recalcitrant bodies conditioned by live, virtual, and spectral encounters with each other. The convergence of present and absent bodies at the site of the prison and the intermingling of these three registers reveal that while the prison (tour) may function primarily as an embodied performance of discipline, it unravels in salient ways and the participants therein find meaningful, if often subtle, ways of exploiting the resulting ruptures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the challenges that investigators face when conducting scholarly research on supermax prisons. Drawing on existing literature, as well as results of a survey sent to researchers who have published scholarship on supermax prisons, issues and suggestions for enhancing and growing this specialized body of literature are summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prisons and jails are the most invisible part of the American criminal justice system. In this hidden world of punishment, no prison is more shrouded in secrecy than the federal Bureau of Prisons' only "supermax" prison--the U.S. Penitentiary-Administrative Maximum known as ADX. Located in a remote area of Colorado, ADX has been described by one journalist as "a black site on American soil." The men at ADX are held in solitary confinement, locked in cells the size of a parking space for twenty-three hours a day, with little or no contact with other people. Some of them have been there for decades. This Article describes the work of the men at ADX and their lawyers, including the student attorneys at the University of Denver's Civil Rights Clinic, who have dedicated themselves to bringing the conditions at ADX into compliance with the Constitution, human rights principles, and basic human dignity. While the federal courts have found constitutional violations in some of the ADX cases but not in others, the civil rights litigation undertaken by these lawyers and clients has been instrumental in shining a light into this darkest of places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on in-depth, qualitative interviews that examine individual experiences in two different legal contexts: deportation regimes and supermax prisons. Through putting these contexts and experiences into dialogue, we identify common legal processes of punishment experiences across both contexts. Specifically, the U.S. legal system re-labels immigrants (as deportable noncitizens) and supermax prisoners (as dangerous gang offenders). This re-labeling begins a process of othering, which ends in categorical exclusions for both immigrants and supermax prisoners. As individuals experience this categorical exclusion, they cross multiple borders and boundaries-often against their will-moving from prison to detention center to other countries beyond the U.S. border, and from isolation to prison to 'free' society. In both cases, the state action that subjects experience as punishment is civil and, therefore, nominally not punitive. Ultimately, excluded individuals find themselves in a space of legal nonexistence. By examining these common processes and experiences, we argue that a new kind of subject is revealed: a disintegrating subject (as opposed to a juridical or disciplinary subject) whose exclusion reinforces the power of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of studies have examined whether the carceral experience has a criminogenic, deterrent, or null effect on offenders’ postrelease behaviors, but it is less clear whether exposure to different types of confinement similarly affects offenders’ postrelease behaviors. Using data collected from offenders released under postrelease supervision in Ohio, we examine the impact of exposure to one type of penal environment, supermax confinement, on offenders’ odds of recidivism and other postrelease outcomes. The findings revealed that exposure to supermax confinement had no impact on offenders’ postrelease behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how increasingly punitive prison conditions, epitomized by the birth and spread of the supermax prison, developed in the United States. This analysis builds on a growing literature about the 'new punitiveness' of U.S. punishment policy and its global proliferation. This article shifts the focus away from the policies that have led to increasing rates of incarceration, however, and toward the policies that have shaped the conditions of incarceration. Drawing on archival research and more than 30 oral history interviews with key informants, I examine the administrative and legislative processes that underwrote the supermax innovation in California in the 1980s. During California's late twentieth-century prison-building spree, prison administrators deployed multiple rhetorics of risk to extend their control over conditions of confinement in state prisons. As the state invested billions of dollars in prison building initiatives, legislators, who were focused primarily on building prisons faster, ceded authority over prison design and conditions to prison administrators. In the end, rather than implementing legislative policy, prison administrators initiated their own policies, institutionalizing a new form of 'supermax' confinement, pushing at the limits of constitutionally acceptable practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mike Kelley's 1995 sculptureEducational Complex, an architectural model that amalgamates every school Kelley ever attended, presents an ambivalent narrative on the psychology of memory and trauma, using institutional forms to comment on the unconscious. Memory and architecture merge similarly in the writings and images of Renaissance mystic and scholar Giordano Bruno. The idea of imaginary architecture is linked with punishment in theCarceri d'Invenzione, a series of eighteenth-century prints and drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Both theComplexand theCarcerireference subterranean spaces of shadow and illusion, and thus have an affinity with Plato's cave, with Freudian psychoanalysis, and with the mental torture inflicted by spaces of solitary confinement in contemporary American prisons. This article attempts to bring together discourses of irrationalism in Western intellectual history in order to suggest thatEducational Complexoffers both a context and a critique for modern spaces of punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Human Rights is the property of Canadian Journal of Human Rights and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As a criminal justice policy, researchers have encountered numerous problems attempting to evaluate whether supermax confinement achieves its desired goals. Among the many goals of supermax confinement is the incapacitation of the “worst of the worst” inmates. This type of custody, however, has been widely criticized for worsening inmate mental health. In an effort to better understand the treatment of the mentally ill in supermax confinement, we performed a content analysis on 42 state correctional policies. We found considerable variation exists regarding the treatment of the mentally ill as prescribed by official policies and that the majority of correctional policies dictate some level of treatment or intervention for supermax inmates. As criticism regarding the indefinite use of lockdown increases, we argue it is important correctional departments have a foundation that protects inmates and the agency itself, which begins with official policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of solitary confinement in the U.S. prison system, focusing on hunger strike campaigns in 2011 and 2013 in California, in response to the use of isolation units, and denial of basic physical and mental health care. Topics include information on the historic Eastern State Penitentiary; the Security Housing Unit (SHU) of the Pelican Bay State Prison in California and supermax prisons; and an assessment of the social impact of the strikes.

Supermaxes are technologically advanced prisons designed to keep individuals in long-term solitary confinement, structurally eliminating all physical, human contact for months, years, and sometimes decades at a time. Supermax designers and prison administrators explain that supermax prisons contain " the worst of the worst prisoners"--those too violent and dangerous to live in a general prison population. This article explores and challenges the legally and publicly accepted idea that supermaxes control violence. Drawing on interviews with and the writings of former supermax prisoners, I document the often-invisible ways supermax prisoners experience violence. 1 argue supermaxes should he viewed not just as tools of violence control, but as tools of violence production. Supermaxes are a novel and uniquely modern form of state violence, and their legal and ethical implications should be reconsidered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the recidivism covariates of 610 released inmates who were confined in a supermax unit in 2004. Follow-up data (an average of 66 months from prison release in 2004) were collected for each inmate to assess the recidivism covariates of those who re-engaged in crime after prison release. The findings show that when compared with ex-supermax inmates who did not recidivate, those who did were younger, more likely to be serving time for a drug offense, and had a history of prior incarcerations and disciplinary infractions while incarcerated. Time to recidivate, however, was significantly predicted by gang membership, length of sentence, and prior substance abuse history. The implications of this research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the July 2011 hunger strike, which is referred to as an act of prison resistance, in the supermax prison the Pelican Bay State Prison Security Housing Unit (SHU), California. An overview of the relationship between the killing of the Black Panther Party prisoner George Jackson in San Quentin State Prison, California and the aforementioned hunger strike is provided.

As a response to an increasing prison population and as a counteractive measure to problematic inmates, many states within the United States have established supermaximum (supermax) prisons or supermax units within existing prison facilities. Many criminal justice researchers have questioned the efficacy of these specialized units. Although the National Institute for Corrections has established model criteria to dictate what types of inmates should be placed in supermax custody, existing research has not yet examined if the states have chosen to follow the criteria or substitute their own criteria for admission to supermax custody. The current study examines 42 individual state policies in an attempt to ascertain how states determine which inmates are considered the “worst of the worst” and deserve segregation in supermax facilities and/or units. Implications of these policies and directions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research Summary Supermaximum-security prisons-or 'supermaxes'-symbolize the 'get tough' criminal justice policies that have developed over the past three decades in the United States and in other countries. Proponents believe that they effectively address critical prison system problems; opponents believe that they do not and that they create substantial harm. This essay examines the available evidence about supermaxes. Policy Implications A range of considerations are relevant to determining whether supermaxes constitute effective policy. These include (a) definitional problems in discussing supermax incarceration; (b) five critical dimensions along which evidence for policies is desirable and along which supermaxes fall short, including demonstration of policy need, credible policy theory, high-quality implementation, impact, and benefits that exceed costs and do so more than other policies; (c) the challenge of assessing causal claims related to supermaxes; (d) legal and ethical issues; (e) policy and political challenges confronting states; (f) policy options other than supermaxes; and (g) research gaps that remain to be addressed. The essay argues that causal uncertainty about supermax incarceration makes it difficult at present to claim credibly that it achieves intended goals. Policy implications and recommendations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite concerns whether supermaximum security prisons violate human rights or prove effective, these facilities have proliferated in America over the past 25 years. This punishment—aimed at the “worst of the worst” inmates and involving 23-hr-per-day single-cell confinement with few privileges or services—has emerged despite little evidence that the public supports it. Based on public opinion survey data, this study identified the extent to which support exists for supermax prisons and so tested three interrelated hypotheses about variation in public views. The focal contention is that support can be linked to groups that are most concerned with symbolic threats, to those most embracing of a belief in individual agency, and to those who have had negative contacts with offenders. The article concludes with a discussion on implications for theory, research, and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, was retrofitted in 2008 to offer the country's first federal Special Management Unit (SMU) program of its kind. This model SMU is designed for federal inmates from around the country identified as the most intractably troublesome, and features double-celling of inmates in tiny spaces, in 23-hour or 24-hour a day lockdown, requiring them to pass through a two-year program of readjustment. These spatial tactics, and the philosophy of punishment underlying them, contrast with the modern reform ideals upon which the prison was designed and built in 1932. The SMU represents the latest punitive phase in American penology, one that neither simply eliminates men as in the premodern spectacle, nor creates the docile, rehabilitated bodies of the modern panopticon; rather, it is a late-modern structure that produces only fear, terror, violence, and death. This SMU represents the latest of the late-modern prisons, similar to other supermax facilities in the US but offering its own unique system of punishment as well. While the prison exists within the system of American law and jurisprudence, it also manifests features of Agamben's lawless, camp-like space that emerges during a state of exception, exempt from outside scrutiny with inmate treatment typically beyond the scope of the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prison's (BOP) response toward the plight of men and women with serious mental illness in the federal prison system. It describes the conditions in the supermax prisons, units within prisons which represents the most secure levels of custody in the prison system, and discusses the serious mental illness as well as the case law that prevents those who suffer with one from being housed in a supermax prison. It highlights lawsuit challenging that the supermax houses inmates with severe mental illnesses.

The Eighth Amendment has long served as the traditional legal vehicle for challenging prison conditions, including long-term isolation or "supermax" confinement. As described by Hafemeister and George in their article, The Ninth Circle of Hell: An Eighth Amendment Analysis of Imposing Prolonged Supermax Solitary Confinement on Inmates with a Mental Illness, some prisoners with mental illness have prevailed in Eighth Amendment challenges to prolonged isolation. Yet an equal or greater number of these claims have been unsuccessful. This Essay considers why some of these cases fail, and suggests that one reason is that Eighth Amendment jurisprudence does not contain a well-defined doctrinal framework for courts to use in considering a prison's proffered "legitimate penological interest" in a given condition of confinement, including prolonged supermax confinement. In this Essay, we explore the idea that the federal disability discrimination statutes may offer a more tailored methodology for challenging solitary confinement of mentally ill prisoners. Unlike an Eighth Amendment claim, in which a prisoner typically challenges the aggregate of supermax conditions, a disability discrimination approach requires courts to assess the individual conditions that comprise supermax confinement, a process that requires an analysis of whether discrimination is occurring vis-à-vis each component deprivation. Finally, the Essay concludes by examining the disability discrimination approach in the context of claims asserted by the Civil Rights Clinic of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law on behalf of a mentally ill man who has been in isolation for over a decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing number of inmates with a mental disorder in America's prison population and the inadequacy of their treatment and housing conditions have been issues of growing significance in recent years. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that "over one and a quarter million people suffering from mental health problems are in prisons or jails, a figure that constitutes nearly sixty percent of the total incarcerated population in the United States." Furthermore, a person suffering from a mental illness in the United States is three times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized, with as many as 40% of those who suffer from a mental illness coming into contact with the criminal justice system every year and police officers almost twice as likely to arrest someone who appears to have a mental illness. As a result, the United States penal system has become the nation's largest provider of mental health services, a "tragic consequence of inadequate community mental health services combined with punitive criminal justice policies." This growth in the number of inmates with a mental disorder, combined with the recent rise in the use of prolonged supermax solitary confinement and the increasingly punitive nature of the American penological system, has resulted in a disproportionately large number of inmates with a mental disorder being housed in supermax confinement. The harsh restrictions of this confinement often significantly exacerbate these in- mates' mental disorders or otherwise cause significant additional harm to their mental health, and preclude the delivery of proper mental health treatment. Given the exacerbating conditions associated with supermax confinement, this setting not only is ill suited to the penological problems posed by the growing number of these inmates but also intensifies these problems by creating a revolving door for many such inmates who are unable to conform their behavior within the general prison environment. Housing inmates with a mental disorder in prolonged supermax solitary confinement deprives them of a minimal life necessity because this setting poses a significant risk to their basic level of mental health, a need "as essential to human existence as other basic physical demands," and thereby meets the objective element required for an Eighth Amendment cruel and unusual punishment claim. In addition, placing such inmates in supermax confinement constitutes deliberate indifference to their needs because this setting subjects this class of readily identifiable and vulnerable inmates to a present and known risk by knowingly placing them in an environment that is uniquely toxic to their condition, thereby satisfying the subjective element needed for an Eighth Amendment claim. Whether it is called torture, a violation of evolving standards of human decency, or cruel and unusual punishment, truly "a risk this grave--this shocking and indecent--simply has no place in civilized society." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the notions of security and securitization in the context of the housing of U.S. racial minorities. Topics include the role of minorities as consumers of mortgages, the incarceration of minorities in the U.S., and the role of security in the neoliberal ideology that the author attributes to former U.S. President George W. Bush. Also addressed are the racialization of the body in modern politics, the ideological relation between personhood and property, and the creation of supermax prisons that isolate prisoners in the U.S.

The article discusses the legal rights of American prisoners and the physical injury requirement of the U.S. Prison Litigation Reform Act as of April 2012, focusing on a call for judicial oversight of the alleged abuse of prisoners in supermax prisons and isolation units. It states that under the PLRA, claims of emotional or mental injury by a prisoner are not compensable without a showing of physical injury.

The article focuses on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and its impact on solitary confinement usage in Supermax correctional facilities. Topics include the Optional Protocol, the constitutionality of indefinite solitary confinement for convicts in correctional facilities within the U.S., and if indefinite solitary confinement violates an individual's human rights.

The article discusses the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case Graham v. Florida and its impact upon so-called supermax prison facilities. The author argues that the reach of the U.S. Constitution's cruel and unusual punishment clause be expanded in order to bar prolonged detentions in supermax prisons for nonviolent prisoners.