'Total Confinement' paints portrait of life inside maximum security prisons
11 February 2004
Joel Schwarz of the University of Washington

Scattered across the United States are about 60 penal institutions that are called super-maximum security prisons, control units or some other similar name. Virtually unknown by the general public, they first began springing up in the 1980s and house an inmate population that has been described as "the worst of the worst."

Under constant surveillance, these men are confined to their solitary cells for 23 hours or more a day. Their only windows are narrow and sometimes frosted, muffling natural light and any view of the outside world. They are only permitted outside their cells to be taken in restraints for brief showers or solitary exercise in a walled-in yard. They commonly use their body wastes as a weapon, hurling it at guards or smearing it on their own bodies.

Some inmates are released from these units after several weeks, but typical confinement can extend from months to several years. A number of prisoners have been locked up this way for more than 10 years.

What it says about our society that we resort to such institutions worries a University of Washington researcher. In her new book, "Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison," UW anthropologist Lorna Rhodes paints a portrait of the inmates locked up in and the staff that works at these facilities.

The precise number of supermax prisons and their population is unknown, Rhodes said, because few national statistics are compiled. The only available official number of inmates is 20,000, but she believes the actual number is more likely between 40,000 and 45,000. She estimates that between 15 and 25 percent of them are mentally ill.

"Total Confinement" offers a unique, up-close and disturbing look at the supermax prison. Other books have looked at prison life from the perspective of inmates or prison workers, but Rhodes' work describes how prisoners, workers and administrators interact and negotiate in this highly restrictive environment.

"We need to know what effects this form of confinement has on the people involved," she said. "Prisoners and corrections people have some of the same views because they are so enmeshed with each other. My purpose in writing the book was to describe supermax units as an institution, the different positions of the people involved and the way power operates inside an institution like a prison."

Rhodes' involvement with super-maximum prisons began in 1993 as part of a collaboration between the UW and the Washington State Department of Corrections to examine the mental health treatment provided in the state's penal facilities. While researching her book, she visited six supermax prisons in Washington and other states. She and her colleagues talked with 90 prisoners and 40 corrections workers, administrators and mental health workers, some of them on multiple occasions. Using her skills as an anthropologist, she also spent time over several years observing the operations and daily life of one supermax unit.

Rhodes is clearly troubled by the high percentage of mentally ill inmates who are housed in supermax units. Many people who would have been institutionalized in public psychiatric hospitals that were closed in the 1970s and '80s have been imprisoned instead and some wind up in control units. Sorting out the mentally ill or "dings," as they are sometimes called in prison, from other inmates is an on-going source of contention between corrections and mental health workers.

"Supermax units isolate inmates and cause some people to deteriorate," said Rhodes. "Others may not be mentally ill when they go in but develop symptoms such as hallucinations. Others become more violent as a result of the isolation. Mentally ill people tend to be hard to reason with, and may be shouting and raving all day and night in their cells.

"It is a human rights issue when people who cannot understand the rules in prison end up in a supermax unit and then can not get out. Is it right to sentence these people to years in one of them?" Rhodes asked.

While Rhodes is bothered by how long-term solitary confinement can warp the mental health of inmates, she acknowledges the need to isolate some prisoners.

"Corrections people would say, and I would agree, that you can't run a prison without segregation. Some prisoners are violent and dangerous to other inmates and prison workers. Corrections departments have a responsibility to the general prison population and to their staff to take these violent people out of circulation," she said.

"Do supermax units keep corrections staff reasonably safe while working with dangerous prisoners? Yes. But do they work as a solution to crime? No. It seems the more you have these places the more you need them from a corrections standpoint, and most of these inmates will be released some day, perhaps more violent and paranoid than when they went in. We have four control units in Washington and all of the beds are not filled. But we are building two more units."

Rhodes' larger point is that we have developed a mythology in our culture about how to contain threats that encourages the temptation to classify some people as outside the circle of humanity. Reliance on supermax prisons makes it more difficult, in her view, to come up with more effective solutions to problems of violence and crime.

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For more information, contact Rhodes at lrhodes@u.washington.edu.

For a copy of "Total Confinement," contact Colette DeDonato at the University of California Press at colette.dedonato@ucpress.edu