"No-Touch Torture" ?

"This is a form of no-touch torture. It sends inmates in one of two directions: catatonia or rage."-Alfred W. McCoy, University of Wisconsin at Madison (The Paradox of Supermax: The nation's toughest prisons may be driving inmates mad-and in the process, making us all less safe. Time, Feb. 5, 2007).

I have spent this Sunday reading the new Time and came across this startling article about "supermax" prisons where each inmate is confined to a tiny cell with no human contact or even change in light for up to 23 hours a day, save one hour for exercise. There are many critics to this type of incarceration, not just people like me who see threats to anyone's basic civil rights as a threat to mine. So food for thought:

The origin of solitary confinement in the U.S. is actually benign. It was the Philadelphia Quakers of the 19th century who dreamed up the idea, establishing a program at the city's Walnut Street prison under which inmates were housed in isolation in the hope of providing them with an opportunity for quiet contemplation during which they would develop insight into their crimes. That's not what has happened.

So I know it seems like blind idealism to think that a prisoner would sit in jail and meditate on his wrong-doings. And clearly that didn't work; I don't think that is the intention in supermax prisons today. Maybe the real change needs to come from the people on the outside who view prison as a place to corral bad guys. What about thinking of a prison as a correctional facility, designed to restore goodness in its inmates? Driving them mad seems as far from the goal as it gets.

By the 1830s, evidence began to accumulate that the extended solitude was leading to emotional disintegration, certainly in higher numbers than in communal prisons. In 1890 the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in, deploring solitary confinement for the "semi-fatuous condition" in which it left prisoners. The case was narrow enough that its effect was merely to overturn a single law in a single state, but the court's distaste for the idea of solitary was clear. "The justices saw it as a form of what some people now call no-touch torture," says Alfred W. McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of the book A Question of Torture. "It sends prisoners in one of two directions: catatonia or rage."

Read the article and find that there is hope. Lawmakers have taken steps to amend the system and restore rights to the prisoners. As so perfectly stated:

"We have to ask ourselves why we're doing this," says psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, a former faculty member at the Harvard Medical School and a consultant in criminal cases. "These aren't a bunch of cold, controlled James Cagneys. We're taking criminals who are already unstable and driving them crazy."

My heart bleeds.