WASHINGTON — Imagine being locked alone in a small, bare cell for 23 hours a day. Your meals are slid through a slot in the metal door. You cannot see or talk to another human being. You cannot see out the window.
You cannot make telephone calls or have direct contact with visitors. When you do briefly leave your cell for showers or solitary exercise, you must strip and permit a visual search of your body, including bending over and spreading your buttocks. Your legs are shackled, your arms are cuffed and you are led by two guards, one of whom presses an electric stun gun against your body at all times.
Such conditions are typical in so-called "supermaximum security prisons"--the hottest trend in the U.S. prison system--which now house at least 20,000 inmates.
Popular with politicians, supermax prisons are under increasing scrutiny in lawsuits and official investigations probing persistent allegations of serious human rights excesses.
Supermax prisons are designed for what corrections officials call the "worst of the worst"--prisoners so violent, so disruptive, so incorrigible that they cannot be kept in regular custody. Politicians who want to be seen as tough on crime have championed the construction of such facilities, which cost considerably more to build and operate than regular prisons.
But human rights organizations and a growing number of independent experts say many of those locked up are not violent or dangerous criminals but seriously mentally ill individuals.
Sometimes, nonviolent offenders who have never caused trouble can get shunted into supermax facilities because it would be embarrassing to the authorities, having constructed such expensive prisons, to leave them half empty.
A report by Human Rights Watch said, "The conditions of confinement impose pointless suffering and humiliation. The absence of normal human interaction, of reasonable mental stimulus, of almost anything that makes life bearable, is emotionally, physically and psychologically destructive."
The Justice Department is investigating conditions in Virginia supermaxes after two prisoners transferred from Connecticut died under suspicious circumstances.
One, a young drug offender, committed suicide seven months before his release date. The other, a diabetic, went into convulsions after allegedly being denied his medication. Guards reacted by firing their stun guns at him, and he later died.
