As Pelican Bay Hunger Strikers Risk Death, Psychologist Testifies that Solitary Confinement is Torture
By Andy Worthington
On
Day 17 of the renewed hunger strike by prisoners in Pelican Bay State
Prison, and other prisons in California, prisoners, their relatives and
their supporters fear that there will soon be deaths amongst the hunger
strikers, because, as
SF Bay View
reported yesterday, the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation (CDCR) “has been treating the current strike, which began
on Sept. 26, as a mass disturbance and has refused negotiations.”
As the article explained, prisoners have begun to report “grave
medical issues.” A relative of a striker at Calipatria State Prison
said, “Men are collapsing in their cells because they haven’t eaten in
two weeks,” adding, “I have been told that guards refuse to respond when
called. This is clearly a medical emergency.”
To give some sense of the horrors of the system, the hunger strikers
have stated
that “513 of the 1,111 prisoners held at Pelican Bay have been in
solitary confinement for 10 or more years, and 78 have been held for
more than 20 years without access to light or open space for prolonged
periods of time.” Moreover, there are three other SHUs in California,
and nationally at least 75,000 prisoners are currently held in solitary
confinement, even though it is self-evidently a form of torture when
used for more than a short period of time.
Reports received by the
Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition
indicate that, since the hunger strike resumed in California, prison
officials have been attempting to freeze the prisoners out, “using the
air conditioning system in conjunction with cold weather conditions
where the prison is located.” SF Bay View also noted that, last week, a
hunger striker in Pelican Bay suffered a heart attack, and was taken to a
hospital in Oregon, and that other prisoners have been “denied
medications, including prescriptions for high blood pressure.”
With the authorities refusing to negotiate, to improve the horrendous
conditions in California’s prisons, and especially in the Security
Housing Units, Dorsey Nunn, the executive director of
Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
and a member of the mediation team working on behalf of the prisoners,
explained how many of the prisoners were not prepared to back down under
any circumstances.
“The prisoners are saying that they are willing to take this to death
if necessary to win their demands,” he said, adding, “Any deaths that
result from the men starving themselves will be on the hands of the
CDCR. We are at a point where we are calling on the media to make
inquiries on prison protocol if and when prisoners begin to die. If they
want to avoid that kind of scenario, the CDCR can start negotiating.”
Illustrating these points, prisoners at Corcoran State Prison have
made the gravest statement to date. “Due to what they have done here to
us,” they have said, “some men have stopped drinking water completely,
so we may well be close to death in a few days.”
The fear, amongst everyone concerned with the welfare of the
prisoners, is that the CDCR is not essentially concerned, and wishes
only to break the strike at any cost. As SF Bay View noted, prisoners
and their supporters have long expressed “serious concerns about the
state of medical care in Corcoran, Calipatria, Pelican Bay and Salinas
Valley,” where the hunger strike is ongoing. IN 2009, Dr. Michael Sayre,
the chief medical officer at Pelican Bay, was successfully sued by a
prisoner for “knowingly disregarding his severe medical needs,” and, as
Terry Kupers, M.D., a member of the mediation team and an expert on
prison health issues, has said, “The California prison system is in
federal receivership in part due to the substandard medical care
provided inside. It is my professional opinion that the hunger strikers
are not receiving the care that they need and that their conditions
could be exacerbated by the CDCR, especially if force-feeding comes into
play.”
As SF Bay View noted, “Force-feeding is a common practice used
against prisoners who refuse to eat and can involve forcing a tube into
the person’s stomach via the nose,” something that I am familiar with
from my research and writing about Guantánamo, where the force-feeding
of hunger strikers has been in place for many years, even though, as SF
Bay View also noted, “The practice has been widely condemned as torture
by hundreds of doctors worldwide.”
In the hope of providing further insight into the rotten and
unacceptable conditions of confinement practised not only in California,
but across the United States, I’m also cross-posting below the
testimony of Dr. Craig Haney, Professor of Psychology at the University
of California at Santa Cruz, regarding the issue of California’s
Security Housing Units, as delivered to the California Assembly’s
Committee on Public Safety on August 23 this year. The testimony was
originally published on Solitary Watch,
where it was noted that Dr. Haney “provides a historical overview of
the use of solitary confinement, litigation and research on solitary
confinement, and comments on the current state of the California prison
system.”
That is a rather mild introduction to what is an extremely
hard-hitting statement by Dr. Haney, demonstrating, in no uncertain
terms, that solitary confinement has the power “to drive prisoners mad,”
that the CDCR has known this all along, and that California prison
officials have deliberately ignored the evidence provided to them to
demonstrate that they are destroying prisoners’ minds on a colossal
scale, even though their policy is not even effective as “a technique to
control prison gangs.”
In some of the most powerful passages, Dr. Haney stated:
It is critically important in this hearing that we not
lose sight of the fact that all of the men confined at the Pelican Bay
SHU and in other housing units like it in CDCR continue to be treated
very badly, routinely worse than prisoners in any civilized nation
anywhere else in the world are treated, under conditions that many
nations and international human organizations regard as torture. They
live their entire lives within the confines of an 80 square foot
windowless cell, which they leave for an hour a day when are allowed to
enter a concrete encased but otherwise barren outdoor exercise pen. Save
the small glimpse of overhead sky they have when they look directly up
inside this pen, they have no contact with the natural world, not even
to touch or see a blade of grass.
They have no contact with the normal social world either. Indeed, the
only regular physical contact they have with another human being is the
incidental brushing up against the guards who must first place them in
handcuffs and chains before they escort them out of their cells and
housing units. They visit loved ones through thick glass and over
phones, and are thus denied the opportunity to ever touch another human
being with affection. This has gone on unabated, for years and years,
for some of these men for several decades now.
Statement of Professor Craig Haney at Hearing of California Assembly Public Safety Committee, August 23, 2011
My name is Craig Haney. I am a Professor of Psychology at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. I have been studying the
psychological effects of prison confinement, including the effects of
solitary confinement, for well over 30 years. That research has included
in-depth analyses of the conditions of confinement in many if not most
of the facilities in the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation (CDCR), including the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit. I
have testified as an expert witness in most of the major prison
conditions lawsuits that have occurred in California over the last
several decades, including ones directly pertinent to today’s hearing — Toussaint v. McCarthy [i], Coleman v. Gomez [ii], Madrid v. Gomez [iii], and the most recent case of Brown v. Plata
[iv]. In the 10 short minutes I have available to me I want to make
several brief points that hopefully will put today’s important issues in
a somewhat larger context.
The first is some historical context. It is that CDCR officials
certainly knew — or should have known — at the time they created the
Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in the late 1980s, that it would
expose prisoners to psychologically dangerous conditions of confinement.
Indeed, as a society we have known since at least the mid-19th century
that the practice of solitary confinement was psychologically harmful
and could significantly damage those persons who were subjected to it on
a long-term basis. Indeed, a hundred or more years before Pelican Bay
was designed and built, public figures like Charles Dickens and Alexis
De Tocqueville wrote eloquently about the evils of prison solitary
confinement and its power to drive prisoners mad.
Our own United States Supreme Court acknowledged as much in an 1890 case known as In re Medley,
when Justice Miller wrote that this form of imprisonment had been
universally abandoned because, in his words: “A considerable number of
the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous
condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and
others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while
those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in
most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any
subsequent service to the community.” [v]
If CDCR officials were unaware of these vivid historical precedents,
they certainly were aware of many more immediate ones. Indeed, for the
10 years preceding the construction of Pelican Bay, the Department was
engaged in continuous and contentious litigation — from the late 1970s
through the 1980s — that focused on exactly these issues: the harmful
effects of solitary or isolated confinement and the wrongheadedness of
attempting to use it as a technique to control prison gangs. Both issues
were at the very heart of a federal court case in which federal judge
Stanley Weigel repeatedly chastised the Department of Corrections for
the inhumane conditions that were being operated in the so-called lockup
units in San Quentin, Folsom, Soledad, and DVI. I know this personally
because I provided much of the testimony that helped to establish many
of those facts.
Instead of taking that expert information and those judicial
admonitions to heart, CDCR officials simply and cynically ignored them,
and moved on to create yet another lockup unit, this one on a vast,
unprecedented scale that was explicitly designed to impose hitherto
unimagined levels of isolation in the “supermax” prison at Pelican Bay.
There can be no doubt that they knew the risks they were taking with the
psyches of the prisoners who were confined there; as I say, I and many
other experts, and at least one federal judge, had clearly and
repeatedly told them so throughout the Toussaint litigation. In
fact, in the entire 10-plus year period of that litigation, the
Department never presented one single expert witness to dispute the
facts that we presented about this potential to do great harm. They just
deliberately and indifferently ignored them.
Indeed, notwithstanding the clear and undeniable evidence that
long-term solitary confinement exposed prisoners to extreme
psychological dangers, and despite the unprecedented and uncharted
levels of nearly complete isolation to which they knew Pelican Bay would
expose prisoners, there is no evidence that CDCR officials ever
bothered to consult with any other psychological or mental health
experts about the design of the facility to obtain advice about what the
effects of the kind of isolation they were planning to impose might
have on the prisoners in order to determine how those effects might be
ameliorated by one or another design feature or approach. As one sign of
how little they appeared to care, CDCR officials chose to open Pelican
Bay prison and operate it for well over a year with only one single
master’s level psychologist on staff to administer to the needs of the
entire population of approximately 4000 prisoners at the entire prison,
including the 1500 who were housed under truly dangerous levels of
isolation in the SHU.
When those isolated and deprived conditions and their psychological
effects were finally scrutinized in federal district court a few years
later, Judge Thelton Henderson acknowledged that, in his words, the
Pelican Bay SHU “may press against the outer limits of what humans can
psychologically tolerate.” [vi] As you no doubt know, Judge Henderson
ordered some significant changes in certain practices that took place at
the prison, most notably in its use-of-force policies and the screening
and removal of the most seriously mentally ill prisoners. He did not
shut the prison down, although perhaps in retrospect wonders if he
should have.
What is important to keep in mind, however, is that although he did
not shut the Pelican Bay SHU down, the facility had only been in
operation for a few years at the time of the hearing in Madrid, and had been operating for a mere 6 years at the time of he issued his strongly worded Madrid
opinion. Back then, in 1995, as Judge Henderson himself noted, “[we
could] not begin to speculate on the impact that Pelican Bay SHU
conditions [might] have on inmates confined in the SHU for periods of 10
or 20 years or more.” [vii] Of course, it is now more than 20 years
since the facility was opened. Unfortunately, we no longer need to
speculate. Indeed, some of the men who were on that first busload of
prisoners brought to this stark, barren, and desolate place in the late
1980s are still there, never having left.
It is critically important in this hearing that we not lose sight of
the fact that all of the men confined at the Pelican Bay SHU and in
other housing units like it in CDCR continue to be treated very badly,
routinely worse than prisoners in any civilized nation anywhere else in
the world are treated, under conditions that many nations and
international human organizations regard as torture. They live their
entire lives within the confines of an 80 square foot windowless cell,
which they leave for an hour a day when are allowed to enter a concrete
encased but otherwise barren outdoor exercise pen. Save the small
glimpse of overhead sky they have when they look directly up inside this
pen, they have no contact with the natural world, not even to touch or
see a blade of grass.
They have no contact with the normal social world either. Indeed, the
only regular physical contact they have with another human being is the
incidental brushing up against the guards who must first place them in
handcuffs and chains before they escort them out of their cells and
housing units. They visit loved ones through thick glass and over
phones, and are thus denied the opportunity to ever touch another human
being with affection. This has gone on unabated, for years and years,
for some of these men for several decades now.
Not surprisingly, this mistreatment has had terrible consequences for
many of them. In our studies of prisoners at Pelican Bay, we have
documented the multiple ways in which they are suffering. The list of
symptoms is far too long for me to recite in the short time available to
me (but it is contained in the written material I have provided to your
staff). [viii] In short, prisoners in these units complain of chronic
and overwhelming feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and depression.
Rates of suicide in the California lockup units are by far the highest
in any prison housing units anywhere in the country. Many SHU inmates
become deeply and unshakably paranoid, and are profoundly anxious around
and afraid of people (on those rare occasions when they are allowed
contact with them). Some begin to lose their grasp on their sanity and
badly decompensate. Others are certain that they will never be able to
live normally among people again and are consumed by this fear. Many
deteriorate mentally and emotionally, and their capacity to function as
remotely effective, feeling, social beings atrophies.
These prisoners are paying a terrible price as pawns in this failed
experiment, a price in terms of the pain they feel during the time they
are housed in isolation, and a perhaps an even greater price when they
are released and find they are unable to cope with the demands of a
normal social life outside prison. To my mind, there is now clear and
convincing evidence that this misguided attempt at managing California
prison gangs simply does not work: when Pelican Bay came on line in the
late 1980s California had a serious prison gang problem; it now has the
worst one in the entire nation. Indeed, I do not believe the CDCR can
present one single shred of reliable evidence that its
gang-control-through-isolation policy is effective. In fact, I believe
that a compelling argument can be made that the SHU units actually have
made the state prison system’s gang problem much worse rather than
better. Thus, the suffering of the SHU prisoners is not only in vain, it
is counterproductive.
The specter of gangs is being used as a justification to continue to
impose these draconian conditions, but it must not be allowed to. People
join gangs in prison for the same reason that they join them on the
streets — because they believe their own safety and self defense depends
on it, and because they have no other way to gain access to things they
need (like a sense of belongingness and purpose in a world that seems
to deprive them of it) and things they feel they want (sometimes illicit
things, ones that are made more attractive by the deprived
circumstances under which they live). But this also means that gangs can
be effectively controlled in prison in much they same way that they are
effectively controlled on the streets. To be sure, steps have to be
taken to make the “neighborhoods” in which prisoners live as safe as
possible, by limiting access to the worst aspects of gang life — weapons
and drugs. (In prison, frankly, this also means doing a better job of
policing correctional officers as well as prisoners.)
More importantly, however, gangs are effectively controlled on the
streets by providing members and potential members with meaningful and
hopeful alternatives, pathways to genuinely better futures that they can
choose instead of gang life, and which their gang involvement would
sacrifice. In prison, just as on the streets, gangs flourish where these
kinds of alternatives are limited or non-existent. The overcrowded
wasteland that the California prison system has become over the last 30
years, one almost completely lacking in meaningful rehabilitation
programs, vocational or educational programming goes a long way in
explaining the proliferation of the gangs.
In 2002, for example, only a little more than half of all prisoners
in California were employed in prison jobs of any kind. [ix] By 2006,
the situation had gotten worse rather than better: more than 50% of
California prisoners were released from prison that year without having
participated in a single rehabilitation or job training program nor
having had a single work assignment throughout their period entire
prison sentence. [x]
The gangs have stepped in to fill this void. Because the CDCR offers
most prisoners little or nothing in the way of programming or pathways
to a better future, many feel they have little or nothing to lose. In
the same way that gang abatement programs on the street that focus
entirely on punishment and suppression are doomed to fail, the CDCR’s
SHU-based isolation-and-deterrence-only model will never work in the
absence of genuine, meaningful pathways for prisoners to do productive
time.
Finally, I am aware that the CDCR intends to make some due process
modifications in the procedures and practices that are in use in the
Pelican Bay SHU (and presumably the other SHU units in the state), and
that we are going to hear about them momentarily from Department of
Corrections officials who will testify next. As best I understand them,
these changes represent first steps along the path of creating a system
that is fairer and more humane. For this, the Department is to be
applauded. These new procedures suggest that the CDCR has come a very
long way since those early days when it insisted on stubbornly ignoring
the warnings that many of them give them about the path they had
embarked on. It has taken a long time — far too long, in my opinion —
but at least the process has begun.
However, as a veteran of the process of trying to create improved
prison conditions and practices in California, I have to remind you that
announcing intentions are not the same thing as solving problems or
actually making changes. Moreover, these first steps are not final
solutions and they do not begin to effectively address the core
injustice and inhumanity of the Pelican Bay—the profound isolation it
imposes and the sheer lengths of time to which so many men are subjected
to it.
I have no reason to believe that Department officials are insincere,
and I am willing to take them at their word that they are trying to
improve this notorious facility. But Pelican Bay’s legacy — its history
of mistreatment, misery, and willful neglect — is long-standing. It will
take a great deal of effort, and oversight to overcome the atmosphere
of distrust and abuse that has surrounded this place. I am hopeful that
this Committee will remain vigilant in this regard, and help the
Department follow through on its new commitment, a commitment to at
least begin the process of meaningful change.
Footnotes
[i] Toussaint v. McCarthy, 553 F. Supp. 1365 (1983); 722 F. 2d 1490 (9th Cir. 1984) 711 F. Supp. 536 (1989).
[ii] Coleman v. Gomez, 912 F. Supp. 1282 (1995).
[iii] Madrid v. Gomez, 889 F. Supp. 1146 (N.D. Cal. 1995).
[iv] Brown v. Plata, 131 S.Ct. 1910 (2011).
[v] In re Medley, 134 U.S. 160, 168 (1890).
[vi] Madrid at 1268.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] In my own study of a representative sample of prisoners in the
Pelican Bay SHU, for example, every symptom of psychological distress
that I measured but one (fainting spells) was suffered by more than half
of the prisoners. Many of the symptoms were reported by two-thirds or
more of the prisoners in this isolated housing unit, and some were
suffered by nearly everyone. Well over half of the Pelican Bay SHU
prisoners reported a constellation of symptoms — headaches, trembling,
sweaty palms, and heart palpitations — that is commonly associated with
hypertension. I also found that almost all of the prisoners evaluated
reported ruminations or intrusive thoughts, an oversensitivity to
external stimuli, irrational anger and irritability, difficulties with
attention and often with memory, and a tendency to socially withdraw.
Almost as many prisoners reported a constellation of symptoms indicative
of mood or emotional disorders — concerns over emotional flatness or
losing the ability to feel, swings in emotional responding, and feelings
of depression or sadness that did not go away. Finally, sizable
minorities of the prisoners reported symptoms that are typically only
associated with more extreme forms of psychopathology — hallucinations,
perceptual distortions, and thoughts of suicide. See Craig Haney, Mental
Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and “Supermax” Confinement, Crime & Delinquency 49, 124-156 (2003). [Previously provided to Committee staff.]
[ix] Specifically, only 53.6% of the more than 150,000 California
prisoners were employed in any type of work assignment at the end of the
year 2002. California Department of Corrections,
CDC Facts, January 2003.
[x] California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Expert Panel
on Adult Offender Reentry and Recidivism Reduction Programs, Report to
the California State Legislature: A Roadmap for Effective Offender
Programming in California (2007), at p. 7.
Andy Worthington is the author of
The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the
US and the
UK) and of two other books:
Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and
The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my
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in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “
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