Most European criticism of America's human-rights record focuses on the death penalty. However, the widespread use of solitary confinement in so-called "supermax" (super-maximum security) prisons is another issue. Atul Gawande has an article about it in the New Yorker:
Prolonged isolation was used sparingly, if at all, by most American prisons for almost a century. Our first supermax—our first institution specifically designed for mass solitary confinement—was not established until 1983, in Marion, Illinois. In 1995, a federal court reviewing California’s first supermax admitted that the conditions “hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable for those with normal resilience.” But it did not rule them to be unconstitutionally cruel or unusual, except in cases of mental illness. The prison’s supermax conditions, the court stated, did not pose “a sufficiently high risk to all inmates of incurring a serious mental illness.” In other words, there could be no legal objection to its routine use, given that the isolation didn’t make everyone crazy. The ruling seemed to fit the public mood. By the end of the nineteen-nineties, some sixty supermax institutions had opened across the country. And new solitary-confinement units were established within nearly all of our ordinary maximum-security prisons.
The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all.
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As it happens, only a subset of prisoners currently locked away for long periods of isolation would be considered truly dangerous. Many are escapees or suspected gang members; many others are in solitary for nonviolent breaches of prison rules.
Gawande notes the devastating psychological effects of prologned solitary confinement, especially on prisoners with intellectual limitations. It's worth noting that the European Court of Human Rights has held that solitary confinement is, itself, not a human-rights violation. The court has, however, suggested that prolonged periods of solidarity would amount to torture outlawed under international human-rights conventions. As Gawande notes, solitary is used in many U.S. prisons for extremely long stretches, almost as a routine state of confinement for many prisoners (especially those with gang ties).
Europe's problem, by contrast, is overcrowding. Many German prisons are overcrowded (g), and German courts are constantly being asked to determine precisely how few square meters per prisoner amount amount to violations of human dignity. You could say that each country's prison problems reflect its geographical and financial conditions: The U.S. has lots of space and (until recently) lots of political will to build prisons. This results in plenty of room for individual isolation cells, which get used because they exist (if you're only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail). In Germany, by contrast, space is at a premium, and there's precious little money or political will to build massive new prison complexes. So the problem there, in light of rising criminality, is too many people squeezed into too small a space.
Well, that is a cute theory. But I am wondering why you did not mention that for decades, solitary confinement was a major topic for the political far left in Germany: Since the 1970s, protesting against the "Isolationsfolter" of the Baader-Meinhof group members (the European Court of Human Rights case you cited) brought together RAF sympathizers. See e.g. http://www.bpb.de/themen/7PH8Y0,0,0,Die_Mythen_der_RAF.html
Posted by: Leander P. | March 30, 2009 at 06:49 PM