03/15/17 – Nathaniel Penn on the inhumane and arbitrary practice of solitary confinement in US prisons – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Nathaniel Penn.
You might remember he wrote that great thing about the Waco biker shootout.
We talked to him, I don't know, about a year ago or something about that, and now he's got another very important piece of long-form journalism in GQ.
It's called Buried Alive, Stories from Inside Solitary Confinement.
Welcome back to the show, Nathaniel.
How are you doing?
I'm very well.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for inviting me on to talk about this story with your audience.
Yeah, yeah.
Very good work here.
Very important work.
And really good that you're bringing a spotlight to this issue.
It's, I don't know, I guess, you know, it's barbarianism.
What you describe here sounds like some other country compared to the one I think I live in from watching on TV, you know?
It does.
You know, there are a lot of people who feel that we show our incarcerated population too much sympathy and that, you know, when you commit a crime and the judge sentences you to your time, that includes anything and everything else that might be entailed by going to prison, including potentially being assaulted and going to solitary confinement.
It's really a kind of extrajudicial punishment.
You know, it's administered without any oversight or obligation to be fair by the prison bureaucracy.
Nobody that I spoke with for this story had ever heard of a prisoner winning on appeal a sentence to solitary.
There's no nationally agreed upon standards for what constitutes solitary worthy behavior.
Standards can differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction within one state or from facility to facility or even from CO to CO.
It's one of the most chilling things about this is that if your CO is in a bad mood or has sadistic tendencies or authoritarian tendencies, and the work I think tends to bring that out in people and possibly to attract that sort of a person, they can send you to solitary for not making your bed, for singing too loudly, for using profanity, for being litigious, for even shooting down a romantic overture.
You can be sent there sort of a la the movie Minority Report because of what you might do, because you're an outspoken, charismatic, politically active sort of person which might make you better able to organize other prisoners.
A guy who was a teenager when he was incarcerated told me that he accidentally brushed the sleeve of a CO and was sent to solitary for assault, and the commander on duty overruled the sentence.
But when he finished his shift, the staff successfully lobbied the new commander to reinstate it.
Another guy said he was in solitary because he tried to escape 22 years earlier.
The board had recommended twice that he be sent back to the general population, but the warden had overruled it.
I spoke with people who literally didn't know why they'd been sent to solitary, that the presumption of guilt is so total that one woman I spoke with was sent to solitary on drug charges she was innocent of, but while the bureaucracy spent 10 months figuring that out, she was in solitary confinement.
Yeah.
So, well, yeah, now let's focus on this because I think the common theme, well, a big part of the common theme of sort of the little tour you took us through right there is that there's no accountability for the people making these decisions.
There's no check and balance.
There's no separation of power.
As you're saying, one CO can overrule another, whatever, nobody ever hears about it.
Eyewitness News doesn't come and document the event.
Right.
But that's really what you found everywhere.
No accountability at all, unless you happen to have a very conscientious warden, something.
Yeah.
You know, there's a generalization, this is a generalization, but you know, at the very tops of the sort of corporate correctional pyramid, there is openness to reform.
A couple of years ago, every single director of corrections in the country signed a sort of manifesto declaring that solitary was overused and pledging to reduce its use.
But the problem is when you speak to people on the front lines, meaning COs, you get the sense that they think the senior executives don't really know the landscape.
I mean, being a CO is a brutally tough job.
I mean, I'm sure we're going to end up talking about what solitary does to the minds of prisoners.
Working in these units causes psychological symptoms for COs.
A third of them suffer from PTSD.
They have high rates of depression, domestic violence, substance abuse, suicide.
I spoke with an officer at Pelican Bay who warned me that the decisions his superiors were making to send longtime solitary prisoners back to the general population were likely to end in disaster.
I mean, he, of course, has a vested interest because fewer prisoners probably means fewer correctional officers.
That's certainly how it's shaking out in California.
COs, I think, are more likely than other people in the system to see huge numbers of prisoners as irredeemable.
You know, to that, I can only say that the Scandinavian system, which is considerably more humane and does not feature solitary confinement, has recidivism rates that are around a quarter to a third of ours.
Well, I'm glad you brought that up.
We treat people more humanely, and they are less likely to come back to prison.
There's this presumption that if you make prison incredibly unpleasant, people won't want to come back there, but in fact, it seems to be the opposite.
Yeah.
Well, it's kind of a rite of passage to go to prison in some communities in this country, you know?
What do you mean, you haven't been to prison yet?
You must not be living life right, then.
Yeah, I mean, I was told, actually, both by COs and prisoners, that going to Pelican Bay is a feather in your cap, like going to Harvard is, for someone from, you know, a different economic stratum, that you grow up idolizing the people who go there, and that when you finally get sent there, it's a mark in your honor, you know, it speaks to your credibility and your accomplishment as a criminal.
Yeah.
It's like joining the army, or going to an Afghan training camp, or going to college, or whatever it is.
It's a ceremonial thing, in a sense, right?
Yeah, sure.
So, and now, but I'm glad you brought the Scandinavia thing, because, you know, and you don't get too far into that in the article, but, you know, when you turn these things into daycare, and you say to these people, like, hey, yeah, let us help you, we'll really educate you, we'll really care for you, we'll really maybe give you some psychological counseling and all these things, all that sounds very effective, probably, and, you know, a lot of these people come, you know, real criminals who hurt people and stuff, they come from bad circumstances themselves, obviously, far more often than not, and could really use the help, but on the other hand, and this isn't just plain devil's advocate, I mean, I guess, what the hell, there's a bit of a right-winger in me, Nathaniel, throw the book at these people, I mean, when we're talking about crimes, we're talking about rapes and murders, we're talking about, I mean, anybody who ever reads the New York Daily News, ever, and just sees the list of the true crime stories on the right side of the page, what people do to their own children, this, I mean, so, what the hell do I care, these people are lucky that all they're getting is the psychological torture of isolation, when, you know, compared to what they really deserve for what they've done to people, by and large, is that fair to say?
Yeah, I mean, no, it's not fair to say, there's this idea, I mean, it's fair to say on the one hand, absolutely fair to say on the one hand, that the sentence should be proportional to the crime, and the sentence that is agreed upon in this country, legally agreed upon, is that you serve a certain amount of time, and or, you are sentenced to death, whatever people may feel about that, about the capital punishment, that's still the law of the land in some places, but there's this idea that the people in solitary confinement are the worst of the worst, and that simply is not true, there are a handful of people around the country who are sort of the Hannibal Lectors of the United States, a handful, and their names actually come up again and again in conversation, because there are so few of them.
The majority of people in solitary often are not even violent criminals, they're burglars, they're extortionists, you know, and the problem is that because of the psychological effects of solitary, and because of the fact that 95% of people who go into prison are eventually going to come out, the problem is they're re-entering our communities as worse people, more dangerous people than they were when they went in.
You know, the Director of Corrections in Colorado, Rick Ramish, said to me when I was interviewing him, how do you want them to come back, how do you want these guys to come back, since 95% of them will?
And the effects of solitary confinement, like a lot of things about solitary confinement, because there's so little transparency here, have only been studied in a sort of preliminary way, but the tentative conclusion thus far is that men who come out of solitary are more likely to commit crimes, that it's more likely those will be violent crimes, and that they'll commit them sooner.
You know, you take a non-violent person, and you put them in solitary, and you're potentially creating a violent person.
You're also most likely creating a person with severe psychological disorders.
I mean, the number of stories or legion that I heard about people who've never been diagnosed with or shown symptoms of a mental illness, and during their time in solitary were diagnosed with one, and even out of solitary, even back in the free world, they are on medication for life.
You know, and the other thing is, and as a libertarian, I think you probably will appreciate this sort of pragmatic side of this argument, solitary confinement was instituted to reduce prison violence.
It wasn't instituted to punish especially bad people.
It was instituted to reduce prison violence.
The problem is there's no evidence that it does that, and what evidence we have so far points in the opposite direction.
So it's a threat both to prison safety, because it makes these guys more likely to act out in prison violently, and to public safety, for the reason that I said, when they come out, they're more likely to be violent.
And all of this is because of what it does to the minds of prisoners.
And we've known this for almost 200 years, from the very earliest use of solitary in America.
I mean, the story begins, the GQ story begins, with a quote from Charles Dickens, who had just, in 1842, visited an all-solitary confinement prison in Philadelphia, talking about how it was the worst form of torture you could imagine.
The first all-solitary confinement prison in the nation actually opened up about 20 years before that, in Auburn, New York, and it was shut down after only 18 months of operation, when the state governor visited and saw that every single one of the prisoners in that prison, 26, had become psychotic.
Prisoners in solitary experience severe depression, rage, panic attacks, PTSD, paranoia, hallucinations, self-mutilation.
The suicide rate in solitary is five to ten times higher than it is in the general prison population.
One of the pioneers of solitary research has written that even a few days in solitary produces an EEG readout that's abnormal and characteristic of stupor and delirium.
Justice Kennedy told a congressional panel, this is a Supreme Court justice speaking, that solitary confinement quote-unquote drives men mad.
And researchers would like to investigate this in laboratories with test animals, that the effects of solitary are not just on the psyche, they're on the brain and body as well, but they need special waivers to do that, to do these kinds of lab tests, because it's against the law to treat lab animals the way we treat human beings in solitary.
Even rats.
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Even rats.
All right, now, so, okay, first thing, rewinding back to my dumb question that I asked there, and I already knew the answer, but I like to try to provoke as best I can.
The false premise of my question was that only really bad people go to state prison, right?
Only people who hurt somebody, only somebody, and you know what, ripping off a little old lady for her husband's life savings or whatever, that's a bad thing to do.
Someone should go to prison for that.
It's not exactly the same thing as mugging somebody, but there are some pretty horrible crimes that people perpetrate against each other.
But as you said, these people, they might have just been a burglar.
They broke into a house and no one was even home.
Or maybe somebody's a drug businessman and sold some drugs to someone who wanted them.
I mean, and then once you're in prison, though, now all bets are off.
Now, you know, I learned this, I guess I already kind of knew this, but Shane Bauer talked about this in his big undercover investigation of being a prison guard, was that once you're in there, nobody really talks about what you're in there for, because nobody wants to create material for the prosecutor of confessing to anything or giving anybody else power over them to snitch on them or anything like that.
So nobody really talks about that.
You might be in here for murder, you might be in here for rape, you might be in here for selling pot.
Nobody really knows.
And then, but once you're in, you're all as equal as a rapist murderer.
You know, you're all basically might as well be the most vile criminals, at least in the eyes of those holding you there.
Yeah, I mean, this isn't in the story, but I found it quite interesting.
Sort of lurking in the background of this story is the whole is the whole classification system.
You know, when you are sentenced to prison, you are interviewed, evaluated, assessed, and they decide whether on the basis of your crime, your psychological profile, other factors, you should go to a minimum, medium, maximum security prison, or straight to a supermax.
And if you're in a minimum or a medium security prison, and you commit the kinds of offenses that we were talking about a few minutes ago, from the spurious ones, like, you know, not making your bed or singing too loudly or rejecting a romantic overture, to much more serious ones like assault, you're not going to go to a supermax, you're not going to get sent to solitary.
There are other sanctions that are going to be applied to you.
I mean, you could conceivably get yourself into a position where the next time you commit a serious offense, you go to this, you go to solitary, but it's not going to be the first thing that happens to you.
Unfortunately, this classification system is like solitary itself administered in a highly subjective and way without a great deal of oversight.
And by all accounts, it seems to be prejudiced, it seems to work prejudicially against minority inmates.
So the body of prisoners from which the solitary population is drawn is already a body of prisoners that has been chosen in an unfair way, regardless of what their actual offenses were.
You know, there's just there's just no way in which this system makes sense, or is fair.
All right.
Now, I want to bring this up just because you know, not everybody can spend their time doing a lot of reading about this stuff.
But if anybody ever watches the movie, the hurricane with Denzel Washington, they they show in their famous based on a true story, they show in their the experience of being locked in solitary confinement as he goes basically mad and fights himself in there and all that kind of thing, give you a little bit of a flavor just so that you can daydream and imagine for just a second what that would really be like to be locked in a room, as you said, the size of a parking space for 23 hours a day for, you know, and as you read through this article, these quotes, these people are locked in here in solitary for decades on end sometimes.
It's just incredible.
So and then now talk, talk to us about drugs here, because I got the idea that maybe there's a good career in being a drug rep who goes and sells psychotropic medicines to prisons.
That sounds like a fat contract, huh?
You put them in solitary, drive them crazy, and then I'll sell you the drugs that chills them out.
Yeah, I mean, it feels like there's a lot of, I don't want to push this too far, but it feels like there's a lot of profiteering around solitary confinement.
As far as drugs in particular are concerned, there is a horror among people in solitary of acknowledging that they are experiencing psychological troubles.
And that horror is twofold.
On the one hand, if you start to say, you know, I'm starting to crack, this is breaking me, you are seen as more likely to inform on your fellow prisoners, which puts your life in jeopardy.
You know, people in solitary, though their freedoms are enormously restricted, are amazingly creative.
And if they want to get you, it might take a long time, but they will get you.
The other side of this is that prisoners don't want to talk to psychologists because the first line treatment is always to prescribe medication, to prescribe drugs that, by all accounts, are incapacitating, debilitating, that are, you know, sort of Thorazine-like, and there are effects on you that turn you into, as several people said to me, zombies.
So I think that there is a great deal of prescribing of these drugs, not just to men in solitary confinement, although you're creating, potentially, a group of people who are going to need those drugs by putting them in solitary.
I mean, I've done stories on medium security prisons where there's an inordinate amount of drug prescribing.
I mean, this gets into the larger issue of the way that prisons today function in our society, essentially as de facto, the largest de facto mental institutions in their respective states.
And in fact, as I say in a footnote to the piece, the Los Angeles County Jail is the largest mental health institution in the country, period.
You know, for a lot of these people, the first time that they're getting any mental health treatment is when they're in prison.
This creates a further problem in that when you put a mentally ill person in solitary confinement, it is going to be extraordinarily difficult for that person to get out.
You're under such close scrutiny in solitary, and it is so difficult, often, for mentally ill people to follow directions.
So once they're in, they're not getting out.
And you can imagine that a mentally ill person in solitary is not going to do any better.
Yeah.
Well, I guess a lot of times, especially when you're talking about the county lockup, you got people in there for minor offenses who aren't even, even if convicted, aren't even going to go off to state prison.
They can be put into segregation just for their own protection, right?
Here's somebody who's not a criminal, and we don't want to put them in with those real bad guys.
We can tell he's half out of his mind anyway.
And so they lock him in segregation for his own good.
But then, of course, it's, as you say, just as hard on him.
Yep.
Man.
All right.
So now one of the quotes in here, and I'm sorry, skipping around a little bit, but one of the quotes is this guy saying to you, or generally speaking, hey, man, we got some serious gang leaders here.
This is one of the California wardens or somebody.
And he's going, look, all this guy has to do is hang a jacket on a hook, and then that's a signal to all these guys to kill all those guys and all this kind of thing.
And, of course, we know that that's true, that gang leaders, word is law, extremely powerful kind of thing, especially in the context of a prison.
And so what do you do, Nathaniel, about somebody who is the leader of a hundred, maybe a few hundred other guys in the general population who will do whatever he says, because they have to?
Well, I mean, I can tell you what the state of California is doing.
I spoke with one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to Pelican Bay dispersing or beginning to disperse its long-term solitary inmates back into the system, into maximum security general population prisons.
And what's happening there, and lawyers are starting to pay attention to this, what's happening there is that the maximum security prisons are sort of hardening up.
They're becoming a lot more like shoes, a lot more like solitary confinement units, where people are locked down for nearly the entire day, where they're out of cell, privileges are few and far between, showers, the yard, and so forth.
They may, if they have any communal time at all, it's at mealtimes.
You know, maximum security in California means something very different now from what it meant a couple of years ago.
That's the first thing.
That's really too bad.
They're basically taking the solitary.
They're letting the people out of solitary, but they're making them bring the solitary with them, and then applying it to everybody else.
Like, when you get in trouble in gym class and everybody else has to do push-ups.
Yeah, I mean, I mentioned that, you know, there's a lot about solitary that's not studied and not sort of pinned down yet.
And one of those things is the actual number of people in solitary.
There's this organization at Yale, a program at Yale, that does this report annually based on self-reported numbers from the states of how many people are in solitary and the various details of their lives in solitary.
And it's a vitally important thing that they're doing, on the one hand.
On the other, people like the guy that we were just talking about are not included on that list, obviously, and neither is anyone in a juvenile facility, immigration and detention facility, military facility, or private prison.
You know, solitary confinement exists in those places as well, and we know next to nothing about it there.
Yeah.
Now, on the state level, do you know how many would count under that then as private contract prisons?
I mean, that's hundreds of prisons, right?
That are excluded then?
Yeah.
We don't know very much about prisons, about private prisons.
Actually, Shane Bauer's story was important precisely because it was done at a private prison.
Those places are under no obligation, as I understand it, to publish data on what they do.
You know, just to give you an example of how sort of closed off they are, a reporter last month published an account of her attempt to get info on a women's private prison in New Mexico.
She made multiple requests over a period of many months, and finally, when it looked like, you know, a lawsuit might be in the offing because she'd been so stonewalled, finally the prison sent her 78 pages.
And I looked at these pages because she posted them on her blog, and I would estimate that between 98 and 99% of those 78 pages were completely blacked out.
So that's what it's like.
Yeah.
Well, you know, some libertarians, actually, I don't know if they still do, but back, you know, a generation ago or so, they supported this idea.
Like, yeah, it'll be more efficient to do a government contract or something.
While other libertarians correctly said that no, no, no, you're just going from socialism to fascism, and with all the wrong incentives baked in.
Like, the less free the society, the more money your business makes.
That's not free market capitalism.
You know, lobbying for more laws and more people to be locked up for this private, rent-seeking, captive market type of a business.
What is this, Germany or something?
It was a huge mistake for people who meant well.
They made a huge mistake in thinking that that was a good idea, to go down that path.
And I know that's only part of this story, but as you're saying, blacked out pages, it's important.
There's even less accountability when it comes to these so-called private prisons, these contract prisons.
Yeah, I mean, we were talking about problems with guards in federal, state, and county prisons.
I mean, we can be pretty sure that the guards in these private prisons who are vetted even less are even more likely to overuse or abuse solitary confinement.
It's a way to make their lives easier.
That's how they see it.
You have a disorderly inmate, whether it's because they're mentally ill or for some other reason, and you just lock them away.
Problem solved.
That's how they see it.
All right, so now, real quickly here, I'm sorry, you mentioned, and there's one example in the article, that sometimes political dissidents get sent off into solitary just for showing up.
That's it.
They didn't even accidentally brush into a CO's elbow or anything.
Yeah, yeah.
And now, is that just because the COs and the guards or the wardens say so, or is that even, you know, usually because of a special request from somebody outside of the prison system, but inside the government, where, hey, I want this person treated this way kind of thing, do you know?
I suspect that it is the latter.
There were two people I spoke to for this story who were sent to solitary because of their political activities, clearly.
One of them was a black revolutionary, another one of them was a Marxist sort of member of a Weatherman-like group in the 70s.
And both of them are extremely smart, extremely charismatic, they've done their reading, and in the minimal contact that they had with other men in prison, it was clear that they were illuminating the world for them in a way that was new.
And I think whether because they were seen to do that because they weren't yet in solitary, or because in the case of the Marxist guy who, representing himself at trial, beat the FBI, and had a target on his back because of that, you know, they were just seen as too dangerous.
I mean, as I say in the story, solitary came into widespread use in large measure to deal with prison activism.
And I think when someone comes into the system who clearly is inclined in that direction, they want to keep that person away from other people.
All right, I'm sorry, we're just out of time here.
I gotta go.
But thank you so much for doing the show and for doing this great work, Nathaniel.
Good stuff.
Thank you so much for having me.
All right, you guys, the article is Buried Alive at GQ.
You gotta read this.
I mean, it looks like it's long, but it's not really that long, man.
I read it in 15, 20 minutes or something, and I read it carefully, taking notes.
So you can, yeah, pass it around, share, retweet, GQ.com, Buried Alive, Stories from Inside Solitary Confinement by Nathaniel Penn.
And I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, scotthorton.org for all the archives, 4,000-something interviews going back to 2003.
And also you can follow me, oh yeah, libertarianinstitute.org, scotthortonshow.
Everything gets posted there first.
And then, yeah, follow me on Twitter, scotthortonshow.
Thanks, you guys.
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