Oh, the irony.
This week’s New York Times magazine has a lengthy article on Halden Fengsel, a Norwegian prison located some two hours from Oslo, that is commonly considered the world’s most human maximum-security prison. From the article:
To anyone familiar with the American correctional system, Halden seems alien. Its modern, cheerful and well-appointed facilities, the relative freedom of movement it offers, its quiet and peaceful atmosphere — these qualities are so out of sync with the forms of imprisonment found in the United States that you could be forgiven for doubting whether Halden is a prison at all. It is, of course, but it is also something more: the physical expression of an entire national philosophy about the relative merits of punishment and forgiveness.
The treatment of inmates at Halden is wholly focused on helping to prepare them for a life after they get out. Not only is there no death penalty in Norway, there are no life sentences. The maximum term for any crime is 21 years — even for Anders Behring Breivik, who is is responsible for probably the deadliest recorded rampage in the world, in which he killed 77 people and injured hundreds more in 2011 by detonating a bomb at a government building in Oslo and then opening fire at a nearby summer camp. “Better out than in” is an unofficial motto of the Norwegian Correctional Service, which makes a reintegration guarantee to all released inmates. It works with other government agencies to secure a home, a job and access to a supportive social network for each inmate before release; Norway’s social safety net also provides health care, education and a pension to all citizens.
In sharp contradistinction, the magazine also features an article on the United States’ only federal “supermax” prison, located in Florence, Colorado and housing such prisoners as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph, 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef, Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols and U.S. F.B.I. agent-turned-Soviet-spy Robert Hanssen. Inmates at that prison, which is now the subject of the largest lawsuit ever filed against the Bureau of Prisons, spend approximately 23 hours of each day in solitary confinement. Of the facility, former warden Robert Hood said, “This place is not designed for humanity. When it’s 23 hours a day in a room with a slit of a window where you can’t even see the Rocky Mountains — let’s be candid here. It’s not designed for rehabilitation. Period. End of story.”
It is awfully hard to sympathize with the men (and they are all men) who are locked up in Florence and I think just about everyone agrees that we are safer with them where they are. That said, I think a strong argument can be made that the 23 hours of solitary confinement each endures is a form of torture.
In testimony before Congress, Dr. Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, testified that “a shockingly high percentage” of the prisoners in solitary confinement are mentally ill, “often profoundly so” — approximately one-third of the segregated prisoners on average, though in some units the figure rises to 50 percent. The emptiness that pervades solitary-confinement units “has led some prisoners into a profound level of what might be called ‘ontological insecurity,’ ” Haney, who worked as a principal researcher on the Stanford Prison Experiment while in graduate school, told the senators. “They are not sure that they exist and, if they do, exactly who they are.”
According to David Cloud, a senior associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to the reform of the criminal-justice system, “The research is pretty conclusive: Since people started looking at this, even 200 years ago, when a guy named Francis Gray studied 4,000 people in ‘silent prisons,’ the studies have found that the conditions themselves can cause mental illness, stress, trauma.” The devastating effects of solitary confinement, even on those who showed no previous signs of psychological problems, are now so broadly accepted by mental-health professionals that policy makers are finally taking notice. Last year the New York State attorney general approved a deal forbidding the placement of minors and mentally ill prisoners in solitary; in January, New York City banned solitary for anyone under 21. Gov. John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado signed a similar bill at the urging of the state corrections chief, Rick Raemisch, who spent a night in solitary confinement and wrote about it in this New York Times Op-Ed piece, concluding that its overuse is “counterproductive and inhumane.” As David Cloud said, “Even if you tried to employ solitary confinement with the most humane intentions, people are still going to lose their minds and hurt themselves.”
If Rick Raemisch found himself working to eliminate solitary confinement after enduring it for just 20 hours, imagine the impact on those who have spent decades in solitary.
I am reminded of Nelson Mandela’s words: “A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”