Isolation, Indeterminate Sentences Used to Extract Confessions at California Supermax Prisons

Adding to Kevin Gosztola's recent coverage [at FDL's The Dissenter] of the hunger strike at Pelican Bay prison (which has spread to at least six other prisons, including Corcoran California Correctional Institution and Valley State Prison for Women), I want to look more closely at one of the prisoner's demands, in particular their call for the abolition of the "debriefing process."

The conditions at Security Housing Units (SHU) at Pelican Bay Prison, and other Supermax prisons, clearly constitute torture and/or cruel, inhumane treatment of prisoners. It relies on the use of severe isolation or solitary confinement, the effects of which I've written about before in the context of the Bradley Manning case (see here and here). At Pelican Bay, the prisoners in "administrative segregation" are locked in a gray concrete 8'X10' foot cell 22-1/2 hours per day. The other time (if that privilege is granted) is spent alone in a tiny concrete yard. There is no human physical contact. No work, no communal activities. If the prisoner has enough money they can purchase a TV or radio. Meals are pushed through a slot in the metal door.

An end to solitary confinement, and in particular to long-term solitary confinement, of an indeterminate nature, is one of five "core" demands of the hunger strikers (see Word document).

Another key demand concerns the onerous and sinister "debriefing" process. The prisoners are asking the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to:

A) cease the use of innocuous association to deny an active status,
B) cease the use of informant/debriefer allegations of illegal gang activity to deny inactive status, unless such allegations are also supported by factual corroborating evidence, in which case CDCR-PBSP staff shall and must follow the regulations by issuing a rule violation report and affording the inmate his due process required by law.

Dr. Corey Weinstein elaborated on the "debriefing process" in an article at Prison Legal News:

More than 50% of the men in SHU are assigned indeterminate terms there because of alleged gang membership or activity. The only program that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCr) offers to them is to debrief. The single way offered to earn their way out of SHU is to tell departmental gang investigators everything they know about gang membership and activities including describing crimes they have committed. The Department calls it debriefing. The prisoners call it “snitch, parole or die.” The only ways out are to snitch, finish the prison term or die. The protection against self incrimination is collapsed in the service of anti-gang investigation.

The "debriefing" process is set up by statute (PDF). It is a long-term process, whereby the prisoner "volunteers" to "debrief," i.e., to snitch upon other prisoners and identify them as "gang" members. The debriefing prisoners are segregated in their own unit for many months, often more than a year. If they fail to finish the "debriefing" process, they lose whatever credits towards good behavior and release they may have accumulated during the debriefing process.

The Case of Tcinque Sampson

An example of the arbitrary nature of the "rewards" allowed to debriefed convicts can be determined by a filing a few weeks ago in the California Court of Appeal, First Appellate District, Division One in the case of Tcinque Sampson (Word doc). Sampson was sent to prison in 2008 for two years eight months for grand theft. He was subsequently "known to be a Validated Member of the prison gang known as the ‘BLACK GUERILLA [sic] FAMILY’ (BGF) per Institutional Gang Investigator (IGI), Officer G. Garrett," and sent into "Administrative Segregation" (SHU unit). If he could get enough credits for good behavior, he could have possibly been released in December 2010. In an effort to get out of isolation sooner, he volunteered it appears sometime in 2009 for the "debriefing" program.

But then, in January 2010, the CDCR changed the rules. From then on, no prisoner who was a "validated gang member" in a SHU could earn credits towards earlier release. For Sampson, this meant another 107 days in prison, even if he followed the rules, and even though he'd agreed to snitch (or make up incriminating evidence) about other purported gang-affiliated prisoners. According to the legal brief, "During a hearing with the chief deputy warden on September 23, 2010, petitioner inquired why his original release date had not been reinstated, given that he had submitted all of the information that had been requested of him with regard to debriefing. On September 29, 2010, petitioner was informed that he 'was "on the list" but the "list" was very long and that is why it was taking so long.' A few days later, Sampson told prison officials he “was no longer interested in debriefing because the institution had not honored its bargain with [him] to grant credits in exchange for debriefing . . . .”

Last December, the Del Norte County Superior Court granted, in part, a pro se petition for writ of habeas corpus, saying the new CDRC regulations about credits "violated the Ex Post Facto Clauses of the federal and state Constitutions." But the Appellate court overturned that ruling. Their reasoning tells us a great deal about how state authorities define who is or isn't a "validated" gang member. In the end, as we shall see, Sampson's refusal to engage in the debriefing process supposedly proved he was a gang member, and worthy of administrative segregation (or long-term solitary confinement). Bold emphases in quote below are added for emphasis:

... petitioner’s ineligibility for conduct credit accrual is not punishment for the offense of which he was convicted. Nor is it punishment for gang-related conduct that occurred prior to January 25, 2010, since petitioner was not stripped of conduct credits he had already accrued. It is punishment for gang-related conduct that continued after January 25, 2010.

Petitioner maintains he “did nothing” after January 25, 2010 to bring himself within the ambit of the amended statute, but we see the matter differently. “ ‘Gangs, as defined in [California Code of Regulations, title 15] section 3000, present a serious threat to the safety and security of California prisons,’ and ‘[i]nmates and parolees shall not knowingly promote, further or assist any gang as defined in section 3000.’ ” (In re Furnace (2010) 185 Cal.App.4th 649, 657.) The “validation” of a gang member involves no more and no less than the CDCR’s recognition of at least three reliable, documented bases (“independent source items”) for concluding that an inmate’s background, person, and/or belongings indicate his or her active association with other validated gang members or associates, and at least one of those bases constitutes a direct link to a current or former validated gang member or associate. (Ibid.; See Cal. Code Regs., tit. 15, §§ 3378, 3321.) For purposes of placement in a SHU, active gang membership or affiliation is considered “conduct [that] endangers the safety of others or the security of the institution” and “a validated prison gang member or associate is deemed to be a severe threat to the safety of others or the security of the institution” warranting an indeterminate SHU term. (Cal. Code Regs., tit. 15, § 3341.5, subd. (c) & subd. (c)(2)(A)(2).)

Once “validated,” an inmate’s continued active membership or affiliation in the gang and placement in a SHU continues until one of three things happens: (1) the periodic, 180-day review of the inmate’s status by the classification committee results in his or her release to the general inmate population (Cal. Code Regs., tit. 15, § 3341.5, subd. (c)(2)(A)(1)); or (2) he or she becomes eligible “for review of inactive [gang] status” after six years of noninvolvement in gang activity (Cal. Code Regs., tit. 15, § 3378, subd. (e)); or (3) he or she initiates and completes the “debriefing process,” thereby demonstrating that he or she has dropped out of the gang. (Cal. Code Regs., tit. 15, § 3378.1.) Unless and until one of these three eventualities come to pass, an inmate continues to engage in the misconduct that brings him or her within the amendment’s ambit.

The Appeal court was even more concrete in a later portion of the brief, when they stated, "By aborting the process, petitioner demonstrated that after January 25, 2010, he continued to associate with the BGF, continued to pose a threat to prison security, and continued to warrant housing in a SHU. " In other words, if you don't participate in their snitch program, you must, by the logic of the prison authorities, be an active gang member. Review of possible "inactive gang status" takes place "after six years" of solitary confinement, assuming the prison authorities determine you to have been "inactive" during this time. But meanwhile, there's a long "list" of debriefing or debriefed prisoners, any of whom, after many, many months of interrogation by prison officials, may have fingered you as gang member.

But these prisoners in Supermax are the worst of the worst, aren't they, in harsh administrative conditions because they have brutally murdered someone, or worse? According to the California Code of Regulations, Title 15, Section 3315, there are 23 "serious rule violations" that can send an inmate to an SHU for a determinate time. These include "acquisition or exchange of personal or state property amounting to more than $50.... tattooing or possession of tattoo paraphenalia.... possession of $5 or more without authorization.... [and] refusal to work or participate in a program as assigned," among others. Certainly violence or "mass disruptive conduct" is included in these codes, but so are "acts of disobedience or disrespect" or the perceived "threat to commit" a disruption or breach of security, including the "threat" to "possess a controlled substance."

From Pelican Bay to Guantanamo Bay

The parallels with the regime instituted by Department of Defense officials at Guantanamo are stunning. Simply replace "gangs" with "Islamic jihadists." And, as at Guantanamo, the emphasis is on coercing cooperation and collaboration with state authorities, with an emphasis on fingering other prisoners, and thereby building up a case for an even greater threat against state authorities, who must have recourse to even more coercion and wielding of state power, all in the name of security, even while constructing the bricks for the edifice of fear out of the very actions of state repression they exercise.

Indeed, quite recently, Jason Leopold and I published documentary evidence that the very SERE techniques that were "reverse-engineered" for use as torture at Guantanamo, Bagram and various "black site" prisons (including, perhaps the new CIA black sites revealed by Jeremy Scahill in an important new article at The Nation), were originally conceived to fully "exploit" the prisoner, including production of false confessions and the recruitment of double agents and informants.

One wishes, at least, that this was all a recent phenomena, one that can be "reformed" by a stroke of a pen. But the institution of state repression has sunk its tentacles deep into the body politic. The conditions at California's prisons are indicative of conditions at other state prisons and Federal prisons, and the situation is out of control. Politicians, wedded to law and order rhetoric, are leery of doing anything to change the situation.

The use of forced confessions, indeterminate sentences, harsh punishments and torture, these were the kinds of inhumane penal conditions that a key member of the Enlightenment, Cesare Beccaria, condemned over two hundred years ago in his influential book, On Crimes and Punishments.

If punishments be very severe, men are naturally led to the perpetration of other crimes, to avoid the punishment due to the first. The countries and times most notorious for severity of punishments were always those in which the most bloody and inhuman actions and the most atrocious crimes were committed; for the hand of the legislator and the assassin were directed by the same spirit of ferocity, which on the throne dictated laws of iron to slaves and savages, and in private instigated the subject to sacrifice one tyrant to make room for another.

From Pelican Bay to Guantanamo Bay, the practice of unnecessarily harsh prison conditions, amounting to torture, needs to end. The hunger strikers at Pelican Bay and elsewhere, whether criminals or not, are putting their lives on the line for the sake of basic human dignity. We need to take notice, and then take action. For more information, and to sign their online petition, visit the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity website.

Originally posted at The Dissenter/FDL

Craig Haney on on Psychologists, Detention Facilities, and Torture

Professor Craig Haney, an expert on the psychological effects of incarceration, and author of Death by Design: Capital Punishment as a Social Psychological System, gave an important presentation at last year's convention of the American Psychological Association. Speaking at the "mini-convention" symposium that examined the issue of psychologists and interrogations and allegations of torture, Dr. Haney spoke to the "degradation" of "our moral universe", not only in relation to governmental policies of torture abroad, but in the emphasis on totalitarian methods of incarceration domestically, and the distortion of decades of legal precedent in order to maintain this prison culture.

Dr. Haney kindly gave Stephen Soldz the opportunity to publish the entire text of his talk at Soldz's blog. I'll reproduce some key passages here, but to read the whole thing, I'm directing you to Soldz's site.

I frankly don’t think the ethical dilemmas we confront now as a society and as a discipline can be attributed entirely to 9-11 and the extraordinary -- maybe even in part understandable -- overreaction that our government had to the threat that 9-11 initially seemed to pose. I think instead that we had been prepared as citizens for a long time to react as we did-as, to a certain extent, at least initially, nearly all of us did. And the basis for this widespread reaction was rooted in domestic not foreign policy. That is, the road that has led us so directly to the morally compromised world we now inhabit was under construction for a very long time, in one sector of our society where civil rights have long been violated with impunity, and where people have regularly been subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment-in our criminal justice system.

Indeed, we have as a nation been reacting for a very long time to troublesome, inconvenient, threatening, and dangerous people inside our borders in one way and in one way only: by punishing them with unprecedented, increasingly unmitigated harshness- punishing them in deeply damaging ways and doing so with nary a concern for the psychological consequences that were being inflicted either on them, those connected to them, or the larger group of us who just got used to hearing about, if not actually seeing, it be done. The criminal justice system in the United States has become callously indifferent to the suffering of certain disfavored others over the last three decades and, along with it, so has the surrounding society. Our consciousness, our sensitivities, what we were willing to tolerate being done to others-indeed, to “the other“-have been shifted as a result.

Sadly, many courts also have dutifully followed suit, taking their lead from the very forces that politicized punishment in the first place, opting to stay out of the fray, frequently refusing to impose meaningful limits on the amount of pain that could be inflicted in the name of preserving civil order. Those of you who are looking to domestic U.S. law for guidance here to the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, for example, as a way to insure humane treatment for detainees in the course of interrogation or confinement-are bound to be disappointed. When pain is made the very purpose of imprisonment, and criminal justice policies seek to spread it to as many corners of our society as possible, then few punishments are too cruel or too unusual as to be legally unacceptable....

As a country, we passed laws that doubled or tripled and doubled again the rate of incarceration in the United States, so that we far outstripped literally every other nation on the planet in this regard. And no one said a thing. Decades ago we began to incarcerate African Americans in this society at a rate that far exceeded the rate of incarceration of Blacks in South Africa and we still do. And no one said a thing. We abandoned long-held principles of juvenile justice and began increasingly to prosecute and punish children as harshly as if they were adults. And no one said a thing....

Once you begin to think of the world as composed of people who are part of the human community and people who are not, to react with extreme punitive harshness toward those whom you have placed outside its boundaries, to demonize rather than to understand them, then a powerful psychological process is set in motion that eventually leads to exactly the place we now find ourselves. But, as I say, we have been on this path for a long time. It is not surprising that when we finally realized that we had come to the logical but unanticipated extreme endpoint in this process-trying to decide whether and how we could participate in the torture of other human beings, we were hard pressed to know what to do or where to draw the lines.

And without wishing to offend some of my psychologist colleagues, it is important to acknowledge that many of them have participated, actively or passively, in furthering many of these degrading and dehumanizing punitive trends. There are psychologists all across the country whose job is to sign off on these extreme levels of psyche- and soul- and family- and community-destroying levels of prison punishment. And sign off they do.

I have clients who have been kept in punitive segregation in Louisiana for 35 years, living their lives inside the confines of an isolation cell not too much bigger than a kind-sized bed, except for the hour or so a day they are allowed to venture beyond its confines. Thirty-five years living like this. But no prison psychologist has seen fit to protest this inhumane treatment. In fact, quite the contrary, every 90 days one or another psychologist dutifully examines them and dutifully signs off on their continued isolation. I’ve had scores of mentally ill clients in Texas who deteriorated so badly under conditions of isolation that they regularly smeared themselves with feces and I could be hear them banging their heads against the walls of their cells or the steel cell doors as I walked up to visit them. No prison psychologist protested this treatment or demanded that these men be released from this horribly inhumane form of confinement. I have had thousands of clients in the close management units in the Florida prison system who, in addition to the severe, debilitating forms of isolation to which they were exposed, were prohibited from talking to one another, from one cell to the next. If they violated this prohibition they were pepper sprayed by prison staff, who sometimes would put a blanket over the rear window of their cells so that the gas would linger longer in the air. Some of the men could neither read nor write which meant that, when they were denied the opportunity to talk like this, they were literally denied the opportunity to communicate with other human beings at all. They were kept under conditions like these for years on end. No prison psychologist to my knowledge lodged a complaint over these and other related brutal practices, threatened to quit in the face of them, or took steps designed end them.

There's much, much more to read in the full essay, and I highly encourage my visitors here to go and read the entire thing.

It's clear that our society has gravely degenerated, that even those who are committed to help individuals who suffer have had their training and their occupation terribly twisted into monstrous subservience to a racist, authoritarian status quo. Meanwhile, the ruling elite continues marauding from New Orleans to Baghdad, filling the coffers of their off-shore bank accounts, while the poor and unconnected have to cough up more money and mindless labor to keep the machine running.

For a contrary view as to what a humane penology might look like, one could start by reading Cesare Becarria's 1764 masterpiece, On Crimes and Punishment.