#supermax prisons

[newx-menfan]

Posting this because I don’t see a lot of newspapers talking about this-

A Dozen Black Inmates Reportedly Self-Immolated at Virginia Supermax Prison to Escape 'Intolerable Racism, Abuse, and Inhumane Conditions'

Twelve Black inmates at Red Onion State Prison have reportedly self-immolated since September in a bid to get transferred away from abusive

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

"When individuals are treated as though they have certain characteristics, whether they actually have them or not, they are likely to develop such characteristics or have them magnified because of the the treatment. This phenomenon frequently occurs when prisoners are classified as recalcitrant and placed in lockup units. Many persons who were minor troublemakers, or who were mistakenly believed to be intensely or intimately involved in prohibited activities (such as gang activities), have been placed in the lockup units where they have actually fulfilled the prophecy—they have become serious troublemakers or gang members.

Several processes accomplish this transformation. In the first place, many prisoners are frustrated, angered, and imbued with a sense of injustice when they believe they have been unfairly placed in lockup. As previously mentioned, the process of classifying prisoners to lockup is often based on hearsay. Administrators have always felt a great need to cultivate and rely on information supplied by informers. They have regularly accepted anonymous information (“notes dropped”) and have often coerced prisoners into supplying information on other prisoners. For example, administrators usually require a prisoner who is seeking protection or is trying to drop out of a gang to name those who threatened him or were involved in prohibited activities, such as gang activities.

Administrators also have offered significant incentives, such as transfers, letters to the parole board, and placement in protective custody, to informants in exchange for information. Though some of the information supplied by informers is reliable, much is not. The new forms of disruption that prison administrations have been trying to control through the use of informants erupted simultaneously with the loss of cohesion among prisoners and a weakening of the convict code, which dictated, above all, not to snitch. A new ethic based on the principle of everyone for himself, or “dog eat dog,” has emerged. Informing for self-gain is consistent with this new ethic and has become much more commonplace. Prisoners even approve of falsely accusing others for self-gain.

...

Once in the lockup units, the prisoners experience the extraordinary deprivations inherent in lockup status and frequently witness or are subjected to additional abuse perpetrated by lockup guards who express their extreme racism and general hostility toward lockup prisoners. This harassment further enrages many prisoners..."

- John Irwin, The Warehouse Prison: Disposal of the New Dangerous Class. Afterword by Barbara Owen. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 2005. p. 140-142.

[thenewdemocratus]

Kristen Cherye: America's Hardest Prisons- National Geographic Documentary

Kristen Cherye: America’s Hardest Prisons- National Geographic Documentary

  Source: Kristen Cherye Source: This piece was originally posted at The New Democrat  This is what happens when you house the worst of the worst together. You have all of these violent criminal inmates who see their time in prison as nothing, but survival. And making their lives as comfortable as possible. And I do not have a problem housing these people together to isolate them from inmates in…

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[angegauche]

I'm a little pissed

We have to do these discussion posts for an online class I'm taking and regarding the treatment of inmates in supermax prisons and a girl wrote (and I copy pasted this idiocy, so it’s a direct quote), "things like bipolar and schizophrenia are chemical imbalances and therefore a person is born with it, prison doesn't cause it.” I wrote a polite response that gently pointed out the flaw in her argument, but what I really wanted to say was this:

What a simple-minded view. That an illness is caused by one factor, and one factor alone.  While there is certainly a genetic component, it is NOT absolute. Traumatic experiences, like I don’t know, maybe being in a supermax prison where you are in solitary confinement 23 hours a day, certainly can influence brain chemistry and if you already have the genetic disposition for it, it could lead to a mental illness.  What a dumb-ass  Do people really think that their brain chemistry is a constant never-changing thing that is the same since birth? And do people honestly believe a mental illness is as simple as you either have it or you don’t? You’re either depressed or you’re not and if you don’t meet those DMS-V criteria you aren't depressed and you never will be? Seriously? Seriously? People like you make the world so hard to live in for the rest of us, so why don’t you get the fuck out of Kansas for 0.2 seconds so you can see that things come in all sorts of colors and shades, not just black and white.

  P.S. Why don’t you fucking read a book or make the slightest attempt to educate yourself before making such a sweeping statement about mental illness.

[5centsapound]

Since 2010, Gielen has used photography to confront the rapid construction of new high-tech prisons, part of a nationwide progression toward increased-security prison systems. The prison business is booming: Recognizing prisons as a growth industry, financial magazines like Barron’shave urged investors to consider buying shares of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner and operator of private prisons in the U.S.

With support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Gielen teamed up with the Canadian cultural historian Michael Prokopow to report on how Supermax prisons are designed. For his series, Gielen combines the stated objectives of prison architects with firsthand accounts of solitary confinement and the perspectives of mental health experts on the effects of isolation. In doing so, he provides a rare glimpse into the dry “science” of building maximum-security prisons.

In 2014, Gielen will launch a website entirely devoted to the “American Prison Perspectives” series. In addition to the photographs, the site will host an online forum in the hope of engaging regularly with the general public. via creativetime.org

Since 1980, when the U.S. prison population began to increase dramatically, Americans have been living in an era of mass incarceration, which Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice,has called one of the “greatest social experiments of our time,” the ramifications of which have yet to be seen. Members of the Spatial Information Design Lab, a think- and action-tank at Columbia University, go so far as asking, “have prisons and jails become the mass housing of our time?”

Raising questions about a culture of incarceration is pertinent at a time when the U.S. prison population is at an unprecedented peak. The building of new prison systems appears to be a growth industry, which I address through visual representation from both new physical and ideological vantage points. With this work I want to expose the prevailing trends—documented in studies such as Sharon Shalev’s prizewinning book Supermax: Controlling Risk Through Solitary Confinement—toward building increased-security prison systems, and illustrate how prison design and architecture do in fact reflect political discourse, economic priorities, cultural sentiments and social insecurities, and how, in turn, these constructed environments also become statements about a society.

Outside of a purely photographic context — this project aims to bring together the perspectives of disciplines that might not otherwise converge, to explicitly connect artistic, social, and architectural issues.

[...]

What connects the shot of a city section in California to these new prison perspectives is a startling recurrence of polygons, and in particular hexagons. I started noticing these prominent patterns cropping up repeatedly when I first photographed sprawl from helicopters, detecting hidden geometries in housing developments from the sky. And that really brings the notion of prisons as our new mass housing full circle.

[radicalrogerspark]

On the anniversary of MLK's assassination, we marched on AFSCME and celebrated their progressive past--and called on them to stop opposing the closure of Tamms supermax! Here, a man who spent seven years in Tamms speaks about its effect on him at a press conference, before we left for the union headquarters.

[radicalrogerspark]

Hostile environment at the hearing. All the red shirts are AFSCME/pro-Tamms.

[denyinghipster]

Recovering humanity in prisons.