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The Globalization of Supermax Prisons edited by J.I.Ross (Ed.). New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press (2013) 236pp. £16.93pb ISBN 978‐0‐813‐55740‐3

2014; Wiley; Volume: 53; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/hojo.12091

1468-2311

Roy D. King,

Crime Patterns and Interventions

The Globalization of Supermax Prisons: Beyond the World of Humpty Dumpty ‘I don't know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don't – till I tell you. I meant “there's a nice knock-down argument for you!” ’ ‘But “glory” doesn't mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected. ‘When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – nothing more nor less.’ Editors sometimes lose sleep worrying that their collection will only be as good as their weakest contribution. The essays in this collection are, indeed, varied, both in quality and style, but this is a case where the contributors have been poorly served by their editor such that the whole is never more than the sum of its parts. Indeed so little is there by way of synthethic integration or conceptual clarification that one regrets the missed opportunity and has to wonder whether the kind words expressed both in Loïc Wacquant's foreword, and the cover blurbs by Lorna Rhodes and Sharon Shalev, were written on the basis of the promises of a book proposal rather than on a reading of the resultant text. In his introduction, Ross takes me to task because: ‘(a)lthough King's thesis in regard to England and Wales is well formulated’ [as in King and Resodihardjo 2010] ‘his definition of supermax is overly narrow’ (p.8). Of course, I have no objection to criticism of my definition, which is essentially a refinement of the ‘official’ one offered by Chase Riveland of the National Institute of Corrections (1997). But it does seem reasonable to expect a better one, or at the very least an alternative, in its place. Instead, he simply says that the problem with my definition is that it ‘would eliminate many facilities (especially in the United States) that corrections professionals and scholars unquestionably identify as supermax prisons’ (p.8). But a few pages earlier, he wrote: ‘countries that operate them’ [that is, ‘supermaxes’] ‘often deny their existence or dissociate their facilities from American-style supermaxes by calling them by other names’. So in the US, supermax prisons are what corrections officials say they are but elsewhere there are supermaxes despite what corrections officials say they are? Hitherto, Humpty Dumpty has had only a marginal role in scientific discourse, but here he has been placed centre stage. Ross is particularly concerned that my definition ‘also excludes Belmarsh Prison and the units that house suspected and convicted terrorists’, although even his chosen author for the chapter on Britain, West Crews, falls short of describing them as supermax. Belmarsh is probably one of the most complex prisons in the world and it has attracted much criticism, albeit, largely because it is tasked by the courts with holding a number of suspected terrorists, mostly Muslim, on remand and who may never be brought to trial. They are held in conditions of very high security, amid fears of ‘radicalisation’. It is a terrible dilemma. But this does not, of itself, make it a ‘supermax’ prison. Last year I took members of the International Secretariat of Amnesty International for visits to Belmarsh and the Close Supervision Centres, shortly after I had accompanied them on an official ‘mission’ to Pelican Bay, Corcoran and Valley State in California. It would be wrong of me to try to represent their views, but whilst concerned at the level of security, it was clear that they regarded these units as a different animal from those they had seen in California. Apart from anything else, the philosophy underlying the mainly individualised policies and practices involving the treatment of prisoners, and the level of internal and external oversight are quite different. I choose the animal metaphor precisely because it is used by Wacquant in his foreword: ‘readers will wonder and ponder (as some of their authors candidly do), are the different chapters chasing after the same animal?’ (p.xii). In fact, while none of the authors put it in quite those terms, most seem to struggle with whether or not there is a supermax in their jurisdiction. West Crews, in her tendentious chapter on Britain, notes that since it is not possible to have a level of security greater than the maximum then the concept of supermax, whilst unmistakably American, is, nevertheless, meaningless. O'Day and O'Connor point out that, in Mexico, ‘the term “super” as in “supermax” is not generally understood’ and that ‘the term “maximum security” is used … to refer to a variety of facilities that in the United States would be designated as anything from mixed medium/maximum … to supermax’ (p.40). As Wacquant rightly argues, the definitional problem arises because supermax is ‘an administrative concept’ which has been ‘smuggled into the social science of the prison’ … during a ‘short segment of the arbitrary history of punishment in one country’ (pp.xii–xiii). What is needed, he argues, is a specification of the ‘shared traits and distinguishing features’ (p.xii) of the various institutional arrangements described in the collection of essays that actually constitute a supermax. As Waquant notes, the book does not resolve the quandaries around these issues and it has to be said that few of the contributions provide much in the way of conceptual clarity. In a particularly purple passage, which takes ever more florid flight as it goes along, Wacquant essays the following towards what he suggests is a ‘rigorous analytic concept’ (p.xii, italics in original): ‘supermax’ ‘designates a species of meta-prison’ [presumably in the self referential sense of meta], ‘a prison for the prison, a facility dedicated in all or most of its aspects (architecture, technology, activities, schedules, social relations, etc) to redoubling the treatment that the penitentiary inflicts on those most recalcitrant to it, and therefore geared to dissolving – or rather, “disappearing” – the gaps, failings, and contradictions of that treatment. In the current era, the meta-prison transposes the philosophies of neutralization and retribution from the outside to the inside of the carceral institution, applying them, as it were, to the “meta-criminals” who repeatedly violate the laws of the administration of penal sanction. It is the materialization of reflexive punitive penality, that is punishment turned onto itself and not just redoubled but squared’ (p xii, italics in original). Presumably the orders of magnitude here are presented for hyperbolic effect – if taken literally, supposing they could be measured, I doubt that any institution could ever meet the criteria. Leaving that aside it is not the kind of rigorous analytic concept that could easily be operationalised. Wacquant does provide a list of empirical questions to be asked of every characteristic used to depict this or that presumed instance of a ‘supermax’ or deviation from it – how many hours of solitude, how little human contact must inmates endure etc – for it to qualify. It is not entirely clear whether, and if so how, these relate to Wacquant's ‘rigorous analytical concept’ or whether they are presented as being beside the point, and a fool's errand to pursue them. En passant, I should note that Wacquant sees the operation of supermax as ‘a straightforward extension of current punishment policy’, rather than as I once put it, ‘a routine and cynical perversion of penological principles’ (King 1999, p.182). For the avoidance of doubt, I rather took it for granted that supermax emerged alongside the ‘new penology’ in an age of mass incarceration: the penological principles I had in mind were those enshrined in the UN Standard Minimum Rules and the Convention Against Torture. In his editorial introduction, Ross invites his contributors to answer a different list of interesting, if somewhat arbitrary, questions: under what circumstances was supermax introduced? what problems was it intended to solve? did international terrorism play a role? what is the prisoner profile of supermax populations? what are the similarities and differences between American supermaxes and those in other jurisdictions? what level of public scrutiny is there over such institutions? and why have some countries rejected the idea of American supermax? But since some contributors only deal with a few of those questions and others pay them little heed, it would be quite a task to tease out these influences. Not surprisingly, the editor does not try to do so and, indeed, gives the reader no editorial steer as to what to expect from the subsequent chapters. So what are we to make of the various contributions? Ross himself provides a brief, oversimplified chapter on the Invention of The American Supermax Prison aimed at a student audience – which perhaps makes it more important that some errors should have been eliminated. These include inter alia: failing to distinguish clearly between administrative and disciplinary segregation (pp.10–11); wrongly asserting that Officers Klutz and Hoffman were murdered in Marion by ‘a [singular] member of the Aryan Brotherhood’ (p.15); and, most importantly, stating that Madrid v. Gomez (889 F.Supp. 1146 (N.D. Cal. 1995)) found conditions in Pelican Bay in breach of 8th Amendment protections against ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ (p.18), when, in fact Judge Henderson did so only in relation to prisoners who were mentally ill or at risk of becoming so. However, in a coda considering future prospects in light of declining crime rates, he raises the interesting proposition that states might combine resources to create regional supermaxes for a reduced number of prisoners – though I would prefer a much more radical rethink of the need for supermax custody. Ross also wrote the chapter on Canada, based entirely on secondary sources and, without a clear definition, it is by no means obvious what the differences are between the ‘supermax’ in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines and its ‘super-max like’ predecessors. Perhaps none, since at times he refers to them all as supermaxes, but it is clear that developments in Canada were ‘motivated by internal dynamics and had nothing to do with external factors (i.e. globalization)’ (p.34). The confusing situation in Mexico, where at one point (p.46) the authors describe Puente Grande in Guadalajara as at the apex of a hierarchy of supermaxes, despite being notorious for its escapes – surely an oxymoron – and at another (p.41) they consider Ayala Morelas to be a supermax solely because of its 23-hour lockdown – on which criterion a great many prisons around the world would qualify. Whatever the situation on the ground, it is most unlikely to be a product of globalisation if only because of deep Mexican mistrust of all things American. One is left with the impression that the correctional system in Mexico is both chaotic and corrupt but also blessed with endearing cultural features utterly at odds with supermax custody – such as conjugal visits. The situation in New Zealand, reported here by Greg Newbold, in part as personal memoire and in part through the different regimes of successive superintendents of Paremoremo, may have some parallels with developments in the United States but there is no evidence that it was influenced by them. South Africa, according to Fran Buntman and Lukas Muntingh, on the other hand, sent representatives to see a supermax in Colorado, although they do not say whether this was the Federal ADX or the State Penitentiary. Moreover they confusingly suggest that Ebongweni, one of the two supermaxes they identify and which was commissioned in 2002, was modelled on Marion – which seems unlikely given the dates. The general picture they paint is of a good legal framework of protection for human rights but with a yawning gap between policy and practice. Ross co-authors (with Dawn Rothe) a chapter on Guantanamo Bay, whilst Rothe alone contributes a chapter on Abu Graib, both of which are tacked on at the end of the book. The latter provides useful summaries of how America uses its hegemonic power to create institutions outside the reach of domestic law and constitutional protections, and of the political shenanigans of the neocons (albeit without mentioning Tony Blair) leading up to the Iraq war and their remarkable efforts to devise and justify new definitions of torture. However, both these chapters miss the real point of the connection between these institutions and domestic supermax. As I have argued elsewhere (King (2008), but see also Reiter (2012)), the failure to rule that the treatment of suspected gang members in California as in breach of 8th Amendment protections effectively legitimated those conditions for domestic American citizens and made it that much easier to ‘justify’ abuses against suspected terrorists abroad. The chapter by Angela West Crews, though fairly meticulously researched on the basis of official reports, judicial reviews, and direct correspondence with the then operational manager of close supervision centres (CSCs) in the High Security Estate, is misleadingly titled ‘The Growth of the Supermax Option in Britain’, and despite her research, she has made numerous errors. Some are too minor to rehearse, but among the more important are her misunderstanding of the roles and structure of the Independent Monitoring Boards, the National Ombusdman, and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons, resulting in a somewhat garbled account of their methods of working. More importantly, she confusingly asserts that Radzinowicz clarified the distinction between security and control, whereas in fact, his report conflated them: it was left to the Control Review Committee 15 years later to make the distinction clear (though some academics, including myself, had been writing about that for some time). Absurdly, she asserts that the CSCs share characteristics with American supermax (among other things) because ‘both the CSC system and American supermax are meant for those prisoners who have demonstrated histories of disruptive behaviour in general prison populations’ (p.65) which is to confuse their purpose with their operational policies and practice. The CSCs are the nearest comparator to the American supermax because they both serve the same function – but the way they discharge that function is very different. Finally, mathematics is not her strong suit: the United States has, proportionately, forty times as many prisoners in supermax as England and Wales has in CSCs, not four; surely the kind of error that the editor should have picked up. One could go on. As West Crews accumulates evidence and places it on the scales it weighs heavily on one side against the idea that England and Wales has embraced supermax, but she is unable to resist placing a feather of conjecture on the other side to conclude that ‘an American-style supermax system may not be too distant on the horizon’ (p.65). I have left three chapters until last and in two of those – by José de Jesus Filho on Brazil and Sandra Resodihardjo on the Netherlands – I need to declare an interest. Filho appears to be one of the few contributors actually to have visited some, if not all, of the institutions of which he writes. These are the facilities at Presidente Bernardes in the state of São Paulo and four new regionally-distributed Federal institutions (a fifth is planned for Brasilia), which have been developed in an attempt to break the power of the PCC (First Command of the Capital) which operates in the pavilions of multiple-occupation cells in most prisons (King and Valensia 2014). My interest here is that during my research in São Paulo from 2001 to 2003, at which time the authorities had developed the Regime Displinar Differenciado (RDD), a differentiated regime in individual cells which could be applied in a number of prisons, and were talking about creating a new facility at Presidente Bernardes, I hoped to dissuade Dr Nagashi, then Director of the Penitentiary Department, from going down the supermax route. I am not entirely convinced, from the description Filho offers here, that these really constitute supermax facilities or merely the construction of prisons based around single cells with a more structured regime. However, it would not be surprising if a system, such as Brazil's, which does not have a strong tradition of professional staff using ‘dynamic security’ for the maintenance of order, but, instead, depends upon ‘trusted’ prisoners to run the pavilions which staff rarely enter, could be attracted to the quick fix that the supermax narrative seems to offer once things have gone badly wrong. In my own research I came across Vught as a supermax facility and was puzzled as to how this had come about in the Netherlands, which I had assumed would be the least likely country to adopt such an institution. When I met Sandra Resodihardjo, then serving an internship at the International Centre for Prison Studies whilst she was finishing her PhD, we recognised our mutual interests in trying to understand why the Netherlands did, and why England and Wales did not, adopt a supermax solution, which eventually resulted in our 2010 paper. Here she provides a characteristically clear and timely updating of her earlier work. Resodihardjo is one of the few scholars to have developed a framework for analysing the process of political decision making that led to the development of supermax, using the concepts of learning and leeway from her background in public administration rather than criminology. I would urge readers to go to her book (Resodihardjo 2009) where this is set out in full. In many ways, the most interesting question to emerge from the thoughtful long view of the situation in Australia by David Brown and Dee Carlton comes originally from Norval Morris (2002). Morris, who regarded pre-Maconochie Norfolk Island as a kind of prototypical supermax, wondered how Maconochie might manage today's ‘dangerous and difficult to handle’ prisoners, and suggested that he would have done so ‘by imposing the least afflictive control necessary in the light of the threat, and let each maximum security prison look after its own troublemakers’ (Morris 2002, p.192). This is not a bad description of what the prison service in England and Wales strives for (even if, like all noble aims, it sometimes seems elusive and is vulnerable at times of crisis and financial cost-cutting); and there was a time when the Federal Bureau of Prisons espoused policies somewhat along these lines. One general criticism is that few writers seek to contextualise supermax within the sociology of the prison, or, indeed, to conceptualise the problem of order, the restoration and maintenance of which supermax custody is all about. Serious sociological studies of American prisons seem largely to have disappeared since DiIulio's (1987) attack on the genre. Indeed DiIulio gets scant attention in the book, despite arguably being the provider of what intellectual underpinnings the American supermax may possess. Having diagnosed the failure of American prisons, and the consequent flourishing of gang culture, as the result of their being ill-managed, under managed or not managed at all, his solution was that prisons should be run by highly-disciplined authorities which are strong enough to control prisoners but obliged to control themselves; and that the aims of imprisonment should be limited to the delivery of order, amenity and services. In supermax, all too often the control of prisoners has not been matched by self-control of staff – indeed the need for the latter is virtually eliminated by separation of the staff and inmate worlds; and the aims of imprisonment have been reduced to the maintenance of control and the provision, in the prison vernacular, of ‘three hots and a cot’ (see King 2014). The most important analysis of the problem of order is to be found in Sparks, Bottoms and Hay (1996), conspicuous by its absence from the collected references here. They compared two maximum-security prisons in England and Wales in the late 1980s. Borrowing from the police literature, they applied the situational and social (or community) styles of crime prevention to the problem of maintaining order in prisons. In the prisons context, maintaining order through situational control prioritises reducing the opportunities for transgressions, whilst social control relies on effective social relations and what correctional staff in England and Wales, at least, refer to as ‘dynamic security’. Clearly all prisons deploy some elements of both situational control and social control, and Sparks, Bottoms and Hay were concerned to explore the extent to which different combinations of these approaches could be regarded as legitimate. Sparks, Bottoms and Hay conducted their research before the take-off of supermax custody in the United States, but it is possible to conceptualise supermax institutions as being at the extreme end on both these continua, attempting to maximise situational control whilst minimising the need for social control. Intriguingly, they indicated that they had yet to encounter a prison with high levels of situational control which also had high levels of legitimacy, although they conceded that my account of Oak Park Heights (King 1991) seemed to do so, perhaps because that should be expected ‘if one interprets situational control as increasing physical safety and psychic security’ (Sparks, Bottoms and Hay, p.327). However, I would suggest that the reason for the relative legitimacy of Oak Park Heights, has been because it also deployed a high level of professional social control, insisting that staff share social space with prisoners – a situation which the prison maintained long after the Minnesota Department of Corrections redefined it as a supermax. But as I maintained at the outset of this review, it is only in the world of Humpty Dumpty that prisons are supermaxes because someone says they are.