The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

A large portion of the population of Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, another supermax prison, was converted to less restrictive maximum security status last year. Ohio now also houses death row and lower security inmates at its penitentiary.

The scenario has been repeated across the country, where early legal challenges prompted states to remove most mentally ill prisoners from supermax units and states recognized quickly that the prisons were expensive to operate and difficult to staff.

"In a nutshell, it just became clear that they were not working," said David Fathi, director of U.S. programs at Human Rights Watch. "They were more trouble and expense than they were worth."

Supermax prisons were built to house inmates convicted of serious crimes who caused trouble in prison, including gang activity, subversive behavior or violence against staff. Ohio's went up after the deadly 1993 Lucasville prison uprising.

Dave Johnson, the penitentiary's first warden, recalls a kind of super-maximum space race among state corrections departments at the time, each wanting their facility to be the first, the biggest or the best. The first inmates arrived at Ohio's prison in May 1998.

"I got a call one morning and the man on the other end said, 'I don't know you but I already hate you,'" Johnson recalled. "It was the warden from the Illinois Supermax, and we had gotten our accreditation before he did."

Johnson said the Supermax was viewed as much safer than the Lucasville prison.

"Philosophically, the big thing that we wanted to avoid was an atmosphere of retaliation, where inmates would do something, staff would retaliate, then inmates would retaliate, then things would spiral downhill," he said. "It started out right away (at the Supermax) where staff would be safe, so they wouldn't be fearful of inmates, wouldn't dread coming to work, and it was a very positive, upbeat environment."

In Maryland, prisons had also become deadly, said Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Its Supermax was built in the wake of two prison guard murders, one in a prison a touring judge labeled "the innermost circle of hell."

At the peak of the supermax craze in 2000, more than 30 states were operating one or more supermax prisons, holding an estimated 20,000 prisoners, according to a National Institute of Corrections study and research by Human Rights Watch. By 2006, the number of prisoners held in supermax custody had fallen to 2,378 in 10 states, according to statistics from the American Correctional Association.

Ohio's Supermax provides a prime example. Only 53 of 553 inmates are held in the extreme isolation.

The cell of a supermax inmate measures 89.7 square feet, enough room for a ledge for his cot, a small desk and stool, a set of three small bookshelves (one used for the TV), and a toilet and sink. Inmates are allotted a 15-minute shower and one hour for exercise each weekday. Meals and most routine medical care take place in the cell. All visits with outsiders are non-contact.

On a recent day, some inmates released for their hour reprieve from isolation were dashing end-to-end in a cellblock, some were doing vigorous pull-ups, push-ups and knee bends, while others were just talking.

"Just to endure the conditions takes a very strong person or else a person who can retreat into a very narrow place," said Alice Lynd, part of a husband-wife attorney team from Niles that has fought Ohio's Supermax in court. "You lose any interest in staying alive. There's no ability to concentrate, you don't get normal feedback."

With the prisons' popularity waning, states also found that there were not enough ultra-bad inmates to justify all the glistening new ultra-high security cells _ conceived, Fathi says, "not by corrections professionals, but by politicians trying to look tougher on crime than the next person."

Walter Dickey, a former Wisconsin prisons chief who served as court monitor in a challenge to the state's former Supermax, the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility, said the excess capacity remains a problem.

"Because there's a bed shortage overall in most prison systems, there's pressure to use supermax beds because they're the only empty beds in the systems," said Dickey, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

"That was an issue with our state's Supermax, and one that most corrections departments need to look in the eye. And it's not easy to look it in the eye because it's not easy to know what to do."

Virginia's Wallens Ridge is now nearly full _ housing 1,150 maximum-security inmates in 1,200 available beds. By contrast, 795 of the 1,200 beds available at the state's remaining Supermax, Red Onion, are in use, said Virginia Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor.

Corrections professionals were also divided over how extensively to use supermax, something that state law generally leaves up to their discretion. Ohio's penitentiary created two tiers of security for its supermax inmates after the Lynds' litigation had begun _ allowing the better behaved ones slightly more mobility and more access to perks such as library books and commissary items.

"I look at 10 years ago and we had one purpose: to protect and serve, to take the worst of the worst," said Marcus Hill, a member of the prison's program staff. "Now you can tell how far we've come. We ask the inmate, 'What are your needs?' Before, we gave them their needs."

Kenyatta, sentenced to 30 years for robbery and attempted murder, said the "worst of the worst" label stings.

"They say these are the worst people, that they couldn't get along in society," said Kenyatta, who now chairs the prisoner advocacy group CURE-Ohio. "Well, I'm out here in society and I'm very successful. I have my own business, a lot of charitable causes and everything."

Despite the prisons' evolution, Dickey doesn't believe the Supermax will disappear.

"We wanted to make them as good as we could. There were some people who wanted to make them as bad as possible in hopes they would be shut down," he said.

"But I think there's the potential now to have the best of both worlds, to have those who straight out do bad things be segregated but not to have it be so onerous on the people who are in there."

http://www.ohio.com/news/ap?articleID=478064&c=y