Permanent Lockdown

Control Unit Prisons and the Proliferation of the Isolation Model

from the book

The Celling of America

edited by Daniel Burton-Rose

with editors of Prison Legal News
Dan Pens and Paul Wright

Common Courage Press, 1998

Control units are prisons inside prisons, stark and grim modern dungeons where prisoners spend 22-24 hours a day in their cells. Sometimes as small as 70 square feet, the cells are the size of an average bathroom. Exercise is taken in mesh-ceilinged outdoor cages, or in internal cells no larger than the prisoners' own, with only a chin-up bar to mark a difference. Educational and psychological programs are severely curtailed if they exist at all.

The stated purpose of control units is to concentrate "incorrigibles"-the so-called "monsters" and "predators" that attack both staff and other prisoners-in a small number of facilities which are designed to handle them more effectively. In reality, control units are often used against activist prisoners-legal or otherwise-that have made themselves unpopular with staff as a result of attempts to try to check the brutal excesses that frequently occur in prisons. Control units are also dumping grounds for the mentally ill, terribly exacerbating the prisoner's original problems, sometimes fatally so.

But even for those for whom the units are supposedly intended- the uncontrollably violent-the extreme isolation and lack of positive outlets make them more violent and self-destructive. Traumatic and scarring for the prisoner on a personal level, control units also pose a danger for society at large. Dr. Stuart Grassian, a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School who has studied the effects of solitary confinement on prisoners for well over a decade, has remarked that the use of control units is "kind of like kicking and beating a dog and keeping it in a cage until it gets crazy and vicious and wild as it can possibly get and then one day you take it out into the middle of the streets of San Francisco or Boston and you open the cage and you run away..." "That's no favor to the community," Grassian concluded. And it's no favor to the person prison officials treat worse than a dog.

Control units are the most extreme manifestation of a national prison system that has abandoned rehabilitation as a goal and is only interested in techniques of more effective, and preferably more expensive, warehousing.

A 1997 survey by the National Campaign to Stop Control Unit Prisons found that 40 states, the federal prison system, and the District of Columbia have at least one control unit-many have units for both men and women. The amazingly high cost of control units makes their entrenchment in the penal system a definite goal for the prison-industrial complex.

Celling of America