Unit 32

Mississippi State Penitentiary (also known as Parchman Farm) is located upstate –northwest in the Mississippi Delta region – and is the only maximum security prison in the state for men. Currently housing just under 5,000 inmates, it also houses the only death house in the state. Built in 1901, it is Mississippi’s oldest prison facility, and much of the housing on this 18 thousand acre working prison farm was horribly outmoded and worn, so a new on-site facility was built in the 1970s.

Parchman was also the prison where Mississippi was fond of confining the Freedom Riders (163 civil rights activists) in the early 60s. So it is perhaps unexpected that corrections officials in “backwater” Mississippi were among the first to challenge the widely-held belief that all inmates deemed violent and dangerous should live their sentences – and hence often their entire lives – in 23-hour-a-day lockdown isolation. In some states, just being a clear member of a violent gang earns such isolation.

Before it was closed in 2010, special housing Unit 32 served as Parchman’s isolation section, 34.4 acres of hell on earth. A “modern facility” (built in 1990), it was the prison’s “supermax,” designed to hold a thousand inmates, including death row prisoners. Life there was both miserable and still amazingly dangerous. Men would lie motionless on searingly hot summer days on their concrete slab beds. “Kept in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours each day, allowed out only in shackles and escorted by guards, they were restless and angry — made more so by the excrement-smeared walls, the insects, the filthy food trays and the mentally ill inmates who screamed in the night, conditions that a judge had already ruled unacceptable… So it was not really surprising when violence erupted in 2007: an inmate stabbed to death with a homemade spear that May; in June, a suicide; in July, another stabbing; in August, a prisoner killed by a member of a rival gang.” New York Times, March 10^th.

What happened next would seem to be out of kilter for a facility with an old-world reputation of insensitive incarceration. Instead of tightening security, prison officials decided that perhaps the excessive isolation and the bitterness and anger engendered in these most cloistered inmates were the problem. “What was surprising was what happened next… They allowed most inmates out of their cells for hours each day. They built a basketball court and a group dining area. They put rehabilitation programs in place and let prisoners work their way to greater privileges.

“In response, the inmates became better behaved. Violence went down. The number of prisoners in isolation dropped to about 300 from more than 1,000. So many inmates were moved into the general population of other prisons that Unit 32 was closed in 2010, saving the state more than $5 million.” NY Times.

In a country that represents 5% of the world’s population yet houses 25% of all prisoners on earth – half for drug-related crimes (and half of those for possession or dealing) – the “same old-same old” doesn’t cut it anymore. The United States doesn’t have the money anymore to keep solving its problems by slamming miscreants in prison under some of the longest sentences on earth, believing that our systems will best serve society. For those prisoners who do get released, they are better-trained at criminality, pretty much relegated to the bottom end of the workforce (which in today’s impaired economy means unemployment) and often bitterly angry at the society that put them “inside.” Even the tattoos that helped them survive prison label them as workforce undesirables when they get out.

Some states are reaching the same conclusion about the value of isolating prisoners: “Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Ohio and Washington State have been taking steps to reduce the number of prisoners in long-term isolation; others have plans to do so. On [March 9^th], officials in California announced a plan for policy changes that could result in fewer prisoners being sent to the state’s three super-maximum-security units.” NY Times. But we need a ground up re-think of our propensity to incarcerate, whether our drug laws help or actually hurt our nation by keeping prices high enough to encourage violent criminal enterprise (there’s certainly no shortage of narcotics on the street; we don’t seemed to have learned the lesson of Prohibition), and whether our sentencing and prison methods really make sense anymore.

I’m Peter Dekom, and that massive “tough on crime” slogan of a few years ago seems to have resulted in a “tough on society” result.