Tough Time: Inside the supermax Pelican Bay prison, brutal conditions make convicts more brutal.

One of the toughest prisons on the planet stands in a 275-acre clearing in a lush forest, about a day's drive north of San Francisco, at the end of a narrow highway that winds through magnificent redwoods and Pacific vistas of stunning beauty.

Pelican Bay State Prison is a "supermax," a level of high-tech security above maximum. It is also the symbol and product of American tough-on-crime justice. Inmates in California's prisons speak of it with fear and awe. Critics of the American penal system loathe it, while supporters adore Pelican Bay and demand more like it.

Knowing this, one might expect something like Alcatraz, Sing Sing, Attica or San Quentin -- the looming, black fortresses of Hollywood movies. But at Pelican Bay, there is no fortress, no iron gate. Entering the grounds, I am stopped at a security booth, situated on neatly groomed gardens. The guard, friendly and casual, waves me on to a bland administration building. I feel as if I could be here to renew my driver's licence.

From a distance, the prison is a complex of interconnected two-storey concrete buildings brutal only in their blandness, seemingly sand-blasted of any distinguishing characteristics. It could be a FedEx depot or a factory in an industrial park churning out shrink-wrapped software. Not even the three fences that ring the property look imposing, except up close, where signs warn that the electrified middle barrier is lethal.

Throughout the prison, the noise, filth and visceral brutality of old dungeons like Alcatraz are gone. It is a little world of concrete, stainless steel and bright fluorescent lighting. It is clean, almost antiseptic. And everything is in rigid order.

But this almost clinical surface masks profound pain.

Pelican Bay is divided in two, with one side operating as an ordinary maximum prison that keeps the appearance of order by a steady rotation of "lock downs" that keep prisoners in their cells around the clock. But it is in the other half, the supermax "Security Housing Unit" (SHU), that a whole new form of pain is deliberately and calculatedly inflicted on inmates.

Every prisoner in Pelican Bay's supermax is locked in his cell for 22.5 hours a day. At an appointed time each day, a guard flips a switch and the cell doors open. The prisoner steps out into a tiny corridor which serves seven other cells. Everything is naked grey concrete, stainless steel or steel mesh. The only colour comes from the dull orange of the cell doors.

At one end of the corridor, behind a locked door, is the elevated command post that controls this little universe. At the other end is a shower and an opening onto an empty concrete courtyard, about three metres by seven metres, covered by a semi-transparent plastic roof. Here, each prisoner paces alone for 90 minutes before being ordered back to his cell.

The supermax prisoner never sees the sky, or the outside world, because there are no windows. The only natural light filters down through the courtyard roof and a second-storey skylight above the main corridor. The cells are never dark since lights are dimmed at night but kept bright enough to illuminate everything.

Some prisoners live alone in their cells, while others are double-bunked. Cellmates at least have human contact, though spending every waking moment with the same person locked in a box just three-and-a-half metres long by two-and-a-half metres wide may be more tormenting than loneliness. Phone calls are forbidden. Those who can, write letters, although almost half cannot; they are illiterate. They are allowed one parcel a year from home.

On weekends, prisoners can see visitors for three hours. But these are no-contact visits: Communication is by phone while seated behind Plexiglas. Many prisoners never receive visits because Pelican Bay is two days' drive from Los Angeles, where most inmates' families live.

The cell is the prisoner's world. They can have televisions or radios if they behave, but that small concession can be revoked. That leaves functionally illiterate prisoners with nothing to fill 22.5 hours a day beyond shouting at prisoners in cells they cannot see.

Convicts land here in one of two ways. Misbehaviour at a lower security prison can get a man a "determinate" sentence. Assaulting another inmate with a weapon, for example, means 15 months at Pelican Bay.

Prisoners also land in supermax if they are gang members who refuse to "debrief" -- which means telling authorities everything about their gang's membership and activities. Refusal can result in an indefinite sentence. Once in, he will have to spend at least six years here, after which he may be declared inactive and returned to the general population. Otherwise, the only way he can leave Pelican Bay, in the words of the prison's spokesman, Lieut. Ben Grundy, is to "parole, debrief or die." Those serving life sentences have only the last two options. And since anyone who debriefs is a marked man, some have only one way out: die.

"If there are ever Nuremberg trials in the United States," says Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley, "Pelican Bay and its equivalent in other states will be the basis of indictments."

Zimring is very much in the minority. When Pelican Bay opened in 1989, at a cost of $290 million U.S., the governor christened it "the prison of the future." He was right. In 1999, the U.S. federal Department of Justice estimated some form of extreme lockup -- the definition varies -- now exists in "more than 30 states." In 1996, the department put the number of prisoners being held in such places at eight to 10 per cent of the total -- possibly 100,000 men. Almost 1,300 are held in Pelican Bay's SHU.

This is uniquely American. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the western world.

Canada's Special Handling Unit, north of Montreal, has been called a supermax but it's nothing like Pelican Bay. The SHU provides education, treatment and access to a real outdoor courtyard. Inmates are allowed time in common areas with up to seven other prisoners. Prisoners are returned to maximum security as quickly as possible with the overwhelming majority staying for fewer than two years. Those who misbehave can be put in segregation, which means 23 hours a day alone in a cell, with one hour of solitary exercise. But that's a temporary and extraordinary measure for very few.

The supermax is an exclusively American phenomenon because "tough-on-crime" theory is exclusively American. In that theory, it is believed that misbehaviour can always be deterred by tougher punishment. That's true outside prisons and inside. If inmates misbehave, they must be transferred to higher security and harsher conditions. But what if prisoners misbehave in maximum security? The get-tough answer is transfer to an even higher security level with even harsher living conditions. The supermax is born.

Eventually, it is believed, if the system is tough enough, it will deter bad behaviour. Prisoners will do what they are told. And they will leave prison with a healthy fear of ever going back.

That's the theory. The reality is quite different.

"Brutal prisons make brutal prisoners," Markku Salminen, director general of Finland's prisons, told me in Helsinki. "The American system has made the American criminal very hard."

The modern history of American prisons is dominated by two revolutions that swept through over the past 30 years. The first began in a small town east of Buffalo, New York.

On Sept. 9, 1971, 1,200 inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility rioted and took guards hostage. For five days, images of the Attica uprising were broadcast into American living rooms. On Sept. 13, as the prisoners prepared to kill hostages, police opened fire and stormed the prison. Forty-three people, including 10 hostages, were killed.

Other riots and many more deaths followed in prisons across the United States.

The chaos shone a spotlight on prisons across the continent. What was revealed was horrifying. "Prior to 1970, you had essentially 19th-century conditions in our prisons," says Alvin Bronstein, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union's Prison Project. A report on the Attica riot blamed the squalor and overcrowding in the prison. So, too, did an examination of a New Mexico riot that took nearly as many lives.

Bronstein and others helped prisoners sue governments, seeking orders to improve conditions. Previously, American courts had ignored prisoners, declaring them devoid of constitutional rights -- "slaves of the state," as one court indelicately put it. But a 1964 Supreme Court ruling changed that. Federal courts responded to Attica with a flurry of orders demanding that prisons meet safety standards and that crowding be reduced to tolerable levels. By 1992, almost all state prison systems were under court order.

Wardens could no longer run prisons as fiefdoms. Corruption fell. Hiring standards improved and codes of conduct were established.

Today, a "greater sense of professionalism" reigns among corrections officials, says Bronstein, as well as "a recognition that you have major responsibility to protect the bodies and lives of the people in your custody, which I don't think was recognized 30 years ago."

Conditions, too, are far better than in the era before the Attica riot -- thanks in part, ironically, to the tough-on-crime revolution that got underway in the late 1970s.

Crowding in prisons such as Attica wasn't the result of rising imprisonment rates, which were actually flat or declining in the 1950s and 1960s. It happened simply because, while the general population grew, the liberal politics of the time didn't support the construction of new prisons.

Once the public embraced the tough-on-crime ethos, prisons ceased to be shameful. Indeed, politicians boasted about building them. As incarceration rates rose and judges began demanding the elimination of 19th-century prison conditions, prison construction exploded.

Texas alone has built more than 100 prisons since 1980. In the past decade-and-a-half, California has built 21 enormous prisons at a cost of $5.27 billion U.S.

"Every major architectural school has classes in prison architecture now," notes John Irwin, professor emeritus of criminology at San Francisco State University who has studied California's prisons for more than 30 years. "It's a boom industry all the way up and down the line." New prisons are vast improvements over 19th-century institutions such as San Quentin and the old Kingston Penitentiary. Surveillance technology eliminated blind spots. Bars were replaced with steel mesh or solid steel, making it virtually impossible for a prisoner to assault a passerby. Higher-security prisons were built with posts placed so that "prisoners can be fired upon wherever they are," says Irwin. But more modest changes also had great effect. Before Attica, guards in many American prisons never entered dormitories. Inmates were simply locked up, leaving the weak at the mercy of predators. Federal courts, determined to eliminate a source of brutal violence, ordered that "officers be in the dormitories 24 hours, all three shifts," says Alvin Bronstein. As a result, the average American prison today looks nothing like the dank, dark places seen in Hollywood movies. They are clean, well-lit, and much better supervised than before. Guards and wardens are far better educated and corrections commissioners tend to be, says Bronstein, "good people, decent people who want to do the right thing." Prisons are safer, too. Homicides have fallen sharply and steadily since the 1970s and prisons are "unbelievably pacific" compared to the past, says Irwin. But they are also tough -- a spartan world of concrete floors, cinder-block walls and steel roofs. Beds are a steel or concrete slab with a roll for a mattress. Furniture is often made of concrete capped with stainless steel surfaces. Everything is bolted down. Doors buzz open at the flip of remote switches. Fluorescent lights flood every corner. Video cameras watch prisoners' every movement. It is as clean, bright and orderly as it is hard, cold and unyielding. A critic would call it inhuman; a supporter austere.
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In fact, austere is the tough-on-crime ideal of what prisons should be. "We don't need the situation where our conditions are so lax where people say, well, I don't mind spending a couple of years in prison," says Vic Toews, the Canadian Alliance justice critic and former justice minister of Manitoba. "I think there has to be an element of that austere deterrence in order to say, 'this is not a place I want to go back to.'"

American prisons, and the justice systems that support them, are what Canadian tough-on-crime supporters promote for this country. For example, Ontario's new "super jails," including the recently completed Maplehurst facility, are straight from the American model.

In 1996, Art Hanger, then the Reform party's justice critic, gave a lengthy speech in Parliament detailing his party's blueprint for a prison system. The key, he said, is "to return prison time to hard time." Maximum-security prisons should have "labour-intensive work details without pay or skills training, no conjugal visits, only a core duty of care, (and) restricted access on a very limited basis to entertainment and communications." Medium security "should house non-violent offenders and only those who have a proven willingness to participate in rehabilitative programs." Minimum security "shall house non-violent offenders and those who have earned the privilege at this level."

Conjugal visits would only be allowed in minimum-security facilities. Television, university education, "lavish workout facilities," and "special meals" would all be eliminated. Visits from children would be banned. So would pornography and personal stereos.

Only basic education and work programs would be offered. Pay for work would be garnisheed to cover room and board. Failure to participate would be punished with transfer to a higher-security institution, as would any other unco-operative behaviour.

These ideas are a stark contrast with European prisons, where officials try to put prisoners in environments that encourage personal responsibility. European prison systems, as well as Canada's federal system, have lower-security prisons where inmates live in townhouses, prepare their own food and live a daily routine that's as normal as possible. It's not an act of generosity or a reward for good behaviour. The objective is to expose prisoners to an ordinary social environment where prisoners manage daily chores, personal hygiene and social interaction. It is preparing them for release and a law-abiding life. It's "not coddling, not sentimental," says Ole Ingstrup, the former commissioner of corrections who pioneered this approach in the Canadian system. It is "a systematic, respectful dealing with people."

Maximum-security prisons in this model can be harsh -- no one has ever called Millhaven Penitentiary a "Club Fed." But the tough conditions only exist for safety reasons, not as punishment. In Canada, prisoners can be placed in maximum security only if they pose a high risk of assault or escape, not for being unco-operative or for misbehaving. And even then, the system tries to move prisoners into the less grinding atmosphere of a lower-security prison quickly -- not as a reward, but because it's necessary for rehabilitation.

Which prison system -- the hard-line American model or the European model -- succeeds?

That's not a simple question to answer, but prison violence is surely one measure.

There's no question that today's American institutions are safer and better run than 30 years ago. But that doesn't mean modern tough-on-crime prisons produce better behaviour -- only that they don't produce behaviour as bad as that in the old dungeons. In fact, recent data on violence trends in American prisons give reason to believe the tough-on-crime approach is making prisoners tougher and meaner.

In California, the rate of assaults with weapons reported by guards climbed by more than 50 per cent between 1991 and 2000. The rate of assaults without weapons more than doubled. Nowhere is violence worse than in the maximum-security prisons. "There's all kinds of stuff, all the shit that you can imagine," a young prisoner with a hardened face and tattoos told me in Avenal State prison, a low-security facility. After being in maximum, he was glad to be in Avenal, where the violence was merely of the bare-knuckle variety. It's much more than that at the higher levels. "Killings. Torture. There's all kinds of shit."

As warden of Pelican Bay -- the "top of the food chain" as a prison spokesman put it -- Joe McGrath's perspective on the violence is unique. And he is blunt: "We're up against the wall. Violence is so great that we can't (provide programs to inmates) in our prisons. All our top-level prisons are either locked down or in some phase of modified programming continually. That's not where we want to be. There's nowhere to go from there. I'm the end of the road. Some prisoners get in trouble, oh, send them to Pelican Bay. Well, what do I do with them?"

cGrath took over only recently and already he's frustrated. He wants to offer education and training but the violence just won't permit it. "You can't do a positive program when you can't have inmates out long enough without stabbing each other to get anything done. And that's kind of where we found ourselves in the last three years."

In 2001, prisoners in the maximum-security section of Pelican Bay rioted. One inmate was shot dead. More than 100 were stabbed. Four months later, about 400 prisoners were following a simple routine of eating in a cafeteria, taking programs, and exercising in the main yard. "They're thrilled to be part of a program where they don't have to fear for their lives," says McGrath. "Yet on the other side of that, I still have 800 or 900 in their cells and who have to be escorted everywhere, can't be let out together because they're loyal to the faction and they'll kill those other guys if they get a chance."

California's woes are not unique. A panel recently assessed Florida's correctional system and concluded, "violence within the prisons is on the rise."

Such comprehensive assessments are rare. Prison life is often determined by anecdotal evidence and impressions and these can be contradictory. In Texas, Alvin Bronstein says, administrators deny a rise in violence and sexual assaults. But lawyers who work with prisoners "feel that in Texas, the levels of violence are escalating dramatically, that there are rapes and assaults and beatings happening on a daily basis." Bronstein believes wardens aren't providing top officials with the full picture. But more importantly, "a lot of this is not reported because of prisoners' fears of retaliation and a lot of it is sponsored by correctional officers."

The American Civil Liberties Union works with officials and inmates across the United States and based on that experience, Bronstein says, "our sense is that violence is going up."

Many prison officials and administrators agree. In 1999, a report to the federal Department of Justice noted that corrections officials typically support the construction of supermaxes "based on the perceived 'toughening' of the inmate population, increased gang activity, (and) the difficulty of maintaining order in severely crowded prisons ... "

For the most part, the inmate population is not "toughening" because tougher criminals are being thrown into prison. The opposite is true. Tough-on-crime justice policies, along with the war on drugs, have sent more and more less-serious offenders to prison. More than three-quarters of the growth in prison populations between 1978 and 1996 involved non-violent offenders. If American prison populations are getting collectively tougher, it's because the prisons are making them tougher.

There are two exceptions, two categories of prisoners who are appearing at prison gates harder than before. One is gang members, who are entering prison in larger numbers because the number of gangs keeps increasing, partly, at least, because the soaring rate of incarceration in the United States has actually helped gangs proliferate.

The second exception is the hopeless prisoner who is almost entirely a creation of the harsh sentences favoured by tough-on-crime politicians. "We get inmates that are 20, 21, 22 years old who are looking at the rest of their lives in prison," McGrath says. Feeling that they have nothing to live for and nothing to lose, they lash out at prisoners or guards and are punished by transfer to higher-security -- and more violent -- institutions. Half the inmates at Pelican Bay are lifers. "What that tells me," he says, "is that the young people coming in with life to do are ending up much more difficult to manage, and that's why they're ending up at Pelican Bay."

Tony Strong, a lifer in the maximum unit, agrees. He has spent 22 years in California's prisons, the last 11 at Pelican Bay. When the three strikes law passed in 1994, he says, "a lot of people just gave up hope. When they come to prison with shoplifting and stuff like that and they get a 25-years-to-life sentence, they just give up hope." Without hope, he says, prisoners fall into a "downward spiral" and become dangerous to themselves or others.

Prison officials have long known that a hopeless prisoner is a dangerous prisoner. That's the rationale behind Canada's "faint-hope clause." In the 1970s, when Canada abolished the death penalty for first-degree murder and replaced it with an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years, Parliament also passed the "faint-hope clause," which allows a prisoner to apply after 15 years to have his parole date moved forward. Prisoners, it was felt, must always have at least a "faint hope."

But gang members and lifers aside, American prisoners are getting tougher only after they get to prison. Several factors account for this -- all of them the product of tough-on-crime policies.

One is the sort of hard, cold and austere environment favoured by get-tough politicians. "People will act the way you expect them to act based on the physical environment," insists Jim Marshall, currently the warden of Millhaven who, at the time he spoke to the Citizen, was warden of Bath, a medium-security federal prison near Kingston.

In his 25 years in corrections, Marshall has worked at all security levels and he is convinced that a more social environment produces more social behaviour. That's why the Correctional Service of Canada has been building units at Bath and other lower-security institutions according to residential construction standards. They not only look like ordinary townhouses, they are. "People said, 'residential construction, you gotta be kidding, they're going to kick holes and all that.'" That hasn't happened. Marshall notes that the residential units at Bath "are in better shape than the Queen's (University) residences." This is proof, he says, "that if you ask people to be responsible -- except for the ones who are really, really dysfunctional and just can't listen or choose not to listen -- there's a real incentive to behave like you would normally behave in any place. And it's amazing to watch these folks respond to that."

Most American prisons take exactly the opposite approach. Physical control is emphasized and the authorities make a show of power -- guards are organized along paramilitary lines and wear uniforms like those of police or military officers. Many criminologists feel this is a mistake. "More structured, more authoritarian settings," one criminologist has written, "may engender more disruptive behaviour."

Once again, Canada's federal prisons take a different approach. Ole Ingstrup, the former Corrections Commissioner, says CSC research shows military-style uniforms actually provoke violence against guards. "We're not at war with the inmates," he says. So, in Canada's lower-security prisons, staff wear civilian clothes; in higher security, they wear a "demilitarized" uniform -- a plain blue shirt. Guards control the environment through interaction, not as an occupying force.

There is serious violence in Canadian prisons, just as there is in prisons everywhere. But relative to other prison systems, Ingstrup says, the violence here is "very, very low." It also seems to be declining. During the past decade, there has been a gradual, modest drop in what the Correctional Service of Canada calls "major security incidents," including major assaults, fights, escapes and other disruptions.

British experience further supports the idea that harsh environments promote violence. In the 1950s and 1960s, Britain sent prisoners to facilities with tighter controls than found in maximum security. The experiment was a failure so the opposite approach was tried. Prisoners who misbehaved in maximum security were sent to a unit inside a prison in Glasgow where they were actually given more freedoms and privileges, including frequent, unlimited contact visits with friends and family. Research showed that the rate at which these hard-core inmates committed assaults and other serious offences dropped immediately after entering the more open environment. And it stayed far lower.
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Crowding and violence also appear to go hand in hand, which presents a challenge to the tough-on-crime approach.

Not only do the get-tough policies send far more offenders to prisons to serve longer sentences, they restrict parole and other early release programs. And they are much quicker to send those who do get parole back to prison not for committing new crimes, but for technical violations, such as failing a urine test for marijuana. As a result, American prison populations have soared.

California's prison population began to climb in 1980, when it stood at 23,000. A decade later, it was 93,000. In 2000 there were more than 160,000 inmates in the state's prisons.

That explosive growth has meant crowding despite the state having spent more than $5 billion U.S. building enormous new prisons (and quadrupling the percentage of the state's budget handed to corrections, from two to eight per cent). In 1980, the prison population stood at 100 per cent of official capacity. In 1990, it was at 177 per cent. Today, California's prisons are at almost 200-per-cent capacity.

Crowding is corrosive in many ways. In California, it's not unusual for 300 prisoners to be watched by two guards. Under that kind of strain, says Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist who acts as an expert witness in prison litigation, guards are more likely to react "defensively and violently" to trouble.

At Avenal State Prison, where the 6,500 inmates live in jammed dormitories and even the gyms are filled with bunks, there is constant "light and noise," says Ronald Sheldon, the prison's senior psychologist. The stress not only worsens behaviour but damages mental health. Sheldon's team has more than 600 patients but "I think the numbers are increasing. Substantially so."

Crowding can also result in a decline in supervision. Technology helps, but cramming prisoners into dormitories can produce blindspots where the ills of prison culture flourish. Weak prisoners are bullied, robbed, assaulted and raped. Black markets operate. Gangs recruit.

There's also the struggle to keep prisoners occupied. Corrections officials have always known that "an idle prison is a dangerous place," as Alvin Bronstein says, but it's difficult to provide meaningful work to prisoners who are often unskilled and badly educated. Training that might lead to a job after release is an even greater challenge. Soaring prison populations stretch resources and opportunities thin. One survey of soon-to-released prisoners across the United States found that just 27 per cent had participated in vocational training, while just seven per cent worked in prison industries. One-quarter reported doing nothing.

California has spent heavily to build shops where inmates produce furniture and other goods. Other products used by the prisoners themselves, like running shoes, are also manufactured. And there's the traditional work involved in keeping a prison running: laundry, cleaning, grounds keeping and so on. But the sheer numbers mean corrections officials struggle to keep inmates busy.

Huge inmate populations have also overwhelmed rehabilitation resources. So too have tough-on-crime politicians who rarely support spending money on programs that could be seen as helping, rather than punishing, prisoners. In one extreme example, in 1994, Virginia Governor George Allen announced a package of tough-on-crime reforms that included cutting the $970,000 U.S. budget for sex offender treatment.

A 1997 survey found that just 35 per cent of state prisoners participated in educational programs, down from 43 per cent in 1991. Drug treatment has also suffered: A White House report estimated that 70 to 85 per cent of state prisoners need drug treatment but only 13 per cent receive it.

For the most part, Canadian tough-on-crime promoters take a more moderate line on programs but most favour cutting higher education, along with the anger management classes and cognitive skills training that Art Hanger once ridiculed as "pie-in-the-sky courses."

On both sides of the border, hardliners have also supported "truth in sentencing," which has meant, in the United States, the abolition of discretionary parole. As a result, American prisoners have little incentive to get involved in whatever rehabilitation programs are available since self-improvement won't get them out any earlier. The combination of program cutbacks and "truth in sentencing" has proven destructive. A paper prepared for the federal Department of Justice concluded, "Fewer programs, and a lack of incentives to participate, mean fewer inmates leave prison having addressed their work, education, and substance abuse problems."

Big prison populations also mean big prisons, which presents a whole new set of problems. "The larger a prison gets, the more difficult it is to run," says McGrath. "There has to be somebody at the top that has to know everything that's going on, and has to be able to touch and feel the tenor and the tone of the prison."

But even the most dedicated warden struggles in giant prisons such as Pelican Bay, with its $100-million U.S. annual budget, 3,300 prisoners and 1,400 employees. "This is a city," says McGrath. "We have our own waterworks, our own water treatment facility, we have boiler plants, we have generators to run electrical, we have a full medical department with hundreds of medical staff, a full education department with teachers. I have my own school district superintendent here. It goes on and on and on."

Big prisons "become very mechanistic," says Alvin Bronstein. "You lose the humanness that's important in terms of keeping staff sane and in giving prisoners some social sense so that when they come out they're not totally institutionalized."

Prisons can function well with a population of "up to 500," says Canada's Ole Ingstrup, "but not much more than that. It's actually better if it's a little less than 500, it seems to give us better interaction with the offenders."

The smallest prison for men in California holds 3,500 prisoners. California currently has 33 state prisons. The existing prison system, with its 160,000 inmates, costs $4 billion U.S. a year to operate. "If you were to break that down, duplicate the administrative staff, and instead of 33 prisons have 100 prisons," says McGrath, "the cost would be phenomenal." To break up the inmate population to meet the 500 population standard, the state would need 320 prisons.

Still, according to tough-on-crime theory, the fact that prison life is getting harsher should not be such a bad thing. After all, it gives prisoners more reason to obey the law once they are released and to behave properly while in prison so they can at least stay in the relative safety and comfort of lower-security prisons.

But California is experiencing neither of these results. The rising violence is proof of that. So is the distribution of prisoners since bad behaviour is punished with transfer to higher security: Of the roughly 160,000 inmates in California's state prisons, 33,000 are in maximum security. Another 3,700 prisoners are in special security units, including more than 1,200 men in the Pelican Bay supermax. Altogether, 23 per cent of California's prisoners are in maximum security or higher.

Much the same is happening in other states. "It's true throughout the country, with few exceptions, (that) the percentages of maximum security prisoners are going up," says Alvin Bronstein.

Canada, with almost the same population as California, has a little more than 1,700 prisoners in federal maximum-security prisons. That's 13 per cent of the total federal prison population. And this is despite the fact that Canada's federal prisoners start out, on average as more serious offenders than those in California, a state that punishes far more property crimes and other lesser offences with prison-time than does Canada.

In the U.S., hardest of the hard men being manufactured by American prisons end up in supermaxes, where there are no education programs, no skills training, no work and almost no recreation. They are warehouses where even the pretense making the prisoner a better person is stripped away.

But even "the worst of the worst" are human. And experience has long shown that men can't be safely stored away like guns in a safe. Lock them in a box and they go mad.

This has been known since the early-19th century, when Pennsylvania opened Eastern State penitentiary. Eastern State put inmates in isolated cells slightly larger than those of Pelican Bay and deprived them of human contact. It was a bold experiment at the time, intended not to punish but to give prisoners a chance to reflect and reform themselves. It was a disaster. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited and met a man utterly broken by the experience. "I never saw or heard of any kind of misery that impressed me more than the wretchedness of this man," Dickens later wrote.

The same mental stress afflicts supermax prisoners today. Harvard researcher Stuart Grassian calls it "SHU syndrome." Some suffer mental breakdown. But even those who don't are ground down mentally. They certainly don't behave better in hopes of getting out of such a hellish place. In fact, they behave much, much worse.

Because they are so severely controlled, physical assaults are rare in supermaxes. But they regularly lash out the only way they can: By throwing urine and feces. In all of the supermax units I have toured," wrote Dr. Terry Kupers in his book Prison Madness, "the smearing and throwing of feces is commonplace, and it is difficult even for the psychiatrist to know which of the feces-slinging prisoners are actually psychotic."

Prisoners who throw what they call "brew" or "Agent Orange" -- excrement and urine mixed together -- are put in special cells completely covered with Plexiglas. It stops the assaults, but it also smothers sound and raises the temperature inside the cell, adding yet another level of isolation.

Supermax prisoners are so volatile they are even given special running shoes that don't have the little rings around the shoelace holes: Officials know from experience inmates will even turn these insignificant bits of metal into tiny weapons to hurt others, or themselves.

Since the Pelican Bay supermax opened 11 years ago, there have been 13 deaths. One was from natural causes. Four were suicides. Eight were murders -- committed by cellmates, including seven by strangulation and one by "severe facial trauma."

In a more open prison, the number of deaths at Pelican Bay might not seem so high. In a prison where there is near-absolute control and surveillance, they are a disturbing indication of the rage boiling inside the supermax cells.

Of course, some may not be bothered by the brutal conditions in which supermax prisoners live. If prisoners should suffer, as many tough-on-crime supporters argue, then the worst prisoners should suffer horribly.

That vengeful spirit is another way in which tough-on-crime inexorably arrives at the supermax.

But if the supermax is the final destination for the tough-on-crime movement, it isn't for many of those locked inside. The lifers and gangsters may never get out. But other inmates in this universe of pain do leave when their sentences end.

It's a strange moment. The door buzzes and the inmate steps out from his cell. But today, instead of going to the little courtyard like every other day for the past weeks, months and years, he turns toward the control booth. He is walked down long halls and across open ground to the prison entrance. Standing at the security booth, with its neatly groomed landscaping and friendly guard, a man who hasn't seen the sky for months or years blinks in the sunshine.

On average, 30 men make this journey every month, almost one a day. Each is handed a bus ticket and sent on his way.

Dan Gardner*'s column appears Wednesdays and Fridays.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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