Going Up the River by Joseph T. Hallinan

Author:Joseph T. Hallinan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375506932
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Although Pelican Bay was billed as the “prison of the future,”9 it is in fact a knockoff of Pennsylvania’s nineteenth-century wonder, the Eastern State Penitentiary. It has the same fortresslike construction, the same use of isolation and sensory deprivation, the same resulting mental illness. The similarities are so uncanny that there’s even a display in the lobby at Eastern State likening it to modern supermaxes like Pelican Bay. The primary difference between the two appears to be not in the design but in the intent. Eastern State genuinely sought to reform the men it held. It failed, and badly, but at least it tried. Pelican Bay makes no such pretense. It does not call itself a penitentiary, but a prison. It is Eastern State minus the hope. At Pelican Bay, the inmates in the SHU are given almost no preparation for their life outside prison. If their terms expire while they are in the SHU, MacDonald says, they are released directly into the free world, with no transition, no adjustment of any kind.

Little is known about the recidivism of inmates released from SHU-like settings, but the anecdotal evidence is not encouraging. In 1992, Massachusetts opened a new, 124-cell supermax unit inside its already existing maximum-security prison at Walpole, twenty-five miles southeast of Boston. Two years after it opened, the American Civil Liberties Union brought a class action lawsuit on behalf of eleven inmates confined in the unit, known as the Departmental Disciplinary Unit, or DDU. In all practical respects, the DDU is similar to Pelican Bay, only smaller. The inmates are confined in eight-by-ten-foot cinder block cells, from which they are released for one hour a day to exercise. Inmates start off in the DDU with no TV or radio and get only a single fifteen-minute phone call and noncontact visit a month. Of the eleven inmates represented by the ACLU, three were later released. One of them, Mark MacDougall, is a convicted rapist whose suicide attempts and other outbursts had merited him three trips from the solitary unit to the state mental hospital at Bridgewater. On the day his sentence ran out, in March 1996, prison officials took him directly from his cell to the front door of the prison, removed his handcuffs and shackles, gave him the $50 in “gate” money mandated by state law, and said good-bye. Within twenty months, MacDougall was back in prison as a probation violator and awaiting trial on ten additional charges, including assault and battery, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault with intent to commit murder, and three counts of assaulting a police officer.10

There is one additional twist that differentiates the supermax of the twentieth century from its counterpart of the nineteenth, and that is money. Today’s supermax is a twofer, touted as being not only tough on crime but also great for the economy. Pelican Bay, for instance, is built in Del Norte County, which has California’s lowest per capita income. Unemployment here is high—over 10 percent in 1999. But before the prison was built it was even higher, running as much as 26 percent.

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