there again soon, and he’s working on a review of that facility."
Study after study warns of the dangers of prolonged solitary confinement. It is proven to produce panic attacks, paranoia, hallucinations, insomnia, chronic lethargy, short-term memory loss, an inability to concentrate, and, ironically, an oversized anger at the intrusion of small sounds such as plumbing, footsteps, or light switches. Some prisoners respond by “acting out;” they throw food or bodily fluids at the guards, smear feces on the cell walls, cut themselves, swallow glass or razor blades, attempt suicide.
Inmates can request counseling services, but Schnapp says it’s up to the mental health workers to decide whether to provide a private counseling session. For the most severely mentally ill inmates, Tamms has a 60-bed section called J-Pod, in which the men get to leave their cells for four hours a day, and have a type of “group therapy” with their individual cages arranged facing a therapist. There’s also an “elevated security wing” where the walls are specially treated to be easily washed, and the cell doors are covered with plexiglass to prevent inmates from pelting the guards with excrement.
Dr. Stuart Grassian, a forensic psychiatrist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, has observed inmates in solitary in several states, and found that “incarceration in solitary caused either severe exacerbation or recurrence of preexisting [mental] illness, or the appearance of an acute mental illness in individuals who had previously been free of any such illness.”
Psychology professor Craig Haney, who studied 100 inmates at Pelican Bay, summed up the hazards of solitary segregation in a 2003 article in the journal Crime and Delinquency: “Supermax prisoners are literally at risk of losing their grasp on who they are, of how and whether they are connected to a larger social world.”
In 2006, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons — a national bipartisan task force — recommended tightening admissions criteria for supermax units and providing “regular and meaningful human contact” for prisoners in solitary confinement.
“To the extent that safety allows, give prisoners in segregation opportunities to fully engage in treatment, work, study and other productive activities,” the task force recommended, and above all, “[transition] inmates out as quickly as possible.”
This recommendation would come as no surprise to the Illinois Task Force on Crime and Corrections, the 1993 panel that proposed construction of a supermax. In its final report, the task force emphasized: “To serve its purpose, inmates must move in and out, based on some objective classification and standards.”
If IDOC has objective standards for moving inmates in or out of Tamms, it isn’t apparent. For example, Michael Johnson, the inmate sent to Tamms six years after being convicted of the murder of a Pontiac prison superintendent, was never accused of killing the superintendent himself; rather, he and another inmate, David Carter, were accused of recruiting inmates Ike Easley and Roosevelt Lucas to carry out the killing. Easley, who stabbed superintendent Taylor six times, is currently locked up in Tamms. But an Illinois Times search of IDOC records shows that Carter, who conspired with Johnson, and Roosevelt, who beat superintendent Taylor with a lead pipe, are both at the more traditional Stateville Correctional Center.
Evan Griffith is another offender who seems to fit Tamms’ criteria. He was convicted and sent to Death Row for the 1990 fatal stabbing of a fellow inmate at Pontiac Correctional Center. Yet when former Gov. George Ryan continued on page 14
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Study after study warns of the dangers of prolonged solitary confinement. It is proven to produce panic attacks, paranoia, hallucinations, insomnia, chronic lethargy, short-term memory loss, an inability to concentrate, and, ironically, an oversized anger at the intrusion of small sounds such as plumbing, footsteps, or light switches. Some prisoners respond by “acting out;” they throw food or bodily fluids at the guards, smear feces on the cell walls, cut themselves, swallow glass or razor blades, attempt suicide.