Supermax lockups adjust to decreasing demand

By JULIE CARR SMYTH

YOUNGSTOWN — Kunta Kenyatta struggles to describe the 33 months he spent in the tight four walls of a super-maximum security cell at the Ohio State Penitentiary.

“It’s extreme isolation, sensory deprivation. It’s hard to explain really,” said Kenyatta, 39, out since 2001.

Supermax prisons — where inmates spend roughly 23 hours a day locked in soundproofed cells — were trendy when Ohio cut the ribbon on its angular, steel-bedecked penitentiary April 9, 1998.

A decade later, the winds favoring ultrasecure incarceration have shifted.

Virginia and Wisconsin downgraded supermax prisons to maximum security in 2002. Virginia made the change at its notorious Wallens Ridge State Prison just four years after the facility was built.

A large portion of the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, another supermax prison, was converted to less restrictive maximum security status last year. Ohio now also houses death row and lower security inmates at its penitentiary.

The scenario has been repeated across the country, where early legal challenges prompted states to remove most mentally ill prisoners from supermax units and states recognized quickly that the prisons were expensive to operate and difficult to staff.

“In a nutshell, it just became clear that they were not working,” said David Fathi, director of U.S. programs at Human Rights Watch. “They were more trouble and expense than they were worth.”

Supermax prisons were built to house inmates convicted of serious crimes who caused trouble in prison, including gang activity, subversive behavior or violence against staff. Ohio’s went up after the deadly 1993 Lucasville prison uprising.

Dave Johnson, the penitentiary’s first warden, recalls a kind of super-maximum space race among state corrections departments at the time, each wanting their facility to be the first, the biggest or the best. The first inmates arrived at Ohio’s prison in May 1998.

“I got a call one morning and the man on the other end said, ‘I don’t know you but I already hate you,”’ Johnson recalled. “It was the warden from the Illinois Supermax, and we had gotten our accreditation before he did.”

Johnson said the Supermax was viewed as much safer the Lucasville prison.

“Philosophically, the big thing that we wanted to avoid was an atmosphere of retaliation, where inmates would do something, staff would retaliate, then inmates would retaliate, then things would spiral downhill,” he said. “It started out right away [at the Supermax] where staff would be safe, so they wouldn’t be fearful of inmates, wouldn’t dread coming to work, and it was a very positive, upbeat environment.”

In Maryland, prisons had also become deadly, said Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Its Supermax was built in the wake of two prison guard murders, one in a prison a touring judge labeled “the innermost circle of hell.”

At the peak of the prisons’ popularity in 2000, more than 30 states were operating one or more supermax prisons, holding an estimated 20,000 prisoners, according to a National Institute of Corrections study and research by Human Rights Watch. By 2006, the number of prisoners held in supermax custody had fallen to 2,378, according to figures from the American Correctional Association.

Ohio’s Supermax provides a prime example. Only 53 of 553 inmates are held in the extreme isolation.

The cell of a supermax inmate measures 89.7 square feet, enough room for a ledge for his cot, a small desk and stool, a set of three small bookshelves (one used for the TV), and a toilet and sink. Inmates are allotted a 15-minute shower and one hour for exercise each weekday. Meals and most routine medical care take place in the cell. All visits with outsiders are noncontact.

On a recent day, some inmates released for their hour reprieve from isolation were dashing end-to-end in a cellblock, some were doing vigorous pull-ups, push-ups and knee bends, while others were just talking.

“Just to endure the conditions takes a very strong person or else a person who can retreat into a very narrow place,” said Alice Lynd, part of a husband-wife attorney team from Niles that has fought Ohio’s Supermax in court. “You lose any interest in staying alive. There’s no ability to concentrate, you don’t get normal feedback.”

With the prisons’ popularity with the public waning, states also found that there were not enough ultra-bad inmates to justify all the glistening new ultra-high security cells — conceived, Fathi says, “not by corrections professionals, but by politicians trying to look tougher on crime than the next person.”