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"Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in U.S. prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend twenty-three hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators' discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one "supermax," California's Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners. This book describes how Pelican Bay was created without legislative oversight, in fearful response to 1970s radicals; how easily prisoners slip into solitary; and the mental havoc and social costs of years and decades in isolation. The product of fifteen years of research in and about prisons, this book provides essential background to a subject now drawing national attention,"--Baker & Taylor

"Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in U.S. prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend twenty-three hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators' discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one "supermax," California's Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners. This book describes how Pelican Bay was created without legislative oversight, in fearful response to 1970s radicals; how easily prisoners slip into solitary; and the mental havoc and social costs of years and decades in isolation. The product of fifteen years of research in and about prisons, this book provides essential background to a subject now drawing national attention, "--Baker & Taylor

Supermaxes are prisons designed to impose long-term solitary confinement. Supermax prisoners spend 23 h or more per day in windowless cells. Technology, like centrally controlled automated cell doors and fluorescent lights that are never turned off, allows prisoners to be under constant surveillance, while minimizing all human contact. California built two of the first and largest supermaxes in 1988 and 1989. Corcoran State Prison and Pelican Bay State Prison, which together house more than 3000 prisoners in supermax conditions, were two of 23 new prisons built in California during the late twentieth century era of rapidly increasing incarceration rates and prison capacities. This article will address three stages of supermax operation in California: (1) the early, tumultuous years of total administrative discretion and egregious abuses; (2) the middle years of controlled expansion and entrenchment of supermax use; and (3) the recent events and reforms initiated following a hunger strike in California's segregation units in the summer of 2011. The history of California's use of supermax prisons reveals both the role of administrative discretion in shaping the initial design and day-to-day operation of the institutions, as well as the perverse ncentives that made these institutions increasingly invisible and decreasingly governable. Supermaxes, then, serve as an important piece of the story of mass incarceration in California, a microcosm of the larger trends in administration, law, and politics, which have created the social and economic behemoth of a state prison system facing Californians today.

Supermaximum security prisons ('supermaxes') across the United States detain thousands in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. In 1988 and 1989, California opened two of the first and largest of the modern supermaxes: Corcoran and Pelican Bay State Prisons. Today, California houses more than 3300 prisoners in supermaxes. Each month, between 50 and 100 people are released directly from these supermaxes onto parole. Using statistics obtained from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, this article explores who these prisoners and parolees are: what race are these prisoners, how long did they spend in solitary confinement, and how frequently are they released? Relative to non-supermax prisoners and parolees in California, supermax prisoners and parolees are disproportionately Latinos, who have served long prison sentences, under severe conditions. Analysis of interviews with correctional department administrators about the original goals and purposes of the supermaxes further contextualizes these data, revealing that supermaxes today function rather differently than their designers envisioned 20 years ago. In sum, this research provides one of the first evaluations of how supermaxes function, in terms of whom they detain and for how long, and how these patterns relate to the originally articulated purposes of the institutions.

Concrete, steel, artificial light, complete technological automation, near-complete sensory deprivation, and total isolation - these are the basic conditions of supermaximum security prisons in the United States. "Supermax" prisoners remain alone twenty-three to twenty-four hours a day, under fluorescent lights that are never turned off. Meals arrive through a small slot in an automated cell door. Prisoners have little to no human contact for months, years, or even decades at a time, save brief interactions with correctional officers, who place hand, ankle, and waist cuffs on each prisoner before removing him from his cell. Prisoners only leave their cells four or five times per week, for showers or for brief, solitary exercise periods in "dog runs" - concrete pens with roofs at least partially open to natural light. In sum, supermax prisons across the United States detain thousands in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. They are prisons within prisons, confining the prisoners correctional administrators deem a threat to the general prison population.Arizona opened the first supermax, in 1986, and California opened the second, in 1989. Over the subsequent ten years, almost every state, along with the federal prison system, either built a supermax or retrofitted an existing facility to create a supermax unit. This dissertation examines the birth of the supermax in Arizona and California, and the spread of the institutional innovation across the United States. The research presented here draws on three major categories of data: archival materials, including legal decisions and case files, local news reporting, and legislative records; oral history interviews with more than thirty key informants, including correctional administrators, legal professionals, architects, and former prisoners; and quantitative data maintained by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. This is the first study specifically focused on unearthing the administrative and political processes that underwrote the supermax.The dissertation begins with an overview of the idea of solitary confinement and the term "supermax," leading to a working definition of supermaxes as institutions that are: bounded in time, administratively overseen, characterized by extremely restrictive conditions, and large in both scale of beds and durations of confinement. Chapter Two uses this definition to create a working list of supermax institutions in the United States. Chapter Three frames supermaxes as a product of mass incarceration, and introduces the core region (the Sunbelt) and core case study (California) on which the dissertation will focus. Chapters Four through Six document how and why correctional administrators decided to build California's first supermax, Pelican Bay State Prison. These chapters trace how socio-political changes in the 1970s - including structural changes to sentencing laws; race-based social organizing, both in and out of prison; and increasing judicial attention to prisons - paved the way for the supermax innovation in the 1980s. Chapter Four argues that critical power shifts between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government left a power vacuum, which correctional administrators quickly filled, in part through building supermaxes. Chapter Five describes the legislative process that nominally underwrote the supermax, and argues that California legislators ceded both planning and moral authority to state correctional administrators. Chapter Six describes the processes of architectural design and technological innovation that created the physical supermaxes themselves.Chapters Seven though Nine explore the implications of the administrative origins of the supermax. These chapters document how the institution has never had a clearly articulated purpose (Chapter Seven), and how it has been operated in contradiction to its articulated goals (Chapters Eight and Nine). Chapter Eight shows that supermaxes have detained prisoners for decades longer than intended, and have disproportionately impacted minority prisoners. Chapter Nine argues that courts have largely deferred to correctional administrators' claims about the necessity of the supermax, even though little empirical evidence exists to support these claims. Together, these chapters demonstrate that correctional bureaucrats not only made the initial supermax design decisions in California, but also progressively concentrated their power over supermax prisoners through hyper-automated buildings and internal prison classification procedures.Chapter Ten further explores the relationship between supermaxes and the federal judiciary, arguing that federal court decisions setting minimum conditions and standards for prisons in the 1970s and 1980s shaped the supermax innovation that followed. The conformity of supermaxes to these minimum constitutional standards has rendered the institutions resistant to legal challenges. The Conclusion discusses the implications of recent supermax-related trends, including prisoner protests about conditions of confinement, and state-based movements to reduce supermax populations. In sum, because supermaxes manifest, both physically and legally, the outer limits of non-death penalty punishment policy, they are critical for understanding both U.S. prison expansion, and the impacts of U.S. tough-on-crime policies.

In this testimony, I will discuss, in turn, three aspects of solitary confinement in the United States on which I have a particular expertise: (1) the history of the practice as an administrative (rather than legislative or judicial) innovation, (2) the lack of evidence that the practice promotes safety, either in prisons or in communities; and (3) the unprecedented scale of the practice – in terms of both numbers of people confined and durations of confinement. Statement of Keramet A. Reiter, J.D., Ph.D. Before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights

In 2008, five students representing four different U.C. Berkeley graduate departments—Jurisprudence & Social Policy, Education, Sociology, and Public Policy—got together for coffee. None of us knew each other, but we had one friend in common: Amy Lerman, a recent U.C. Berkeley Political Science Ph.D., who had completed a dissertation that examined the California Correctional Peace Officers' Union. The five of us were all studying the criminal justice system in some form: policing, prisons, theories of punishment, and fear of crime. We were all eager for a forum to talk about our research, and for colleagues with similar interests. We started meeting regularly, and in 2009, we applied for working group status and funding, through the Center for Race and Gender, in order to formalize and expand our group.

Supermaxes across the United States detain thousands in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. Almost every state built a supermax between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. This chapter examines the role of federal prisoners' rights litigation in the 1960s and 1970s in shaping the prisons, especially supermaxes, built in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. This chapter uses a systematic analysis of federal court case law, as well as archival research and oral history interviews with key informants, including lawyers, experts, and correctional administrators, to explore the relationship between federal court litigation and prison building and designing. This chapter argues that federal conditions of confinement litigation in the 1960s and 1970s (1) had a direct role in shaping the supermax institutions built in the subsequent decades and (2) contributed to the resistance of these institutions to constitutional challenges. The history of litigation around supermaxes is an important and as-yet-unexplored aspect of the development of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in the United States over the last half century. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]