Abstract
Supermax prison facilities, which hold select prisoners in solitary confinement in conditions of sensory deprivation for 23 or more hours per day, are “America’s prisons in their ultimate form” (p. 9). Prisoners remain in supermaxes for years, or decades, not “because of a specific crime committed inside or outside of prison,” nor for a specific sentence determined by a judge or jury, but because of prison administrators who seek further control over prisoners for whom, they believe, “prison is not enough” (p. 2). In 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary, Keramet Reiter examines the origins of this new phenomenon in California.
In a welcome deviation from the main thrust of most punishment and society research, Reiter highlights the role of penal administrators working behind the scenes to create penal policy and practice. Indeed, most of the macro-level social shifts and political dynamics that caused mass incarceration and prison proliferation form the “backdrop” to this story (p. 7). Instead, as Reiter explains, “Administrative discretion, the supermax story reveals, is even more powerful than penal populism” (p. 3). Indeed, rather than another unintended consequence of the prisoners’ rights movement, legislative reform, and prison conditions litigation (p. 7; p. 85), supermaxes were the result of correctional officials’ strategic choices: “prison officials built different prisons and developed new tools of control over prisoners, all explicitly designed to avoid the kind of public oversight that had plagued them in the 1970s” (p. 85).
This story begins in the 1960s and 1970s, when prisons became increasingly overcrowded and violent. This period produced in prison administrators a long-lasting fear of their prisoners, particularly men like George Jackson, the epitome of prison officials’ “most dangerous prisoner” trope (Chapter 2). After prisons erupted in violence and chaos, legislative attempts at sentencing reform and prison conditions litigation reduced administrative discretion, leading prison officials to feel they had “lost control” (Chapter 3). Far from it. In one of the book’s most important chapters, Reiter explains how in the 1980s correctional personnel (and the architects they hired) had virtually free reign while they created the supermax to restore their control over prisoners (Chapter 4). Even when conditions at “Skeleton Bay” (Pelican Bay State Prison, California’s first supermax)—including guard-orchestrated gladiator fights for some prisoners of rival gangs and a mentally ill prisoner forced to bathe in scalding water—were subjected to judicial scrutiny, the supermax was not found unconstitutional, but was merely refined (Chapter 5).
In addition to tracing the history of the supermax as an ascendant penal technology, 23/7 offers repeated glimpses into supermax prisoners’ Kafkaesque reality. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the basics of supermax confinement, including some of the routines and coping strategies prisoners employ and the significance of a chance encounter that allows two prisoners to shake hands (p. 28). Chapter 6 explains how prisoners enter and exit a supermax: Until 2015, prisoners were sent to a supermax if they were a “gang affiliate,” a status determined by a few seemingly arbitrary factors (possessing “radical” literature, suggestive drawings and tattoos, apparent associations with other gang affiliates). For many supermax prisoners, the only way of leaving a supermax is to debrief (“snitch”) or die—those eligible for early release on parole are rarely paroled (see also Chapter 7). Notably, debriefing is dangerous and can potentially require a return to conditions very similar to supermax confinement for safety reasons. Ironically, Reiter notes, prisoners’ failure to debrief—along with the very tattoos that helped send them to the supermax—is sometimes used as evidence against their reformation, eliminating their chances of parole-based release (see also the book’s Afterword).
In a central theme of the book, Reiter interrogates the many myths (or pieces of misinformation) that not only brought supermaxes to life but also sustain them. Without whitewashing or engaging in hagiography, Reiter also illustrates the large and problematic gaps between state representatives’ descriptions of supermax prisoners as “the worst of the worst” and who is actually kept in long-term solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. Individual biographies of supermax prisoners gathered through interviews and correspondence with family members and former supermax detainees, prisoners’ published writings, court records, newspaper accounts, and other sources appear throughout the book. Some of these men, including Todd Ashker (Chapter 1) and Rene Enriquez (Chapter 6), were well-known gang leaders and others, including “Ernie” (a pseudonym), were originally incarcerated “for nonviolent, non-serious third-strike offenses” (p. 184). Notably, state officials keep minimal data on their supermax population—how many are under confinement, for how long, or where (Chapter 7). However, Reiter found that “[b]etween 1997 and 2007, California sent more than 10,000 prisoners [held under determinate sentences] from its supermaxes straight onto city streets” despite their ostensibly dangerous characters (p. 168). As Reiter argues, obfuscation and lack of transparency hide some of the many paradoxes that lay at the heart of supermax policy.
Recently, prisoners dragged the supermax into the spotlight through repeated hunger strikes in 2011 and 2013 and a class action lawsuit settled in 2015 (Chapter 8). However, Reiter remains skeptical of the latter’s long-term consequences: “no settlement, nor any legislative initiative, will cure prison officials of the fear they experience daily in managing mentally ill prisoners, negotiating hungry strikes, and fighting the memory of George Jackson,” which helps sustain the belief that supermax prisoners are the “worst of the worst” (p. 202). So long as there remains “fear of uncontrollably violent prisoners, lack of transparency, and bureaucratic discretion … the process that made [supermaxes] will not be easily unmade or depopulated” (p. 203). Ironically, by writing this book and “revealing the deepest corners of our most restrictive and least visible prisons” (p. 8), Reiter has contributed to a process that may ultimately prove her skepticism wrong.
Throughout the book, Reiter incorporates a first-person, occasionally autobiographical writing style. Incorporating the author’s personal account is becoming more common (see also Eason, 2017), but the approach may be jarring to those used to staid conventional academic approaches. It is a high-risk, high-reward approach that pays off in this case. In addition to making the book eminently readable, Reiter’s writing style provides a nice way of making her methodology transparent and clarifying her normative biases (which always exist to some degree, but are rarely made explicit). The result is a refreshingly honest way of presenting her data collection and analysis. Reiter’s style is particularly useful given the wide appeal and politically diverse audience at which the book is aimed. Indeed, Reiter invites her audience to consider “whether prison is ever enough” because “[w]hen prison is not enough, there is no end to the terrors, no limit to punishment” (p. 8).
Some scholars may criticize this work as yet another book on California’s distinctive penality, but Reiter’s focus is not misplaced, nor is the work exclusively focused on California. As Reiter explains, the supermax was “a local innovation” (p. 5); a national-level survey would obscure the role of administrative elites and their discretion over the construction and operation of this new technology. While giving California a central role in the narrative, Reiter weaves in developments from around the country, lending useful context to the California story. Moreover, as she illustrates, the history of the California supermax is integral to the rise of the supermax, and its distinctive mode of long-term solitary confinement, more generally. As Reiter explains, litigation over the conditions in Pelican Bay that refined the features of the supermax “paved the way for other states, and the federal government, to open more supermaxes”—and to successfully overcome additional legal challenges to what were newly judicially sanctioned “minimum standards of ‘humane treatment’” (p. 5). In this sense, the California supermax became a template for the nation’s correctional departments. Understanding the origins of the California supermax is thus a crucial first step for understanding the supermax phenomenon.