TOO MUCH CONFINEMENT IN PRISON 'SUPER-MAX' UNITS

Our position: Even prisoners who have committed acts of violence behind
bars should not be treated like animals.

Is it right to confine the most unruly inmates 23 hours a day in 7-by-12
cells, sometimes for years at a time, with no sunlight, minimal exercise
and little contact with people? Is it humane to deny them education and job
training?

For that matter, is it moral? In Indiana, the constitution states that the
penal code "shall be founded on the principles of reformation, and not of
vindictive justice."

Throughout the country, prolonged solitary confinement of inmates is common
practice in overcrowded prison systems. Correctional authorities say they
must separate the worst of the worst from the general population to
maintain order in their facilities.

Common or not, the practice has come under scrutiny from human rights
advocates and mental health experts, who say isolation can aggravate the
factors that resulted in an inmate's transfer to a super-maximum security
facility in the first place. Hoosier citizens have an additional concern:
Does such treatment comply with our constitution?

More than half these inmates suffer mental illnesses that may be made worse
by confinement in disciplinary segregation, such as the Secured Housing
Unit at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility near Carlisle or the Maximum
Control Facility at Westville.

Five years after a 1997 report by Human Rights Watch sharply criticized
conditions in those facilities, some progress has been made. But the
Department of Correction still struggles with treatment of mentally ill
prisoners, including those with severe psychoses who would be much better
served in a mental hospital than in disciplinary segregation.

State prisons send their hardest-to-handle offenders to the SHU, the most
rugged of Indiana's two super-max units. Prisoners who wind up at either
place are usually there for committing violence against staff or other
inmates. But some sent to super-max have committed non-violent offenses
such as repeatedly violating prison rules.

Under DOC policy, offenders who have accumulated at least two years of
disciplinary segregation time for rules infractions are eligible for
transfer to the SHU, where they are kept until the staff decides their
behavior has improved enough to re-enter the general population.

Length of sentence, usually one to three years, is imposed by a board
consisting of correctional officers, or by a hearing officer. Inmates at
the SHU can earn the privilege to have a TV in their cell based on improved
behavior over several months. In some cases, offenders do all their prison
time at the super-max.

A thorough examination of conditions at the SHU and MCF occurred in 1997,
when the facilities were visited by a team of lawyers and doctors from
Human Rights Watch, a group based in New York City that investigates claims
of human rights violations.

In its report "Cold Storage: Super-Maximum Security Confinement in
Indiana," Human Rights Watch took the Department of Correction to task for
failing to treat inmates with chronic mental illness, which usually leads
to extensive disciplinary records and lands them in the MCF or SHU. The
report said more than half of the prisoners at the SHU had a mental illness.

Human Rights Watch interviewed prisoners at the SHU who heard voices, were
delusional, self-mutilators and suffered brain damage and seizures. One
prisoner believed that he was "attached to an alien affiliation." But the
state has few treatment options for the kinds of prisoners who wind up at
the SHU, 60 percent of whom are on psychotic medication.

The DOC has been working to address the issue by sending the worst cases of
mental illness to the new psychiatric unit at the state prison in New
Castle. But that makes only a dent in the problem.

"There needs to be institutions for the criminally insane but there are
not," said Jackie Ziemer, a registered nurse at the SHU. "There's not money
for it, and for whatever reason, somebody has to take care of them and
somebody has to treat them. We happen to be one of those units that do."

Citing medical studies showing prolonged solitary confinement makes mental
illness worse, Human Rights Watch suggested inmates in segregation be able
to reduce their time there through good behavior, and no prisoner be
assigned to an additional period of disciplinary segregation after having
spent three consecutive months in segregation.

These are sound recommendations that were never implemented, but should be.

A super-max facility is intended to correct bad behavior, not aggravate
mental illness. Indiana must improve treatment for the criminally insane
and reduce its reliance on solitary confinement in the process.