Unfair (68 page)

Part of this reflects:
“Smarter Sentencing,”
New York Times
, August 13, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/​2013/08​/14/opinion​/smarter-sentencing.html
; Barbara H. Fried, “Beyond Blame: Would We Be Better Off in a World Without Blame?”
Boston Review
, June 28, 2013,
http://www​.bostonreview.net/​forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blame​-moral-responsibility-philosophy-law
. In 2013, the Obama administration directed U.S. attorneys preparing narcotics indictments to no longer list out the specific amount of drugs—a trigger for mandatory minimums—when the offender had no significant criminal history and the offense did not involve minors, violence, weapons, or gangs. “Smarter Sentencing”; Charlie Savage, “Justice Dept. Seeks to Curtail Stiff Drug Sentences,”
New York Times
, August 12, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/​2013/08/12/us​/justice-dept-seeks-to-curtail-stiff-drug-sentences.html
. More recently, the United States Sentencing Commission proposed altering the federal guidelines for drug offenses, which would reduce the average prison sentence for drug dealing by about a year. Matt Apuzzo, “Holder Endorses Proposal to Reduce Drug Sentences in Latest Sign of Shift,”
New York Times
, March 13, 2014,
http://www.nytimes​.com/​2014/03/14/us/politics/holder-endorses-proposal-to-reduce-drug-sentences.html
. The Department of Justice has also been calling for eliminating mandatory minimums for drug crimes that do not involve violence. Apuzzo, “Holder Endorses Proposal to Reduce Drug Sentences.” In 2014, the DOJ announced that it would be flexing the long-atrophying muscles of the executive clemency by providing potential relief to nonviolent, low-level federal inmates who have served at least ten years for a crime that would receive a lesser
sentence today. “Reviving Clemency, Serving Justice,”
New York Times
, April 23, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/​2014/04/24/opinion​/reviving-clemency​-serving-justice.html
.

Other efforts at the state:
“Smarter Sentencing”; Goode, “U.S. Prison Populations Decline.”

In California, the harshest aspects:
Marc Mauer, “Is the ‘Tough on Crime' Movement on its Way Out?,”
MSNBC.com
, May 5, 2014,
http://www.msnbc.com/​msnbc/​sentencing-reform-the-end-​tough-crime
. There is also a new provision for resentencing people like Leandro who were locked away based on a low-level final strike. Mauer, “Is the ‘Tough on Crime' Movement.”

These are all important steps:
Goode, “U.S. Prison Populations Decline.”

There are still five times:
Goode, “U.S. Prison Populations Decline.”

Three-strikes laws are still:
Cal. Penal Code § 1170.12 (West 2014).

Now, as then, the prisoner:
Paul H. Robinson and John M. Darley, “The Role of Deterrence in the Formulation of Criminal Law Rules: At Its Worst When Doing Its Best,”
Georgetown Law Journal
91 (2003): 950–51.

To decrease crime, the thinking:
Robinson and Darley, “The Role of Deterrence,” 950–51.

Wake up in the morning:
Conditions of solitary confinement vary across the country, but under extreme conditions such as those found in “supermax” prisons, individuals have no control over the electric light in their cells. John J. Gibbons and Nicholas de B. Katzenbach,
Confronting Confinement: A Report of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons
(New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2006), 57,
http://www.vera.org/​sites/default/files/resources​/downloads/Confronting_Confinement​.pdf
;
Brandon Keim, “Solitary Confinement: The Invisible Torture,”
Wired
, April 29, 2009,
http://www.wired.com/​2009/04/​solitaryconfinement/
.

Roll from your bed:
Atul Gawande, “Hellhole: The United States Holds Tens of Thousands of Inmates in Long-Term Solitary Confinement. Is this Torture?,” Annals of Human Rights,
New Yorker
, March 30, 2009,
http://www.newyorker.com/​reporting/2009​/03/30/​090330fa_fact_gawande
.

It may be thirteen by eight:
Gawande, “Hellhole”; Keim, “Solitary Confinement”; Ryan Devereaux, “Prisoners Challenge Legality of Solitary Confinement Lasting More Than a Decade,”
Guardian
, May 31, 2012,
http://​www.theguardian.com/​law/2012/​may/31/california-prison-lawsuit​-solitary-confinement
; James Ridgeway, Jean Casella, and Sal Rodriguez, “Senators Finally Ponder the Question: Is Solitary Confinement Wrong?,”
Mother Jones
, June 19, 2012,
http://www.motherjones.com/​mojo/2012/​06/congress-looks-solitary​-confinement
; Judith Resnick and Jonathan Curtis-Resnick, “Abolish the Death Penalty and the Supermax, Too,”
Slate
, June 18, 2012,
http://hive.slate.com/​hive/how-can-we-​fix-constitution/article/​abolish-the-death-penalty-and-the-supermax-too
.

There are no windows:
“The Abuse of Solitary Confinement”; Gawande, “Hellhole.”

There is a toilet:
Gawande, “Hellhole.”

This is where you sit:
Gawande, “Hellhole.”

You get taken out only to:
Gawande, “Hellhole”; Lance Tapley, “The Worst of the Worst: Supermax Torture in America,”
Boston Review
, November 1, 2010,
http://bostonreview.net/​tapley-supermax-torture​-in-america.php
.

In Maine, no radios or televisions:
Tapley, “The Worst of the Worst.”

At California's Pelican Bay:
Devereaux, “Prisoners Challenge Legality of Solitary Confinement Lasting More Than a Decade.”

It is a bit softer in:
Gawande, “Hellhole.”

Human contact is virtually:
Keim, “Solitary Confinement.”

The doors are often solid:
Resnick and Curtis-Resnick, “Abolish the Death Penalty and the Supermax, Too.”

For many, the opening of:
Ridgeway, Casella, and Rodriguez, “Senators Finally Ponder the Question: Is Solitary Confinement Wrong?”

If you want to feel:
Devereaux, “Prisoners Challenge Legality of Solitary Confinement Lasting More Than a Decade”; Tapley, “The Worst of the Worst.”

Officers with shields and helmets:
“Supermax Prison Cell Extraction,”
Boston Review
, YouTube video, 12:44, uploaded December 16, 2010,
http://youtu.be/​3jUfK5i_lQs
.

Your clothes may be cut off:
“Supermax Prison Cell Extraction.”

You may then be strapped:
Tapley, “The Worst of the Worst.”

More than 185 years after:
Johnston,
Crucible of Good Intentions
, 102.

Philadelphia's penitentiary had a:
Johnston,
Crucible of Good Intentions
, 61. The “tranquilizing chair” used at the penitentiary in the 1830s shows a striking resemblance to the restraint chair they use in Maine today. Johnston,
Crucible of Good Intentions
, 61. The instrument of straps, chains, and locks was invented by Dr. Benjamin Rush of the Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, who saw himself as a true humanitarian reformer and friend of the less fortunate—an apt reminder that those with the most benevolent intentions can engender the cruelest of punishment regimes. Johnston,
Crucible of Good Intentions
, 61.

Humans need social contact:
Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, and J. Bradley Layton, “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review,”
PLoS Med
7 (2010): 14–15,
http://www.plosmedicine.org/​article/info%3Adoi%​2F10.1371%2Fjournal​.pmed.1000316#pmed-1000316-g006
.

Our brains are wired for connection:
Matthew D. Lieberman,
Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
(New York: Random House, 2013), 22, 33–35. Although friendship is rare in the animal kingdom, it is rarely absent among humans: we are a naturally and strongly social species. Lieberman,
Social
, 24; Holt-Lunstad, Smith, and Layton, “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk.” And one theory is that the main reason the modern human neocortex is so large is that it facilitated living in larger, more social groups. Lieberman,
Social
, 32.

According to one theory, when:
John T. Cacioppo and Louise C. Hawkley, “Perceived Social Isolation and Cognition,”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
(2009): 447.

And evidence collected over:
Louise C. Hawkley and John T. Cacioppo, “Loneliness Matters: A Theoretical and Empirical Review of Consequences and Mechanisms,”
Annals of Behavioral Medicine
40 (2010): 218; Holt-Lunstad, Smith, and Layton, “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk.”

Infants die without food:
Holt-Lunstad, Smith, and Layton, “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk,” 14–15. Prior to the fall of communism, in countries such as Romania, foster care was rarely used and infants and children were often placed in large institutions where they experienced profound neglect. UNICEF,
Children at Risk in Central and Eastern Europe: Perils and Promises
(Florence, Italy: United Nationals Children's Fund, International Child Development Centre, 1997), 12–14. In many cases, existing family ties were completely severed
but not replaced by other significant human contact. UNICEF,
Children at Risk in Central and Eastern Europe
, 12–14.

More recently, researchers have found:
Holt-Lunstad, Smith, and Layton, “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk,” 14.

Put differently, having adequate social ties:
Holt-Lunstad, Smith, and Layton, “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk,” 2.

It hurts us to be alone:
Hawkley and Cacioppo, “Loneliness Matters,” 219. Loneliness is associated with an array of cardiovascular risk factors, as well as numerous emotional and cognitive problems—from personality disorders to Alzheimer's disease. Hawkley and Cacioppo, “Loneliness Matters,” 220.

When the U.S. military studied:
Gawande, “Hellhole.”

As a POW, John McCain spent:
Gawande, “Hellhole.”

When he returned, he did not:
Gawande, “Hellhole.”

Solitary confinement appears not only:
Daniel P. Mears, “Supermax Prisons: The Policy and the Evidence,”
Criminology and Public Policy
12 (2013): 691–92; Tapley, “The Worst of the Worst.”

A healthy person who has:
Keim, “Solitary Confinement”; Gawande, “Hellhole.”

And many inmates in solitary:
Tapley, “The Worst of the Worst”; Gawande, “Hellhole.”

A number of these psychological problems:
Tapley, “The Worst of the Worst.”

Self-mutilation is a regular occurrence:
Ridgeway, Casella, and Rodriguez, “Senators Finally Ponder the Question: Is Solitary Confinement Wrong?”; Gibbons and de B. Katzenbach,
Confronting Confinement
, 59; Goode, “Senators Start a Review of Solitary Confinement”; “The Abuse of Solitary Confinement.”

Nineteenth-century Philadelphians were no doubt:
Johnston,
Crucible of Good Intentions
, 61.

Meanwhile, thousands of our citizens:
Amnesty International,
Death Sentences and Executions
2013, 10; “Executions by Year Since 1976,” Death Penalty Information Center, accessed May 24, 2014,
http://www.​deathpenaltyinfo.org/​executions-year
. There were forty-five executions in 2013 in the United States, which means that the chance of being put to death after committing a capital-punishment-eligible murder was less than 2 percent. Justin Wolfers, “Life in Prison, With the Remote Possibility of Death,”
New York Times
, July 18, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/​2014/07/19/​upshot/life-in-prison-with-the​-remote-possibility-of-death.html​?emc=eta1&abt​=0002&abg=1
. Instead, many prisoners end up locked on death row for decades. Wolfers, “Life in Prison.”

Few of us stop to consider:
Our incarceration system may cause more anguish than any the world has ever known, but it's hard to recognize that reality. Indeed, I am always interested to witness how vigorously some of my friends and colleagues will argue against the brutality of the death penalty and their ardor in fighting for its elimination while showing little concern with the current alternative of long prison sentences and solitary confinement.

Yet there have been prominent:
Indeed, solitary confinement has been used for centuries as torture—that is, for the precise purpose of causing extreme suffering. Keim, “Solitary Confinement.”

On March 8, 1842, during his tour:
Johnston,
Crucible of Good Intentions
, 57.

He subsequently “passed the whole day”:
Johnston,
Crucible of Good Intentions
, 58.

But despite his initial excitement:
Charles Dickens,
American Notes
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1842), 238–39; Gopnik, “The Caging of America.”