A Culture of Harm

• Date: 01 August 2008
• DOI: 10.1177/0093854808318585
• Author: Craig Haney
• Published date: 01 August 2008
• Subject Matter: Articles

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A CULTURE OF HARM

Taming the Dynamics of Cruelty

in Supermax Prisons

CRAIG HANEY

University of California, Santa Cruz

This article examines the heightened risk of prisoner abuse that is created in supermax prison settings. It suggests that a

combination of powerful contextual forces to which correctional officers are exposed can influence and affect them in ways

that may engender a culture of mistreatment or harm. Those forces include a problematic set of ideological beliefs, a sur-

rounding environment or ecology that is structured in such a way as to encourage cruelty, and a particularly intense—even

desperate—set of interpersonal dynamics created between prisoners and guards. The importance of taking this heightened

potential for abuse into account when discussing the negative effects of supermax and proposals for its reform is discussed.

Keywords: supermax facilities; isolation; prison environments; mental disorder in prison

There is now a reasonably large and growing literature on the many ways that so-called

“supermax” confinement can adversely affect the overall mental health of prisoners.

The long-term absence of meaningful human contact and social interaction, the enforced

idleness and inactivity, and the oppressive security and surveillance procedures (and

the weapons, hardware, and other paraphernalia that go along with them) all combine to

create starkly deprived conditions of confinement. These conditions predictably undermine

the cognitive and emotional health of many prisoners who are subjected to them (see, e.g.,

Cloyes, Lovell, Allen, & Rhodes, 2006; Haney, 2003; Smith, 2006).

Of course, there are better and worse supermaxes, including some that seek to amelio-

rate these harsh conditions and minimize the harm to prisoners. And there are more and less

resilient prisoners, including some who seem able to withstand the painfulness of these

environments and to recover from the experience with few if any lasting effects. But nei-

ther fact challenges the overall consensus that has emerged on the harmfulness of long-term

punitive isolation and the risks to prisoners who are subjected to it.

This consensus has led a number of courts to exclude certain vulnerable groups of

prisoners, such as those who are mentally ill—or at especially high risk of becoming

so—from supermax confinement (e.g., Madrid v. Gomez, 1995), and to express concern

and condemnation that prisoners housed there “suffer actual psychological harm from

their almost total deprivation of human contact, mental stimulus, personal property and

human dignity” (Ruiz v. Johnson, 1999, p. 913). National commissions and human rights

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 35 No. 8, August 2008 956-984

DOI: 10.1177/0093854808318585

© 2008 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Correspondence concerning this article may be sent to Dr. Craig Haney, Professor of

Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064; e-mail: psylaw@ucsc.edu.

Haney / A CULTURE OF HARM 957

organizations also have roundly criticized the use of supermax and called for the practice

to end. For example, Human Rights Watch (2000) concluded that “state and federal cor-

rections departments are operating supermax in ways that violate basic human rights”

because the conditions of confinement in these facilities “are unduly severe and dispropor-

tionate to legitimate security and inmate management objectives; impose pointless suffering

and humiliation; and reflect a stunning disregard of the fact that all prisoners . . . are members

of the human community” (p. 2). In a report based in part on a series of fact-finding hearings

that addressed a wide range of prison issues, the bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse

in America’s Prisons termed supermaxes “expensive and soul destroying” (Gibbons &

Katzenbach, 2006, p. 59) and recommended that prison systems “end conditions of isolation”

(Gibbons & Katzenbach, 2006, p. 57).

More recently, an international task force of mental health and correctional experts meeting

in Istanbul, Turkey issued a joint statement on “the use and effects of solitary confinement” in

which they acknowledged that its “central harmful feature” is the reduction of meaningful

social contact to a level that it is “insufficient to sustain health and well being” (International

Psychological Trauma Symposium, 2007). Citing various statements, comments, and princi-

ples that had been issued previously by the United Nations—all recommending that the use of

solitary confinement be carefully restricted or abolished altogether—the Istanbul group con-

cluded that “[a]s a general principle solitary confinement should only be used in very excep-

tional cases, for as short a time as possible and only as a last resort.” Notably, the specific

recommendations they made about how such a regime should be structured and operated

would, if adopted, end supermax as we know it in the United States.

Even a former supermax warden—one whose writing reflects relatively little sympa-

thy for prisoners in general and for supermax prisoners in particular—acknowledged that

“[a]fter long-term confinement and the loss of hope for offenders controlled under

[supermax] conditions, mental deterioration is almost assured” (Bruton, 2004, p. 38).

Distinguished penologists and correctional legal scholars agree. Thus, Hans Toch (2001)

concluded that supermax confinement “is vulnerable to charges that it impairs the mental

health of prisoners and that it makes violent men more dangerous” and, in addition, that

“[t]he regime is draconian, redolent with custodial overkill, and stultifying” (p. 383). The

late Norval Morris concluded that supermax prisons “raise the level of punishment close

to that of psychological torture” (Morris, 2000, p. 98). And Fred Cohen (2006) has

argued that extreme forms of penal isolation “simply should be banned; in its less oner-

ous forms, isolation should be sharply limited, closely monitored, and very closely reg-

ulated,” a reform he acknowledged “may well require abandonment of supermax

confinement” (p. 296).

Most of the analysis of the harmfulness of supermax is directed at the extreme levels of

material deprivation, the lack of activity and other forms of sensory stimulation, and, espe-

cially, the absence of normal or meaningful social contact that prisoners experience in these

settings. This emphasis is not misplaced. There is no widely accepted psychological theory,

correctional rationale, or conception of human nature of which I am aware to suggest that

long-term exposure to these powerful and painful stressors is neutral or benign and does not

carry a significant risk of harm.

However, in this article I want to concentrate on a closely related but conceptually sep-

arate issue—the effects of the supermax environment on correctional staff and the ways in