Supermax prisons and the trajectory of exception

• Published date: 25 August 2009
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-4337(2009)0000047009
• Pages: 193-218
• Date: 25 August 2009
• Author: Lorna A. Rhodes

SUPERMAX PRISONS AND THE

TRAJECTORY OF EXCEPTION

Lorna A. Rhodes

ABSTRACT

Supermax prisons have proliferated in the United States since their

contemporary introduction in the early 1980s and have developed a more

recent trajectory in the war prison. Drawing on the work of Giorgio

Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman as well as ethnographic research in

Washington state prisons, this article considers the internal dynamics

and history of the supermax prison in terms of bare life, exception,

indifference, and ‘‘choice.’’ Contradictory relationships within and around

the supermax are contextualized in terms of the extreme and techno-

logically sophisticated methods that make up contemporary incarceration.

Thirty years ago prisons appeared as a central feature of modernity, but one

that would inevitably give way to other forms. This was the case when

predictions were made about the future of incarceration and also when

‘‘the prison’’ was considered as a model for modern society. Whether

prisons were believed not to work at all, or to work so well that a general

internalization of discipline would render them obsolete, they were not

expected to radically increase in number and population. In fact Gilles

Deleuze argued in 1992 that ‘‘We are in a generalized crisis in relation to

all the environments of enclosure – prison, hospital, factory . . . everyone

Special Issue: New Perspectives on Crime and Criminal Justice

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 47, 193–218

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ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-4337(2009)0000047009

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knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their

expiration periods’’ (1992, p. 4).

If this is the prison’s expiration period, then it is not only stretching into

the foreseeable future but taking the form of an evolution and intensifica-

tion of enclosure. Most strikingly, the development of the contemporary

supermax over the past 30 years – in parallel with massive growth in prisons

as whole – suggests that a new form has emerged. The supermax or control

prison is a specialized technology designed to isolate and ‘‘manage’’ that

fraction of the incarcerated population considered the highest security risk.

A national survey that is now 10 years old found almost 60 of these facilities,

either freestanding or as control units within larger prison complexes

(National Institute of Corrections, 1997). Although the extent of growth

since is obscured by problems of definition, lack of information provided by

prison systems, and the absence of any systematic study, it is clear that the

supermax has largely replaced older forms of segregation to become a taken-

for-granted element in the state and federal penal landscape.

Supermax confinement appeared throughout the 1990s largely as a matter

of domestic practice, with some exporting of the model to other countries

(e.g., Boin, 2001). But with the emergence of the war prison, the practice of

extreme confinement inside the United States has taken on a new aspect as

the prehistory, or condition of possibility, for regimes of incarceration that

have severed any connection to the national criminal justice system. The

2004 announcement that Abu Ghraib would be replaced by a presumably

more acceptable supermax suggests the extent to which the current use of

the supermax model occurs in the context of extensive overlap between

domestic and military practices (Hutchinson, 2007;Kelber, 2004;Gordon,

2006). Untethered from the specifics of criminal justice policy, these

prisons emerge as exclusionary projects that do not depend on domestic

political and social conditions for their proliferation. As Brown notes,

‘‘The institutional similarities between Abu Ghraib and the rise of the

supermax prison mark a particularly dangerous pattern in the exploitation

of punishment . .. the logic of custody and incapacitation at home [is]

converging with the global application of detention by the United States’’

(2005, pp. 986, 989).

My intent here is to explore the contradictory terrain that comes into view

if we examine these supermax ‘‘enclosures’’ as social settings whose history

and cultural logic shed light on their capacity for expansion.

1

I begin by

describing the supermax as productive of what the philosopher Giorgio

Agamben calls bare life. This term highlights the process of ‘‘stripping

down’’ – of constituting the prisoner as nothing but his ‘‘bare,’’ biological,

LORNA A. RHODES194