In case people don't have a good understanding of what a supermax is, it is torture.

[JonLP24]

223. They do this to detainees too

Five years ago, a major lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons would have sounded quixotic. But in the present moment, the ADX case feels like the crest of a wave, as the excessive use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons has come under intensifying scrutiny. Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, held the first-ever congressional hearing on the issue in 2012. Dr. Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, testified that “a shockingly high percentage” of the prisoners in solitary confinement are mentally ill, “often profoundly so” — approximately one-third of the segregated prisoners on average, though in some units the figure rises to 50 percent. The emptiness that pervades solitary-confinement units “has led some prisoners into a profound level of what might be called ‘ontological insecurity,’ ” Haney, who worked as a principal researcher on the Stanford Prison Experiment while in graduate school, told the senators. “They are not sure that they exist and, if they do, exactly who they are.”
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According to David Cloud, a senior associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to the reform of the criminal-justice system, “The research is pretty conclusive: Since people started looking at this, even 200 years ago, when a guy named Francis Gray studied 4,000 people in ‘silent prisons,’ the studies have found that the conditions themselves can cause mental illness, stress, trauma.” The devastating effects of solitary confinement, even on those who showed no previous signs of psychological problems, are now so broadly accepted by mental-health professionals that policy makers are finally taking notice. Last year the New York State attorney general approved a deal forbidding the placement of minors and mentally ill prisoners in solitary; in January, New York City banned solitary for anyone under 21. Gov. John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado signed a similar bill at the urging of the state corrections chief, Rick Raemisch, who spent a night in solitary confinement and wrote about it in a New York Times Op-Ed, concluding that its overuse is “counterproductive and inhumane.” As Cloud told me, “Even if you tried to employ solitary confinement with the most humane intentions, people are still going to lose their minds and hurt themselves.”


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“Solitary confinement is known to trigger all kinds of harms — deep anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations,” said Alexis Agathocleous, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a counsel for people challenging long-term solitary confinement at California’s Pelican Bay Prison. “People lose all sense of self and their ability to function as social human beings.”

Lutalo says he avoided mental breakdown by following a daily routine and suppressing his emotions. “Emotions are dangerous,” he said. “Emotional people had psychological breakdowns because they couldn’t cope with the lockdown.”

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/11/11/solitary-confinementinusunderunreview.html

Mental torture is the worst kind of torture.