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Female prisoners in England left to give birth without midwife, report reveals

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Female prisoners in England left to give birth without midwife, report reveals

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Female prisoners in England left to give birth without midwife, report reveals

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Exclusive: research reveals lack of proper medical care for pregnant women and babies in some prisons

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"Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court..." The opening words of classic sitcom Porridge, of course, as Ronnie Barker's character "Fletch" enters the classic British nick: a gothic arch over a portcullis-like door, leading into a dour labyrinth of bricks and bars.

"These are the archetypal prisons of the public imagination," says Chris Costelloe, director of the Victorian Society. "We always think of high masonry walls, big gates and the term 'Dickensian'. They're grim." Deliberately so, one might argue.

Yet several of these classic old prisons now find themselves in prime urban sites, and of course, they can't be left alone. Chancellor George Osborne has announced that he will close several, including the women's prison Holloway, Pentonville, Wandsworth and the legendary Wormwood Scrubs - itself star of appearances in The Italian Job, Minder and Steptoe and Son, the very name conjuring carbolic soap and caper movies.

They'll be developed, mostly as housing, and nine new prisons will be built on brownfield sites outside urban areas.

Osborne's policy move came after justice secretary Michael Gove tagged these gloomy old nicks "ageing and ineffective", replete with "bullying, drug-dealing and violence", and the idea draws from Gove's think-tank Policy Exchange's 2013 report Future Prisons, which proposed a programme of high-tech "hub" prisons deploying "cutting-edge architecture", each housing up to 3,000 inmates in "campus-style" units around centralised services. They'd have "resettlement" aspects built in, wider community and share sites [eg, courts] with other parts of the criminal justice system," said the report, and the Government's heritage body Historic England isn't, says a spokeswoman, "opposed to the sale and re-use of historic prison buildings, provided that any new development is done sensitively to the distinctive character and history of the buildings".

On the face of it, it's hard to argue against the decommissioning of Victorian prisons, punitive edifices whose massive walls express the opprobrium of the state, and seem to refer to the castles and dungeons of incarceration's deep history. Their most common design - cells arranged in galleries around a central atrium - does a good job. "They're often very good at sight lines and security," says Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust (PRT). But they're too much at the punitive end of the spectrum and don't speak of Lyon's two pillars of "redemption and rehabilitation". "Some still have 'slopping out'," says Lyon. "They're a health and safety nightmare where people share cells with open toilets, and they incubate resentment." Harsh brick walls and stress-inducing slamming doors - those steel-on-brick clangs we all know from prison dramas - don't help.

The UK has historically been a prison-design leader and gave the world one of the most famous designs, in the Panopticon, created by British social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century and made famous to a generation of students by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who saw them as a metaphor of a brutalised surveillance society. This design enabled a smaller number of guards to watch the same amount of prisoners from a central point, cutting down on costs and supposedly leading to self-restraint by prisoners, who would act differently in the knowledge that they were being watched - an early portent of the CCTV era. The 19th-century prisons drew from that well.

So do the UK's new prisons follow this tradition? Not really. Our new jails are mostly brick-faced warehouses with high fences in low-value areas. Two noteworthy prisons are exemplars: Oakwood in the Midlands, designed by Pick Everard in a "modern custodial aesthetic", which has naturally lit rooms and double-height association spaces, and as-yet unbuilt Wrexham, by the Aedas group, mooted to hold 2,100, which says it will be providing "activity associated with rehabilitation" and claims to reflect "local distinctiveness and character" in 14 buildings, including a visitor support building, workshops and an energy centre.

But Yvonne Jewkes, professor of criminology at the University of Leicester, thinks that despite such humanising appurtenances, these edifices are more akin to the "Amazon warehouse" typology, hardly "cutting-edge architecture", more a container model imported from the US: bland and technocratic, with a smell of fear and an assembly-line ethos. In a recent paper, Designing Punishment: Balancing security, creativity and humanity in contemporary correctional systems, Jewkes wrote that "prisons send a clear message about punishment from the 'carefully scripted' construction of their façades" and that the new "bland, corporate-looking" prisons have no architect engagement with their "clients" or if you prefer, end users. It's not about them. Maybe the nine prisons-to-be will be akin to Jewkes' desire for an "architecture of hope". But she is not optimistic, and nor is architect Will Alsop of aLL Design. Ten years ago, Alsop made a project with organisation Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation), a company that promotes the arts within the penal system, and found all manner of spirit-crushing detail: beds just 6ft long, lavatories in cells two feet away from the bed. "They bang up prisoners in these miserable places," he says. "No wonder they're universities of crime." Alsop recommended giving prisoners more agency: their own keys to cells, meaningful jobs, better education and mixed age groups - even allowing prisoners to paint their cells so as to achieve "a sense of place" - and his HMP Paterson concept (named after pre-war prison reformer, Alexander Paterson) mooted a landscape surrounded by buildings: library, sports facilities, recording studio.

Bleeding-heart accusations arrived ("They all came out with the 'holiday camp' line," Alsop recalls) so he stuck them with the UK's high 62 per cent recidivist rate: "Schools should make you learn, hospitals should make you better, and prisons should help prisoners reform." Alsop hasn't been asked to contribute a design for the nine new nicks and, according to Jewkes, will be unlikely to tender.

"Design and build contracts are distributed between a handful of anonymous global companies," she says. "It's a process that discourages innovation."

Lyon says that there have been different stages in prison design, and those built in the 1960s through to the 1980s did focus on rehabilitation, creating spaces such as "communal living rooms". But they haven't necessarily aged well. As Lyon says, some have poor sight lines, low ceilings, corridors and blind spots. During the riots in Risley Prison, Warrington, which opened in 1964, people became trapped on landings. So, softening devices such as vinyl flooring, better insulation and underfloor heating aren't much use if a prison fails in the creation of safety.

Karin Beijersbergen of the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, writing in the Crime & Delinquency journal, established the existence of six broad jail-design styles, from the late 19th to the 21st century: panoptical, radial, rectangular, courtyard, high-rise and campus; more or less in that historical order. Her study argued for more openness and, like Lyon, she believes that better staff-prisoner relations are a significant factor in preventing recidivism. "More open layouts can improve inmate-guard relations and support a culture of progress rather than fear." Closeness to family is also important, another reason for concern about the out-of-town jails, where travel times will be greater.

These views are shared by the social entrepreneur Hilary Cottam, who has done much research on prison design and in the 2000s worked with architects Buschow Henley on a project called The Learning Prison, which proposed a jail composed of a cellular structure of 11 "house units", each holding 36 prisoners in small communities. Cells should be like studies, they argued, with access to animals and gardens: an idea that has indeed been taken up. "They have chickens at Holloway," she says. The Learning Prison's emphasis was that prison surroundings may be spartan, but shouldn't be mentally and emotionally repressive.

"Prison design is a hot potato and brings out a lot of emotion," adds Cottam. "But it's enshrined in English law that courts punish and prisons rehabilitate. Designers need to look at the purpose of prison, and the idea that you can simply 'warehouse' people is wrong."

So, where are the good new prisons? There are a few celebrated worldwide jails, including Norway's Bastøy prison, on Bastøy island, whose wooden cottages look like the kind of place that you might even choose for a holiday were it on Airbnb, and where inmates are allowed to ride horses, fish and go skiing. It's not for high category prisoners but, even so, the recidivism rate, claimed at a low 16 per cent, has caused much interest.

Leoben Prison by Josef Hohensinn near Graz, Austria, built in 2004, is another set-piece that looks like an car manufacturer's hi-tech HQ, has a deliberately de-stressing acoustics and prisoners are allowed to wear their own clothes. "Maximum security outside; maximum freedom inside," is Hohensinn's ethos. Even more recently, the Mas d'Enric Penitentiary near Tarragona, Spain, by AiB Estudi d'Arquitectes in 2013, is a low-rise campus of buildings with green rooftops and courtyards. And ideas are also coming from the US, where architect Glen Santayana designed for his Masters at Harvard a new kind of prison called a "PriSchool". "It symbiotically merges the program of incarceration and education," writes Santayana. "The prison is for non-violent drug offenders, the school of criminology and criminal justice, where inmate-student interaction is facilitated and encouraged." Again, the idea is to promote rehabilitation and, as Santayana puts it, "the creation of new productive members of society".

Hilary Cottam also lionises Greenland's Ny Anstalt prison by Schmidt Hammer Lassen, which, when finished in 2017, will bring its ethos of light and openness to rehabilitation and "diminish physical and psychological violence", and which finds an echo in an as-yet unbuilt womens' prison for Iceland by architects Ooiio, which sets out (as Jewkes puts it), "to design a prison that doesn't look like a prison: no dark spaces, small cells and concrete walls, but natural light, open spaces, and natural green materials such as peat, grass and flowers." Homeliness, communal activities, close staff-prisoner relationships and access to open air could finally bury Oscar Wilde's plaintive stanza in The Ballad of Reading Gaol: "That little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky". Incidentally, Wilde's unhappy old home, Grade II listed Reading, is now decommissioned, and another of those Victorian jails that will probably become a residential development.

Juliet Lyon isn't convinced that these newer examples will influence the upcoming nine jails or ameliorate what she calls the "crisis in prisons". "The climate of redemption and rehabilitation just isn't there," she says. "The point is to get prisoner numbers down, shorter sentencing as well as better design." Jewkes, meanwhile, lists factors that she believes designers should integrate: welcoming entrances, an atmosphere more like a civic building (a shopping or sports centre), freedom of movement and soft furnishings instead of hard, fixed furniture - not to mention access to courtyards, gardens and technology. To "holiday camp" jibes she suggests that the old style of prison actually cleaves to the "worst" prisoners by designing for the hardest cases.

And what of the refurbishments of the 300-odd ageing Porridge-type jails? They might do well: after all, Victorian asylums have been turned into residential housing with some success. The spokeswoman for Historic England, which recently undertook a review project with prison architecture expert Alan Brodie, is keen that their heritage is recognised. While their internal layouts can cause problems - all those damned cells - these buildings often have a handsome muscularity, not to mention a potentially great marketing story. Indeed, their conversion has been under way for a while. Shropshire Council is potentially to develop Grade II-listed HMP Shrewsbury, probably for residential and student housing, with Panter Hudspith Architects. Architectural firm Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios has been invited to turn two historic and partially listed former prisons into housing schemes at Gloucester (where Fred West was held on remand) and Portsmouth. Oxford's prison is already a Malmaison Hotel - well, which bourgeois mini-breaker doesn't want a frisson of excitement? Canterbury's prison is on the way to becoming student accommodation for Christ Church University, and is navigating its Grade II listing.

There are gems out there. Other old prisons of architectural note include Stafford, designed in 1787 by William Blackburn; 1819-vintage Maidstone in 1819, Shepton Mallet's prison is Grade II* and was the oldest in use before being closed in 2013 (again, it is likely to gain residential or hotel use).

Preston's jail goes back to the 1780s, and Manchester's infamous prison was not only name-checked by The Smiths in Strangeways, Here We Come, but also partly designed by Alfred Waterhouse, one of the Victorian era's greatest architects, who built the Natural History Museum. For a taste of how these might look when flamed up, Amsterdam's Het Arresthuis hotel is a striking answer to the problem of making a tarry old jail cosy. And there's a social enterprise at Brixton Prison's Old Governor's House that has now become training restaurant for prisoners. "Several of these old prisons are wonderful buildings," says the Victorian Society's Costelloe, who believes we should develop them sensitively. "Infill could provide space for some of the 'more than 3,000 new homes' the Government plans to build on the sites and then we could retain as many historic buildings as possible," he says. "For example, Wormwood Scrubs' chapel is Grade II* listed: a really important building. These are grand and solid buildings with strong character and not resistant to conversion."

Even Fletcher's old jail in St Albans is now a register office. Prisons can change - as can prisoners.
Best new jails
Norway's Bastoy prison, on Bastoy Island is not for high category prisoners but even so, the recidivism rate, claimed at a low 16 per cent.

Austria's Leoben Prison by Josef Hohensinn near Graz, of 2004, has a high-tech look and de-stressing acoustic performance.

The Mas d'Enric Penitentiary near Tarragona, Spain, by AiB Estudi d'Arquitectes in 2013, is a low-rise campus of buildings with green rooftops and courtyards.
Unbuilt or in process
Glen J Santayana's Pri-School is an educative type of jail which argues for "the creation of productive members of society".

Greenland's Ny Anstalt prison by Schmidt Hammer Lassen, due to be finished in 2017 will bring an ethos of rehabilitation

A womens' prison for Iceland by architects Ooiio sets out: "To design a prison that doesn't look like a prison.

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How designers could be building better UK prisons

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The Government's plans to close Victorian gaols in towns isn't just a chance for urban redevelopment, it's an opportunity to build prisons on a more human scale, with natural light and better facilities. It's happening across Europe, but could a new generation of nicks become the norm here?

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Women make up just under 5% of the prison population in England and Wales, yet they are more likely than men to reoffend. Why doesn't prison work for women and what is being done to improve outcomes for them?

"The last day, I was given a bin bag of my stuff. The door closed behind me, and it was over.

"But no-one helps you on the outside, and anyone who hasn't been through it can't even begin to understand."

In 2011, Lisa* spent three months in prison for her involvement in a fraud. Despite receiving a relatively short custodial sentence, the impact was life-changing.

Away from her daughters, she questioned her abilities as a mother and her mental health began to deteriorate.

"I hadn't wanted to see my girls when I was inside because I didn't want to put them through that.

"When I got out, there were some days I couldn't face picking the girls up from school because I knew parents were talking about me. I had panic attacks just walking to the shops. I got paranoid.

"Once you've been inside, it's like your mind goes back when you least expect it.

"The walls are in your head, it's even worse than sitting in your cell."

According to the Women in Prison charity, 84% of women entering prison in 2017 committed a non-violent offence - often for crimes such as theft, handling stolen goods and non-payment of council tax.

As a consequence, they are likely to receive shorter sentences, which studies have shown link to higher rates of reoffending.

Lisa believes the fact she was in prison for a matter of months played a part in the lack of support she received.

"Even the officers said there was not much they could do to help me because I wasn't in for long enough," she said.

A Ministry of Justice report last year found short-term sentences served by both men and women were "consistently associated with higher rates of proven reoffending".

But analysis shows that women serving sentences of less than a year are more likely to reoffend than men with comparable sentences - although they are slightly less likely to reoffend overall.

Female inmates are also more than twice as likely as men to report needing mental health help.

Penal reform charity the Howard League says women account for one in five of all incidents of self-injury behind bars.

"Prison is a negative experience for everyone, but it is particularly distressing for women," says its chief executive, Frances Crook.

"They typically have more complex needs than men. They are more likely to be victims of abuse, and more likely to have been sentenced for offending related to their exploitation by a partner.

"And as women are much more likely than men to be primary carers of children, they are disproportionately affected by a short prison sentence.

"Even a few weeks in custody can be enough to cause a woman to lose her job, her home and her children."

Justice Secretary David Gauke said in June that female offenders are often amongst the most vulnerable of all.

"Many experience chaotic lifestyles involving substance misuse, mental health problems, homelessness, and offending behaviour... often the product of a life of abuse and trauma," he wrote in the Female Offender Strategy.

"Evidence clearly shows that putting women into prison can do more harm than good for society, failing to cut the cycle of reoffending and often exacerbating already difficult family circumstances."

The government has said it is shifting towards community services to keep women away from prison and pledged to spend £5m over two years.

It has scrapped plans for five community prisons and instead will trial five residential centres helping women with drug rehabilitation and finding work.

"Women's centres can achieve what prisons cannot - working with other organisations in the community to ensure that women are given the support they need and guided away from crime," said Ms Crook.

"Prison does not work."

'Wall of silence'

About 60% of female inmates are a victim of domestic violence.

Yasmin Akhtar had been in a violent marriage and tried to take her own life before she spent two years at HMP Drake Hall for drug possession with intent to supply.

"When I was in prison, my family would tell everyone that I was working away because they didn't want to face the stigma.

"There was a lot of shame, being Asian and the first woman in my family to go to prison. There was a wall of silence."

The 43-year-old now works for Birmingham's probation service to help other female prisoners. It runs a reducing reoffending partnership with programmes specially for women.

"When I was in prison, I felt the freest I'd ever felt, because I'd been trapped in my marriage, in my life outside.

"There was counselling in prison which helped me. But some women didn't want it or respond to it well.

"It's a lot to accept and some are unable to do that straight away. That's what made me want to help other women when I got out."

Rehabilitating women through methods other than custody is something Marie-Claire O'Brien backs.

The former prisoner, who served 14 months for causing death by dangerous driving, said the key is investing in services to help women upon release.

"I didn't believe that I deserved a second chance," said the 37-year-old, who had therapy and rehab at HMP Send.

"I had to work through that with the support of the people around me. But for many women coming out of prison they don't have anything like that network at all.

"Prison can work for some women, I'm testimony to that, but for people who have committed low-level offences, it's not always fair to put them through the experience."

Ms O'Brien has since set up the New Leaf Initiative, which works with former female inmates across the West Midlands to support them into employment.

She added: "I believe having well-run and well-funded prisons is important, but so is investing in the rehabilitation of women so their entire lives are not just completely defined by their time in custody."

The MoJ said its Female Offender Strategy will "help us deliver the best possible outcomes for women, placing greater emphasis on community provision and cutting the cost of female offending".

But while the move towards opening residential centres has been welcomed, charities have warned they must be properly funded.

Kate Paradine, chief executive of Women in Prison, said the level of funding currently available for female offenders is "pitiful".

"[Without an increase] the opportunity will be lost to transform the current shameful response to some of our most disadvantaged and vulnerable women and their families.

"We will be left with a broken system that fails victims and communities."
*Name has been changed

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Women make up just under 5% of the prison population in England and Wales, yet they are more likely than men to reoffend. Why doesn't prison work for women and what is being done to improve outcomes for them? "The last day, I was given a bin bag of my stuff.

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Women who give birth in prison can keep their baby for the first 18 months in a mother and baby unit.

A prisoner with a child under 18 months old can apply to bring their child to prison with them.

Social Services arrange for children over 18 months to be cared for, eg by the prisoner's parents, or fostering.

Applying for a place in a mother and baby unit

1. The prisoner can apply for a space in a mother and baby unit when they enter prison.

2. An admissions board will decide if it's the best thing for the child.

3. If there are no places in the prison the mother first goes to, they may be offered a place in another unit.

4. If there are no spaces in any unit, arrangements must be made for the child to be cared for outside prison.

5. If the mother is refused a place they can appeal - the prison will explain how.

6. Separation plans are made when the mother enters prison if the child will reach 18 months before her sentence is over.

For prisoners with sentences of 18 months or over, arrangements are normally made for the child to be cared for outside prison.

Prisons with mother and baby units

The following prisons have mother and baby units:
Find a prison.

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Women who give birth in prison can keep their baby for the first 18 months in a mother and baby unit. A prisoner with a child under 18 months old can apply to bring their child to prison with them. Social Services arrange for children over 18 months to be cared for, eg by the prisoner's parents, or fostering.

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US 'supermax' prison is condemned internationally for its abusive regime

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US 'supermax' prison is condemned internationally for its abusive regime

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US 'supermax' prison is condemned internationally for its abusive regime | Sadhbh Walshe

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Sadhbh Walshe: The Bureau of Prisons boss seems oblivious, as ADX Florence faces a class action lawsuit brought by mentally ill prisoners

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What Life Is Like in America's Highest-Security 'Supermax' Prison

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What Life Is Like in America's Highest-Security 'Supermax' Prison

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Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between The Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system.
Not many people ever make it out of the ADX.

Officially called the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence-and colloquially known as the "Alcatraz of the Rockies"-the ADX is the highest-security federal prison in the country, located in the Colorado mountains. It houses some of the more notorious inmates in recent American history, from Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols to Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who became a Soviet spy. Inmates at the ADX are held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, and because of their crimes, many are never released.

But Travis Dusenbury, a 46-year-old from Lexington, North Carolina, who was locked up at the ADX for ten years, made it out. And he has much to say about the prison and the famous people he says he met there, including the "Unabomber" and the "shoe bomber."

Dusenbury, a self-described "righteous black power type," first went to prison at the age of 16 for aggravated assault. He has been in and out ever since, for everything from inciting riots to gun charges. In 2005, he was doing time in a federal prison in Florida when he assaulted a prison guard who, he said, had been bullying black and Latino inmates. That got him sent to the ADX as a behavioral risk, where he remained until January of last year.

Dusenbury spoke with us about what life is like inside the most isolated, rarely glimpsed prison in the United States.

What was your first impression of ADX Florence when you arrived there?
Travis Dusenbury: It wasn't like any of the prisons I'd been to, and I've been to a lot of prisons. I've been locked up in some isolated, rural places, but at least at those places I could always see a highway, see the sky.

But at the ADX, you can't see nothing, not a highway out in the distance, not the sky. You know the minute you get there you won't see any of that, not for years and years.

You're just shut off [from] the world. You feel it. It sinks in, this dread feeling.

What did the place look like-the cell you lived in, the bed you slept on?
It's just the harshest place you've ever seen. Nothing living, not so much as a blade of grass anywhere.

My cell was all concrete. Every single thing, made out of concrete. The walls, floor, the desk, the sink, even the bed-a slab of concrete. Then you get a little fortified [recreation cage] that's outside that you get to go walk around in for an hour a day.

It ain't no lollygagging solitary confinement like you have at some other prisons-it's 22, 23 hours in this concrete room, then one [to two] hours in this fenced-in area, and two days a week there was no rec though, and sometimes they just canceled it for no reason.

Did you ever run into any of the well-known terrorists and other criminals who are at the ADX?
Well, I never got sent to the control unit, where they keep the "worst" of them.

But I did meet Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber," on the range [i.e. he was on the same cell block]. He was just a fucking weird little guy-he wouldn't even go outside when he was allowed to. I didn't like him because I knew about his crime and that crime was a weird thing to do, but I guess I respected him because he was older. So I called him "Mr." and I think he really liked that. He ended up giving me an IQ test, because to him, intelligence was everything.

I also got to know Eric Rudolph [the Atlanta Olympics bomber]. I appreciated him because he could have easily gotten cozy with the Aryan Brotherhood, but he didn't, he talked to me, talked to everybody, never said "nigger." When a black dude was banging all night in the cell next to us, he took it peacefully. He was a gentleman, and that's one thing we can all get with at the ADX.

And I ran across guys like the "shoe bomber," Richard Reid, all them with terrorism charges. I'm glad Richard wasn't successful at blowing up the plane. That would have been fucked up. But I got along with them fine enough and learned about how they practiced Islam.

Wait, how did you communicate with those guys?
There was a couple [of ways to communicate]. We got moved around to different units, and sometimes I was on the same unit as them. Sometimes I was the "orderly" and would go around to different cells on the unit, cleaning up. Or I could just sometimes holler loud as I could down the unit and they'd hear you and talk back.

Sometimes, also, you could take a whole toilet paper roll, put it over the drain in your sink or shower, and blow as hard as you could. That would blow the water down the pipes just far enough that the pipes were empty between you and your neighbor's cell. Then you keep holding the toilet paper roll over the drain, you talk into it, and your neighbor can hear what you're saying clearly. It depended on the cell you were in, if the pipes were lined up and all that, but you could usually contact your neighbor this way or even one more inmate down the line.

And then if your rec time happened to line up, you might be able to see them through the fence of your rec area. The closest human contact you could get was what we called "finger handshakes" through the fence.

What did you do with your days?
Wasn't much you could do-pushups, reading. You could also write, but the only pens you could get were expensive and then when you got them, they were these little floppy rubber ink pens, the length of a crayon-so that it can't be made into a [weapon]. But you couldn't write with those floppy things at all.

You could listen to the radio too, but they didn't have no rap station!

The one thing I would have liked to be able to do was sleep. But I had this monstrous insomnia. I just couldn't sleep. I'd lie there all night, for ten years, not being able to sleep, and by the end I had this sleep deprivation that was absolutely monstrous. The cell just became my world and I couldn't get out of it, not even into sleep.

It's so claustrophobic in there. I know claustrophobia is a condition, but I think that place was claustrophobic. It got to the point where absolutely anything that changed, like if I saw snow falling outside, was what allowed me to survive.

Did they offer you any treatment, any psychological help?
I mean, at first, they would try to catch me sleeping, because they didn't believe me that I was an insomniac-they thought I just wanted the meds. That went on for years.

Then they gave me the meds, but they didn't care if it was the right meds. They didn't care if the meds were working. They just cared that they were giving it to me, and there was no checking on me to see if I could sleep, which I still couldn't.

And did you ever have a chance to get out of solitary?
After five years, I made it into the Step Down program-which was next to where they had a larger yard, so you could see the sky. You were with two to seven people at a time, instead of just yourself.

I'm a people person, and before long, I was hugging other inmates, and the guards were all saying, "Damn, usually motherfuckers don't want to go near other motherfuckers after they've been inside."

But at one point I got into an argument with a former comrade of mine (it boiled down to he was jealous that I was going to get out in four years and I had family waiting for me). But the guards moved us apart, and not long after that they deemed me unfit for the program, saying that I had "failed to adjust." So they sent me back to solitary after only six months in the program.

What about the staff? What kinds of interactions did you have with the guards?
Ain't no black people in rural Colorado. The staff were all white, all lower-class, and they could be more easily manipulated by white inmates than by black inmates. The white inmates could get them to bring in contraband, but the black inmates could never do that. They even sometimes called the white inmates "brother."

They couldn't stand me personally because I was a righteous OG type of cat, a righteous black power type of cat, always causing disruptions-and I wasn't in any type of gang or nothing (the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia) to back me up.

On the whole they just viewed you as less than human, there was this contemptuous look all the time. And they experimented with you by putting you next to people they knew you had violent histories with.

I think most people take it for granted that they are human, but when you get to the ADX, you realize that being human isn't a birthright.

How did the guards punish you when you broke a rule or acted out, the way you've done at other prisons?
It only happened to me three times at the ADX, and I think they did it a lot more to some other guys. But what they would do is they would send this unit that we called the Goon Squad. They'd come in with the tear gas, nightsticks, steel boots, riot gear.

When I was real angry though, I'd get in at least a few punches before my lights went out. They felt it. They knew I was there.

And then you finally got out.
Yes. On January 13 of last year, they shipped me to a medical hospital in Springfield, Missouri; then they flew me to a prison in Oklahoma; then they sent me to Terre Haute, Indiana.

By May 13, I was going home to North Carolina. I'm staying with my mom now, and I'm on the right meds and I'm finally sleeping.

And you know I heard they finally have a rap station at the ADX. That's my legacy.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The federal 'supermax' prison ADX Florence in Colorado. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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What Life Is Like in America's Highest-Security 'Supermax' Prison

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Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between The Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system. Not many people ever make it out of the ADX.

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Sweden is taking steps to close many prisons due to lack of prisoners.

This year alone, four prisons and a detention center got closed in Sweden.

The percentage of the population in Sweden prison is significantly lower than in most other countries.

And,the Swedish prison system is not generally severe. For example, the top-of-the-line prison in Sollentuna, Sweden includes cells with comfortable mattresses and private bathrooms. After prisoners hit the weight room, they can cook up a meal in the state of the art kitchen before kicking back and watching TV on the couch. Sweden's prison authorities are quick to point out that every square inch of the prison can be seen on a security camera.

Though the Sweden Government is taking steps to close the prisons, crime rate in sweden is not reduced. Actually Crime rate it getting increased in Sweden. It seems they are planning to take steps for preventing the crimes than focusing on sentencing the people involve in criminal activities.

Apart from Sweden, few other countries are also having Luxury prisons. Watch the below video showing most Luxurious prisons in the world.

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Sweden is closing many prisons due to lack of prisoners.

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Sweden is taking steps to close many prisons due to lack of prisoners. This year alone, four prisons and a detention center got closed in Sweden. The percentage of the population in Sweden prison is significantly lower than in most other countries. And,the Swedish prison system is not generally severe.

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Supermax prison in Colorado

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Feature

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At left, the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, otherwise known as the ADX, in Florence, Colo. Credit Credit Jamey Stillings for The New York Times

In prison, Rodney Jones told me, everyone had a nickname. Jones's was Saint E's, short for St. Elizabeths, the federal psychiatric hospital in Washington, best known for housing John Hinckley Jr. after he shot Ronald Reagan. Jones spent time there as well, having shown signs of mental illness from an early age; he first attempted suicide at 12, when he drank an entire bottle of Clorox. Later, he became addicted to PCP and crack and turned to robbery to support his habit.

I met Jones a few blocks from his childhood home in LeDroit Park, a D.C. neighborhood not far from Howard University. It was a warm October afternoon, but Jones, 46, was wearing a puffy black vest. The keys to his grandmother's house, where he currently lives, hung from a lanyard around his neck. His face was thin, a tightly cropped beard undergirding prominent cheekbones, and he had a lookout's gaze, drifting more than darting but always alert.

Jones had been out of prison for three years, a record for him, at least as an adult, but he still sounded a bit like Rip Van Winkle as he marveled at how gentrified his old neighborhood had become. We sat on a cafe's sun-dappled terrace, surrounded by creative-class types. A chef wandered outside to pluck some fresh rosemary from a planter. Jones was the only black patron at the cafe and probably the only person who remembered when it used to be a liquor store. "You wouldn't be sitting here," Jones said. He nodded at some toddlers playing across the street. "That park right there, that wasn't a park. That was just an open field where everybody gambled. At any given time, you would hear shots ring out."

From the age of 15, Jones found himself in and out of juvenile detention, St. Elizabeths or prison - never free for much longer than a month or so. The outside world came to feel terrifying; once, he wanted to get back inside so badly, he bought a bag of crack and called the cops on himself. "That was the world that I knew," he said.

It hadn't been easy for Jones to transition back to a life of freedom. He managed to stick it out, he said, because he was determined not to return to the place where he spent the final eight years of his last sentence: the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo., known more colloquially as the ADX. The ADX is the highest-security prison in the country. It was designed to be escape-proof, the Alcatraz of the Rockies, a place to incarcerate the worst, most unredeemable class of criminal - "a very small subset of the inmate population who show," in the words of Norman Carlson, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, "absolutely no concern for human life." Ted Kaczynski and the Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph call the ADX home. The 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui is held there, too, along with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef; the Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols; the underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab; and the former Bonanno crime-family boss Vincent Basciano. Michael Swango, a serial-killing doctor who may have poisoned 60 of his patients, is serving three consecutive life sentences; Larry Hoover, the Gangster Disciples kingpin made famous by rappers like Rick Ross, is serving six; the traitorous F.B.I. agent Robert Hanssen, a Soviet spy, 15.

Along with such notorious inmates, prisoners deemed serious behavioral or flight risks can also end up at the ADX - men like Jones, who in 2003, after racking up three assault charges in less than a year (all fights with other inmates) at a medium-security facility in Louisiana, found himself transferred to the same ADX cellblock as Kaczynski.

Inmates at the ADX spend approximately 23 hours of each day in solitary confinement. Jones had never been so isolated before. Other prisoners on his cellblock screamed and banged on their doors for hours. Jones said the staff psychiatrist stopped his prescription for Seroquel, a drug taken for bipolar disorder, telling him, "We don't give out feel-good drugs here." Jones experienced severe mood swings. To cope, he would work out in his cell until he was too tired to move. Sometimes he cut himself. In response, guards fastened his arms and legs to his bed with a medieval quartet of restraints, a process known as four-pointing.

One day in 2009, Jones was in the rec yard and spotted Michael Bacote, a friend from back home. The familiar face was welcome but also troubling. Bacote was illiterate, with an I.Q. of only 61, and suffered from acute paranoia. He had been sent to the ADX for his role as a lookout in a murder at a Texas prison, and he was not coping well. His multiple requests for transfers or psychological treatment had been denied. He was convinced that the Bureau of Prisons was trying to poison him, so he was refusing meals and medication. "You would have to be blind and crazy yourself not to see that this guy had issues," Jones said, shaking his head. "He can barely function in a normal setting. His comprehension level was pretty much at zero."

Bacote had paperwork from previous psychiatric examinations, so Jones went to the prison's law library (a room with a computer) and looked up the address of a pro bono legal-aid group he had heard about, the D.C. Prisoners' Project. Because Bacote couldn't write, Jones ghosted a query. "I suppose to have a hearing before coming to the ADX," Jones, as Bacote, wrote. "They never gave me a hearing." He continued, "I need some help cause I have facts! Please help me."

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The ADX from above. Credit Jamey Stillings for The New York Times

The story of the largest lawsuit ever filed against the United States Bureau of Prisons begins, improbably enough, with this letter. Deborah Golden, the director of the D.C. Prisoners' Project, fields approximately 2,000 requests each year, but Bacote's, which she received in October 2009, caught her eye. "I thought I might be missing something, because it was inconceivable to me that the Bureau of Prisons could be operating in such a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional manner," she said. Golden was referring to B.O.P. regulations that forbid the placement of inmates who "show evidence of significant mental disorder" in prisons like the ADX.

Groups like Golden's D.C. Prisoners' Project tend to focus their reform efforts on state-run prisons - in part because the Prison Litigation Reform Act, passed by Congress in 1996, made it more difficult for prisoners to file federal lawsuits, and in part because the federal government possesses, as Golden put it, "an inexhaustible supply of resources." A droll 42-year-old attorney who once considered rabbinical school, Golden has spent her entire career practicing human rights law. As she investigated Bacote's claims, she came to realize there were dozens of inmates at the ADX with comparable stories, or worse: cases of self-mutilation, obvious psychosis, suicide. Her organization had never considered filing such an enormous suit. Because it is so difficult to win cases against the federal government, challenging the B.O.P. "just didn't fit into anyone's strategic goals," Golden explained. The last major B.O.P. lawsuit to result in a settlement was in the mid-'90s (Lucas v. White, brought by a group of female inmates who had been sexually assaulted). But the clarity of Bacote's claims gave her pause. "A lot of cases we see involve matters of interpretation: Who knew what and when," she said. "This didn't seem to involve that kind of uncertainty. I wasn't sure if we had a chance. But it seemed like a court had to see it."

Since opening in 1994, the ADX has remained not just the only federal supermax but also the apogee of a particular strain of the American penal system, wherein abstract dreams of rehabilitation have been entirely superseded by the architecture of control. Throughout our country's history, there have been different ideas about what to do with the "worst of the worst" of our criminal offenders, ranging from the 19th-century chain gangs, who toiled in enforced silence, to the physical isolation of Alcatraz Island. The use of solitary confinement in the United States emerged as a substitute to corporal punishments popular at the end of the 18th century. The practice was first promoted in 1787, by a group of reformers called the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. At a salon hosted by Benjamin Franklin, a pamphlet was read calling for the construction of a "house of repentance," in which solitude could work to soothe the minds of criminals - an enlightened alternative, the group believed, to inhumane "public punishments" like "the gallows, the pillory, the stocks, the whipping post, and the wheelbarrow." Inmates at Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, which opened in 1829, were completely isolated from one another in cells outfitted with skylights, toilets and access to private outdoor exercise yards, where they worked at various trades, took all meals and read the Bible. Other states tried, but quickly abandoned, the so-called Pennsylvania System, and an 1890 Supreme Court ruling against the use of solitary on Colorado's death row noted that "a considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semifatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide, while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed."

The concept soon fell out of favor, and beginning in the 1930s, the hardest cases in the federal system - men like Al Capone and George (Machine Gun Kelly) Barnes - were housed in the converted military prison on Alcatraz Island, until it was closed in 1963 because of the costly upkeep inherent to an island prison. By the end of the decade, many of its prisoners had been transferred to the new "control units" at a federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., where they were kept in solitary confinement. In 1983, after the assassination of two guards in separate attacks on the same day, by members of the Aryan Brotherhood, the Marion penitentiary was converted to the first modern all-lockdown facility, the entire prison now a solitary unit. (One of the guards' killers, Tommy Silverstein, is now at the ADX. He has been in solitary confinement for the past 22 years.)

Beginning in 1989 with California's Pelican Bay, states began building their own lockdown penitentiaries, inspired by the Marion model. The renewed use of solitary coincided with the era of mass incarceration and the widespread closing of state-run mental-health facilities. The supermax became the most expedient method of controlling an increasingly overcrowded and psychologically volatile prison population. A result of this unfortunate confluence has been a network of ever more austere and utilitarian penitentiaries, built specifically to seal off a significant portion of state and federal inmates, using methods that would shock many Americans. According to a 2014 Amnesty International report, more than 40 states now operate supermax prisons. On any given day, there are 80,000 U.S. prisoners in solitary confinement.

Norman Carlson, the B.O.P. director at the time of the Marion attacks, spearheaded the construction of a federal supermax that could eventually replace Marion. Florence, a faded Colorado mining town, lobbied hard for the $60 million prison to be built within its city limits, with residents eventually donating 600 acres of land to the B.O.P.

The ADX can house up to 500 prisoners in its eight units. Inmates spend their days in 12-by-7-foot cells with thick concrete walls and double sets of sliding metal doors (with solid exteriors, so prisoners can't see one another). A single window, about three feet high but only four inches wide, offers a notched glimpse of sky and little else. Each cell has a sink-toilet combo and an automated shower, and prisoners sleep on concrete slabs topped with thin mattresses. Most cells also have televisions (with built-in radios), and inmates have access to books and periodicals, as well as certain arts-and-craft materials. Prisoners in the general population are allotted a maximum of 10 hours of exercise a week outside their cells, alternating between solo trips to an indoor "gym" (a windowless cell with a single chin-up bar) and group visits to the outdoor rec yard (where each prisoner nonetheless remains confined to an individual cage). All meals come through slots in the interior door, as does any face-to-face human interaction (with a guard or psychiatrist, chaplain or imam). The Amnesty report said that ADX prisoners "routinely go days with only a few words spoken to them."

Robert Hood, the warden of the ADX from 2002 to 2005, told me that when he first arrived on the campus, he was struck by "the very stark environment," unlike any other prison in which he ever worked or visited - no noise, no mess, no prisoners walking the hallways. When inmates complained to him, he would tell them, "This place is not designed for humanity," he recalled. "When it's 23 hours a day in a room with a slit of a window where you can't even see the Rocky Mountains - let's be candid here. It's not designed for rehabilitation. Period. End of story."

Hood was not trying to be cruel with such frankness. The ADX was built explicitly to house men often already serving multiple life sentences and thus facing little disincentive to, say, murder a guard or another prisoner. Still, during his own tenure, Hood said he made a point of developing one-on-one relationships with as many inmates as possible - he described Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano as "a very likable guy, believe it or not," and he bonded with the Unabomber over their shared interest in running marathons - in hopes of eliciting good behavior in exchange for whatever he could do to make their sentences more bearable. But he also needed them to understand that even as warden, he lacked the authority to change the rules of their confinement. In the past, Hood has memorably described the ADX as "a clean version of hell."

In the Control Unit, the most restrictive section of the ADX prison, most of the beds are equipped with strap-down rings.

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."

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."

Golden recognized that a lawsuit against the B.O.P. would still be a long shot - and that a co-counsel with deeper pockets than her own would be necessary. So she approached Arnold & Porter, a white-shoe law firm with a history of taking on high-profile pro bono cases. Ed Aro, a partner based in Denver, was intrigued; a close family member had spent time in prison, and other relatives had suffered from mental illness. Aro himself, though, was a trial lawyer who mostly represented corporations and had never set foot in a correctional facility. The prison jargon so baffled him at first that Golden had to send him a glossary that she put together.

A Colorado native who looks the part, Aro, 50, favors cowboy boots and fleece jackets, and his cheeks have the ruddy, slightly cured quality of a man who enjoys vigorous exercise at high altitudes. "Juries are my stock in trade," he told me. "They bring me in when the story is complicated and there's not going to be a settlement and they need someone to tell a convincing narrative. With this case, I worried, How do you weave a narrative and humanize people at a prison like this?"

As he tried to get a handle on the lawsuit, he made the two-hour drive to Florence nearly every week. For years, conditions inside the ADX had remained largely a mystery; from 2002 on, the Amnesty report noted, ADX officials denied every media request for a visit or prisoner interview, aside from a restricted tour in 2007. (The B.O.P. declined to comment for this article or to allow a site visit.) Aro assumed he would find a small number of prisoners who had somehow slipped through the cracks. "The thing that shocked me most was how massive the problem was," Aro said. "The ADX is the most closely monitored and evaluated subset of the prison population in the entire country. With the extent of the problem, it's incomprehensible to me that the B.O.P. didn't notice what was going on." How, Aro wondered, did the toughest prison in the United States become a mental asylum - one incapable of controlling its own population?

He enlisted Dr. Doris Gundersen, a Denver-based forensic psychiatrist, who was allowed inside the ADX as part of his legal team. After evaluating 45 prisoners, she estimated that 70 percent met the criteria for at least one serious mental illness. She and Aro spoke to inmates who swallowed razor blades, inmates who were left for days or weeks shackled to their beds (where they were routinely allowed to soil themselves), an inmate who ate his own feces so regularly that staff psychiatrists made a special note only when he did so with unusual "voracity." A number of prisoners were taken off prescribed medications. (Until recently prison regulations forbade the placement of inmates on psychotropic medication in the Control Unit, the most restrictive section of the ADX, as, by definition, such medication implies severe mental illness.) Others claimed that they were denied treatment, aside from "therapy classes" on the prison television's educational station and workbooks with titles like "Cage Your Rage," despite repeated written requests. (The ADX lawsuit says that only two psychologists and one part-time psychiatrist serve the entire prison.)

Gunderson and Aro met one inmate, Marcellus Washington, sentenced to life for carjacking and armed robbery, who slashed his wrists in a suicide attempt and was punished for it: He lost his television and radio privileges for several weeks. They met another inmate, Herbert Perkins, also serving life for armed robbery, who, after slashing his throat with a razor and being rushed to a hospital, was returned to the same cell, given a mop and bucket and ordered to clean up the blood.

They also met David Shelby, a schizophrenic who, in 1995, became convinced that God wanted him to free Charles Manson from prison and that the best way to achieve this would be to send threatening letters to President Bill Clinton. He arrived at the ADX in 2000. Nine years later, in response to another command from God, Shelby, who just a few months earlier tried to commit suicide by slashing his arms, legs and stomach, fashioned a tourniquet around the base of his left pinkie, hacked off the top two joints with a Bic razor blade and ate his finger with a bowl of ramen. When he became agitated and summoned a guard to say he'd done a "terrible thing," he mostly meant that he'd eaten meat; for the previous few months, he had been a vegetarian.

Aro had interviewed about 25 ADX prisoners when, in October 2011, he met the man who would become the face of the lawsuit. This particular inmate, Jack Powers, who was 52, refused to take a seat during their first meeting; years in solitary had made him skittish around other humans. Still, Aro immediately found Powers striking: bright, articulate, no history of institutional violence.

Some of the ADX's most infamous residents. Clockwise: Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympics bomber. Terry Nichols, the Oklahoma City bomber. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber. Michael Swango, the doctor who may have poisoned up to 60 patients. Larry Hoover, the Gangster Disciples kingpin. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Zacarias Moussaoui, the 9/11 conspirator. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Credit Rudolph: Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images. Nichols: Larry W. Smith/Getty Images. Abdulmutallab: Associated Press. Swango: Ed Betz/Associated Press. Hoover: Associated Press/The Chicago Sun-Times. Kaczynski: Associated Press/Department of Motor Vehicles. Moussaoui: Associated Press/Sherburne County, Minn., Sheriff's Office. Yousef: Associated Press.

"If you looked at Jack's criminal history," Aro said, "at the bizarre, unhappy confluence of circumstances that led him to the ADX and into this incredible descent into madness, it's impossible to believe what happened to him has nothing to do with his conditions of confinement." In his search for a compelling character whose story could explain the lawsuit, Aro thought as he left the prison that day, it wouldn't get much better than Jack Powers.

Jack Powers grew up in Norwich, N.Y., the son of a Vietnam veteran who beat him regularly. Powers ran away from home at 14; a few years later he was sent to prison on burglary charges. He was released in 1982, at 21, and he married and moved to Holland, Mich., where he founded a construction company and beauty salon. But by the end of the decade, both businesses had gone bankrupt, and he began robbing banks - at least 30, according to his 1990 conviction. He never armed himself; he always just slipped a note to the bank teller. He thinks his wife (now ex) turned him in.

At the U.S. penitentiary in Atlanta, where he was serving his 40-year sentence, he befriended a new inmate named Eduardo Wong, a heroin smuggler with supposed ties to Chinese organized crime. "Nice guy," Powers said in a recorded deposition. "I mean, relatively speaking." Wong and Powers liked to play chess. "But it wasn't that long, just a matter of weeks," Powers said, "before things went awry."

Wong became a target of members of the Aryan Brotherhood, who threatened to kill him if he didn't procure cash for them. Powers warned Wong about the seriousness of his situation, but Wong hesitated. One afternoon, a group of men ran onto their tier and stabbed Wong multiple times while Powers was held in the cell next door at knife point. After they ran off, Wong stumbled into Powers's arms, blood gushing from his neck. "John, help me," he said. Powers managed to carry Wong down several floors to the prison hospital, where he died.

During the murder investigation, Powers was moved to a protective custody unit. Shortly after his transfer, though, the face of an Aryan Brotherhood member appeared at the food slot of his door. "If you tell on my boys," the man warned, "I'm going to chop your head off." But Powers had a teenage son in Syracuse he wanted to reconnect with, so in exchange for what he believed would be a sentence reduction, he agreed to appear as a witness for the government. Three of the four Aryan Brotherhood members he testified against were convicted and received life sentences.

Powers had no history of mental illness before his incarceration. But after Wong's murder, he began to display symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which manifested in the form of panic attacks, near-constant anxiety and nightmares in which inmates with weapons cornered Powers in an isolated area of the prison. By 1999, he had not received his sentence reduction and had become convinced that the B.O.P. was planning on transferring him out of protective custody. So he decided to escape.

He put a dummy in his bed, hid inside a grate in the rec yard and scaled the side of a building with a homemade grappling hook. From the rooftop, he jumped over a 16-foot electric fence, then climbed a second barbed-wire fence with FedEx boxes tape to his arms and legs. Once outside, he stole a car and headed to Syracuse to see his son.

When his son didn't answer his phone, he tried to visit his half sister. (She wasn't home, but when he spotted a neighbor struggling with a lawn mower, he cut her grass.) The police picked him up after two days. A reporter from The Syracuse Post-Standard interviewed Powers at the local jail and asked him whether he would do it again. The article reads as a lighthearted human-interest feature about a gentleman bandit, and Powers's affirmative answer became the kicker. "Without life's normal sensations and emotions and feelings," Powers said, "what have you got?"

In October 2001, Powers, now considered a flight risk, was transferred to the ADX - where all three of the Aryan Brotherhood members Powers had testified against were serving their own sentences. Powers's PTSD intensified. Tagged as a snitch and, more damaging, as an enemy of the Aryan Brotherhood, even unaffiliated prisoners avoided speaking to him. The guards, Powers said, treated him differently as well. If the whole unit is against a prisoner, he explained, "it's like, the majority prevails. If they're trying to be cool with the rest of these guys, then they can't be cool with you."

Over the next decade, Powers, by any rational accounting, lost his mind. He cut off both earlobes, chewed off a finger, sliced through his Achilles' tendon, pushed staples into his face and forehead, swallowed a toothbrush and then tried to cut open his abdomen to retrieve it and injected what he considered "a pretty fair amount of bacteria-laden fluid" into his brain cavity after smashing a hole in his forehead. In 2005, after slicing open his scrotum and removing a testicle, Powers was sent to the medical center for federal prisoners in Springfield, Mo., for treatment, where a psychiatrist determined he was "not in need of inpatient psychiatric treatment or psychotropic medication" and that his behavior "was secondary to his antisocial disorder." When he was returned to Springfield four years later, after slashing his wrists and writing "American Gulag" in blood on his bedsheets, the doctor wrote, "Considerations that [Powers] has some form of psychosis, thought disorder or mental illness are unfounded."

In 2007, an inmate named Jose Vega was placed in the cell directly below Powers. Vega had come to the ADX after attacking an associate warden with a razor blade at another prison. He had received a diagnosis of depression, and because he was sick and disruptive - flinging feces and urine at the staff - the guards came to despise him, according to Powers. But he and Vega began talking through the drains of their sinks. (Prisoners in neighboring cells could communicate through the plumbing if they used toilet-paper rolls to blow the water from the U-shaped pipes, called sink traps, that ran beneath their basins.) For the first time in years, Powers had someone he considered a friend. They would chat about the prison, their families, legal issues. Vega had lost his television privilege, so Powers would place his own headphones near the sink drain and play music loud enough so that his friend could listen, too.

At times, a guard would provoke Vega. He became convinced that staff members were sneaking into his cell at night and assaulting him. Powers knew that was impossible - the heavy cell doors could not be opened without Powers hearing - but he said that guards did withhold Vega's mail and intentionally dropped his food on the floor. One guard told Vega that he might as well kill himself, because things weren't going to get any better. "They started to break him," Powers said. "Almost like you see with pro wrestlers, like a tag-team-type thing, where one of them passes it off to the next and to the next and to the next."

On the morning of May 1, 2010, Vega was found dead in his cell. He had hanged himself with a bedsheet. After Vega's death, Powers shaved his head and began decorating his body with what he would describe as his "Avatar stripes," a reference to the striped blue aliens in the James Cameron movie. Using a razor blade to make tiny cuts in his skin and then rubbing carbon-paper dust into the wounds, Powers tattooed spiky black slashes along his arms, legs, neck, skull, under his eyes and around his Adam's apple. A photograph from 2011 presents an astounding transformation: The smirking, shaggy-haired young bank robber who entered the federal prison system in 1990 no longer existed, and the man who replaced him looked like something out of a nightmare.

Aro's team first met with members of the U.S. Justice Department in November 2011. A series of conversations with the B.O.P. followed, in which the lawyers proposed specific remedies that could head off a lawsuit. Aro described the agency as "routinely unhelpful" and said it soon became "crystal clear that they were circling the wagons. They weren't going to even admit there were problems, let alone try to fix them."

According to Golden, prisons have a history of getting lawsuits mooted by simply transferring the litigious inmate to a different facility. In anticipation of such a maneuver, Golden and Aro assembled a broad platform of plaintiffs, unwieldy enough to make the transfer strategy impractical: The initial complaint featured six primary inmates, including Powers and Shelby, and 11 backups, demonstrating a range of illnesses, races and backgrounds. (The legal team also filed a suit on behalf of the family of Jose Vega seeking damages for abuse and wrongful death.)

In 2013, Aro and a U.S. attorney representing the B.O.P. spent two days questioning Powers in a filmed deposition (the source of much of the preceding account of his time at the ADX). The video frames Powers, dressed in the standard prison uniform, seated behind a table, his hands shackled. At one point, he tells a lawyer he can't remember the last time he was in a room with so many people, probably years ago. He's thoughtful and deliberate, obviously intelligent. Despite the litany of horrors he relates, you can almost understand how people might have judged him sane.

By that fall, Judge Richard Matsch, who presided over the Oklahoma City bombing trial, had denied motions to dismiss filed by the B.O.P., and the lawsuit entered its discovery phase. And then, to Aro and Golden's genuine surprise, the government's lawyers broached the subject of a potential settlement - which, according to Golden, "is almost unheard-of" for the B.O.P. Aro added, "I don't think any of us went into this very optimistic that we'd get to a resolution without dragging them kicking and screaming across the finish line. The government routinely defends lawsuits if they think they have a snowball's chance in hell of winning."

Matsch assigned a federal magistrate judge to oversee the potential settlement, and Aro and Golden presented the B.O.P. with a list of 27 points that needed to be addressed, including specific demands for diagnosis and treatment and an oversight board to ensure that these demands were met. (The lawsuit does not include any financial settlements.) After nearly a year of negotiations, Golden told me in January, "I think we're very close to a settlement." Aro, though also increasingly optimistic, told me this month that he still couldn't predict whether there would be a settlement or a trial.

Simultaneous to the settlement negotiations, however, the B.O.P. unilaterally began effecting certain (though by no means all) of the requested changes at the ADX. New mental-health programming was added, additional psychologists were hired and a new unit for high-security mentally ill prisoners opened in Atlanta. As predicted, a number of the inmates named in the suit have been transferred out of the ADX - including Powers, who was sent to a high-security prison in Tucson last year.

Powers couldn't cope with the openness of the new facility. Aro believes the B.O.P. acted with good intentions, but it dismally failed to acclimate a man who spent much of the previous 13 years alone in a cell. Prisoners' cell doors were left unlocked for much of the day, but Powers rarely ventured out into communal areas, and his mood turned ugly. After he struck a staff member during an argument, he was put in solitary. There, with a drill bit fashioned out of a battery, he managed to bore a hole through the top of his skull in an attempted trepanation.

Aro and Golden had both grown close to Powers over the course of the lawsuit. Separately they told me how protective they felt about him and how worried they were about his continued self-destructive behavior. Changes are very likely coming at the ADX, in no small part thanks to Powers's story. But it seemed entirely possible that he might not survive to see the outcome.

David Shelby, the ADX inmate who ate his finger, was also transferred to a medium-security facility, in Butner, N.C. He is six feet tall and 300 pounds, with thick-framed prison-issue glasses and a round, clean-shaven face. (At the ADX, he had an unruly beard, suggestive of a backwoods survivalist). Before he described a violent episode from his past when I visited him this fall, he paused and said, softly: "I hope I don't make you feel uncomfortable, sir. I'm well-medicated now, so you're perfectly safe."

As a child in Mitchell, Ind., Shelby hunted squirrel and rabbit for supper and would occasionally trade the meat to old-timers for food stamps. His parents drank, and Shelby developed a taste of his own. (His favorite cocktail was a mixture of Everclear and Wild Turkey, which he called Wilder Turkey.) He went to prison in his late teens after pulling a shotgun on a man who owed him $2, and again in his 20s following a string of burglaries. He also began experiencing schizophrenic episodes in which he heard God's voice in his head. It's not difficult to imagine that Shelby's life would have followed a different trajectory had he received comprehensive psychological treatment. When officials picked him up at a post office, he was preparing to mail Clinton a package containing a pocketknife and a light bulb that was booby-trapped, Looney Tunes style, with gunpowder. "I think you are doing a good job," the note read, "and I am sending you the pocketknife as a gift and a light bulb so you won't strain your eyes." Shelby, in a deal with prosecutors, pleaded guilty and received a 24-year prison sentence. He was moved to the ADX two years later, after he took a female cook hostage with a homemade knife. Shelby told her that he wanted a warden "to order the best sniper to come in here and kill me." By all subsequent accounts, including his hostage's, he was careful not to hurt her during his suicide attempt. A staff psychiatrist eventually talked him down.

Since his move to Butner, Shelby has thrived. He shares his cell with another prisoner, and the door remains unlocked for much of the day. Shelby said his unit, Duke, was for people who are "special." (All the units at Butner are named for Southeastern college-sports powers.) "We're crazy," he cheerily explained. "We're all in the pill line in Duke. I've got three kinds of insanity: One is depression, one is bipolar, one is schizophrenia. But right now, my personal prescription is perfect." He has even had a couple of brief encounters with Butner's most famous inmate, Bernard Madoff, though, Shelby noted: "We're from such different worlds, I don't think he'd want to know me. Unless he's interested in squirrel hunting."

Aro, who accompanied me on my visit, said this funny, personable version of Shelby was nothing like the Shelby of the ADX. The morning of my visit, I spotted other inmates tending to a vegetable garden in a pleasant central courtyard. Shelby works as a janitor. "We've got four bathrooms that stay good and clean because of me," he said, adding earnestly, "I must have done something good in a past life to deserve this. There are times in the free world where I've never had it this good."

In January, Aro and Golden told me that Powers's health also appeared to be on the upswing. He had been transferred back to Florence, to a new mental-health program the B.O.P. started in a lower-security penitentiary, part of the same complex as the ADX. The multistep program focuses on inmates' developing coping mechanisms, via individual and group-therapy sessions. During the early stages, the prisoners remain largely in solitary but are rewarded with more freedoms as they progress. Aro forwarded me a recent photograph of Powers that showed him actually smiling. Soon afterward, I began receiving letters from Powers, neatly handwritten, in all caps. He sounded upbeat at first, though subsequent correspondence expressed increasing skepticism about the program. "Traditional notions of penological care, custody and control of prisoners - and especially those who have a mental illness - differ from psychological treatment initiatives like night differs from day," he wrote, claiming the mood in the new unit had "reverted back to distrust, hostility and resistance - like a jungle reclaims an abandoned settlement."

Still, in the same letter, he acknowledged the policy changes might eventually yield results. "These programs are works in progress and must be given time to develop," he wrote. And then, without signing his name or adding any other form of valediction, he concluded with a final line: "Right now the participants are guinea pigs."

Robert Hood, the former ADX warden, thinks that changes at the supermax are long overdue. He had requested his assignment there, his last before retiring. He found the challenge appealing, especially because he considered himself a "teaching-oriented guy," rather than the "custody-oriented" type of warden you might expect to find at a supermax. Hood is proud of his time at the ADX but has also come to believe that it needs to be transformed. "Not everyone in the ADX needs to be in a supermax. I could reduce that population. I don't know what the magic number is, but a certain percentage could be put in a place that doesn't require 23-hour lockdown. The public might not like it, but I don't care if Sammy the Bull is out in the yard playing Ping-Pong with Robert Hanssen."

Hood noted that the ADX's predecessors, Alcatraz and Marion, each existed for roughly 30 years before shutting their doors. "The supermax in Colorado has been there for 20 years," Hood said, "so it's getting close to the last third of its life. I'd say the bureau is looking in the mirror and saying: 'Guess what? The world is different now than in 1994.' "

Correction:

An article on March 29 about a federal prison in Florence, Colo., misspelled the surname of a well-known inmate. As the article correctly noted in other references, he is Ted Kaczynski, not Kacynski.

Mark Binelli is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the author of "Detroit City Is the Place to Be." His last article for the magazine was about the artist Lonnie Holley.
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Inside America's Toughest Federal Prison

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Feature In prison, Rodney Jones told me, everyone had a nickname. Jones's was Saint E's, short for St. Elizabeths, the federal psychiatric hospital in Washington, best known for housing John Hinckley Jr. after he shot Ronald Reagan.

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McKean, a federal correctional institution, does everything that "make 'em bust rocks" politicians decry --imagine, educating inmates! -- and it works

Approaching McKean, the federal correctional institution in Bradford, Pennsylvania, one is not likely to think of a prison. The buildings, low and modern, display a pseudo-Navajo motif in soft gray and salmon colors. In the air-conditioned entryway there are carpets over an immaculate tile floor, the glimmer of polished glass, the green tint of tropical plants. Tasteful couches sit in the corners. Well-dressed employees walk up and down the stairs, speaking in hushed, respectful tones. Beyond, on the prison grounds, are a broad expanse of well-tended lawn and distant athletic fields. Inmates walk alone or in pairs along the concrete pathways, offering greetings as they pass. Across the compound inmates sit quietly in classrooms, learning everything from basic reading skills to masonry, carpentry, horticulture, barbering, cooking, and catering. Next door is a multi-denominational chapel. The cellblocks are cramped but clean and orderly, with a weekly inspection score posted on the wall. "With visitors, it's like a joke, to see how long before they compare this place to a college campus," one prison staff member says.

Also see:

The Prison-Industrial Complex (December 1998)
Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. By Eric Schlosser

When They Get Out (June 1999)
How prisons, established to fight crime, produce crime.

This prison and others like it are the targets of a fierce campaign that is changing the shape of the U.S. criminal-justice system. For several years journalists and politicians all over the country have spoken and written angrily about such prisons as "resorts" or "country clubs." They have railed against a philosophy of rehabilitation that "coddles" inmates with too many amenities. Punishment is in vogue, along with hard labor and "no frills" prisons, stripped of weight rooms, TVs, and computers. Republicans in Congress have added a no-frills-prison section to the Contract With America's "Take Back Our Streets Act," and they have passed it as an amendment to the 1994 crime bill. Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld has argued that prisons should be "a tour through the circles of hell," where inmates should learn only "the joys of busting rocks." Alabama has already reinstituted the chain gang, forcing inmates to do hard labor in leg irons for up to ten hours a day. State administrators and sheriffs, sniffing the political wind, have begun to crack down, cutting educational and treatment programs, making prison life as harsh as possible.

Yet McKean, by several measures, may well be the most successful medium-security prison in the country. Badly overcrowded, housing a growing number of violent criminals, it costs taxpayers approximately $15,370 a year for each inmate. That is below the average for prisons of its type, and far below the overall federal average of $21,350. It is about two thirds of what many state prisons cost. And the incident record since McKean opened, in 1989, reads like a blank slate: No escapes. No homicides. No sexual assaults. No suicides. In six years there have been three serious assaults on staff members and six recorded assaults on inmates. State prisons of comparable size often see that many assaults in a single week. The American Correctional Society has given McKean one of its highest possible ratings. No recidivism studies have been conducted on its former inmates, but senior staff members claim that McKean parolees return to prison far less often than those from other institutions, and a local parole officer agrees. According to the Princeton University criminologist John DiIulio, "McKean is probably the best-managed prison in the country. And that has everything to do with a warden named Dennis Luther."

Dennis Luther is a slim man of fifty with thinning brown hair and wide, curious eyes. He retired last July, after sixteen years as a warden. He dresses neatly in a jacket, a tie, and tasseled loafers, more like an English professor than a prison administrator. His movements are slow and deliberate, and his voice has an uncanny steadiness to it. He is not a large man, but it is easy to imagine him walking unarmed into the center of a prison riot and asking calmly to speak to the leaders. As a young man, Luther considered going into the ministry. He chose corrections instead, and soon came to believe that American prisons were unnecessarily brutal places, more likely to teach hatred and violence than remorse. But, he says, that insight did not lead him to a liberal philosophy of inmate rehabilitation. Instead he read up on business management. He saw no reason why ideas that had worked in the private sector could not be applied to prisons, to make them more cost-effective and more humane. What he came up with was a systematic approach to building something he calls "prison culture." All prisons, according to Luther, have a culture of some sort, but it is generally violent and abusive, based on gangs. Prison staffs are aware of this culture, but they are helpless to change it.

The root of Luther's approach is an unconditional respect for the inmates as people. "If you want people to behave responsibly, and treat you with respect, then you treat other people that way," Luther says. McKean is literally decorated with this conviction. Plaques all over the prison remind staff members and inmates alike of their responsibilities; one of these plaques is titled "Beliefs About the Treatment of Inmates." There are twenty-eight beliefs, the product of Luther's many years as a warden, and they begin like this:

1. Inmates are sent to prison as punishment and not for punishment.

2. Correctional workers have a responsibility to ensure that inmates are returned to the community no more angry or hostile than when they were committed.

3. Inmates are entitled to a safe and humane environment while in prison.

4. You must believe in man's capacity to change his behavior.

5. Normalize the environment to the extent possible by providing programs, amenities, and services. The denial of such must be related to maintaining order and security rather than punishment.

6. Most inmates will respond favorably to a clean and aesthetically pleasing physical environment and will not vandalize or destroy it.

To a visitor, McKean's "clean and aesthetically pleasing" environment is its most striking feature. Impressions gleaned from Midnight Express, Judge Dredd, or an ordinary state prison are out of place here. Luther insists that these physical details help to maintain order, just as the programs do. During my visit, as he led me past the special housing unit that is known in most prisons as "the hole" to the recreation area, a group of inmates appeared in the distance, jogging on a circular track around an athletic field. "Some of the staff think there's too much recreation here," he told me. "Most think it's important. On a summer evening you've got three to five hundred men in this rec yard, with three staff. If you had less recreation, you'd need more staff. There's a clear economic advantage. You'd definitely have more fights. We do surveys every year, and they show that as inmates get more involved in the rec program, they get in less trouble. Also, they tend to have less health trouble, and that saves money."

Even without recreation programs most of the inmates at McKean would keep busy, with work assignments or training programs. Forty-seven percent are enrolled in classes, which is one of the highest rates in the federal system. Many inmates earn licenses that help them to get jobs when they are released. They also have opportunities to teach one another--a mentors' group, for instance, and the "I Care" group, which holds discussions about issues of prison life. Many inmates teach Adult Continuing Education as well. These programs are not mere frills, Luther claims, because they help to keep the prison running smoothly. "The older guys see some young guy who's got forty years to do," one staff member told me. "They think, He's angry, and he's scared of me, and I've got to do time with this guy. So they see it as a challenge to get some of the younger guys involved in the ed program; they see that as the only hope. They do it a lot of different ways--mentoring, whether formally or informally--to somehow expand the resources of this younger population coming in. Wherever the staff leave that challenge, the older inmates pick it up."

Education may be the most effective way to lower prison costs. DiIulio, who is well known in Washington for his pessimism about rehabilitation, claims, "In some prison systems cost-effective management is possible only because programs keep prisoners busy, with less supervision than you'd need otherwise. Especially with respect to certain types of prison educational programs, you save money by hiring fewer officers in the short run and reducing recidivism in the long run." The Corrections Corporation of America, a publicly traded company that was founded on the principle of cost-effective management, takes the same line on the value of educational programs.

In some respects McKean is stricter than other prisons, because inmates are held to higher standards. Three years ago, after a few minor incidents, Luther imposed a condition known as "closed" movement, restricting inmates' activity during evening hours. The condition was meant to be permanent. A group of inmates asked him if he would restore "open" movement if the prison was incident-free for a period of ninety days. He agreed, and the prison has run on open movement ever since. Many McKean inmates will also say that they do not carry "shanks"--homemade knives or blades--because they don't need them. The McKean staff takes weapons very seriously, and inmates found with them will be prosecuted and put in isolation.

Luther successfully transformed every aspect of prison life into a management tool. Each cellblock has a weekly inspection, and the inmates of those that score high enough are allowed to use the TV and phone rooms at night. They can also earn their way to the "honor unit," which almost always passes inspection and is especially quiet. Inmates who show consistently good behavior are allowed to attend supervised picnics on Family Day, so that they can start adjusting to life on the outside. Even the staff is involved in McKean's system of incentives. Any suggestion from a staff member will receive a response within twenty-four hours, and if it is adopted, the staff member earns a star next to his or her office plaque, redeemable for $25.00. This system may sound patronizing, but it enhances morale. "It's all in the culture the warden has established here," one staff member says. "It's a culture of responsiveness."

Nonetheless, Dennis Luther achieved his successes against the will of Bureau of Prisons senior management. The bureau declined to comment, but Luther claims that officials there saw him as "a maverick, as someone who violates bureau policy flagrantly." Some of the more successful programs at McKean --the Inmate Benefit Fund, for instance (which raised $50,000 a year, much of it for local charities)--have been cut by the bureau, whose director serves at the discretion of the Attorney General. Inmates' access to computers and other amenities has been reduced in the past year, and now, with Luther retired, the trend may continue. Education also suffered at McKean--and at all other prisons--when the 1994 crime bill denied prisoners the right to apply for Pell grants. Grants to prisoners, according to congressional logic, were unfair to those hardworking citizens who cannot afford to pay for a college education. In fact, no eligible applicant for a Pell grant ever lost out to an inmate, because the grants are awarded on a merit basis, with any costs above the yearly appropriation coming out of the next year's budget. Less than one percent of all Pell-grant funds went to prisoners during the 1993- 1994 award year. With the loss of the grants, prison college programs are virtually extinct.

But the Pell-grant controversy is only a small part of a huge and largely undocumented trend. The increase in prison violence over the past few years has coincided with big cuts in educational and vocational programming at all levels. College-aid programs like one administered by New York State's Tuition Assistance Program have died, and allocations for basic literacy and GED programs have been scaled back drastically. At least twenty-five states have made cuts in vocational and technical training, the areas most likely to provide inmates with an alternative career when they leave prison. Most states now have long waiting lists for classes of any kind. Even in states where programs have not been cut, prison overcrowding has often rendered them almost useless. Class sizes have increased so rapidly that the standard approach for elementary-level courses, according to one prison teacher, is "throw them the GED handbook and say `Let me know when you're finished.' You can't learn that way." In New Jersey the ratio of inmates to prison programs rose from 32 to 1 in 1984 to 83 to 1 at the beginning of last year.

Numerous studies have shown a correspondence between educational programs and reduced recidivism rates. There is no question that college-level programs at Roosevelt University, in Chicago; Boston University; and Ball State, in Indiana, have had remarkable success with inmates, many of whom have gone on to work in social services and treatment programs themselves. And federal surveys have found a significant difference between those prisoners who participated in classes and those who did not. The trouble with all these studies is that they do not distinguish between inmates for whom education made a real difference and those who were already unlikely to be sent back to prison. The best way to eliminate this problem of self-selection would be to offer education to prisoners at random, retain an identical control group that did not receive it, and then monitor the progress of the two groups after parole.

Whatever its effect on recidivism rates, education clearly makes prisons easier and less expensive to run. Prison costs are rapidly spinning out of control. In the past decade state and federal prison expenses have risen from approximately $12 billion to $24.6 billion. That estimate is low, because some costs are invariably left out in the process of reporting and because prisons put fiscal pressure on other government agencies as well. For instance, the costs of lawsuits that are brought by federal prisoners are borne by the Attorney General's Office, not the Bureau of Prisons. And state attorneys general bear the costs of constitutional challenges to their prison systems. Prison costs are continuing to rise with the implementation of the 1994 crime bill, which puts financial pressure on states to adopt harsher sentencing guidelines, and which includes a "three strikes" mandatory life-sentence provision for three-time violent offenders. These measures will swell the ranks of prisons that are already bursting with nonviolent offenders. By the turn of the century corrections are likely to be the largest item in many state budgets. Already California is spending more on its prisons than on its universities, and the state correctional officers' union has lobbied hard for tougher sentencing laws.

Within a decade a baby boomlet will add another million boys in the fourteen-to-seventeen-year-old range to our population. According to James Q. Wilson, of the University of California at Los Angeles, at least six percent of those will commit violent crimes. That means 30,000 more young killers, rapists, and thieves. Some of them will be what DiIulio calls "super-predators"--a new variety of young criminal who has no adults in his life and no apparent capacity for remorse. With today's long sentences and high rates of incarceration, many of these younger criminals will be spending their lives in prison, at taxpayer expense. "There's a tornado coming," DiIulio claims. "We can't stop it; we have to prepare for it."

Intelligent prison policy is necessary now more than ever before. Yet politicians have been unwilling to forsake the popular fixation with "getting tough on crime" by getting tough on prisoners. The 1994 crime bill authorized $7.9 billion for prison construction, and House Republicans have added another $2.3 billion to that. Some of the new prisons are necessary, but they will be counterproductive if they are run on the no-frills principle, with no vocational programs, no drug treatment, no education. "It's easy for politicians to advertise building more prisons, because up-front costs are negligible," according to Norman Carlson, who directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 1970 to 1987. "Construction costs are just the tip of the iceberg." Some politicians appear to recognize the gravity of the problem. New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman now pays lip service to the idea that more prison educational programs could reduce recidivism. But she will not fund them. As one teacher at East Jersey State Prison put it, "If this place blows up, they'll blame the lack of education. But they're cutting back." Dennis Luther is still convinced that his methods would work in any prison, even those most plagued with violence, overcrowding, and gangs. He had inmates in transfer who were violent in other prisons, he says, and when they reached McKean, they tended to calm down. But he has no illusions about the future of crime policy. "If the trend continues, prisons are going to become very different places to work in," he told me. "It's hard enough now to recruit a qualified staff for a prison. And I don't think we've seen anything yet." McKean staff members who worked under Luther feel the same way. Many have worked in other prisons, both state and federal, and they consider McKean a shining example of the difference good management can make. They don't expect it to last. Nor do the inmates, one of whom has written an M.A. thesis arguing that prisoners should have the opportunity to earn back the cost of their incarceration and then get an education. This is similar to arguments from inmates throughout the country: providing a long-term goal helps them to stay sane and makes them less prone to violence. It also makes the entire prison easier and less expensive to manage. But prisoners know very well that the current political trend is in the opposite direction. And none of them have any doubt about what the result will be. As one inmate serving a life term at East Jersey State Prison puts it, "You create Spartan conditions, you're gonna get gladiators."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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McKean, a federal correctional institution, does everything that "make 'em bust rocks" politicians decry --imagine, educating inmates! -- and it works Approaching McKean, the federal correctional institution in Bradford, Pennsylvania, one is not likely to think of a prison. The buildings, low and modern, display a pseudo-Navajo motif in soft gray and salmon colors.

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Just how bad are American 'supermax' prisons?

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Just how bad are American 'supermax' prisons?

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European Court ruling that 4 terror suspects could face 'ill-treatment' inside a supermax institution

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The European Court of Human Rights has rejected arguments by Babar Ahmad and three other terror suspects that they could face ill treatment in a "supermax" American high-security prison.

But what is life like in the "Alcatraz of the Rockies" and why was the court not convinced?

The Administrative Maximum facility (ADX), or "supermax" prison in Florence, Colorado, holds some of the most notorious American terrorists and murderers in solitary confinement.

The prison is home to about 360 inmates held under ultra-high security.

It is here, the suspects argued, they could end up if found guilty of terrorism in the US.

But the European Court of Human Rights found that a life sentence in the prison would be justified.

Supermax prisoner's story

"Extreme solitary confinement and reduced environmental stimulation" is how Thomas Silverstein, a convicted multiple murder, has described conditions at the Supermax prison.

In a 2007 lawsuit challenging the conditions of his imprisonment, Silverstein said he was subject to 24-hour surveillance, locked in an 8.5ft by 10ft cell for as many as 23 hours a day, and took meals and exercised alone.

The cells in "Z-Unit" - a special segregation unit - contained a bed with metal restraint rings, a sink, toilet and shower.

One had a mirror, cement walls and a small window he could only see out of when he stood on his desk. The other cell had no mirror - only a small window covered in mesh and painted over, he said.

Silverstein, 60, had been convicted of murdering another prisoner at a maximum security prison in Illinois. He said he exercised an hour a day by himself in 10ft by 10ft "dog-kennel-like" cement yard attached to his cell.

He said he was "entombed" by a sound-proof door that prevented him from talking to other inmates, and in any case he was barred from contacting other inmates.

The conditions, he said, caused depression, hallucination, disorientation and memory loss.

He said the damage went "beyond the boundaries of what most human beings can psychologically tolerate".

According to the court: "If the applicants were convicted as charged, the US authorities would be justified in considering them a significant security risk and in imposing strict limitations on their ability to communicate with the outside world."

Based on evidence from the US Department of Justice and statements from the American prison, the court said conditions in the jail would not breach human rights.

The prison, known for its high-profile inmates, small cells and restrictions on contact with the outside world, has an infamous international reputation: mainly because of its policy of holding its inmates in almost permanent solitary confinement.

The facility, 108 miles (173km) from Denver, holds convicted terrorists, militant anti-government extremists, gangsters, and other criminals considered so violent and dangerous mere maximum-security prison is not safe enough.

"We have only the most violent, disruptive and escape-prone inmates in the federal system," says Mark Collins, a spokesman for the prison.

Most of the prisoners are locked in spartan, 87-sq ft (8-sq m) cells; those under the strictest conditions are allowed out for as little as an hour a day, Mr Collins says.

Contact with other human beings is strictly limited - mostly to prison guards, counsellors and other staff.

Inmates who follow the rules can be rewarded with further time out of their cells and more opportunities to interact with other prisoners, Mr Collins says.

But current and former inmates, lawyers and others familiar with the prison describe it as an infernal environment in which even the design of the cells and the architecture of the prison conspire to render the inmates docile and drive them mad.

"People talk about it as being a cleaner version of hell," says Colin Dayan, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University and author of The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, who has studied high security prisons in the US.

Some of the inmates

Zacarias Moussaoui: Alleged "20th hijacker" convicted for a role in planning the 11 September terror attacks

Ahmed Ghailani: Convicted of conspiring to carry out the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania

Ted Kaczynski: The "Unabomber" imprisoned for killing three people and wounding dozens of others in a string of bombings

Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and Ramzi Yousef: Convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing

Anthony Casso: Former underboss of New York's Lucchese mob family, serving multiple life sentences for murder

Eric Rudolph: Anti-abortion militant who bombed a park during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta

Richard Reid: The so-called shoe bomber who tried to blow up a passenger jet

Jose Padilla: A former Chicago gangster who trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan

Source: US Bureau of Prisons, BBC research
"It's immaculate. It's no black hole. It's not your typical sense of the hole of solitary confinement. You are staring upon nothingness: Concrete all the time. The architecture itself is the form of the torture."

It is this reputation that lawyers for Babar Ahmad, Syed Tahla Ahsan, Adel Abdul Bary and Khaled Al-Fawwaz used in their defence.

According to the court, US Authorities would consider it impossible to detain Abu Hamza, the fifth suspect, at the supermax prison "because of his disabilities (particularly the amputation of his forearms)".

Lawyers for the other four suspects argued that the tough prison conditions would amount to "inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment", under the Human Rights Act.

Last week Babar Ahmad told the BBC: "I am facing extradition to the United States and spending the rest of my life in solitary confinement."

But the court's judgement said that the facilities for prisoners, including television, radio, newspapers, books and telephone calls, "went beyond what was provided in most prisons in Europe".

'Horrifying cases'

In its ruling the court pointed out that "not all inmates convicted of international terrorism were housed at ADX". The judgement said "procedural safeguards" are in place for prisoners and that they can bring claims to the attention of US authorities.

I have a feeling the courts don't realise how extreme they are
Dr Sharon Shalev, Criminologist, London School of Economics

But Dr Sharon Shalev, a criminologist at the London School of Economics, who has visited American high-security facilities, said: "Supermax prisons are very extreme. I have a feeling the courts don't realise how extreme they are. I've yet to see a European prison as extreme.

"Prisoners spend most of the day inside a small cell with no view and no contact with other humans. Everything is done from inside the cell.

"Even during medical treatment doctors stand at the gate of the cell. American authorities would have you believe this is meaningful human contact."

A supermax prison cell - 3.5m x 2m (7ft x 12ft)

1. Window - partially blocked to leave only a view of the sky

2. Shower - water on a timer switch to prevent flooding

3. Fixed concrete stool and writing desk

4. Combined toilet, sink and water fountain unit

5. Polished steel mirror

Dr Shalev said she had seen "horrifying cases" of people who went into prison sane, but ended up self-harming and attempting suicide as a result of solitary confinement.

Ray Luc Levasseur, a former inmate at ADX Florence Penitentiary in Colorado, told the Today programme: "It doesn't always stop with damage... it doesn't always have to stop with the mind.

"It can move on into degrading your soul, your spirit. And a prisoner who's been damaged like this - from point of view of the prison wardens - that prisoner is more controllable, more manageable."

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Just how bad are American 'supermax' prisons?

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The European Court of Human Rights has rejected arguments by Babar Ahmad and three other terror suspects that they could face ill treatment in a "supermax" American high-security prison. But what is life like in the "Alcatraz of the Rockies" and why was the court not convinced?

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The Norwegian prison where inmates are treated like people

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The Norwegian prison where inmates are treated like people

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Norway's Bastoy Island

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The Norwegian prison where inmates are treated like people

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On Bastoy prison island in Norway, the prisoners, some of whom are murderers and rapists, live in conditions that critics brand ‘cushy’ and ‘luxurious’. Yet it has by far the lowest reoffending rate in Europe. Erwin James reports

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Early ideas of the 'model prison'

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The panopticon is a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. From the tower, a guard can see every cell and inmate but the inmates can't see into the tower. Prisoners will never know whether or not they are being watched.

Introduced by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the panopticon was a manifestation of his belief that power should be visible and unverifiable. Through this seemingly constant surveillance, Bentham believed all groups of society could be altered - morals would be reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated and so on as they were all subject to observation.

Think of the last time you were at work and your boss walked in the room. Did you straighten up and work harder in their presence? Now imagine they were always in the room. They wouldn't be watching you all the time, but you'd know they were there. This is the power of constant surveillance - and the power of the panopticon.

Over time the panopticon has attracted criticism, most notably from French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault asserts the panopticon's ultimate goal is to induce in the inmates a state of conscious visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. To him, this form of incarceration is a "cruel, ingenious cage".

Foucault also compares this disciplinary observation to a medieval village under quarantine. In order to stamp out the plague, officials must strictly separate everyone and patrol the streets to ensure villagers don't leave their homes and become sick. If villagers are caught outside, the punishment is death.

In Foucault's village, constant surveillance - or to be precise, the idea of constant surveillance - creates regulation in even the smallest details of everyday life. This system is what Foucault refers to as a " discipline blockade" - similar to a dungeon where each inmate is sequestered, out of mind, and discipline administered can be absolute in life and death ways.

On the other hand, Bentham highlights the panopticon's power as being a "new mode of obtaining mind over mind". By discarding this isolation within a blockade, the discipline becomes a self-propagating mental mechanism through visibility.

Today, we are more likely to identify panopticism in new technologies than in prison towers. The increasing presence of CCTV cameras equipped with speakers in the UK is one example often seen to be indicative of a disciplinary society that works to normalise behaviours through constant monitoring.

Similarly, the internet is often framed as a panoptic form of monitoring. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have the ability to track customers' activities and interests, which are often used to personalise advertisements.

Philosopher and psychologist Shoshanna Zuboff highlights what she calls " surveillance capitalism". Foucault argued the "ingenious" panoptic method of surveillance can be used for disciplinary methods, and Zuboff suggests it can also be used for marketing.

Concerns over this sort of monitoring date back to the beginning of the rise of personal computers in the late 80s. Zuboff outlined the PC's role as an " information panopticon" which can monitor the amount of work being completed by an individual.

Today this seems more applicable. Employers can get programs to covertly track keystrokes of staff working from home to make sure they really are putting in their hours. Parents can get software to monitor their children's mobile phone use. Governments around the world are passing laws so they can collect internet data on people suspected of planning terror attacks. Even public transport cards can be used to monitor physical movements of citizens.

This sort of monitoring and data collection is particularly analogous with the panopticon because it's a one-way information avenue. When you're sitting in front of your computer, browsing the web, scrolling down your newsfeed and watching videos, information is being compiled and sent off to your ISP. In this scenario, the computer is Bentham's panopticon tower. And you are the subject of which information is being extracted. On the other end of the line, nothing is being communicated, no information divulged. Your online behaviour and actions can always be seen but you never see the observer.

In these new ways, Bentham's panopticon continues to operate and influence our society. Lack of transparency and one-way communication is often disconcerting, especially when thought about through a lens of control.

Then again, you might also argue to ensure a society functions, it's useful to monitor and influence people to do what is deemed good and right.

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The panopticon is a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. From the tower, a guard can see every cell and inmate but the inmates can't see into the tower. Prisoners will never know whether or not they are being watched.

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Female prisoners from Vanaja Prison invite everybody to dance - Rikosseuraamuslaitos

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Inspired by this successful project, we now want to invite all female prison units across the world to create their own dance videos. With our dance video, we want to promote the significance of both cultural activities and the general prison conditions that genuinely support the rehabilitation in prison, especially when it comes to female prisoners.

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From jailhouse to marijuana farm: empty US prisons get strange makeovers

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From jailhouse to marijuana farm: empty US prisons get strange makeovers

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Old, unused prisons being transformed into haunted houses, weed farms, fancy restaurants

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From jailhouse to marijuana farm: empty US prisons get strange makeovers

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As prisons close across the US, ideas for their reuse abound - from a yoga studio to a farm for medical marijuana. In Gainesville, since a medium-security jail reopened as a shelter, chronic homelessness in the Florida city has halved

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Video: How Norway's Prisons are Changing What it Means to Do Time

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Video: How Norway's Prisons are Changing What it Means to Do Time

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Prison systems look very different in Norway compared to the US.

Norwegian crime rates are extremely low and the recidivism rate is a mere 20% because their prison system actually works.

I took a tour of various Norwegian prisons, speaking with inmates and guards, and I learned that the US prison system is in need of reform.

Here's what happened when I toured Norway's prisons.

The following is an excerpt from "Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World" by Baz Dreisinger:
The most highly touted aspect of the humane Norwegian prison system is the fact that it seems to work. Crime rates are very low and the recidivism rate is a mere 20%. Where else could I conclude my journey? I know what to expect; I'm one of the many believers ogling this system. Whether it lives up to the hype is the real question.

Can Norway at last take me to that elusive thing I've been searching for in full, flourishing form: justice?

"Prison?" I ask two deckhands, after the train has carried me to the ferry and now I've boarded a small vessel hopefully bound for Bastoy Island.

"Yes," says one of the men, rubbing his hands together for warmth. He looks me up and down with arrogant blue eyes. "But sorry, it is only for men." Then he laughs. "Come, come, you're in the right place."

I look up at the masthead and notice that it's crowned by a dead, stuffed swan.

"We found it frozen in a block of ice, years ago," says the other deckhand. He wears a black ski hat and has a wizened, kindly face. "It's creepy-looking," I say.

"You think so? Our mascot. You are afraid of criminals?" he suddenly asks. And, before I can answer, "We are criminals." I look into his eyes; they're laughing. Is he kidding?

"Really, we are. Criminals. Are you afraid?"

"Why would I be?" I shrug. I'm still not sure if he's joking.

"I am Wiggo," he says, offering a handshake.

He's indeed a prisoner, serving a twenty-one-year sentence, the maximum in Norway, but he'll likely be out next year.

Cato, the other deckhand, is serving one and a half years for intention to commit a criminal act, though he insists he's innocent.

He and Wiggo bring me to a vestibule to show me their daily schedule, posted on the wall. "We work the six-to-noon shift," Cato says. "Then we go back to the prison and relax. Some exercise, then relax in my room. Come, you want to meet the captain? He is not a prisoner. The only one who isn't, on this boat."

Upstairs, the sturdy captain shakes my hand. "You talking to those criminals?" he says, with a laugh. I'm lapping up this playful mockery of the scary-criminals mentality.

There's clearly nothing to be afraid of here and everyone seems to know it.

As the boat sets sail I spy Bastoy, a cluster of gangly pine trees in a gray sea, stretching toward a gray sky. Inside the boat's small seating area, Cato sits down next to me and turns on the TV, flipping to the History Channel. "Are you on Facebook?" he asks. "You're allowed Facebook? And Internet?" I counter.

"Not while over there." He points to the pine trees. "But yes, when we are on home leave." I jot down my name on a slip of paper. For the first time since my arrival, a thin line of blue sky appears overhead. "They say it is a summer camp, Bastoy," says Wiggo, as I leave the cabin to disembark. He is almost reprimanding me. "You will maybe think so. But no, it is prison. Trust me. We have our life stopped. Frozen."

I point to the swan. "Like your mascot. Frozen. Even on a beautiful island." Wiggo nods emphatically. "Back to the mainland!" he calls to Cato, ready for another run. Modern-day Charons, I think. Ferrying new souls across the river to the underworld. It hardly looks like the underworld, though. Wiggo was right, it does look like summer camp. Or, this time of year, a calendar painting for October.

Mottled leaves are falling on cyclers - yes, they're prisoners - and a horse-and-carriage canters by. Gingerbread houses dot the landscape; they're dull yellow, with green trim and red roofs.

I spy sheep and cows but no fence or barbed wire; Bastoy, after all, is an open prison, a concept born in Finland during the 1930s and now part of the norm throughout Scandinavia, where prisoners can sometimes keep their jobs on the outside while serving time, commuting daily.

30% of Norway's prisons are open, and Bastoy, a notorious reformatory for boys converted in 1984 to a prison, is considered the crown jewel of them all.

A small yellow van driven by a smiling officer carries me to a cabin where I check my phone in, the first thing that remotely suggests "prison." Tom the governor - not warden or superintendent but governor - looks like Kevin Costner. He offers me a cup of coffee and we take a seat in his office, which, with its floral drapes, aloe plants, and faintly perfumed, cinder scent, reminds me of a quaint bed-and-breakfast somewhere in New England.

"It doesn't work. We only do it because we're lazy," Tom says flatly. He's talking about the traditional prison system, where he was stationed for twenty-two years before running this open prison. A fly buzzes loudly by the window as Tom goes on.

"I started skeptical. That changed quickly. More prisons should be open - almost all should be. We take as many as we can here, but there isn't room for everyone." Prisoners from around the coun-try can apply to move to an open prison like Bastoy when they're within three years of release. The island is home to 115 men overseen by 73 staff members, but there's a waiting list of about 30.

"There's a perception that, 'Oh, this is the lightweight prison; you just take the nice guys for the summer-camp prison.' But in fact no. Our guys are into, pardon my French, some heavy shit. Drugs and violence. And the truth is, some have been problematic in other prisons but then they come here and we find them easy.

We say, 'Is that the same guy you called difficult?' It's really very simple: Treat people like dirt and they will be dirt. Treat them like human beings and they will act like human beings."

He opens the window to let the fly go free. "Come, let's take a stroll."

We wander through the forest, past grazing horses, a breeding area for birds, a greenhouse, and a barbecue pit where men can cook lunch. Prisoners live in shared houses resembling log cabins. The delicious smell of burning firewood wafts through the air, and South Africa's Robben Island springs to mind. Bastoy is the opposite of its doppelgänger: not a dark, evil twin but the humane edition of that prison-island hellhole.

"It's not about running a prison but running an island," Tom explains.

This is a nature reserve, growing about 25% of its food. Most vehicles are electric and everything is recycled.

"Agriculture is a big part of our philosophy. We are humane, ecological. Animals have a social function, too, teaching empathy. Everyone works the land."

"Do you live on the island?" I ask.

"I commute by boat every day. I love this. No more driving in traffic to Oslo." He shakes his head. "I knew nothing about any of this, you know. I was a city boy. Now my life is so much restored by this place, this lifestyle. Just like for the prisoners."

Tom shows me a wooden church ornamented by a brass Chandelier - "Norway is secular so this is more of a cultural space; the chaplain is more of a therapist than an old-fashioned minister," he explains. He also takes me to a gleaming supermarket, which sells premium cacao chocolate and aloe-vera juice. There are red phone booths for unlimited use, although Tom thinks cell phones and Internet should be permitted in all prisons.

'What are we afraid of? You can't kill anyone by Internet or by phone,' he mutters.

I ask about stigma and reentry.

"In Norway, when you're released, you're released," he replies. "No big stigma. One guy I know spent eighteen years in prison and is now living in my neighborhood, a normal old guy, no one cares. You find this a lot. I have many friends who've been to prison. Norwegians are very forgiving people." He pauses. "Strange because we weren't always like that."

That's an understatement. This is the land of the pillaging Vikings and of the Nordic sagas, depicted on wooden friezes outside Oslo's city hall, which I visited the other day. The sagas are long tales of violence, murder, jealousy, and revenge, and it's fascinating to think that somewhere deep in Norway's past, a social tide turned and, as in Rwanda, a culture of peace and forgiveness came to triumph.

Over lunch, Tom continues to impress me with his progressive thinking. He explains that although the "conservative" party here would be considered liberal anywhere else, and in general the left and the right agree on the main threads of correctional policy, an influx of immigrants, rising xenophobia, and conservative politics lately threaten to undermine the country's progressive system and soft-on-crime approach.

An anti-immigration Progress Party, part of the conservative-led government, is promoting a backlash against what's known as "naving," or living off welfare - NAV is the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration. In recent years a local newspaper claimed that 80% of Norwegians want stricter punishments, and a 2010 survey showed that a majority felt punishments were generally too lenient. "It's your media that's also responsible," Tom says, biting into a slice of whole-grain toast with brown cheese.

"American TV shows about tough prisons and talk about being 'tough on crime.' It influences people here. But thankfully that's started to change. All the bad press in the past few years from you guys has started to make us not take you all so seriously anymore. Especially in elections. In the political speeches, those biblical references by a secular country? And Sarah Palin? People are laughing and also crying - this is a country we want to imitate?"

I sigh. It's disturbing, the way media can make and unmake the problem. I say as much, adding that the culture of fear is to blame. I tell him a little about my Australian experience and the Murdoch media.

"Yes," Tom concurs. "Talk to people at a party and every - pardon my French - idiot will insist there's more crime than there. Statistics say there is nothing to fear."

A study of home leave in Germany, I say, found that the failure-to-return rate amounts to a mere 1%. "Exactly," Tom nods. "Here there were instances where prisoners committed crime while on home leave, but so few of them. You can't construct a whole justice system around one or two exceptions.

"I tell people, we're releasing neighbors every year. Do you want to release them as ticking time bombs? Is that who you want living next to you? Hey" - he puts down his toast - "have you seen the film about the Attica warden?" Apparently a recently released Finnish documentary depicts a former Attica superintendent's tour of Halden, a new prison I'll be visiting later this week. They make a laughingstock of him, because where the Norwegian officials see rehabilitation and correction, the American sees risk and danger.

"He even looks at staff playing cards with the prisoners, chatting about each other's lives and calling each other by first names, and he is disgusted.

'That is not safe,' he keeps saying. But where are the statistics to show that it's a danger? How can you help the prisoners if you are not sharing, about you and your life and your kids? The men here know my kids, my address, everything. Why should I be afraid?" It's as if Governor Tom were reading my mind.

After my visit, as I'm waiting for the yellow van to carry me back to the boat and to Oslo, a man with a chipped front tooth stands beside me."You are from America?" he asks. "You must think this place is crazy, huh?" Without letting me answer, he goes on."But if you treat people like shit, they will be shit. Why doesn't America get it? Funny, because Tony Robbins is so smart, and he is from America."

He's talking about the self-help guru known for infomercials and books like Unleash the Power Within. The man lets out a nervous laugh. "What are you doing here?" I ask him. His blue parka says ENGINEERING, so I assume he must be repairing equipment.

"Me? I am sitting here. I am going to see the doctor, because I may have to be transferred to another open prison. I am developing allergies to horses." Oh - he's in prison here. I had no idea. I find my own cluelessness deeply moving, because it means things are as they should be. He and I are two human beings. Like my meeting with the deckhands Wiggo and Cato, our casual, normal interaction contrasts starkly with the many prison interviews I've done over the years; it's a total erasure of boundaries between "us" and "them." Chatting with me like an old friend on the ride back to the mainland, he tells me that he once worked in oil and traveled the world, and although home leaves have kept him close to family and community, when he goes home next year it won't be so easy to pick up the pieces. "I am hopeful, though. In prison, you can choose to see the sky or choose to see the moss on the ground. I look at the sky."

I do, too. For a sliver of a beautiful moment, the sun has dramatically emerged from the clouds and the world, in full-on color, looks wholly new. An imposing fourteenth-century fortress towers over the cobblestone streets of Halden, a town in southeast Norway near the Swedish border.

The air here is frigid, so I snap a quick photo of the bastion, then hurry from the train station to the taxi stand, where a warm car carries me into the mountains. I arrive at a more modern sort of fortress: a closed prison. It's marked by a twenty-foot concrete wall - no barbed wire, just the wall, which actually isn't a mean-looking wall but, obscured by pine trees and featuring a sloping, rounded top, an almost kindly one.

I've heard about this wall.

And this place, nicknamed the IKEA Prison because its sleek, modish style is said to mimic that of the Swedish retailers.

Opened in 2012 to house 259 men and about as many staff, it cost $252 million to build and has been called the "nicest prison in the world" - usually mockingly. It's pointed to as an example of how Norway's so-called criminals get to live in a five-star hotel.

But why shouldn't a country that can afford it bestow restorative conditions on the people who need it most? Aren't prisons supposed to be for correction? I've already seen the photos and footage of Halden, but I'm still excited to lay eyes on the place.

My guide, Lasse Andresen, a jolly little man who's the prison's inspector for operations and community relations, seems almost disappointed when I'm neither surprised nor appalled by what he proudly presents. Not by the absence of prison uniforms and bars, nor the gorgeous shared housing units, with their stainless-steel countertops, wraparound sofas, chic coffee tables, and long vertical windows designed to admit optimum sunlight. Not by the stylish prison yard, adorned with funky graffiti-style murals courtesy of local artist Dolk Lundgren; the immaculate gym with its climbing wall; the friendly prison choir, practicing Woody Guthrie's "Peace"; the knitted art on the wall, featuring poems by Pablo Neruda and W. H. Auden. And the magnificent health unit, home to a thriving medical staff and a plethora of drug treatment options, and the well-stocked library, where the book club is deep in conversation about a Norwegian novel.

But the gorgeous, private visiting rooms, stocked with condoms and lubricants - these do surprise and impress me.

"Big visiting hall, like you have in your country, is no good," Lasse says with disgust.

"I see it in Belgium. How can families connect with no privacy? So loud and crowded?" I know exactly what he means, from my many hours spent in just such loud, unwelcoming prison visiting rooms. He points to the toys neatly stacked in the corner. "We try to do the best for the children." Then he swings open the door to another visiting room. Saying, "Let me take you home!" he reveals a massive mural of the New York City skyline.

I have a flashback to a particular New York prison visiting room, and the photos I'd take with my friend after being permitted our one hug goodbye. Every prison visiting room has a photo area, where a prisoner with an archaic-looking Polaroid camera charges two dollars for a shot of you and your incarcerated loved one, before a backdrop that's more fit for a prom than a prison. The backdrops rotate from week to week; I dubbed one The Plantation because it looked like the porch of a slave master's house, and the other, with its vivid cityscape, Night on the Town. That one looked nearly identical to the mural I'm looking at here in Halden, except this one is bizarre not for its out-of-placeness but for its sheer humanity.

If we have to send people away from the very people most capable of "correcting" them, the people who love them, then at the very least, allow them some true intimacy. It benefits every one, as one Minnesota study found, after looking at those released from prison between 2003 and 2007 and concluding that visitation significantly decreased the risk of recidivism. From the passionate education inspector, I learn that Halden's promotion of intimacy extends to staff-prisoner relations.

"Relations. This is the basis of our system," she emphasizes. "I train officers to be firm and realistic, yes - not everybody can be helped or wants to be helped. But they must be open and sharing with the prisoners. When I see new officers nervously hiding their name tags, I know: You're not right for this job."

Candidates for the job must obtain a two-year degree from a special staff academy, where they study a mix of criminology, law, welfare, applied ethics, and social work. I'd visited the academy yesterday and been blown away by the humanity and depth of its curriculum. How to establish relationships with prisoners, how to communicate with them and see the person behind the offense - this is the goal of officer training, I was told. Officers are paid while they study and the job is considered a very good one, akin to that of a nurse or a teacher, with solid pay and generous benefits.

It's such a desirable job, in fact, that 1,300 people were now interviewing for 150 to 175 slots. Learning that Norway trains prison staff in other countries, from Poland and Russia to Somalia - the governor of Halden told me he'd just returned from Namibia - gave me great joy. Better you than us, I'd said to myself, thinking of all the countries scurrying to import America's bereft model.
Excerpted from "Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World" (Other Press Trade Paperback; 2017) by Baz Dreisinger. Copyright © Baz Dreisinger. With permission from Other Press

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I toured prisons around the world - and the system that seems the most relaxed is also one that works

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Prison systems look very different in Norway compared to the US. Norwegian crime rates are low and the recidivism rate is a mere 20% because their prison system actually works. I took a tour of Norwegian prisons, speaking with inmates and guards, and I learned that the US prison system is outdated.

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Ideas for a humane criminal justice system

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Ideas for a humane criminal justice system

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Rikers Island, New York City's notorious jail complex, is set to close within the next decade. For some activists, the pace of change is too slow, but, if the city is taken at its word, ten years is a solid chunk of time to rethink justice in 21st century New York. A design team, convened by Van Alen in collaboration with NADAAA, has set out to do exactly that.

, a new report from the Van Alen Institute, a design advocacy organization, gives broad guidelines on how New York's criminal justice system should look, feel, and function. Notably, it centers the urban condition but aims to enhance life for those behind bars, as well as those outside the justice system, by elevating both the city and the jail's livability with public programming, dense service networks, and lots of light and greenery.

The project was deeply collaborative. To produce Van Alen partnered with City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and the legal experts, politicians, developers, and prison reform advocates she convened last year to address the Rikers closure. That group, sometimes called the Lippman Commission but known formally as the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, issued its recommendations this past March: Closing Rikers Island, it said, is a " moral imperative," and it advocated for reducing the city's overall jail population and creating a network of neighborhood-based jails.

To that end, Van Alen convened architects, environmental psychologists, prison reformers, and nonprofit leaders for the project team. Dan Gallagher and Nader Tehrani, principals at New York- and Boston-based NADAAA, partnered with urbanist Karen Kubey; Susan Opotow and Jayne Mooney, a psychologist and associate professor of sociology, respectively, who work at both John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, CUNY; as well as Susan Gottesfeld of the Osborne Association, a nonprofit that works with justice-involved individuals and their families. (The team is credited in the commission's report with providing "additional support" to the study.)

The group hosted workshops in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens with law enforcement, reformers, academics, and formerly incarcerated individuals to get an idea of what jail is like inside, and after. The workshops, Gallagher said, helped the designers better understand both day-to-day life in Rikers and incarceration's impact on housing choice, employment, and mental health long after release. From there, the team developed its design guidelines.

Instead of producing a strictly carceral space, the designers envisioned a networked jail system spread throughout the city and meant to serve the wider community, not just prisoners. Called Justice Hubs, the mini-neighborhoods are intended to confront re-entry dilemmas-despite new rules, for example, many industries still discriminate against people with backgrounds-while addressing day-to-day challenges faced by those who work in the criminal justice system.

In the Brooklyn forum, residents said they weren't concerned about safety if a jail were to open in their neighborhood. Instead, Gahllager said, people were worried the building would be ugly: a grey concrete Hulk surrounded by razor wire. That prompted the team to think not only about the design of the jail itself, but its relationship to the city and its people.

"The building has to become more than a big wall with something else going on inside," said Gallagher, a partner at NADAAA. "It has to be an active tool of civic engagement."

NADAAA's conceptual designs try to make life on the inside as normal ("more conventional," per Gallagher) as possible. The report emphasizes access to natural light and ventilation not only in outdoor areas, but in visitor rooms, activity spaces, and (especially) cells. Instead of monolithic cinder blocks and concrete finished, the architects advocated for softer, natural finishes to add visual variety and reduce background noise, a significant stressor in close quarters. The layout is supposed to make it easier to move within the jail, and the facilities would be placed near courts and social services. There would be ample but unobtrusive parking for corrections officers, too.

The team didn't want to reproduce the spatial segregation that Rikers-a literal island in the East River, near Laguardia Airport-embodied. As a result, community facilities like public outdoor space, gardens, art studios, and libraries are part of the program and are open to detainee's friends and family, as well as residents who have no personal involvement with the jail.

This is the first time NADAAA has done a project like this. Van Alen approached the firm both for their design sense and for their ability to analyze and rethink troubled systems. "It was one of those situations where we said, 'okay let's jump in with both feet,'" Gallagher explained. He gave full credit to the team's non-architects, whose research and work experience brought a local and highly international perspective to the project. They read up on Denmark, for example, which lets inmates wear street clothing and cook with sharp knives (but even their relatively progressive prison system is far from perfect).

The design team's role going forward is unclear, Gallagher and Van Alen confirmed, but both parties want to stay involved. The general recommendations, summarized on the last few pages of the report, are just that. The concepts don't specify designs, as Justice Hubs will adjust to local zoning: A 200-bed facility in densely developed Downtown Brooklyn might look very different from a similar-sized jail in St. George, Staten Island. With a mandate to envision a system that at its core features many jails, there wasn't much room for questioning the fundamentals of the carceral state or challenging the culture of surveillance. But the guidelines are a cautious step in the right direction to end a traumatic system where detainees suffer degrading and abusive treatment, visitors lose hours on the bus to see family, and guards are hurt by inmates who themselves may struggle with poor mental health.

Although Mayor Bill de Blasio supports the closing of Rikers, he hasn't been totally clear on whether he supports community-based jails. Given how quickly NIMBYs mobilized against the mayor's new homeless shelters, it's unclear how residents may react to neighborhood jails. Still, the design team is optimistic about the recommendations. "As a society we have a responsibility to facilitate best outcomes," said David van der Leer, Van Alen's executive director. And architects, he hopes, will keep a seat at the table.

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This design team has ideas for a better, more humane jail system

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Rikers Island, New York City's notorious jail complex, is set to close within the next decade. For some activists, the pace of change is too slow, but, if the city is taken at its word, ten years is a solid chunk of time to rethink justice in 21st century New York.

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What kind of prison might prisoners design?

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What kind of prison might prisoners design?

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The workshop leaders came laden with markers in colors other than red and blue (gang colors), drafting rulers crafted from museum board (too dull to double as weapons) and kiddie scissors (ditto).

All the students wore orange. And on this final day, their paper models were taking shape.

Architect Deanna VanBuren adjusted a piece of tracing paper over Anthony Pratt's design, showing him how to mark the perimeter to show walls and windows, then urging him to use dots to indicate open spaces.

Restorative justice: An article in the Aug. 18 A section on the design of spaces conducive to restorative justice referred to Deanna VanBuren as an architect. While VanBuren has practiced in the field for 15 years, she is required by the American Institute of Architects to define herself as a designer because she is not licensed. -

A towering, broad-chested man with full tattoos adorning both arms, Pratt, 29, was among those sketching out new visions: an airy room with a skylight to cure vitamin D deficiencies and a fountain with a cascading waterfall to represent resilience and adaptability. Privacy barriers for the shower and toilet. A healing center with lots of windows and, in the middle, a talking circle with a sun emblazoned in its center.

The spaces they were planning could be at a New Age retreat, but these were conceived by inmates at San Francisco's County Jail No. 5.

Most inmates on this 48-man jail pod are awaiting trial on violent crimes. All must agree to participate in a program called "Resolve to Stop the Violence," which involves concepts of restorative justice, an alternative to traditional criminal justice that focuses on healing victims and offenders alike. This day's class allowed them to explore their feelings about the system that landed them here and how its physical contours might be altered.

As Pratt stippled his drawing with concentration, Keith Wilkins, 25, painstakingly cut the waterfall for the 3D model. Both are facing murder charges. Lamar Paschall, 32, charged with kidnapping, rape and robbery, helped with the trees.

Some of their models are fanciful - individual cells with Internet connections and even outdoor decks exist in Norway but aren't likely to become part of U.S. prison design any time soon. Others, such as peace-making centers where agreement on punishment is reached collaboratively without entering a courtroom, are already becoming a reality.

"I feel an extra sense of purpose today," Paschall had told his fellow classmates as the workshop got underway. "Hopefully this can become fruitful and turn into something real down the line."

The 18 men who enrolled in the four-day workshop this summer were contemplating restorative justice through a novel lens: design.

As consensus builds that traditional criminal justice models are failing to prevent recidivism, VanBuren and fellow instructor Barb Toews, an academic, have joined a small chorus of designers, researchers and even judges and wardens calling for new spaces to match the tenets of restorative justice.

"Architects are sort of the psychiatrists of the system," said Linda Bernauer, chair of the American Institute of Architects' Academy of Architecture for Justice. "We have to listen to everyone, and victims and perpetrators don't generally have much of a voice.... The intent is to talk about how therapeutic spaces can provide better outcomes and have architects be the leaders as opposed to just being hired to do what we're told."

Restorative justice concepts were first promoted in the 1970s by global practitioner and theorist Howard Zehr, now a professor at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. The goal was to make the needs of victims central, and by doing so effect broader healing for all, communities included.

Critics of restorative justice contend the process is too subjective and could lead to proposed remedies that are wildly disparate. As a result, some victim organizations and hard-line prosecutors reject it.

But the practice has nonetheless spread globally and throughout the U.S. as a body of evidence grows showing it helps reduce school expulsions, keep youths out of the criminal justice system and prevent youths and adults who have already been sentenced from re-offending.

The conversation has now turned to space.

Courtrooms are out, said Sujatha Baliga, director of the Restorative Justice Project at the National Council on Crime & Delinquency, a research and policy organization. They're "so binary - someone is going to be victor and someone vanquished."

The Oakland-based architect was working for a big firm when she heard bereaved-father-turned-restorative-justice-proponent Azim Khamisa on a podcast and was deeply moved. After his son was murdered by a teenage gang member, Khamisa reached out in forgiveness to the boy's grandfather (as well as the assailant) so they could all heal, and the two men launched the San Diego-based Tariq Khamisa Foundation to address the roots of youth violence.

Soon after, she heard the founder of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth speak about transformations at a West Oakland middle school, where suspensions and expulsions of African American students had plummeted. They teamed and VanBuren designed her first stand-alone restorative justice room - in a portable trailer at an Oakland high school. She had found her calling.

VanBuren is now helping to design a peacemaking center in Syracuse for the New York-based Center for Court Innovation, a nonprofit arm of the state court system. With separate entrances for victims and offenders, views of a verdant terrace from the main peacemaking room and private spaces for reflection, it was crafted after intensive community workshops similar in many ways to the one in the jail.

Toews, meanwhile, who was raised in the Mennonite faith, got her start as a restorative justice practitioner in the 1990s while doing her voluntary service and was hooked. In 2000, she conducted a workshop in a Pennsylvania prison with 13 inmates serving life sentences, most of whom had committed murder.

The men were defensive, reluctant to share their feelings. So she shifted to metaphor: The traditional system, she told them, is like a boxing ring, with a winner and loser and outsiders determining the outcome.

"What would a room look like," she then asked, "where you could face anything you've done and be accountable for it?"

Together, they created a vision and called it "Do No Harm" room. A picture window with a mountain view. A door that locks from the inside. Plants and rugs. The workshop dynamic shifted.

Later, Toews wondered, "If we treated it as a potential for something literal, if the environment were different, how might that change how we do justice?"

She was exploring the question as a doctoral student a few years ago when VanBuren tracked her down. "I could not believe that someone had similar interests to me," Toews said. "It was the craziest, luckiest thing."

San Francisco County Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi welcomed the workshop into the jail.

He lauded the women's work for offering a perspective "that is woefully absent in assessing how this nation's incarceration system operates and fails."

On the final workshop day in June, the inmates scrambled to piece together their models with glue sticks and tape.

Deandre Hill, 27, convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm, and Christopher Gillis, 44, facing murder and commercial burglary charges, sat side by side. They envisioned a cell with a computer that allowed for communication with family. Natural light, as in all the models, was key.

"The most important thing is to be accountable, but in order to work on yourself you have to be comfortable," said Gillis, who is planning a restorative justice circle to "make up for the harm" he had inflicted on his 16-year-old son through his absence and violent tendencies.

Then it was time to present their models to the larger pod and a panel of outside reviewers.

As his teammates stood beside him, Dante Hayes, 33, facing charges of burglary and burglary to commit rape, showed a design with a tree in the atrium representing growth and "the ability for us to grow." A kitchen would feed all visitors. (The group scrapped the outdoor pond because of the drought, they explained to laughs.)

In a closing circle after the presentation, Pratt, who recently participated in a restorative justice-style circle with his girlfriend, said his whole outlook had changed: "Instead of being barbarians and just beating each other upside the head, we can be like family."

VanBuren said she is encouraging big architecture firms that design jails and prisons to hold similar workshops with inmates and guards.

"The goal is to empower those inside the institutions and prod architects to actually talk to the people they are designing for," she said. "That's how an architect would practice in any other setting."

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What kind of prison might the inmates design?

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The workshop leaders came laden with markers in colors other than red and blue (gang colors), drafting rulers crafted from museum board (too dull to double as weapons) and kiddie scissors (ditto). All the students wore orange. And on this final day, their paper models were taking shape.