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Across the nation, 25,000 high-risk prisoners are currently housed in “supermaximum” units designed for extreme sensory and social deprivation. Berkeley grad student Keramet Reiter — researching the rise of this harsh form of confinement — has pored through archives and listened to former prisoners’ powerful accounts of near-total isolation and its psychological effects.
Tag: prison
‘Soft on crime’? Fault traditional incarceration, says criminal-justice reformer
October 11, 2011:
The new “realignment” of the California correctional system — sending hundreds of non-violent offenders to local jails instead of state prisons — may yield much better results, a San Francisco Sheriff’s Department official, Sunny Schwartz, said in an Oct. 5 talk to students. Schwartz was a speaker in Political Science 179, a course that has for nearly 30 years has featured lectures by figures in public life from across the political spectrum.
Downsizing the prison-industrial complex
May 4, 2010:
California has created, through its laws and policies, a hugely bloated correctional system, says Barry Krisberg, a well-known advocate of criminal-justice reform. With 170,000 prisoners held in dozens of overcrowded facilities located mostly in rural areas, the system is financially unsustainable — setting the stage, potentially, for smarter policies, he says.
