Obama Is Right About Supermax Prisons

Have you ever been to a Supermax prison?  I have.  In the Tamms Correctional Facility in Illinois, they house the "worst of the worst," as the Illinois Department of Corrections will tell you.  Sometimes the prisoners are there because they are serial murderers, thought to be inherently dangerous to themselves or in a population.  Sometimes the prisoners are there because they are relatively petty offenders, but are acute disciplinary problems.  But the level of security in a Supermax in staggering.  I'd like to tell you a little about the Supermax, to say why President Obama is right to remind lawmakers and the nation, as we refashion our policy toward convicted and suspected terrorists, that no one has ever escaped from one.

First, underscoring the safety from their tenants the Supermaxes provide to the public, at the Supermax I've visited, prisoners are not allowed any physical or verbal contact with other prisoners.  None.  They are in secure, soundproof cells all the time.  When they are brought out, every arm and leg is secured, and a team of four correctional officers moves them.  They get one hour per week of "yard," for exercise or recreation.  "Yard" consists of an empty concrete room roughly ten by twenty feet with an overhead slat to the sky fifteen feet above, and no windows or horizontal view or egress out.  The solo inmate is watched by a staff of correctional officer during their one hour per week of "yard."

Second, the security protocols at a Supermax are just as staggering and thorough as the isolation.  Aside from a full complement of guards walking every prisoner in full chains, one moves through a Supermax thus:  forward through a secured door which shuts behind you, into an area forward of which is another machine and computer secured door, controlled remotely out of your presence.  Only when you are locked between two impenetrable doors, the forward door opens, ushering you into another such secured area.  Each closure is controlled by a person in a distant and fully secured control center with video, and again, each prisoner so moved is fully chained and far outnumbered by the correctional officers walking them.  The concept of leaving such a place by ruse or by overpowering the guards is beyond the limits of my ample imagination.  It can't happen, folks.

Third, and thus unsurprisingly, as President Obama reminded everyone this morning in his speech about new directions in fighting terrorism, hundreds of convicted terrorists are housed at supermax prisons.  And as he reminded us, none have ever escaped.  This includes one of our smartest, scariest, and worst domestic terrorists, Harvard College graduate and serial terrorist and murderer, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

Fourth, many residents of Supermaxes are provided with a nutritional supplement called "meal loaf," or its equivalent.  Meal loaf is all of a prisoner's food for a day cooked into a solid log, and pushed under their door.  Eggs, hamburger, pasta, breads, everything.  Guantanamo Bay sounds like a very tough incarceration center, and is meant to be.  I simply raise the point that Supermaxes are not day spas, or even conventional maximum security facilities.  Their isolation, and the protocols employed at them, are meant to fully secure an individual, and have the effect, whether incidental or intended, of breaking the will of a prisoner. 

My point?  I am not saying any of this to praise or criticize Supermaxes as institutions, but rather to inform about them, and describe them.  And my point is that whatever is being done at Guantanamo can be done at a Supermax without any danger to the public or any decline in efficacy of whatever interrogation is determined to be proper and permissible of convicted or suspected terrorists.  I think this is a point the President is starting toward, and will end up making a centerpiece of the policy he recommends to Congress and the American people about these detained or imprisoned persons.  He will tell us the Supermax is the same difference in safety and security.  And he's right.