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Article Excerpt
SUPERMAX PRISONS ARE OFTEN DESCRIBED AS "HIGH TECH." * OBSERVERS seem to mean two things by this. First that these "prisons within prisons" are a technology in themselves: hard-edged and brightly lit, the fortress-like supermax dearly signals its specialized purpose of isolation and control. The second is that supermax prisons rely heavily on specialized, relatively new technologies: computerized systems produce new forms of intensive surveillance while special teams armed with electronic shields maintain control over prisoners.
But as Leo Marx observed several years ago in this journal, "technology is a hazardous concept" (1997: 965). The term has come to refer not only to specific devices or inventions (that is, the internal combustion engine), but also to what he calls "complex sociotechnological systems" (the vast array of equipment, corporate operations, workers, and institutional changes unfolding from the automobile). Thus "technology narrowly conceived is only one part of a complex social and institutional matrix.... Technology [also emerged as] a name for these ambiguous, messy, incoherent, new formations" (1997: 979-80, original emphasis). We need to see the technology of the supermax prison in these terms if we are to understand its effects. Like the automobile, this type of prison is an invention traceable to a specific time, place, and person. The single-cell design, surveillance-friendly layout, and individualized organization were invented by Jeremy Bentham in the 1790s; prisons on his panoptical model were first built in the early nineteenth century. But supermax prisons are also embedded in a complex socio technological system--the prison industrial system, or more accurately, the prison-military industrial system--in precisely Marx's second sense in which technology lacks boundaries and tends to spread out in all directions from the original invention (1997: 980).
The contemporary supermaximum security or control prison is designed to separate prisoners from the general prison population. Inmates are kept alone in small cells for 23 or more hours a day; they are taken out only in restraints and under guard. The cells have heavy doors, opaque windows, or no windows at all; lights are on all night and noise levels are generally high. Contact with the outside world is restricted or nonexistent (Rhodes, 2004, 2005). This model of intensive isolation has become pervasive over the past 30 years of prison expansion, with at least 60 facilities currently operating in the United States (National Institute of Corrections, 1997). Although specific information is sketchy, it is clear that the supermax is now a standard feature of the state and federal prison complex as well as of various "homeland security" projects. Domestic use of supermax occurs in a context of extensive overlap between domestic and military practices (Gordon, 2006) as well as international expansion (Boin, 2001).
My aim here is to consider three aspects of the technology of supermax. The first is the sense in which the supermax prison is itself a "machine": a specific invention with a purpose and meaning closely linked to its features as a technology. This aspect is important for understanding what makes the construction of these prisons so attractive to correctional professionals and so seemingly acceptable to the general public. The second aspect is the use of specialized tools of control inside the supermax prison. These internal solutions to problems of order--I will discuss computerized surveillance, special response teams, and stun technology--offer clues to how specific technologies intersect with intensive confinement to frame punishment as decisive "action" produced by prisoners' "choices" and analogous to "war." Finally, supermax technology imposes specific practices and ways of being on both prisoners and prison staff. These need to be understood not only for how they augment and intensify other negative aspects of these environments, but also for their potential to affect prisoners in quite different ways, depending on individual vulnerabilities.
A common theme running through my discussion of each of these aspects of supermax is that the appearance of specialized technology constitutes what Garland describes, for penal practices in general, as a "signifying practice" (Garland, 1990: 260). Beyond its immediate effects during use, supermax technology offers the cultural gloss of a "high-tech solution" that helps to frame problems--some of them caused by supermax confinement in the first place--largely in terms of their susceptibility to technical intervention. In other contexts "technology" signifies a "clean," profitable, scientific, and masculine approach: direct action on manageable problems. The spillover of this imagery into prisons--in association with other meanings of crime and punishment--is one element serving to obscure the larger issues posed by mass incarceration. As Marx points out, the reification of technology has the effect of producing an aura of inevitability. I will return to this point at the end to consider briefly how a framing of supermax primarily in terms of technology can itself be seen as hazardous.
SUPERMAX AS MACHINE
Prisons have always had some form of segregation or "hole." At worst, this consisted of confinement in dark, dungeon-like cells and prolonged deprivation of food, light, and exercise (Thompson, 1995). In many prisons during the mid-twentieth century, segregation units were notably stark, but they were used for fairly short term punishment--several weeks without exercise, coffee, or cigarettes--and they generally allowed for communication among prisoners (Kurki and Morris, 2001: 419). Supermax prisons fulfill some of the same managerial goals as segregation, removing and punishing prisoners who get in fights, harm staff, or are simply considered troublemakers. But these facilities are no longer serving as "jail" or relatively short-term detention; rather, contemporary prisoners serve long supermax sentences in "administrative" rather than disciplinary segregation (DeMaio, 2001). The aim is to remove and isolate, often preemptively, and many...
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