Introduction
"What the Angola Three know -- and this is perhaps the danger most feared -- is that imprisonment goes hand in hand with familiar racist practices. Fear is a vice that takes root. The realities of stop-and-frisk, racial profiling and summary killing of young blacks have always been part of our history. It is ultimately a race thing."
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"'It's an awful thing, solitary,' Senator John McCain wrote of his time in isolation as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. 'It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.' McCain spent about two years in isolation; Herman Wallace is now in his 42nd year of solitary confinement."
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"Today's prisons make little pretense of spiritually transforming people though solitary confinement. Instead, isolation is entirely punitive and seeks to debase rather than help. Many people who work with inmates understand that solitary is an assault on human dignity."
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"America can operate a safe and humane prison system without such widespread use of prolonged isolation. We, the people, are responsible for our prisons and what happens in them. When the public sends the message to stop the widespread use of isolation, America's solitary cell doors will open and we will have a prison system more worthy of our nation."
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Keramet Reiter, Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine and Author
"Director [Angad Singh] Bhalla insists that we imagine not just what [Herman] Wallace's dream house could be, but what Wallace, and the thousands of others like him, might be outside of the confines of a six-by-nine-foot prison cell."
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"If we do not have the ability to separate these inmates from others, what are we to do with them? What other tools will correctional officers be given to ensure safety inside prison walls or prevent the disruption of the rehabilitation of other inmates?"
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Donn Rowe
Herman's House and its portrayal of Herman Wallace fit this narrative.
The film shows that Herman Wallace has used his time in prison to rehabilitate himself, and we see examples of the positive impact he has had on other inmates. Meanwhile, the circumstances leading to his placement in special housing are even questioned by the widow of the man he is alleged to have killed.
In this respect, the film is quite effective and makes a compelling argument against the use of disciplinary confinement in the case of Herman Wallace.
But citing a singular incident to discredit a practice that is successfully applied to thousands of inmates is not a compelling policy argument. And like most advocates who have called for the abolishment of disciplinary confinement, the film fails to offer an alternative solution.
Disciplinary confinement is a punishment for violating the code of conduct inside the prison walls. Furthermore, it is one of the only tools we have to remove inmates from the general population in order to protect correction officers and other inmates. Frequently, placement in a special housing unit is also the best way to ensure the safety of the inmate who is placed there.
I can't speak from personal experience about Louisiana's state corrections system. But I can say that, sadly, here in New York there are far too many examples of inmates perpetrating violence on themselves, other inmates or correctional officers.
Last August, inmate Robert Hayes--serving time at Auburn Correctional Facility for murder--attacked a corrections sergeant who was interviewing him. The assault was unprovoked; Hayes lunged out of his chair and threw the sergeant against a table and to the ground. Hayes then used his hands to attack the sergeant's face, scratching his eye and eyelid, which later required five stitches. The sergeant sustained two broken ribs, a punctured lung and a swollen knee and spent days in the hospital. Inmate Hayes was moved to disciplinary confinement. And this is not an isolated example. In a typical year in the New York State corrections system, there are more than 1,200 reported incidents of inmate-on-inmate or inmate-on-staff assaults. If we eliminated special housing units, that violence would not simply disappear--in fact, the numbers would probably skyrocket.
If we do not have the ability to separate these inmates from others, what are we to do with them? What other tools will correctional officers be given to ensure safety inside prison walls or prevent the disruption of the rehabilitation of other inmates?
Inmates are absolutely entitled to their rights and should never be subjected to unreasonable or arbitrary punishment. In New York, no inmate is assigned to a special housing unit without due process, including a legal hearing.
But it's equally important to remember that correctional officers are public servants who put their safety and lives on the line for the public good. Members of my union, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association (NYSCOPBA), work in some of the most dangerous environments in the state. Any discussion of special housing must include the fact that New York's prison system, like other prison systems across the country, houses some of the most violent and troubled individuals in our society. In those settings, correctional officers must be given the tools to manage these systems safely for the good of everyone inside--and outside--the walls.
Donn Rowe is the president of the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association (NYSCOPBA) and an active corrections officer with more than 30 years of experience. NYSCOPBA represents more than 27,000 active and retired critical law enforcement personnel, including state correctional officers and correctional sergeants.
Keramet Reiter
Herman's House documents Herman Wallace's surprising friendship with a young New York artist who was not even born when Wallace first entered solitary confinement. Along the way, the film touches on key moments in Wallace's legal battles to overturn his criminal sentence and to force Louisiana prison officials to release him, at least from solitary confinement. Like Wallace, prisoners in solitary confinement across the United States are in isolation based on internal, correctional department decisions, not based on external, criminal court decisions. And like Wallace, prisoners across the United States, from Louisiana to California, have brought challenges to both the harsh conditions of their solitary confinement and the extended lengths of their confinement.
Judge Thelton Henderson resolved one of the first such lawsuits (Madrid v. Gomez) in 1995. That case challenged the constitutionality of conditions of confinement at California's Pelican Bay State Prison, which opened in 1989 and was one of the first U.S. "supermax" facilities, as prisons built explicitly to detain people in solitary confinement for indefinitely long periods of time have come to be known. Although Henderson found that certain policies at Pelican Bay violated the U.S. Constitution, he ultimately held that the basic conditions and extended durations of solitary confinement there were, in fact, constitutional. Indeed, no U.S. court has held that the extreme deprivations of solitary confinement are, per se, unconstitutional. And no U.S. court has limited the period of time that a prisoner without pre-existing mental health problems may be kept under these conditions. A new lawsuit, brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, seeks to re-open the question of the constitutionality of the conditions and durations of confinement at Pelican Bay. The suit survived the prison system's motion to dismiss in April, and plaintiffs' lawyers are preparing to certify a class of a few dozen prisoners who have spent more than 10 years in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison.
Herman's House is part of a growing body of artistic, journalistic, scholarly and political works investigating the practice of solitary confinement in the United States. In 2002, Mississippi closed its 1,000-bed supermax prison; researchers documented a decrease in violence and disciplinary infractions throughout the state prison system. In November 2011, following up on a three-week hunger strike at Pelican Bay State Prison in which hundreds participated, Amnesty International visited the facility and wrote a report condemning the use of long-term solitary confinement there. In June 2012, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing about uses of solitary confinement in the United States; as a result, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is investigating the necessity of its own uses of solitary confinement.
Unlike some of those other projects, Herman's House is one of the rare pieces that eschews a political agenda, existing instead as art. Its images linger in your mind long after you see it. I am thinking in particular of the moment when Wallace's sister stands at the threshold of a replica of Wallace's Louisiana cell, the replica built by artist Jackie Sumell. His sister thinks long and hard before walking into the replica cell, leaving the audience to imagine with her, with Sumell and with Wallace how the physical structures that contain us shape not only our identities, but those of our most intimate relations. Like the images in the film, both animated and actual, Wallace's story lingers, too. Director Bhalla insists that we imagine not just what Wallace's dream house could be, but what Wallace, and the thousands of others like him, might be outside of the confines of a six-by-nine-foot prison cell.
Keramet Reiter is an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, in the department of criminology, law and society and at its school of law. She is currently working on a book project examining supermax incarceration in the United States.
Michael B. Mushlin
I first confronted conditions in solitary confinement units more than 30 years ago when I served as trial counsel in a federal civil rights case involving Unit 14, the solitary confinement unit in upstate New York close to the Canadian border. What I saw there was deeply disturbing. As discussed in the 1977 case Frazier v. Ward, for 23 hours each day, inmates were locked in small windowless cages; this went on for months and years on end. No programs or activities were provided to the inmates. During that one precious hour per day when a Unit 14 inmate could leave his cell, there was only one place to go: a small space directly behind his cell called a "tiger cage." The tiger cage was a small, empty space with a barren floor surrounded on all sides by high concrete walls that were not topped by a roof. An inmate could walk only a few steps in one direction before turning. If he looked up, he could glimpse a bit of the sky, but nothing else of the outside world.
I will never forget looking into the eyes of those inmates, who were struggling to maintain a foothold on reality and sanity. Since then, when visiting other solitary confinement units, no matter where, I see that same pained, desperate stare. I have seen it so often and in so many different places that I have come to recognize it instantly as the gaze of a tortured person. Solitary units provide fertile soil for mistreatment and abuse of prisoners. Where but in a fictionalized horror story would one learn of places where "bodies are smeared with one's own excrement; arms are mutilated; suicides attempted and some completed; objects inserted in the penis; stitches repeatedly ripped from recent surgery; a shoulder partly eaten away"? That's one piece of testimony given before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee in 2012.
Massive numbers of people--many of whom are mentally ill, young or deemed too dangerous or vulnerable to be placed in the general prison population, even though they have not violated any prison rules--have been placed into solitary confinement. Even teenagers have been thrown into solitary. Not long ago I was shocked to read a U.S. Justice Department report describing how children 16 years old were being held for as long as one full year in solitary in an adult jail in Westchester County, New York, a mile or two from my office on the campus of Pace Law School.
This does not have to be. America can operate a safe and humane prison system without such widespread use of prolonged isolation. We, the people, are responsible for our prisons and what happens in them. When the public sends the message to stop the widespread use of isolation, America's solitary cell doors will open and we will have a prison system more worthy of our nation--one that no longer hides men and women suffering silently and unnecessarily in those dark, oppressive solitary confinement cells. This film advances the coming of that bright day.
Michael B. Mushlin is a professor at Pace Law School. He was project director of the Prisoners' Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society, is vice chair of the Correctional Association of New York and is the author of Rights of Prisoners, a four-volume legal text.
Derek S. Jeffreys
Psychologists document how punitive isolation unleashes psychological damage. Solitary confinement should also alarm anyone who values human spirituality and inherent dignity. Some religious traditions locate dignity in a person's relationship to God or a higher power. Secular human rights traditions and international law also acknowledge this dignity. Philosophically, inherent dignity is grounded in our spiritual nature. Through cognition, we transcend our circumstances, and we are never confined to one restricted environment. For example, Wallace imagines a house that differs from the horrible cell he inhabits. His detailed plan for it beautifully illustrates spiritual transcendence. Relating to others, we also develop self-possession, an awareness of our character and habitual actions. Finally, we are creative beings, combining immaterial and material realities to create artistic, architectural and musical objects. These spiritual qualities distinguish persons from things. They accord them a dignity that exists regardless of their behavior. Someone cannot lose that merely because she is incarcerated.
Solitary confinement systematically assaults human dignity. For at least 23 hours a day, inmates remain in small, drab cells. They communicate with corrections officers through slots in their cell doors. Their cells may be continuously lit and bereft of windows, television, radio or books. When they are released for showers or exercise, their cells are often opened remotely. Inmates frequently shout at each other or scream incoherently, creating a cacophony that drowns out thought. If granted visitation privileges, inmates see visitors through Plexiglas windows or remote videoconferencing. They enjoy little access to educational programs and cannot attend religious services. Many people in solitary are guilty of only minor disciplinary violations. Administrative hearings rarely work in inmates' favor, and challenging prison authorities brings brutal retaliation. As in Wallace's case, wardens or prison disciplinary boards can decide to extend solitary sentences for years.
In punitive isolation, a person experiences intense spiritual anguish. Some extraordinary people like Wallace manage to survive. Others suffer a slow psychic disintegration, go mad or take their own lives. Because inmates confront environmental uniformity, their spiritual capacity to transcend an environment diminishes. Their world becomes narrowly defined by the walls of their cells. Those in solitary also describe a fracturing of their identities and self-possession. The sense of self they develop in personal relationships fragments. For example, in a moving moment in Herman's House, Wallace describes how his sense of his body changed during his short stint in the general population. He began to regain parts of his self, only to lose them again when he was thrown back into solitary. Many inmates also experience a profound temporal dislocation that undermines the narratives of their lives. Often lacking clocks or calendars, they feel that days melt into each other with little change. Finally, the person's creative powers find no outlet in solitary confinement. Inmates inhabit a world without beauty, one that is unimaginable to people with music, art and books in their lives.
In a sad historical turn of events, contemporary prisons revive a 19th-century practice without its higher spiritual aspirations. In 19th-century England and the United States, Quakers and others designed brutal solitary confinement prisons. Their purpose was to produce spiritual transformation in the inmate. For example, in the famous Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania (opened in 1829), all inmates occupied solitary cells. They were forbidden to speak, forced to work in their cells and provided with religious materials to read. This was supposed to induce pangs of conscience that would then lead to repentance. Prison authorities insisted that solitary confinement was a positive form of punishment. However, they quickly discovered that many inmates went mad in their solitude. Those who survived showed few spiritual gains. Solitary prisons were also too costly to maintain. Consequently, authorities abandoned the widespread use of solitary confinement. Rather than seeing it as the primary means of punishment, they used it selectively to discipline recalcitrant inmates.
Today's prisons make little pretense of spiritually transforming people though solitary confinement. Instead, isolation is entirely punitive and seeks to debase rather than help. Many people who work with inmates understand that solitary is an assault on human dignity. We are witnessing a growing movement to end it. Grassroots organizations and films like Herman's House alert people to solitary's horror. In Mississippi, Maine and Illinois, authorities have modified or ended solitary confinement. Nevertheless, it remains firmly entrenched in many state prison systems. Cash-strapped states and counties may eventually abandon solitary confinement because of its prohibitive cost. In the meantime, opposition to it is sure to increase as Americans recognize its spiritual and ethical horror. Solitary confinement seeks deliberately to dismantle and degrade the personality. No society that values human dignity can support such an unjust policy.
Derek S. Jeffreys is professor of humanistic studies and religion at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is author of Spirituality in Dark Places: The Ethics of Solitary Confinement.
David C. Fathi
The United States is an egregious global outlier in this area. No other democratic country has made solitary confinement such a routine and integral part of its prison system. On any given day, about 80,000 U.S. prisoners are in solitary confinement or some other form of highly restricted housing. And while Herman Wallace's case is extreme by any measure, long-term solitary confinement is alarmingly common. A 2009 study of a single Illinois prison revealed that more than 50 prisoners had been in continuous solitary confinement for more than 10 years.
The damaging effects of solitary confinement have long been well known. In 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court described its effects in the early days of the republic:
A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous 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, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.
Solitary confinement is especially devastating to those with pre-existing mental illness. Subjected to the extreme social isolation and environmental deprivation of solitary confinement, these prisoners often suffer catastrophic psychiatric breakdowns, sometimes including self-mutilation and suicide. At one solitary confinement unit in Indiana, a mentally ill prisoner burned himself alive; another choked himself to death with a washcloth. Not even children are exempt from this draconian practice. Last year a report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union found children as young as 13 held in solitary confinement in adult prisons and jails throughout the United States.
I once represented a 17-year-old boy who was in the most restrictive unit of Wisconsin's solitary confinement prison. He had a history of severe mental illness going back to the age of nine and had already tried to hang himself in prison. Since his transfer to solitary confinement, his mental health had deteriorated dramatically; a psychiatrist concluded that he exhibited severe depression and was at extremely high risk of suicide. Fortunately a federal judge ordered that he be removed from solitary immediately, but most others in his situation aren't so lucky.
In addition to raising grave human rights concerns, solitary confinement is expensive. Staffing costs are higher, because prisoners in solitary don't work and must have food, medication and everything else delivered to their cells by staff. So-called "supermax" prisons, designed specifically to hold prisoners in long-term solitary confinement, cost two to three times as much to build and operate as conventional prisons.
Professional organizations and human rights experts are sounding the alarm. Last year the American Psychiatric Association adopted a policy recommending that persons with serious mental illness not be subjected to prolonged solitary confinement. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry similarly urged a ban on the solitary confinement of children. The American Bar Association recommends strict limits on solitary confinement. And in a 2011 report, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture concluded that in some circumstances solitary confinement can constitute an act of torture prohibited by international law.
As concerns mount about the human and financial costs of solitary confinement, some states are choosing a different path. Maine, Colorado and Michigan have dramatically reduced solitary confinement. Mississippi and Illinois closed entire supermax prisons, saving millions of dollars in the process. The federal prison system--the nation's largest--will soon undergo a comprehensive independent review of its use of solitary. These are hopeful signs. But until much more is done, the United States will retain its dubious distinction as the world's leading practitioner of solitary confinement.
David C. Fathi is director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project and from 2007 to 2010 was director of the U.S. program of Human Rights Watch. Fathi has lectured nationally and internationally on criminal justice issues.
Colin Dayan
That is what makes Herman's House so moving and instructive. The voice we hear from the outset, telling us, "I can only make about four steps forward before I touch the door," is strong, understated. Herman Wallace has been held alone in a six-by-nine-foot cell for nearly 41 years. Along with Albert Woodfox, he was convicted of killing a correctional officer while serving time for armed robbery at Angola in 1972. These two remaining members of the Angola Three (Richard King was released in 2001) have always declared their innocence and challenged their conviction.
In response to injustice, Wallace dares to dream. To envision the house where he might never live. To "play" Jackie's "game," as he puts it. When he first talks to Jackie Sumell, he is in the "dungeon," under conditions harsher than even "closed cell restriction," the Angola euphemism for solitary confinement. Wallace imagines himself outside the box. The house would have gardens, lots of gardens filled with "gardenias, carnations and tulips." He wants "guests to be able to smile and walk through flowers all year long."
There are moments when the idea of a white New York artist collaborating with a black Louisiana prisoner may seem to evoke the wrong kind of sympathy: a sentiment that can only be felt by the free on behalf of the bound. But this film is fearless in calling for another kind of feeling. Wallace, in conversation with Sumell, gives us the chance to know what it means to feel without sentimentality, to speak about a system of punishment that disproportionately targets African Americans, to consider a form of justice that ignores the cry of the innocent, to know again the legacy of slavery that haunts the present.
Will Herman Wallace's house ever be built? Will it be possible to find land for it in New Orleans, where Wallace was born 70 years ago? The film does not answer these questions, but instead leaves us with the anxiety induced by knowing that even when he is finally free, there may be no place that he can call his own. Perhaps he knows this, as the years pass and Sumell's attempts to buy the land are fruitless. He understands how prejudice against the disenfranchised is made real.
What the Angola Three know--and this is perhaps the danger most feared--is that imprisonment goes hand in hand with familiar racist practices. Fear is a vice that takes root. The realities of stop-and-frisk, racial profiling and summary killing of young blacks have always been part of our history. It is ultimately a race thing. In the 19th century, this country fine-tuned the law of slavery like no other place in the world. And when abolition came, blacks were still shackled by police power.
The prison is now the central public institution in the United States. Though hidden out of sight, it defines our society in profound ways. The issue is not crime. Mechanisms of discrimination against African-American men mark the most concerted effort since Reconstruction to create a class of citizens subordinate to and separate from those outside the prison walls. But ever larger categories of our population can be tarred with the same brush.
Louisiana prison officials refuse to release Wallace and Woodfox, even though the case against them is filled with inconsistencies, perjured witnesses and evidence suppressed or lost. Perhaps the real reason is that in 1971 they founded the Angola chapter of the Black Panther Party to fight brutal and degrading treatment and to help prisoners garner strength through reading and talking--what Walter Rodney, the Guyanese historian and activist, called "grounding with my brothers."
The officials of the Louisiana State Penitentiary will not forget that. The threat of resistance is not to be endured. It must be eliminated. But the disease of pride and the fact of survival are hard to wipe out. Wallace cannot be rehabilitated: as Burl Cain, warden of Angola, said, "I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism." Even after all these years, Wallace wants a black panther painted at the bottom of the pool in his dream house.
Colin Dayan's books include The Story of Cruel and Unusual and The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. She is the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches American Studies, comparative literature, and the religious and legal history of the Americas. In 2012 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.