Supermax Reform Gains Momentum in Illinois

by Matt Kelley

Published April 09, 2009 @ 04:00PM PT

Illinois State Rep. Julie Hamos is gaining support for her bill to greatly improve conditions and limit solitary confinement at the state's only Supermax prison in Tamms. A movement to shine light on torture at this prison has been underway for a couple of years - including the Tamms Year Ten campaign launched last year to mark the prison's tenth anniversary.

In February, the Chicago Tribune reported on conditions inside the prison. A few weeks later, Hamos introduced legislation to limit terms of solitary confinement at Tamms to one year and to end the incarceration of mentally ill prisoners there. This week, Human Rights Watch joined Hamos with a letter of support for her bill.

Here are just a few reasons conditions at Tamms need to change:

- One-third of the population has lived in this extreme solitary confinement since the prison opened almost 11 years ago.

- Phone calls are not allowed, extending the isolation for prisoners with families and friends on the outside.

- The cost to taxpayers is more than $50,000 per prisoner per year.

Visit Hamos' site, which includes a petition to her fellow Illinois lawmakers urging them to support this crucial legislation.

On April 6, Human Rights Watch US Director David Fathi wrote to Hamos and Illinois Department of Corrections Director Roger Walker that his group strongly supported reforms at Tamms and other Supermax prisons across the country to bring these facilities into compliance with international human rights treaties ratified by the U.S.

Perhaps the most important provision of HB 2633 is a ban on placement of prisoners with serious mental illness in supermax confinement. There is an abundant body of evidence that isolated confinement of the kind that exists at Tamms can have catastrophic effects on the seriously mentally ill, leading to exacerbation of their illness and sometimes to self-mutilation and suicide. A number of courts have concluded that supermax confinement of persons with serious mental illness predictably leads to such extreme suffering that it violates the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.  Indeed, one federal judge described putting a person with severe mental illness in a supermax facility as "the mental equivalent of putting an asthmatic in a place with little air to breathe." For these reasons many states, including Indiana and Wisconsin, have banned supermax confinement of the seriously mentally ill.

Read Fathi's full letter here.

And for more on solitary confinement, see the recent New Yorker story "Hell Hole" and the HRW reports mentioned here.