WITNESS
Bonnie Kerness has been a human rights advocate on behalf of prisoners since 1975, working as coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee's (AFSC) Prison Watch Project. She has served as Associate Director and Acting Director of the AFSC Criminal Justice Program in Newark and as the National Coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Control Unit Prisons. Ms. Kerness serves on the Board of Directors of the World Organization For Human Rights, USA, and on the Advisory Boards of California Prison Focus and the Money, Education and Prisons Committee of Madison, Wisconsin.
Ms. Kerness has worked as a professional organizer on gay rights, welfare rights, women's rights, and other campaigns and has her M.S.W. in community organizing. She was active in the civil rights movement, working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Memphis and the Highlander Research and Education Center, where organizers in the civil rights movement received training, in Knoxville. Ms. Kerness helped publish "Torture in U.S. Prisons Ð Evidence of U.S. Human Rights Violations" and "The Prison Inside the Prison: Control Units, Supermax Prisons and Devices of Torture."
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STATEMENT
In a long conversation by mail with Ben, who was in a prison in South Carolina, we talked about his fervent desire to get out of the isolation unit. He also held grave doubts about his ability to adjust after six years there. For the six months after his release from that control unit, he described the experience of trying to adjust. He wrote over and over again about the feeling of being watched, of knowing people were out to "get" him. As the months went on, he spent more and more time in his cell, completely unable to deal with different personalities, demands on his time and emotions. He had grown to hate what he called "all that freedom." He finally wrote of deliberately spitting on an officer, knowing this would lead to being removed to solitary confinement. He repeated this pattern twice more over the course of several years.
Another prisoner said, "If I locked you in your bathroom for 22 hours a day, you're not going to get into too much trouble. But when they let you out, you're going to get into trouble you would never have seen before." He started crying as he added, "I have never met who's been exposed to isolation and abuse whose attitude didn't harden."
…a New Jersey correctional officer talked to me at length about his experiences working in an isolation unit.… "I believe there is a place for isolation, but I am breathing the same canned air, sitting under the same fluorescent lights, listening to the same noises. I don't believe this is good for the officers or good for the inmates. It's too much for both. You can't leave someone in a cage month after month after month for the duration of their sentence." This particular 20 year officer served in Vietnam. He went on to talk about seeing symptoms of madness in people who were POWs there, going on to say that "there's no difference in what was done there and what we are doing in long-term isolation here."
Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission
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