FIVE YEARS AGO, some of the last inmates from the Maryland Penitentiary's notorious South Wing crossed Madison Street to a high-technology prison of the future, bidding goodbye to 19th-century quarters that had famously been dubbed the "innermost circle of hell."
But now that new prison -- the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, better known as "Supermax," designed as the ultimate control unit for the state's most incorrigible prisoners -- is itself being painted as hell of a different sort. And the verdict on Supermax -- small though it is, relative to some others around the country -- may help the nation come to some larger conclusion about whether strictly controlled, supermaximum security prisons are worth their economic and social costs.
In a report forwarded to Gov. Parris N. Glendening two weeks ago, investigators for the U.S. Department of Justice's civil-rights division said Supermax has been operating in violation of the Constitution, depriving inmates of proper mental health services, medical care and exercise.
There is a nationwide movement to build Supermax-style prisons for a criminal population that appears to correctional staff as increasingly out of control. More than 30 control units of some type exist around the nation, with new ones in the planning stages in Wisconsin and Illinois. Meanwhile, an emerging, opposite movement seeks to shut down segregation prisons, based on the notion that the rigid lifestyle just makes difficult inmates worse.
"What I believe is that what you're seeing across the country is a larger and larger percentage of the population being housed in isolation under the guise of security issues," said Bonnie Kerness, coordinator of the National Campaign to Stop Control Unit Prisons and New Jersey criminal-justice coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee. "Lock yourself in your bathroom for four hours and see how you do, and see if you need to lock someone away for 10 years because they're troublesome."
To prison managers, the control units are a boon -- a way to deal with the "10 percenters," that small population of inmates responsible for a large portion of their troubles.
"I think most correctional professionals will agree that offenders today are more violent, more assaultive and in need of very close supervision," said Robert Verdeyen, director of standards and accreditation for the American Correctional Association. "As a result of that, the institutions are having to be designed to accommodate the ability to supervise and provide the additional security for those violent offenders."
