Supermax Prisons

Supermaximum secure prisons, commonly referred to as supermax, are used to hold those individuals whom prison authorities regard as the most dangerous and troublesome in the penal system. The last decade of the 20th century saw an increasing use of such facilities, which merge the 19th-century practice of long-term solitary confinement with 21stcentury technology. This combination subjects prisoners to unparalleled levels of isolation, surveillance, and control and has the potential to inflict significant amounts of psychological harm.

Different prison systems employ different terminology to refer to supermax-like conditions. For example, the program at the Marion Federal Penitentiary, regarded by some as having given rise to the supermax design, was referred to as the “control unit.” The new federal supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, is known as “ADX” (for “administrative maximum”). Arizona's supermax units are called “special management units” or “SMUs”; in California they are known as “security housing units” or “SHUs”; Florida has labeled its units “close management” or “CMs”; in Texas they are “high security units”; and Washington State [Page 939]employs the term “intensive management unit” or “IMU.” Although penologist Chase Riveland (1999) correctly concluded that “there is no universal definition of what supermax facilities are and who should be in them” (p. 4), these units have enough distinctive features in common to be analyzed as a separate penal form.

At the start of the 1990s, Human Rights Watch (1991) identified the rise of supermax prisons as “perhaps the most troubling” human rights trend in corrections in the United States and estimated that some 36 states either had completed or were in the process of creating some kind of “supermaximum” prison facility. By the end of the decade, the same organization estimated that there were approximately 20,000 prisoners confined to supermax-type units in the United States and expressed even more pointed concerns about their human rights implications. Most experts agree that the use of such units has continued to increase significantly and that the number of supermax prisoners is considerably higher than these early estimates.