StopMax: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons Heats Up

"When I left Angola," says Robert King Wilkerson, who spent 29 years in solitary confinement in Louisiana's notorious Angola State Penitentiary for a crime he was later found innocent of, "I said, 'I may be free of Angola, but Angola will never be free of me.'" Since his release seven years ago, the vow has taken him to rallies, churches and talk shows across the globe. Earlier this summer, it brought him to Philadelphia for the first-ever StopMax Conference, where he told stories, analyzed the state of the American prison system and collaborated with a throng of like-minded activists determined to "end the use of solitary confinement and related forms of torture in U.S. prisons."

Wilkerson is a former member of the Black Panther Party and one of the Angola Three. He spent more than 30 years in prison for the killing of a prison guard, along with two other former Black Panthers -- Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace -- before being exonerated by the state of Louisiana in February 2001. Woodfox and Wallace still languish in prison. They are the longest-held prisoners in solitary isolation to date in the United States.

On a Friday early this summer, Wilkerson addressed a crowd composed of both supporters and curious passers-by outside Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, which opened its doors in 1829 as the first institutionalized experiment in long-term solitary confinement. Over the past 40 years, with modern advances enabling an unprecedented level of isolation and control, the practice has been systematized, standardized and forced upon thousands of people across the country, from murderers to drug addicts and petty thieves.

Wilkerson was one of many modern-day solitary survivors who brought focus and momentum to the StopMax Conference, organized by the American Friends Service Committee. Bonnie Kerness, Prison Watch coordinator for the AFSC, said that over the past two decades, the organization has received an "astounding" number of letters from people in solitary confinement describing the abuse that occurs in their desolate cells. She told AlterNet that "they describe in excruciating detail," among other things, "the uses of devices of torture -- forced medication, restraint beds, restraint chairs …"

"And now we're also starting to hear from juveniles," she says, "so it's almost at a point where, how could we not respond?"

According to Kerness, alongside the piles of letters from prisoners, the AFSC has seen a corresponding rise in phone calls it receives from people around the country wanting to know more about the issue of solitary confinement and looking for ways to help friends and family in isolation stay mentally strong and combat the abuse. The conference, then, she says, was "a natural way to move forward."

The crowd that assembled at Philadelphia's Temple University for the StopMax Conference included a motley crew of about 400 people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Members of the United Church of Christ dined alongside dreadlocked media activists. Traditional Aztec dancers rubbed shoulders with psychologists and doctors. Native American religious leaders joked around with young college students and black-clad anarchists. An older, soft-spoken lawyer and community activist co-facilitated a workshop on the New Jersey Department of Corrections gang unit program with a prominent leader in the Almighty Latin Kings and Queens Nation.

All of these people and hundreds more spent three days strategizing, comparing notes and working toward a common goal: to end the use of solitary confinement running rampant, and largely unchecked, in the U.S. prison system.

Prison Nation

The United States has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, at 2.2 million people as of 2006, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. At any given time, an estimated 10 percent of those prisoners are being held in isolation, according to a new analysis of prison data compiled by Dr. Terry Kupers, a mental health adviser to prison facilities and a leading expert on the effects of solitary confinement. That translates into roughly 220,000 local, state and federal prisoners held in solitary confinement at any given moment.