Solitary confinement in the 21st century? Seriously?

You may have heard the term ‘correctional facility’ before. It is a euphemism for ‘prison’… just as ‘Ministry of Love’ was a euphemism for pretty much the same thing in George Orwell’s 1984.

And euphemisms tell us a lot about the culture that resorts to them. They give us an indication of how that culture likes to perceive itself… which, as a rule, tends to be very different from how it actually operates in practice.

For better or worse, the use of ‘correctional facility’ to describe Corradino prison indicates that at some level, our country is cognisant of the need to appear less ‘punitive’ when it comes to issues of crime and punishment. 

‘Prison’ may not be as immediately emotive as any number of other controversial epithets denoting race, gender, creed, etc. – but the fact remains that it was substituted with something more clinical and less blunt; and things are not changed for no reason. 

In this case the reason is clear. Malta wishes to be perceived as having moved on from the days when prisoners were flung into a dark cell and left to subsist on stale bread and water. We are, after all, in the 21st century now; and besides, there are institutions such as the ‘Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture’ which must be kept appeased. (Otherwise, they might write a really, really nasty report about us… which the government will simply ignore for the umpteenth time). 

So regardless of what actually happens in the Corradino Correctional Facility – whether, for instance, there is ever any genuine attempt to ‘correct’ the behaviour which lands people in there – the important thing is that we give the external impression that we have progressed towards a more European approach to justice.

That far, at least, we have climbed up the ladder of human rights awareness. We now know that ‘human rights’ exist; and that other people in other countries consider them to be vaguely important… so we’ve covered up all our warts and blemishes under a quick lick of entirely meaningless political correctness. 

But what is a ‘correctional facility’, anyway, and how is it any different from a prison? Tell you what, let’s just read Corradino’s mission statement, it’s easier:

“Our principal goals as an institution are:

1) Keep prisoners in custody

2) Maintain order, control, discipline and a safe environment

3) Provide decent conditions for prisoners and meet their needs, including health needs

4) Provide positive regimes which help prisoners address their offending behaviour 

5) Allow the prisoners as full and as responsible a life as possible

6) Help prisoners prepare for their return to the community.”

Sound terrific, don’t they? Until you match them up with reality, and realise that at least four of those six goals – possibly five – are quite simply impossible to achieve in practice. 

Not necessarily because of any lack of will or commitment on the part of the prison administration – though it’s difficult to say, as there doesn’t seem to be any prison administration at the moment. The post of ‘director’ is still advertised as ‘vacant’ on the website, two years after the last one resigned. 

The real problem, however, concerns the regulations which govern every aspect of prison management: from Malta’s antiquated criminal laws, to the way these laws are interpreted by judges, all the way down to the prison regulations themselves. Not a single aspect of the legal infrastructure underpinning Malta’s criminal justice system was designed to accommodate any of the above lofty principles (except maybe number one). On the contrary: they are all still very firmly rooted in the sort of ‘punitive’ justice we pretend to have put behind us.

Any number of individual cases will illustrate this stark reality, but I’ll limit myself to the most recent (and publicised) example. Last week, one Nizar El Gadi was found guilty of aggravated homicide, and sentenced to life imprisonment… with a periodic ‘solitary confinement’ of 10 days every five years.

Right: I won’t go into the verdict itself, or even the details of the crime. Whether El Gadi was guilty of murdering his wife or not is irrelevant to this particular argument. It is the sentence that intrigues me… and how it matches up to the ‘principal goals’ of the ‘correctional facility’ in which this man will spend the rest of his life.

Let’s jump to the most relevant. “Help prisoners prepare for their return to the community”. Erm… what ‘return to the community’, exactly? He’s been jailed for life. And as the classic 1980s dancefloor track by Opus endlessly reminds us: ‘Life is life (nya-nya-nya-nya-nyah!)’ 

There is only one way to leave the Corradino prison for people serving a life sentence. And that’s in a wooden box.

Already, then, you can throw ‘principal goal number 6’ out of the barred window. Maltese law provides for sentences lasting the entirety of one’s life, with no possibility of release under any circumstance. Whether or not you actually agree with this approach to justice is once again irrelevant: there is a blatant contradiction here that cannot be ignored. 

It is not possible to prepare an inmate for a social reintegration that will never take place. On a practical level, the prison’s declared aims are simply incompatible with its rules and procedures.

Before turning to the second issue, let’s pause to take in the implications of the first. We talk about ours as a ‘correctional’ approach to justice, as opposed to a ‘punitive’ one… yet how can a sentence which can never be commuted, for any reason, possibly be described as anything other than ‘punitive’? A legal system which contemplates such a penalty in its statute books is clearly motivated by only one guiding principle: that prison is a place of punishment, not correction. No other way to interpret it, really.

And this becomes inescapable (pun intended) when you factor in the second concern. Solitary confinement? As part of a prison sentence? In the 21st century? Seriously?

Well, that puts paid to ‘principal goals’ number two all the way to five, with six already flushed down the toilet. Solitary confinement is widely regarded as an unsafe practice par excellence. Prison inmates already suffer higher suicide (or attempted suicide) risks as it is, and our record in this particular department is not exactly rosy. 

Meanwhile, a February 2014 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that “detainees in solitary confinement in New York City jails were nearly seven times more likely to harm themselves than those in general population, and […] in the Indiana Department of Corrections, the rate of suicides in segregation was almost three times that of other housing units.”

So what better way to ‘maintain a safe environment’, than to place inmates in precisely the one situation where the risk of self-harm is statistically highest? And how does one provide ‘decent health conditions for prisoners’, when a study by PS Smith [‘The Effects of Solitary Confinement on Prison Inmates’] concluded that “psychological effects can include anxiety, depression, anger, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, and psychosis”? 

This simple truth is that one can’t. Because as with life imprisonment – even more so, in fact – the entire concept of solitary confinement as a legal penalty can only make sense in a punitive context, not a correctional one. 

At this point we have to distinguish between different types of ‘solitary confinement’.  In prison and police custody scenarios there are cases where isolation may be necessary for brief periods – to protect other inmates being the most obvious reason, though there are others. More controversially, some prisons (including Malta’s) reserve the right to impose limited periods of solitary confinement as an extreme disciplinary measure. 

What we are dealing with here is very different. This is not an internal prison procedure. This is a case where solitary confinement was conceived a priori as part of the punishment meted for the original crime. 

Regardless how this person actually behaves during his sentence, he will be carted off into solitary (‘the hole’, as it is still referred to on the inside) for 10 days every five years, until the end of his life. For what purpose, exactly? What benefit does society derive from this barbaric practice, other than the thrill of revenge… which has no place in any civilised criminal justice system anyway? 

Well, back in the day when there was no illusion whatsoever about the function of a prison – it was a place where people were meant to suffer, not unlike an existent version of Hell - the answer was simple enough: to maximise distress to the utmost limit, by creating a psychological punishment to accompany the physical deprivations of incarceration. 

It seems that we have ironed out most of those physical deprivations since the 19th century: no more ball and chain, no more forced labour, no more routine prison beatings – at least, not officially – and no more bread and water, either. 

This particular anachronism, however, has survived. Why?

The only possible answer is because the old 19th century attitudes towards crime and punishment have survived, too.  I believe it was Dostoyevsky who said ‘You can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners’.

By that yardstick, our society is very clearly still living in 1848.