Tamms Is Torture: The Campaign to Close an Illinois Supermax Prison [6 May '13]

TIL how artist activists successfully shut down a supermax solitary confinement prison in the USofA.

/ snips /

In 1998, Illinois opened a prison without a yard, cafeteria, classrooms or chapel. Tamms Supermax was designed for just one purpose: sensory deprivation. No phone calls, communal activities or contact visits were allowed. Men could only leave their cells to shower or exercise alone in a concrete pen. Food was pushed through a slot in the door. The consequences of isolation were predictable: many men fell into severe depression, experienced hallucinations, compulsively cut their bodies or attempted suicide.

The first men at Tamms were transferred there from other prisons around the state for a one-year shock treatment intended to break down disruptive prisoners and make them more compliant. But the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) left them there indefinitely. A decade later, more than a third of the men at Tamms had been there since it opened, and for no apparent reason. [...]

By 2008, we had connected with men on the outside who had spent years in Tamms and family members of current prisoners. Together, we launched the Tamms Year Ten campaign. Our goal was to educate the public about Tamms and hold the IDOC, legislators and then-Governor Blagojevich accountable for the use of long-term isolation. Prison reform is hard enough, but getting people to stand up for “the worst of the worst” was considered hopeless. Attorneys and veteran prisoner advocates warned that this campaign could endanger the men and increase support for the prison. But we believed that recent controversy over solitary confinement and torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib opened a new space for debate. And in any case, after a decade of isolation with no end in sight, the men in Tamms didn’t have much to lose. [...]

“Being in Tamms felt like being held underwater and drowning, not being able to breathe. Leaving that place was as if you suddenly came up for air. You’re gulping in air. You feel alive and real again. Every step of the journey of transitioning from Tamms has been a revelation of things both big and small. Our natural human senses, having been so repressed at Tamms, were suddenly and shockingly activated simply by boarding the I.D.O.C. bus. The smell of diesel fumes was overpowering, its presence a turbulent mixture of ambivalent sensations; foreign yet familiar, comforting and nauseating, pleasurable yet unsettling. Shuffling into the bus was a formidable task: the waist and leg shackles severely hindered our movement and were as uncomfortable as they were difficult, yet every prisoner from the first to the last man had the biggest smiles on their faces.”