Word: supermax
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...tornado are either trivial or meretricious. The recent fuss over where to put the Guantánamo prisoners is tawdry politics, incited by desperate Republicans with the supine complicity of congressional Democrats. There are plenty of convicted terrorists currently serving time in U.S. jails. That's why we have supermax prisons, like Administrative Maximum in Florence, Colo. Those convicted in military courts should be held in military prisons...
...fixes are easy. In Nicholson's case, move him to the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colo., and keep him there in isolation for the rest of his life. As for Warren, if guilty, indict, try and send him to prison. It would go a long way in undercutting the outrage in Algeria...
...this is providing legal traction for constitutional lawyers. The most obvious point of attack is the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. One suit involving prisoners in a Wisconsin supermax has led to rulings requiring that mentally ill inmates be kept out of such facilities. The state is challenging the decisions, and arguments will be heard in February, but at least six other states have fought similar suits, and all of them have failed. "So far, the prisoners are batting a thousand on the issue of mentally ill inmates," says David Fathi, a senior staff counsel with...
...process hearing before the state denies an inmate a "liberty interest," something courts define as a reasonable expectation of a freedom or right. People confined to prison have few liberty interests left and thus have little ground to challenge assignment to a strict level of security. Confinement to supermax, however, may be so qualitatively different that it does require a hearing. That's the argument Ohio inmates made in 2005, and that's the argument a unanimous Supreme Court bought, with Justice Anthony Kennedy writing that supermax isolation imposes such an "atypical and significant hardship" that prisoners must have...
...eventual ruling on Padilla's fitness could liberalize things further, and similar suits are sure to follow. Even so, no one thinks the supermax system is going away soon. For all the debate the prisons generate, it may not take much to make them more palatable to civil libertarians. TVs or radios, reading material and clocks, as well as a bit of natural lighting--which provides critical time-of-day orientation--would help stabilize inmates. So would human contact with guards or other prisoners...