Keramet Reiter

Making Windows in Walls Strategies for Prison Research

This article examines the relationships between prison structure, researcher access to prisons, and scholarship about prisons. Drawing on the author’s own work over more than 10 years as a prison educator, legal advocate, and prison researcher, as well as on the scholarship of other prison researchers throughout the social sciences, the article argues that prisons resist scrutiny at two stages. First, prisons are structurally and bureaucratically closed off from research; second, prison researchers are emotionally disconnected from their work. These two layers of obfuscation maintain the prison as a social “black site”: physically located outside of our communities, invisible to the public and the researcher alike. In an effort to overcome these barriers, this article outlines a mixed method, collaborative approach to prison research and discusses the ethical and emotional challenges of this approach. By identifying the major obstacles to meaningful prison research, as well as some possible strategies to overcoming these obstacles, this article seeks to make such work more feasible for investigators in many disciplines.

Experimentation on Prisoners: Persistent Dilemmas in Rights and Regulations

The article discusses the federal regulations governing medical experiments on prisoners in the U.S. It provides information about medical experimentation using dioxins on prisoners by Dr. Albert M. Kligman between 1965 and 1966 and Hythians drug-addiction treatment trials between 2006 and 2008. It notes that the use of different drugs for the Prometa program run by the drug company Hythian was not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treatment. Changes in the ethical standards for using prisoners in medical research are tackled on the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report in 2006. Moreover, the reports recommendations includes an oversight streamlining and expanding of prisoner experimentationand that categorical limitations on prisoner experimentation will be replaced.

The Most Restrictive Alternative: A Litigation History of Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons, 1960–2006

Supermaxes across the United States detain thousands in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. Almost every state built a supermax between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. This chapter examines the role of federal prisoners’ rights litigation in the 1960s and 1970s in shaping the prisons, especially supermaxes, built in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. This chapter uses a systematic analysis of federal court case law, as well as archival research and oral history interviews with key informants, including lawyers, experts, and correctional administrators, to explore the relationship between federal court litigation and prison building and designing. This chapter argues that federal conditions of confinement litigation in the 1960s and 1970s (1) had a direct role in shaping the supermax institutions built in the subsequent decades and (2) contributed to the resistance of these institutions to constitutional challenges. The history of litigation around supermaxes is an important and as-yet-unexplored aspect of the development of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in the United States over the last half century.

Punishing Mental Illness: Trans-institutionalization and Solitary Confinement in the United States

Bradley Ballard died of sepsis in May 2014 after he tied a rubber band around his genitals, smeared his body with feres, and passed out in his Rikers Island. New York City jail cell. Ballard had been arrested tor assault and public lewdness in 2013; he had previously served six years in New York state prisons for assault charges. Ballard was known to be severely mentally ill; he had spent 38 days in a prison psychiatric hospital in the weeks before he died, in the last week of his life, he made a lewd gesture at a female officer and was subsequently placed in total solitary confinement. For several days, he was not allowed to leave his cell, nor was he given medications. Because he intentionally stopped up his toilet, the water line supplying his cell was shut off (Pearson 2014).

Human Subjects Research With Prisoners: Putting the Ethical Question In Context

Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702 (print); 1467-8519 (online) Volume 25 Number 1 2011 pp 55–56 doi:10.1111/j.1467-8519.2010.01859.x LETTER TO THE EDITORS HUMAN SUBJECTS RESEARCH WITH PRISONERS: PUTTING THE ETHICAL QUESTION IN CONTEXT bioe_1859 OSAGIE K. OBASOGIE AND KERAMET A. REITER We write in response to the conversation initiated in Volume 24.1 of Bioethics, which focused on the role of prisoners in biomedical and behavioral research. As interdisciplinary legal scholars who have researched the history, ethics, and current practices of prison research in the United States, we write to encourage further dialogue about the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) recommenda- tions to reform current standards for prisoners’ partici- pation human subjects. Specifically, we challenge three critical assumptions, which underlie several articles in the Bioethics special issue. First, we challenge the idea that a risk-benefit assess- ment applied to prisoner participants in research is too restrictive. 1 On the contrary, we argue that it is too per- missive. The IOM’s risk-benefit proposal – the most sig- nificant of its five main recommendations – is designed to relax current standards that categorically restrict prison- ers’ participation as human subjects to four narrow situ- ations that directly benefit prisoners. 2 Current policies were implemented in response to substantial abuses directly connected to prisoners’ vulnerability and deplor- able prison conditions; a 1976 Commission concluded that widespread research in prisons should not be recon- sidered until these abuses and conditions are resolved. Yet all available evidence suggests that the situation in US prisons has only worsened, from increasing over- crowding and violence to decreasing availability of basic medical care and education. 3 Thus, to suggest that the IOM’s risk-benefit proposal is too restrictive is, at best, overly optimistic about the ability of institutional mecha- nisms such as institutional review boards (IRBs) – faulty even in the best of circumstances 4 – to mitigate the pro- found ethical challenges associated with such research. And at worst, the renewed enthusiasm for using prisoners as human subjects may demonstrate insensitivity to the historical and sociological contexts giving rise to current restrictions. We are also concerned with the methods the IOM used to conclude that applying a risk-benefit standard in prison contexts is ethically appropriate. Our methods for assessing whether the conditions for ethical participation currently exist are as crucial as the substantive and nor- mative questions of whether prisoners ought to partici- pate. 5 In this regard, the IOM’s methodology leaves much to be desired. For example, the Committee only visited one prison and one prison medical facility – far from a robust engagement with current prison conditions. In lieu of this deeper empirical understanding, the Committee largely based its recommendations on a literature review, claiming that scholarship on research ethics has ‘evolved’ since the 1976 Commission’s findings. What is curious, however, is that the ‘evolved’ literature relied upon by the IOM Committee to justify their proposal did not speak to or reference the unique challenges involved with using prisoners as human subjects. In short, the Committee privileged theory over prisoners’ lived conditions. Second, although a few articles in the Bioethics special issue address the importance of a human rights frame- work in analysing whether and how prisoners should participate in medical experimentation, 6 we argue that this framework must be the primary lens of analysis, B. Elger & A. Spaulding. Research on Prisoners – A Comparison between the IOM Committee Recommendations (2006) and European Regulations. Bioethics 2010; 24: 1–13; E. Chwang. Against Risk Benefit Review of Prisoner Research. Bioethics 2010; 24: 14–22. 45 C.F.R. §46.306(a)(2)(i)-(iv). Plata v. Schwarzenegger, No. C01-1351 TEH, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 56031 (N.D. Cal. July 23, 2007): *6; P. Wagner. 2003. The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry. Available at: http:// www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/rootsofcrime.html [Accessed 13 Aug 2010]. C. Elliott. Guinea-Pigging: Healthy Human Subjects For Drug-Safety Trials Are in Demand. The New Yorker Jan. 7. 2008: 36–41; J. Lenzer & S. Brownlee. 2009. Major Gaps In Oversight Of Human Medical Research. Huffington Post Oct. 28. Available at: http://www. huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/28/major-gaps-in-oversight-o_n_337399. html [Accessed 13 Aug 2010]. O. Obasogie. Prisoners as Human Subjects: A Closer Look at the Institute of Medicine’s Recommendations to Loosen Current Restric- tions on Using Prisoners in Scientific Research. Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, forthcoming 2010. Elger & Spaulding, op. cit. note 1, pp. 1–13; D. Thomas. Prisoner Research – Looking Back or Forward. Bioethics 2010; 24: 23–26. Address for correspondence: Ms. Keramet Reiter, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Jurisprudence & Social Policy, 2240 Piedmont Ave. No. 2150 Berkeley, California 94270-2150 USA. Email: keramet@berkeley.edu Conflict of interest statement: No conflicts declared

“Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t” Perceptions of Guns, Safety, and Legitimacy Among Detained Gun Offenders

Procedural justice research generally indicates that legitimacy produces compliance when people perceive the law and legal actors to be fair. Drawing upon 140 in-depth interviews with gun offenders detained in Los Angeles County jails, this article examines legal and extra-legal factors that influence illegal gun possession. Although prior research studies on legal and illegal gun carrying have suggested a relationship between (a) safety perceptions and possession and (b) legal perceptions and possession, few have deeply interrogated how such perceptions develop and interact to inform ideas of legitimacy and compliance with gun laws. Our findings suggest that feelings of insecurity coupled with perceptions of, and experiences with, law enforcement interacted in complex ways to condition legitimacy-based beliefs, and ultimately, compliance. Although many of our respondents viewed the law as legitimate in the abstract, they believed it to be illegitimate in individual application, especially where rules and sanctions failed to account for personal experiences of insecurity.

Theoretical and empirical limits of Scandinavian Exceptionalism: Isolation and normalization in Danish prisons:

Drawing on interviews with 76 prisoners, 47 prison staff, and 14 experts, we document lived experiences of punishment in the Danish prison context. We argue that, regardless of “humanizing” elements of normalization and humanity, prisoners and staff may experience the power of the carceral state in Denmark in ways similar to those under more obviously harsh confinement regimes, as exist in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in the United Kingdom. Ultimately, macro-level theories like Scandinavian Exceptionalism serve as a rhetorical tool, implying that harsher prison systems are fixable, but fail to reflect the micro-level realities of incarceration.

Negotiating Imperfect Humanity in the Danish Penal System

American prison experts are increasingly looking to Europe, and especially to Nordic countries, for examples of a better prison system. In 2014, a retired New York State Prison warden visited Norway’s Halden prison, and a video of the warden’s shock at seeing the tools and knives to which prisoners had access went viral on the Internet in the United States (Sterbenz 2014). In 2015, the Vera Institute of Justice, an American think tank focused on criminal justice issues, led a group of prison scholars, policy makers, and wardens on a tour of European prisons. Upon their return, two of these scholars published an opinion piece in the New York Times lauding the values of dignity and rehabilitation they saw in action in German prisons especially (Turner and Travis 2015). Although Americans (and Brits) are both shocked and impressed by the humane prison conditions they see in prisons in Germany and Scandinavia, they are also quick to acknowledge the influence of differing social contexts.

The Scream: Insider Access and Outsider Legitimacy in Danish Prisons

Joining a long-standing tradition of reflexive analysis in qualitative research, particularly in closed institutions, this chapter examines our role as researchers from the United States in our in-depth study of punishment in Denmark. In this study we conducted ethnographic field research and in-depth interviews with prisoners, staff, and experts in the Danish prison system. Here, we critically examine the ways in which we were simultaneously perceived and treated as outsiders and insiders and the effects of these roles on the research study and, potentially, on the prison system more broadly. We found that our insider status as researchers and our outsider identities as US-based prison researchers facilitated enhanced access to the prison system. Furthermore, our perceived and adopted outsider identities as representatives of a failing US prison system may have also shored up the legitimacy of Danish prison policies and practices.

Ernest Drucker, A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America:

Book reviews for rethinking the concept of sovereignty and turn to the notion of ‘human security’ as a counter-narrative to national security (p. 210). This new approach requires decoupling the individual from the nation state. The authors draw here on argu- ments posed by Catherine Dauvergne (2008), in Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration and Law, where she advocates creation of broader ethical community based on the rule of law, and ‘unhinged from the nation itself’ (p. 214). For Weber and Pickering, membership in this community would be unconditional and based solely on the humanity of immigrants (p. 212). Even though this approach raises many questions, including to whom such sover- eignty will be accounted, or how to guarantee protection of rights of immigrants on the international level inhabited by the nation states, it challenges the hegemonic discourses based on binary division between citizen and non-citizen and forces the reader to reflect on alternative ways of management of migration on a global level. For this and other reasons mentioned above Globalization and Borders: Death at the Global Frontier is a must-read for anyone interested in rethinking the problem of policing migration beyond traditional approaches to migration, border controls and sovereignty. Reference Dauvergne C (2008) Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration and Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magdalena Kmak University of Helsinki, Finland Ernest Drucker, A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America, The New Press: New York, 2011; 226 pp. (including index): 9781595584977,