CityState : Reporter
ment as a penalty for infractions , escalating with the severity of the infraction , Ventura says . The most serious infractions — violent , injurious behavior — could earn an inmate up to a year in disciplinary confinement , with opportunities to work his or her way back into the general population .
Typically , says Richard Ferruccio , a corrections officer for thirty-nine years and president of the Rhode Island Brotherhood of Correctional Officers , “ we consider it a well-run facility . I don ’ t think inmates are being physically or mentally abused . We spend a lot of time helping inmates with mental health problems .
“ Disciplinary confinement is a prison within a prison ,” he adds . “ There has to be a deterrent for you to follow the rules , and if you don ’ t , there has to be a penalty .”
The current era of mass incarceration began in the 1970s ; about a decade later , United States prisons took a hard turn away from rehabilitation as prison violence exploded in overcrowded facilities . In 1983 , two inmates murdered two correctional officers at the federal penitentiary near Marion , Illinois , in separate incidents on the same day . The warden declared the facility on permanent lockdown twenty-three hours a day . Rhode Island was the first to build a so-called super-max prison — a facility with the most restrictive lockdown policies intended for dangerous offenders — in 1981 , but the Marion incident sparked a building boom . Extreme confinement became a template for prison policy across the country . Today , forty states have supermax facilities .
Psychiatrist Dr . Terry Kupers , who has studied and testified in class-action lawsuits to the psychological effects of overcrowding and isolation for the past fifty years , says “ solitary confinement doesn ’ t reduce violence and probably increases it by incapacitating people . The massive psychiatric damage is such that inmates are more likely to get into trouble , do drugs or get involved with gangs or violence . I call it the decimation of life skills — they come out without the skills to be social , to be intimate , to work and be productive . It destroys people .”
For about forty years , Rhode Island ’ s use of solitary confinement was gov-
32 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l JUNE 2023