Shameful.
...These similarities are not coincidental. They’re the result of a deadly game of global copycatting whose origins lie in the United States. Prison is not only one of America’s most catastrophic national experiments—it’s also among the country’s most vile exports.
The most glaring example of this dynamic involves the supermax model I explored in Brazil. America invented this model. In 1787, the Quakers experimented with solitary cells at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia; in 1829, Eastern State Penitentiary was opened nearby as an all-solitary facility, modeled after monasteries (those incarcerated covered their heads with monk-like hoods and were given Bibles to read). In 1983, a Marion, Illinois, prison became America’s first to adopt a 23-hour-a-day cell-isolation policy in its designated “control unit.” As the U.S. prison population soared and tough-on-crime rhetoric intensified over the next two decades, other states followed suit. California built Pelican Bay, where as of last year over 200 incarcerated men have been in solitary for over a decade; Colorado’s so-called Alcatraz of the Rockies, ADX Florence, is home to a man who has spent 32 years in solitary, mostly under a “no human contact” order that at times bars him from interacting even with prison officials. By 1999, there were 57 supermaxes in 34 U.S. states.
Today, iterations of the supermax exist in at least nine countries, from Australia to Mexico. In Brazil, where the 550,000-strong prison population is among the fastest-growing in the world, they come at a tremendous cost to taxpayers: I was told by the superintendent that the annual price per prisoner at Catanduvas is a whopping $120,000 a year, compared to an average of $36 per prisoner per year in Brazil’s impoverished state system, where the incarcerated are often left to feed and clothe themselves.