The Management of High-Security Prisoners
This chapter deals with the vexed question, ‘If not solitary confinement, then what?’. The author describes his personal quest to find an answer this question throughout a professional lifetime during which he spent over two decades in the United Kingdom managing high security prisons where he tried to balance the obligations, on the one hand, to maintain security, safety and good order in each prison while, on the other hand, dealing in a decent and human manner with men who had the potential to be violent and dangerous. He recounts his early observations in the United States and Canada on the beginnings of what were to become ‘supermax’ and ‘administrative segregation’. Having spent a further two decades in academia researching this subject at an international level, he links his earlier experiences in North America with recent involvement in court cases in Canada and the United States. He concludes by laying out a series of operational principles which, if properly applied, are likely to lead to a dramatic reduction and eventually to the elimination of the use of solitary confinement.