User:Conni Kim/sandbox

When California opened its first “adjustment center,” the goal was to return prisoners to the mainline prison population and ultimately to a society through an enrichment program of physchological and social services. However, the plan was never executed. In 1983, George Deukemejian was elected as the California governor and during his time, he formed what was then the state’s newest prison – a massive, windowless “security housing unit” (SHU). SHU was intended to segregate over a thousand prisoners from the rest of the prison system through isolation. Deukemejian boasted that the Pelican Bay State Prison was a “state-of-the-art prison that will serve as a model for the rest of the nation…”.

The prisoners are kept confined to their cells almost twenty-three hours a day and all forms of human contact through refined locking and monitoring systems are minimized. Pelican Bay SHU was one of the first visible “super-maximum security” facilities and thus it attracted lots of media attention. Those opposing the conditions of California’s “supermax” resulted in the federal court criticizing certain features of the prison but left the basic regimen of segregation and isolation largely intact.

One of the policies of supermax confinement among other policies is designed to increase punishment by removing gang members from the mainline population and subject them to solitary confinement, whether it is for a set amount of time or an indefinite duration. In a recent study, it noted that the California Department of corrections has implemented ways to fix their alleged gang problem, such as using ‘confidential informants,’ segregating gang members, intercepting gang communications setting up task forces to monitor and track gang members, locking up gang leaders in high security prisons, and ‘locking down’ entire institutions.

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