A Modern-Day Dungeon? : Corrections: A lawsuit by prisoners at high-tech Pelican Bay charges severe psychological harm from extreme isolation. Prison officials say the concept works and assaults are down.

Three summers ago, then-Gov. George Deukmejian traveled to a clearing in the North Coast redwoods and christened a super-secure prison for the state’s most incorrigible inmates, a sort of futuristic Alcatraz called Pelican Bay.

Designed to reduce violence throughout California’s penal system by corralling the worst troublemakers under one roof, the lockup was praised by Deukmejian as “state of the art” and “a model for the rest of the nation.”

Next week, a very different assessment of Pelican Bay will be aired in a U.S. District courtroom here. Lawyers for inmates in a class-action lawsuit will attack the prison as a modern-day dungeon, a high-tech house of brutality and terror where inhabitants undergo punishment so cruel and unusual that it violates their constitutional rights.

Among their complaints are allegations that marauding, Taser-wielding guards are abusive and that medical care is poor--staples of inmate lawsuits ever since the nation’s first penitentiaries were built.

What distinguishes this case is the claim that Pelican Bay’s fundamental philosophy of operation--namely, the extreme, around-the-clock isolation of prisoners from virtually all human contact--is inhumane and causes severe psychological harm.

“There is a total absence of environmental stimulation at Pelican Bay--no work, no social interaction, nothing--and that creates an experience of absolute, indefinite dullness,” said Donald Specter, an attorney for the inmates.

As a consequence, he said, inmates “are going crazy or exploding or misbehaving just to create some sort of activity in their lives.”

The court test comes at a time of national scrutiny of the propriety and benefits of so-called super-max prisons, a new generation of facilities that use computer technology to isolate and control inmates as never before. Pelican Bay is viewed as a flagship of this new breed of prison, and critics hope that a legal ruling against it will discourage other states that are building or contemplating similar facilities.

California corrections officials dismiss the lawsuit’s allegations and contend that Pelican Bay offers proof that the super-max concept works. They say that since it opened, allowing the transfer of disruptive inmates from institutions such as San Quentin and Folsom, the systemwide rate of assaults on inmates and staff has dropped 24%.

“Pelican Bay is a success,” said Tip Kindel, spokesman for the state Department of Corrections. “We’ve got a small percentage of the inmate population that is extraordinarily disruptive. . . . By putting them in (Pelican Bay), we make the rest of the system run fairly normally.”

Kindel added that Pelican Bay also deters violence: “Word has gotten out. . . . Inmates don’t want to wind up there.”

Many corrections experts agree that prison systems run more smoothly when the “worst of the worst”--gang leaders, for instance, or those who attack fellow inmates and guards--are segregated in ultra-secure housing. But even some who subscribe to that theory believe that conditions at Pelican Bay may push this penological approach too far.

Depriving inmates of all activities and opportunities for social interaction, some argue, deprives them of influences that may help alter their bad behavior, making them less likely to be well-adjusted, law-abiding citizens once they are paroled.

“From my experience as a prison administrator, the prolonged confinement of inmates with little or no contact with others will only make people worse,” said Jerry Enomoto, former California director of corrections. “It certainly isn’t going to make them better.”

Set in a coastal forest near Crescent City, Pelican Bay does not have the antiquated, menacing look of prisons historically associated with lawsuits alleging cruel and unusual punishment. Built of slate-gray concrete, it is quiet, clean and in good repair. Guard towers are there, but much of its security system is discreetly hidden, including the electronic sensors buried beneath the grounds that trigger alarms at the touch of a human foot.

Despite such benign cosmetics, the lawsuit alleges that brutally “sadistic” treatment of inmates by guards is routine--and encouraged--at Pelican Bay. Prisoners say they have been hogtied or shackled to their toilets for hours, and beaten and shot with Taser guns during “cell extractions,” a procedure used to move or punish a balky inmate.

The plaintiffs also claim that they are victims of inadequate medical care, charging that the prison uses ill-trained technicians to assess ailments. Inmate Bernard Hughes says that after his complaints of abdominal pain were ignored for days, he was forced to induce vomiting and fake a seizure to summon help. He underwent emergency surgery for a burst appendix that had caused gangrene, the lawsuit says.

The more unusual accusations in the case are those suggesting that life at Pelican Bay is, in a sense, unconstitutionally monotonous. These complaints focus on the prison’s “security housing unit,” or SHU, which holds 1,578 inmates--about half the prison’s population.

Prisoners land in the unit by joining a gang, assaulting an inmate or guard or selling drugs; stays range from several months to five years. The unit’s windowless cells measure 8 by 10 feet, and inmates are typically confined alone for 22 1/2 hours per day. The other 90 minutes can be spent in an exercise yard, usually alone.

Unlike most prisons, Pelican Bay offers no jobs, no activities, no self-help programs and scant face-to-face contact with guards. Cell doors are opened by remote control, and inmates receive meals through a slot in the wall.

Aside from occasional visits and trips to the law library, where they study alone, inmates leave their cells only to shower three times a week and use the recreation yard. Surrounded by 20-foot-high walls, the tiny yard contains no equipment. It is known as the dog run.

Corrections officials say Pelican Bay inmates “earn” their highly restricted lifestyle by proving that they cannot safely mingle with other inmates. Indeed, the super-max idea evolved from solitary confinement--a once-common technique for managing recalcitrants--and, later, from the high-security “adjustment centers” California and other states established within some prisons.

But since Pelican Bay opened, the federal court in San Francisco has been flooded with petitions from inmates alleging violations of their civil rights. State officials say Pelican Bay simply houses the most litigious inmates. But federal judges were concerned enough to meet with the warden and alert a local Bar association committee, a move that spawned the court battle that begins next week.

In their lawsuit, inmates charge that the deprivation of human contact in the security housing unit is “degrading, dehumanizing” and is driving them mad. Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School instructor, will testify on their behalf.

“When you’re in Pelican Bay, you’re a caged animal, facing absolute boredom--alone--coupled with extreme tensions,” said Grassian, who has interviewed about 50 of the unit’s inmates. “This kind of restricted environmental stimulation can cause massive psychiatric harm. It’s psychological torture--people being driven crazy by the conditions of their confinement.”

Grassian said that on his visits, Pelican Bay resembled “something out of Dante, or another century. I saw inmates smearing themselves with feces, inmates howling, inmates attempting to eat and mutilate themselves. I was shocked at the indifference to these acts.”

Other critics fault Pelican Bay’s techniques from a criminal justice point of view. Even if one believes that these dangerous criminals deserve such treatment, they argue, the risk to society once they are paroled should give us pause.

“Nearly all of these people will, at some point, be back on the streets,” said Kenneth Schoen, former commissioner of corrections for Minnesota and now a special master overseeing New York City’s jails. “Subjecting them to these severe, ‘Clockwork Orange’ conditions makes it quite unlikely they are going to emerge and act like civilized human beings.”

Corrections officials say such arguments have no merit. While acknowledging that inmates are frequently paroled directly from Pelican Bay, they dispute the notion that conditions of confinement there make people more dangerous. The recidivism rate for Pelican Bay parolees is the same--55%--as it is for similar criminals paroled from the state’s other maximum-security institutions, officials said.

“We have not found that their behavior on the street is any different than that of other violent criminals who get out,” Kindel said.

Prison psychiatrists say there is no academic research to prove that highly isolated conditions such as those at Pelican Bay make people psychotic. Although Grassian contends that studies of hostages and prisoners of war are useful in judging the psychiatric harm done to Pelican Bay inmates, others disagree.

“It’s apples and oranges,” said University of Minnesota sociologist David Ward, who is studying inmates at the federal government’s super-max prison in Marion, Ill. “To most of us, these conditions look very Draconian, and to be dumped in there would be extremely difficult and psychologically unnerving.”

But Pelican Bay’s inmates, Ward argues, are different: “These men have been doing hard (prison) time for years and have prepared for this in ways the rest of us have not. . . . For many of them, surviving in places like this--and defying the authority of the state--gives zest to their lives.”