COLUMN LEFT / NAT HENTOFF : Pelican Bay Is Our Own Devil’s Island : In another country, this high-tech dungeon would merit a scathing human-rights report.

In 1974, U.S. District Judge Frank Johnson was about to investigate Alabama’s prison system. He set forth the criterion by which he would evaluate the conditions of imprisonment:

“Where conditions within a prison are such that the inmates . . . will inevitably and necessarily become more sociopathic--and less able to adapt to conventional society as the result of their incarceration than they were prior thereto--cruel and unusual punishment is inflicted.”

After much testimony, Johnson decided that the Eighth Amendment had indeed been violated in Alabama. Recently, in San Francisco, Chief Judge Thelton Henderson of the federal Northern District of California has been presiding over a trial to determine whether inmates of the state prison at Pelican Bay have had their Eighth Amendment rights demolished.

It is claimed that some inmates are made much worse, and therefore more dangerous, by what is done to them in Pelican Bay. The class-action suit charges unwarranted excessive force, deliberate indifference to the prisoners’ serious medical needs and other regular abuses.

Located in the most remote corner of Northern California, this supermaximum prison is the jewel of California’s system and has had admiring visitors from correction officials in other states and abroad. (The Senate crime bill provides for more such high-tech prisons.) Most of the insistent controversy about Pelican Bay concerns a prison within the prison--the Security Housing Unit (SHU). It has 1,200 to 1,500 prisoners at various times who are locked in their cells 22 1/2 hours a day and never see direct sunlight or, for the most part, other inmates. They have to learn to deal with cumulative sensory deprivation over a period of years.

The story of Pelican Bay--America’s Devil’s Island--is finally getting some national attention. Kathy Slobogin brought light to its high-tech dungeons on CNN; and in August, Lowell Berman produced for “60 Minutes” the most sharply focused look yet at an approach to penology that, in another country, would merit a scathing international human-rights report.

Dr. Stuart Grassian, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is an expert on the effects of isolation and solitary confinement. Having interviewed scores of inmates in the SHU, he told Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” that “over a third are psychotic. We’re talking about people who have acute emergent psychiatric needs, who should be in a hospital and should be seen on an hourly or every two-hour basis.

“The California Department of Corrections tries to create the impression that they’re dealing with the incorrigibles,” Grassian continued. “What they’re often dealing with is the wretched of the Earth, people who are mentally retarded, mentally ill.

“One of the really tragic parts of this is that there are treatments for these kinds of conditions . . . but instead, their behavior is viewed as criminal behavior to be punished. They get punished, and they get sicker. They become more violent and more out of control.”

Several months ago, I was part of a conference on prisons in Sacramento. Some guards from Pelican Bay were there along with officials of the state Department of Corrections. In my talk, I cited Frank Johnson’s definition of cruel and unusual punishment and said that my interviews with former SHU prisoners and visiting doctors indicated that Pelican Bay abundantly met that definition.

I know, I said, that rehabilitation is hardly mentioned any more, but do the taxpayers know that they are financing, in Pelican Bay, a system that makes many prisoners more dangerous than when they arrived? A few months before, for example, an SHU inmate, almost immediately on being released, was accused of raping and viciously beating a woman.

James Gomez, director of California’s Department of Corrections, was at the conference, and he told me that SHU inmates were there because they had beaten and sometimes killed inmates in other prisons. Actually, the SHU population is more varied than that. “But even if that’s true,” I asked him, “how can you justify inflicting on any human being the nearly total isolation, the absence of any communal activities--from work to participation in religious exercises?”

Gomez said the isolation was necessary: “Maybe it’s better to write off the prisoners in the SHU in return for the security of the rest of the prison population.”

The federal court suit may determine whether anyone should be “written off.” Or, as Grassian puts it, “Is it OK to drive people crazy in an effort to decrease violence in your prison system?”