I haven’t even had a chance to review this report because it just came into my e-mail box. However I am adamantly opposed to the very existence of the TAMMS Supermax prison.

Attached is the newly released monitoring report by the John Howard Association (which incidentally does some of the most important work out there).

Summary: It need not be this harsh
On Nov. 9 a group of John Howard Association board members, staff and volunteers conducted a monitoring tour of Tamms Correctional Center, the state’s highest security prison often referred to as Tamms Supermax. Tamms is a male prison located approximately 360 miles south and west of Chicago.

Nearly all states operate a supermax prison reserved for gang leaders or inmates who are extraordinarily disruptive and dangerous. Typically they include inmates who have attempted to kill staff or other inmates, have organized gangs to challenge prison management, or who have proven to be exceptionally destructive.

Although conditions vary widely at the nation’s supermax prisons, they are often characterized by years of solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, extremely aggressive security measures and long-term physical and social isolation of inmates. This is the case at Tamms.

For another side of activism around TAMMS, check out an action station that has been set up at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum focused on overcoming the isolation of the prisons there.

Here are a few words about the TAMMS action station:

For example, the “Tamm Year Ten” station tells the story of Tamms super-maximum prison in southern Illinois that houses inmates under permanent isolation. The Tamms Year Ten group—an eclectic coalition of activists, artists, lawyers, prisoners, and ex-prisoners—is dedicated to ending the psychological torture of total confinement, which is counter-productive to rehabilitating inmates. As one Tamms prisoner stated: “I will ask you, ‘Lock yourself in your bathroom for the next 10 years and tell me how it will affect your mind.” Tamms Year Ten’s moniker reflects the prison’s tenth anniversary (currently in its eleventh year). Founded on the notion of short-term punishment, many prisoners at Tamms supermax have been there for a decade.

The Tamms Year Ten station is interactive, engaging visitors with a project to send poems to prisoners. (Why? Because prisoners asked for them.)