touch base with, feel and embrace another human in an intimate, sensitive, humane, compassionate, personal way as opposed to the impersonal, inhumane, insensitive, degrading manner ... one develops a strong, intense desire to taste various foods besides the same ole, tasteless, non-variety, everyday, recycled meals. One is served just enough food to have a bowel movement, just enough to stay alive. This is Sensory Deprivation where even ones sense of taste, appetite, and taste buds is denied and deprived.

All of the aforementioned increased, heightened senses are common among convicted persons held in prisons, but such senses are magnified one hundred times in Control Unit Sensory Deprivation Prisons. Steel and stone torture chambers where, absent various forms of social stimuli, the human mind can become so debased, so de-humanized, and sink so low that if one isn't careful, there is a tendency to adjust, conform, and accustom oneself to a standard of living that is lower than that which exists within the animal kingdom. This is the adverse effect of long-term Sensory Deprivation. It is a form of physical, social, and psychological torture, and it pushes many self-respecting, rational thinking, decent-minded men and women to a quest for excrement, acts of desperation, and to the most extreme points of paranoia.

After spending over a year in the Supermax, I was transferred back to the Maryland Penitentiary without any consideration given to the desocialization process I had undergone. Nor was any provision made to resocialize me back into a general population setting. Upon having difficulty adjusting into general population, it became necessary for me to be placed on punitive segregation for refusing to be housed in a cell with another human being. There was a time when I could tolerate double-cell housing on a temporary, short-term, voluntary basis, but after my experience with Sensory Deprivation, I have now become more anti-social than ever before and I now have a zero-degree tolerance level for double-celling and general population settings.

As a result, for the past five years that I have been out of the Supermax, I have spent a total of only seven months in a general population setting.

In addition, on two occasions, I have had official street charges pressed against me. This never before happened to me in the entire history of my imprisonment. I am currently waiting to go to trial for the latest charge. I have not received, encouraged, nor welcomed any outside contact by way of visits from family members, loved ones, or friends in the past five years since leaving Supermax. This entire experience is uncharacteristic of me, but I believe the underlying root cause is the social dislocation I have suffered from my first encounter with Supermax's Sensory Deprivation. I am only now beginning to question and understand what has happened to me.

Now that I am back in the Supermax for a second time, armed with this overstanding of what Sensory Deprivation actually is, I am less likely to leave Supermax no better off for my experience than when I first arrived. My concern now is with controlling and reversing the ill-effects of my first encounter with Sensory Deprivation. Otherwise, I am concerned that my social dislocation will in all likelihood go from bad to worse, and ruin me to the extent that not only would I not be mentally, physically, or socially fit for a general population setting, but society in general.

Ronald Epps
Maryland

Psychological Effects and Political Platform

1. Psychological Effects of SHU (security housing unit) on prisoners. Psych. Torture takes form of physical pain (i.e. migraines, stress related illnesses, suicide, etc.)

The situation (evidence of physical torture) that I am about to present is not an isolated reality, this is a daily ritual which occurs throughout the Pelican Bay SHU.