control, if you put them in a tight enough cage, they are not going to hurt anyone. The problem is sooner or later they are going to get back into your community. And it's kind of like kicking and beating a dog and keeping it in a cage until it gees as crazy and vicious and wild as it can possibly get and then one day you take it out into the middle of the streets of San Francisco or Boston and you open the cage and you run away. That's no favor to the community.

L: Now you've addressed the lack of social interaction. What about the issue of sensory deprivation? When we think of sensory deprivation, what we tend to think of is the lights are turned off and there is absolute silence. As I understand in the AdMax at Florence, the lights are kept on all day and the temperature is kept the same all day and the outside world is rarely, if ever, glimpsed. What are those effects?

S: First of all, people need to recognize that, you know one of the arguments that is made is that the conditions of these super-max facilities don't approach those of the sensory deprivation experiment. What people are forgetting conveniently is that the sensory deprivation experiments were actually begun as a way of studying phenomenon that was occurring in prison. In fact, it was the Korean prisoners of war and the concern about the brainwashing of those individuals and the severe mental disturbance developing among the American prisoners of war in Korea that led to the laboratory experimentation on profound sensory deprivation. So, clearly to the extent that the research on profound sensory deprivation was of value, there was a value of explaining a phenomenon which was seen and found in political prisoners in Russia and China and among American prisoners of war. Basically, while profound sensory deprivation in susceptible individuals may produce a psychiatric reaction more quickly than it will in say a prison setting, remember that the laboratory experiment involved people remaining in those conditions for only a few hours, whereas in a prison setting we are talking about weeks, months, even years.

In addition, there has been a fair amount of evidence that it isn't a lack of sensory stimulation but a lack of perceptually informative, meaningful kind of stimulation that is really of importance. In other words, if you put someone in an absolutely quiet sort of room, you are going to get some degree of psychiatric disturbance. Now, if you change those conditions, and you put that same individual in a room and add 80 decibels of white noise, you are going to get those disturbances much more quickly. It's not going to take a longer period of time, it's going to take less. So, one of the problems in the prison setting is not only do you have a lack of meaningful perceptual stimulation, but that stimulation which is available is often very noxious, very offensive: offensive smells, offensive noises, and what you are doing is basically adding to the toxicity of that environment. Keeping the lights on 24 hours a day in and of itself is known to cause significant psychiatric disturbances. It is going to interfere massively with the sleep/wake up cycle. We're talking about the need to maintain an adequate sense of alertness in the face of perceptual deprivation. Now if you add to that disturbance in the sleep/wake up cycle, you're going to increase the problem. So one of the worst things you can do for people is to keep the lights on 24 hours a day. Obviously what you need is to keep the lights on roughly 16 hours a day and keep them turned way down the other 8. And that's not happening in a lot of maximum facilities, not just Florence, apparently.

L: Now if you know these things because of your area of work, since you are a court-recognized expert in this area, and I know things like this just from life on the street and the stories you hear, and if we've arrived at the same conclusions, can you conjecture as to why these sorts of behaviors continue to be institutionalized?

S: Yes. I think that's a pretty sobering subject. Because I have been recognized as an expert in this area, and it isn't because I'm so profoundly bright. The first time I was brought in to look at a prison setting, actually I was pretty cynical when I was brought into it, I didn't think I was going to find anything. But I did find something and it was shocking to see what I found - that these inmates were so ill, that they all tended to be ill in very similar kinds of ways and they were so frightened of what was happening to them that they weren't exaggerating their illness. They tended to minimize it, to deny it. They were scared of it.