News

Lance Tapley is an award winning investigative journalist at the Portland Phoenix in Maine where he has covered the Supermax prison in Maine. Lance is also one of the contributors to the anthology The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse. This interview was originally done on The Michael Slate Show and it is being posted at revcom.us courtesy of The Michael Slate Show (KPFK, 90.7fm Los Angeles, 98.7fm Santa Barbara, www.kpfk.org worldwide).

Michael Slate: Your piece, "Notes from the Supermax Prisons," opens with the statement that the American prison system has become a monster. What do you mean by that?

Lance Tapley: Well, we are an exceptional nation as you know, and we are the world torture champions in what happens in our prison system. That's qualitatively. Quantitatively, we have of course the biggest prison system in the world. We have 4.5% of the world's population, and 25% of its prisoners. We have five times the world average incarceration rate, 2.3 million people behind bars, two thirds of them are Black or Hispanic. I could go on. Our incarceration rate is four times what it was in 1980.

Slate: One of the things that you say, though, in relation to all this, is that beyond the mushrooming of imprisonment, in U.S. society, that there's actually been something over the last few decades, a network of supermax prisons that are not on... >>>