“Suicide cages,” Salinas Valley Prison

The article was only one of many in the overseas press depicting Rikers Island as an almost mythically dark and menacing place–though the descriptions often don’t quite measure up to the hype. One British piece called Rikers a “penal colony,” and continued: “Rikers is harsh, loud and dangerous, according to those who know the island jail well. ‘It’s crowded and the food is terrible,’ Gerald Lefcourt, a well-known defence lawyer, told Reuters…’There are really heavy-duty prison bars and gates that make a lot of clanging sounds every time they are open and closed.'”

In fact, DSK’s cell, at 11 x 13, or 143 square feet, is well over twice the size of the isolation cells in the Louisiana Prison system, where Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox have spent 39 years in solitary; those cells measure approximately 6 x 9, or 54 square feet. The cell at ADX Florence federal supermax where Thomas Silverstein is approaching his third decade in solitary is 7 x 12, or 84 square feet. Few cells where American prisoners spend months, years, or decades in isolation are as large as that in which Dominique Strauss-Kahn spent a few days.

As for other prisoners on suicide watch, they are on occasion confined in what have been called “squirrel cages”–tiny enclosures so small that their occupants cannot lie down, where they are sometimes left to stand in their own excrement. Such cages, measuring 3 x 3 feet, were cited in a case in Louisiana last year, and in the Supreme Court decision on California’s prisons that came down earlier this week. Writing for the majority in Brown v. Plata, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy stated: “Because of a shortage of treatment beds, suicidal inmates may be held for prolonged periods in telephone-booth sized cages without toilets…A psychiatric expert reported observing an inmate who had been held in such a cage for nearly 24 hours, standing in a pool of his own urine, unresponsive and nearly catatonic. Prison officials explained they had ‘no place to put him.'” (You can view more photos of these “suicide cages” and other abominations of the California prison system here.)