Editor’s Note: This is an edited version of a speech given by Phoenix contributing writer Lance Tapley to a seminar at the National Lawyers Guild 70th Anniversary Convention in Washington, D.C., on October 31. The discussion was on how to use international treaties to advance human rights in the United States.

On Halloween, I have a true ghost story to tell: the story of 35,000 ghosts in America, the largely invisible inmates of our solitary-confinement “supermax” prisons.

What is their life like? It is torture. It is isolation, sometimes for years — 23 hours a day in a tiny cell, with the other hour in a small cage outdoors. It’s sensory deprivation — usually, no radio or TV and few books. If you are disobedient, you may suffer beatings and Mace in the face when Swat teams “extract” you to put you in a restraint chair. Feces, urine, and blood coat the cellblock walls, floors, and ceilings — splattered there by the many insane and enraged men. Guards “checking” on prisoners deprive them of sleep, and so does the usual pandemonium; like ghosts, some prisoners howl in constant agony. Inadequate food is shoved through an unsanitary slot in the door. The prisoners get poor medical and dental care; in Maine, many Supermax inmates are not allowed toothbrushes. Mental health care is a cruel joke. Medical professionals are complicit in the torture; they try to keep prisoners capable of enduring more suffering. Guards sexually humiliate prisoners and taunt suicidal ones. Rare “no contact” visits with family take place through a window and a tinny speaker. Prisoners typically are allowed one telephone call a week. There is arbitrary censorship of mail and little or no access to education and other possibilities for rehabilitation.

For two years I’ve written about the treatment of men in the Supermax unit of the Maine State Prison. “Supermax” is the informal name of a super-maximum-security “special management unit” or “control unit.” They exist in most states and the federal prison system. Most are separate prisons; they were built beginning in the 1980s to house, in principle, disruptive prisoners.

Supermax confinement is repulsive, immoral mass torture that is historically unprecedented. I would also suggest it is illegal under international law. If the American people can be brought to see these things, it will be possible to get rid of supermaxes. In the process, we will begin to calm our complex, turbulent prison madness. Instead of indulging ourselves in the fury of punishment — with the supermax as the ultimate circle of the hell we have created for prisoners — we can try rationality and rehabilitation. Before we can move to this better place, though, the public needs considerable education. The news media can provide it, but reporters need legal action to report on, and legal action could have some success in itself.

There are so many other crimes committed against prisoners that the few reform groups tend to protest them all at once. Politically, though, supermaxes are a vulnerable point. As unsympathetic as many citizens feel toward prisoners, they don’t want to be seen as torturers. And Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo have sensitized Americans to the word torture.

And Americans would be surprised to learn that supermaxes are not just for “the worst of the worst,” as prison wardens like to say. They contain mostly nonviolent prisoners. Supermaxes are often used as punishment for prison infractions — and, frequently, punishment when a prison administrator simply doesn’t like an inmate. Especially, they contain mentally ill people who find it impossible to not talk back.

Supermaxes are also used for political purposes. In the notorious ADX, the federal supermax in Colorado, and in state supermaxes, many prisoners are spending lengthy sentences in solitary confinement not because they can’t function in a prison general population but because of their politics. At ADX, Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly H. Rap Brown, the black militant; and al-Qaida operative Zacarias Moussaoui are being punished with solitary in addition to their life sentences. These people, therefore, are political prisoners. In Maine, I found the most politically active prisoners in the Supermax.

The United States is a party to the UN Convention Against Torture. Under that treaty, torture is official treatment that causes “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental,” when it is inflicted as punishment or for coercion. Dictionary definitions are similar, except torture obviously can be inflicted by other than officials. Prisoners call supermax conditions “no-touch torture.” In any case, supermaxes fit all the definitions.

The mental destruction of Jose Padilla, the Islamist American citizen whom the US has held in solitary confinement for years, is well known. Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, formerly at Harvard, has researched the mental damage solitary confinement inflicts upon healthy people. But what of the many mentally ill prisoners shoved into the supermaxes? In them, Professor Grassian told Time magazine this year, “We’re taking criminals who are already unstable and driving them crazy.”