Dr. Korn found the twenty-four-hour illumination primitive; the requirement that the prisoners sleep with their heads by the toilet so that their heads were visible to the guards he characterized as 'gratuitous and shocking.' In Dr. Korn's regime, prisoners would exercise under the sky. As he put it, even 'condemned men walk in the yard.'78

In addressing the question of alternatives, Dr. Fox described the process of negotiating solutions to the inherent dilemmas involved in confining prisoners beyond the already restrictive regime of maximum-security imprisonment. Citing some proposals developed by me for dealing with the more general problem of prison discipline,79 he suggested that there had to be an acceptance on the part of the prison administration, the guards, and the prisoners that they were all part of a community and that the only alternative to the constant escalation of force and counterforce was 'a program of equal dialogue, and self-determination inside of the institution.'80 That dialogue must be a three-way affair between the prisoners, guards, and administration, with all parties accepting their reciprocal relationship to one another and their joint responsibility for ensuring that prison life, which to varying degrees they all shared, respected each other's common humanity and dignity. The guards' participation was essential to this process: 'they are not robots to be assigned that nightmare up there and say 'deal with it' ...they need full voice in that dialogue. It is a three-way dialogue because they are all members of that family.'81

Under the present conception of SCU, prisoners confined there are not perceived to be members of any prison community or family. As Dr. Fox put it: 'SCU is casting out. They are no longer members of the community. There is nothing to deal with, there is no way of solving the problem because they are not in your purview, they are cast-outs; they are not part of your life any more. Once you are cast out there is nothing but violence and anger. You become outlawed.'82

Mr. Cernetic and the assistant deputy of security, Mr. Leech, conceded that, given their purposes for dissociating prisoners, many of the restrictive features of the SCU which Dr. Korn had described as 'gratuitous cruelty' were dictated by the way the SCU was constructed and by the lack of adequate staff. They admitted, in other words, that the present repressive regime was not related to any legitimate penal purposes, but resulted from budgetary limitations. The plaintiffs suggested to the court that 'human considerations and constitutional requirements are not to be measured or limited by dollar considerations.'83

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