It is brutal. It is torture by definition. It destroys the mind, body, and soul, making rehabilitation next to impossible. It is also outrageously expensive, and it doesn’t work. Yet at the end of the Obama era, and the dawn of Trump’s, isolation is as widely used as ever in the American penal system. And this is what it feels like.
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers…. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.
—Charles Dickens, on visiting prisoners in solitary confinement at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, 1842
Any imposition of solitary confinement beyond 15 days constitutes torture.
—Juan E. Méndez, United Nations special rapporteur, August 5, 2011
Dawn
Brian Nelson (over 23 years in solitary): I don’t know if you can even grasp what it’s like just to be in this gray box. (❖1)
❖1. Because records are often inaccessible or nonexistent, some prisoners can’t provide an exact accounting of the duration of their time in solitary.
Javier Panuco (over 5 years in solitary): Sometimes I can still smell it: the same soap everybody used, the smell of mildew, the smell of the algae that we had on our concrete yard.
Jacob Barrett (over 20 years in solitary): It smells like the toilet of a men’s locker room at a run-down YMCA. It’s people farting, burping, and sweating, smearing shit on their walls and windows, flooding toilets full of piss and shit.
Shawn Smith (15 years in solitary): I’ve had these cell walls make me see delusions. I’ve tried to kill myself a few times. I’ve smeared my own blood on my cell walls and ceiling. I would cut myself just to see my own blood.
Danny Johnson (24 years in solitary): The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in solitary confinement happens every day. It’s when I wake up.
Steven Czifra (8 years in solitary): That’s what people don’t understand when you try to explain. I’m there for eight years, and in that eight years, they have eight years of experiences. I have one day of experiences. Every day is the same.
I. An American Gulag
There are two kinds of solitary confinement in the United States. One starves a prisoner’s senses. The other overwhelms them. In a Supermax—a high-tech dungeon specifically designed to warehouse men in isolation—a prisoner has virtually no contact with other human beings. Locked behind a slab of steel into a cell smaller than a parking space, he smells and touches only cement. He hears only the incessant hum of a dim fluorescent light that never goes off. If he’s fortunate, he’ll have a window.
Read the rest by Nathaniel Penn at GQ.
