by Mateo Hoke
The US public, however, knows very little of how the damage of solitary confinement reaches far beyond prison walls into homes and communities, and even less about what that damage looks and feels like for thousands of Americans returning home each year. Upwards of 95 percent of all people who go to prison in the United States will be released. How they’re treated while inside has a huge impact on the communities they return to.
Though each story is unique, the following narratives weave together a larger web of prison abuses, showing that solitary is not a singular abuse happening separately from the violence and dehumanization of everyday prison life. In fact, as we see with Aaron Lewis’s description of corrections officers chaining him in stress positions, or with Davon Mosley being denied medication, solitary is often one of a litany of abuses that incarcerated people face every day in America. Isolation just turns up the volume.
As evident in many of the following narratives, solitary drives people to do disturbing things to themselves and others. When locked in isolation, behavioral similarities arise—people self-harm and smear feces in Louisiana just as they do in California. Faced with walls that feel like they’re closing in, identities atrophy in Alaska just as they do in New York. The similar accounts you’ll find in these pages are not coincidental. Isolation everywhere does terrible things to the human machine.
However, it’s worth noting that some of the people you’ll meet in these pages say solitary was tolerable, even desirable, because it was a respite from the violence and chaos of being housed in a prison’s general population. Read that again. A punishment the United Nations classifies as torture can be a respite. Such are the conditions of being incarcerated in the United States.
Yet while solitary units remain hidden behind structures of immense power and bureaucracy, we found the human spirit perseveres in profound ways. People like Maryam Henderson-Uloho are literally making flowers from toilet paper to keep their bodies and minds occupied. People are sharing food with one another to make sure everyone eats. People like “Zah” Dorrough are reading and writing and exercising to keep their minds sharp and their dignity intact while locked in a place that is designed to dull one’s senses and destroy one’s poise.
We hope these stories will prove valuable to anyone wanting a truer understanding of American incarceration and American notions of liberty and justice. As Eugene Debs said nearly a hundred years ago, those hidden behind grim walls well deserve to have their conditions viewed in an enlightened and sympathetic way. In fact, the very health of our communities depends on it. So while tens of thousands of people continue to linger in solitary units throughout the United States, it is our hope that by amplifying some of the voices of those who’ve survived long-term isolation, as well as those of their family members, we honor the thousands whose stories remain yet untold.
SOLITARY CONFINEMENT:
A TEN-POINT PRIMER
Long-term solitary confinement meets the legal definition of torture. According to the United Nations, long-term solitary confinement for more than fifteen days constitutes torture and violates fundamental human rights. The UN found, as early as 1992 and on several occasions since, that solitary confinement amounts to “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment.” In 2012, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture concluded that solitary confinement under the conditions noted above—twenty-three or twenty-four hours in a cell with little human contact—should never be used for more than fifteen consecutive days—regardless of the reason.
The United States leads all other industrialized nations in both volume and rates of incarceration. Every year, around seven million people cycle through the prisons and jails of the United States. On any given day, about 2.3 million people are sitting in US prisons and jails. The United States has just under 5 percent of the world’s population yet over 20 percent of the world’s prisoners. It incarcerates about 700 people for every 100,000 Americans. (Compare that to rates of 114 for every 100,000 in Canada, or 130 for every 100,000 in England and Wales.) The statistics for people incarcerated don’t capture the churn of incarceration. Americans go in and out of jails over eleven million times in a single year.
Solitary confinement is everywhere in the United States today, in every part of the country. Exact numbers are hard to come by (which points to a major problem: no one actually tracks solitary confinement usage), but most scholars and advocates believe that upwards of a hundred thousand people are in some form of solitary confinement at any moment in the United States. The pervasiveness of the practice means that the number of people exposed to solitary confinement over the course of a year is probably ten times higher. Solitary is used in all types of detention facilities, including civil detention facilities for immigrants, in small county jails holding people accused of crimes before trial, and in juvenile detention facilities. People are held in solitary confinement in the dank and filthy basement cells of US prisons built in the nineteenth century, and they are confined in multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art prisons built expressly for solitary confinement within the last decade. At least forty-four states and the federal government have freestanding solitary confinement prisons. States spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build these prisons and currently spend hundreds of millions of dollars more annually to operate them.
Solitary confinement units look different from prison to prison, but the basic principle is universal: maximize deprivation and isolation. People in solitary are held in tiny spaces generally no larger than a parking space—ranging from about sixty to eighty square feet—for twenty-three or twenty-four hours a day. Access to sunlight and fresh air is limited or nonexistent. In places where an hour of recreation is permitted outside of the solitary cell, it often occurs in another barren concrete room. Personal property, like a book or a deck of playing cards, may be forbidden or extremely restricted. There is little or no meaningful human contact. Often, the only human contact a person will have in solitary is with staff through the cell door or while being handcuffed to be moved to recreation. Visitation and other contact (telephone calls, letters) with loved ones are not allowed or severely limited. There is nothing to do, no one to talk to, nowhere to go—for days, weeks, months, and even years. Prison terms for modern-day solitary confinement vary widely. Prison officials generally refer to solitary units as “segregation,” “restricted housing,” or “special housing,” and use a variety of acronyms to denote specific solitary confinement units. Solitary also goes by slang terms like “the hole” or “the box.”
Solitary confinement isn’t always solitary. Some prisons put two people in a solitary confinement cell, a practice generally referred to as “double-bunking.” Prison officials may “double-bunk” people in solitary because they have run out of room in their solitary confinement units or because they have designed isolation units that are purpose-built to hold two people in the small cell. Double-bunked prisoners are subject to all the same deprivations as others in solitary confinement. Many prison officials assert that “double-bunking” lessens the severity of isolation in segregation units. Many people who have been subject to double-
bunking consider it a special form of torture, oftentimes worse than being alone in a solitary cell, to spend twenty-four hours a day in a small concrete box with a stranger. Assaults often occur between “bunkmates” or “cellies.”
People are placed in solitary confinement for a variety of purported reasons. In US jails and prisons, there are basically three official reasons that people are put in solitary: (1) as punishment for a certain length of time for breaking prison rules (“disciplinary segregation”); (2) for an indeterminate amount of time because prison officials have “classified” a person as being too dangerous to be held in the general prison population (“administrative segregation”); or (3) to protect vulnerable people from threats from other prisoners (“protective custody”). In practice, if a corrections officer wants a person in solitary conf
inement, he can almost always find a way to put a prisoner there. Any corrections officer can write a disciplinary “ticket” that will be ruled upon by other corrections officers, who almost always find the target “guilty” and impose punishment. People may be “classified” as dangerous and put into solitary on the basis of flimsy evidence or no evidence at all.
Long-term solitary confinement can pose a risk to mental and physical health. In the mid-1980s, psychiatrists first studied a group of prisoners living in extreme isolation in the Special Housing Unit, or “SHU,” of a Massachusetts prison and identified a variety of negative physiological and psychological symptoms exhibited by the prisoners. The now well-recognized symptoms of solitary confinement include social withdrawal; anxiety and nervousness; panic attacks; irrational anger and rage; loss of impulse control; paranoia; hypersensitivity to external stimuli; severe and chronic depression; difficulties with thinking, concentration, and memory; and perceptual distortions, illusions, and hallucinations. For people with preexisting mental health issues, solitary confinement can be devastating, and even deadly—rates of suicide and self-harm are higher in solitary units.Solitary confinement can also lead to a host of medical problems that can be painful, permanently debilitating, and lead to premature death. People held in long-term isolation can experience dangerous levels of chronic hypertension. They commonly suffer from problems with vision. The lack of free movement can atrophy muscle and exacerbate joint pain and arthritis. For inmates with mental illness, segregation often means being subject to the most extreme conditions of confinement. For more on this, see Locked Up and Locked Down: Segregation of Inmates with Mental Illness, a report by the AVID Prison Project: Amplifying Voices of Inmates with Disabilities, at www.disabilityrightswa.org.
There is no good evidence that the use of solitary confinement improves safety in prison. Prison officials have long argued that solitary improves safety by deterring future bad conduct and by removing dangerous or vulnerable people from the general prison population. These claims were never supported by evidence when the use of solitary confinement first exploded in the United States, and it appears increasingly likely that long-term solitary confinement provides no net safety benefits. A person thrown into the box for weeks as punishment for petty rule breaking, like stealing a candy bar, may come out of solitary even more likely to engage in disruptive behavior than when they first went in. When it comes to the smaller number of people held in solitary who have committed serious acts of violence, the most promising approaches involve intervention and programming, like intensive mental health and substance abuse treatment, and restorative justice processes that require the individual to accept meaningful responsibility for the harms caused by his or her actions—none of which occur in solitary units.
There is evidence that solitary is bad for public safety and community health. To the extent that prison officials realize any short-term safety benefits by warehousing dangerous individuals in their solitary units, they are only shifting the ultimate risk onto the public. Around 95 percent of people who are incarcerated are released. In many cases, prison officials are releasing their most dangerous prisoners directly from solitary confinement to the streets, after having done nothing at all to address the risk that these individuals could be suffering from solitary-induced mental illness and engaging in antisocial behaviors. Time in solitary has been shown to increase the risk of recidivism. Placement in solitary confinement cuts people off from contact with family, which is consistently shown to be the single-best predictor of success in society after release.2 People in solitary confinement lose access to educational or vocational training that may help them get a job upon release. It is unclear if solitary does anything to make prisons safer, but it is certain that it damages the communities and families to which people held in solitary return.
Change is happening. The harrowing experiences of solitary confinement survivors, which have previously been all but hidden, have now been thrust into the public’s view in unprecedented ways. Ten years ago, media reports about solitary confinement were scarce and wide swaths of the public knew little or nothing about these practices. In the last few years, however, solitary confinement has been the subject of an increasing number of public education campaigns, lawsuits, investigative reports, TV shows, documentaries, and even theater productions. Numerous states have dramatically reduced the use of solitary confinement in response to pressure from prisoners, family members, lawsuits, and legislation, and they are doing so at the initiative of corrections leaders. Many more states and the federal government have indicated an intention to reexamine the practice. There is no denying that change is occurring and that there are clear alternatives to solitary confinement. The only question is how far those changes will actually go.
* * *
2. See, for example, Julie Poehlmann, Danielle Dallaire, Ann Booker Loper, and Leslie D. Shear, “Children’s Contact with Their Incarcerated Parents: Research Findings and Recommendations,” American Psychologist 65, no. 6 (2010): 575.
EXECUTIVE EDITOR’S NOTE
The thirteen narratives in this book are the result of oral history interviews conducted over a two-year period between the spring of 2016 and the spring of 2018. With every Voice of Witness narrative, we aim for a novelistic level of detail and (whenever possible) a birth-to-now chronologized scope in order to portray narrators as individuals in all their complexity, rather than as case studies. We do not set out to create comprehensive histories of human rights issues. Rather, our goal is to compile a collection of voices that (1) offers accessible, thought-provoking, and ultimately humanizing perspectives on what can often seem like impenetrable topics; and (2) can meaningfully contribute to the efforts of social justice and human rights movements.
In order to honor our narrators’ experiences, Voice of Witness oral histories are crafted with the utmost care. Recorded interviews are transcribed and organized chronologically by our dedicated team of volunteers. Then, narrative drafts are typically subject to three to five rounds of editorial revision and follow-up interviews, to ensure depth and accuracy. The stories themselves remain faithful to the speakers’ words (we seek final narrator approval before publishing their narratives) and have been edited for clarity, coherence, and length. In a few cases, some names and details have been changed to protect the identities of our narrators and the identities of family and acquaintances. All narratives have been carefully fact-checked and are supported by various appendixes and a glossary included in the back of the book that provide context for, and some explanation of, the history of solitary confinement in the United States.
We thank all the individuals who courageously, generously, and patiently shared their experiences with us, including those whom we were unable to include in this book. We also thank all the frontline human rights and social justice defenders working to promote and protect the rights and dignity of all people throughout the prison systems of the United States. Without the cooperation of these advocates, this book would not be possible.
Finally, we thank our national community of educators and students who inspire our education program. With each Voice of Witness book, we create a Common Core–aligned curriculum that connects high school students and educators with the stories and issues presented in the book, with particular emphasis on serving marginalized communities. Our education program also provides curriculum support, training in ethics-driven storytelling, and site visits to educators in schools and impacted communities. Visit the Voice of Witness website for free educational resources, behind-the-scenes features on this book and other projects, and to find out how you can be part of our work: voiceofwitness.org.
In solidarity,
Mimi Lok
Cofounder, Executive Director, and Executive Editor
Voice of Witness
MARYAM HENDERSON-ULOHO
age: 61
born in: Pine Bluff, Arkansas
interv
iewed in: Arabi, Louisiana
Maryam Henderson-Uloho says she runs her Sister Hearts Thrift Store “like a marine captain.” She’s tough and direct and committed to helping her employees learn and grow in ways they haven’t been able to for a long time. At Sister Hearts, “Ms. Mary” hires formerly incarcerated people, and if they have nowhere else to go, she houses them in a separate area above the store. For someone recently released from years or decades of incarceration, an opportunity like this can mean the difference between a new beginning or a quick return to crime and prison. Working at the store gives her employees a chance at economic independence and a place to transition back into a society where jobs for formerly incarcerated people can be very difficult to find.
Sister Hearts is currently located in a 17,000-square-foot warehouse packed with furniture, clothes, and knickknacks. It’s big, organized, and clean. During our visit Ms. Mary wears a burgundy Sister Hearts T-shirt and jeans. When she’s not sitting down to talk with us, she’s setting up for an event she’s hosting later for formerly incarcerated women to showcase the creative cooking skills they learned behind bars.
Louisiana is often called the incarceration capital of the world, and Black people there are more than four times as likely to go to prison as white people are.3 Ms. Mary herself spent nearly thirteen years in a Louisiana prison, seven of them in segregation. When she went in, she was a successful real estate investor. She says she was targeted in prison and sent to isolation because she’s Muslim and refused to take off her hijab.
I WAS SO SCARED, I WET THE BED
You know, sometimes I say to myself, I have all the ingredients to be a failure. All the ingredients. But here I am.
