I sat down to write and all the thoughts within me faded to an indistinguishable blur. But I will try to make myself write anyway, because those words are packed away somewhere. I started reading Hell is a Very Small Place: voices from solitary confinement. My interest in the movement to end solitary began several months ago, when I came across the Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement. I am jarred and anguished that this form of torture is occurring in our country and people are not just turning a blind eye, but also encouraging it. We continue to build Supermax facilities specifically designed to house people in solitary units so we can continue this form of degradation and punishment that severely violates Geneva Convention standards. Our legislators continue to ignore proposed laws that will change this barbaric, ineffectual, and counterproductive treatment of prisoners -- not excluding children, pregnant women, people with mental illness, and elderly prisoners -- despite evidence that it costs more, leads to higher recidivism, generates violence among inmates, exacerbates and even creates serious mental problems, and has been deemed cruel and unusual. I am deeply disturbed and mortified by the practice of solitary confinement. If you think it is "radical" to fight for basic human rights of prisoners, it is time to wake up. Here is a blog post I wrote with a little more background.

I'm sure my friends find it irritating when I try to relate to their troubles or suffering through my own experiences. But today, as I began Hell is a Very Small Place, I couldn't suppress that tendency of mine. It is a tendency that allows me to feel and understand, very deeply, the problems of our criminal justice systems and the current human rights violations we are allowing.

​My transplant experience woke me to everyone's ultimate lack of control of what will, what is, and what isn't; my utter humanness and fragility; the horrible reality of human inaccuracy -- how wrong our perceptions can be and how easily the human mind can be altered by experience, environment, and exposure. I could not speak with the ventilator, and just for that amount of time I lost my sense of personhood, and it left me to internalize much of what I was experiencing. I tried to scream once just for the sake of expressing how restless I felt, but all I could do was open my mouth.

One night a week after surgery, in that hospital bed in the ICU, where I was confined by my weak body, chest tubes, and IVs, I imagined myself, so vividly, sliding out of the sheets and walking down the hall. I was only able to wiggle my right leg over a few inches before I realized I couldn't even sit up on my own. That night I had a tangible nightmare that I crawled through a rainstorm and found a silver crucifix in a puddle, and a voice said, "FIND JESUS," and I was so thirsty but could not catch the rain in my mouth. Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. I am completely blocked and unable to believe in god; I'm just not wired for it. After a hopeful and ardent stint in sixth grade, I discovered faith like that just didn't work for me. Anyway, I don't know what that nightmare meant but I think of it from time to time. I think it was my brain preparing for a void that was going to occur after the transplant, after all that medical trauma, after I had come to terms with death and had to become so indifferent to loss in order to cope. Or maybe it was my body complaining that my mouth was terribly dry. Either way, I emerged from my transplant experience restless, unsettled, and unable to sit still long enough to recall these details much.

I know that my experience with powerlessness, immobility, loss of self, uncertainty, loss of memory and loss of a sense of reality did not come close to what it is to be in solitary confinement, and not just because I had many things that someone in solitary does not (a loving family sitting with me all day, an end in sight, an unbroken trust that I would be taken care of, a far more comfortable and sanitary environment, people who wanted me to stay alive, to name a few differences). But simply reading the Foreword and Introduction of Hell is a Very Small Place was enough to unearth a feeling that I had long forgotten: I know what it is to not feel human anymore. To feel oneself disappearing, knowing that "self" is a construct that can be torn down more easily than we realize. To brutally comprehend one's own insignificance. To face the arbitrariness of that sliver between life and death.

There must be something that you, too, have experienced that can act as a magnifying glass, a translation; something that will give you a deeper understanding rather than a simple recognition that our prison system is currently violating human rights. You must have something in your arsenal of experience that you shut your eyes to, that thing you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. Now multiply it; imagine experiencing it at the same intensity and uncertainty for days that turn to months that turn to years, and you may have a glimpse of what solitary confinement is.

In the chaos of Penn Station, anxiety set in. People hustling in all directions, the buzzing lights, whirl of perfume and color, and screeching train rails caused a man newly released from five straight years of solitary confinement to curl into an immovable ball. A homeless person eventually approached him and offered a compassionate hand. “You must be right out of prison. Let me help.”

This is one of several accounts Amy Fettig, Senior Staff Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, shared of her clients dealing with Special Housing Unit (SHU) Syndrome. Last Saturday, she spoke on “The Emerging Consensus to Stop Solitary Confinement” at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church at a modest yet passionate conference held by the WNY chapter of the New York Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement (CAIC).

Fettig, who is also a lawyer and directs the Stop Solitary campaign, litigates federal class action prison conditions cases through the ACLU.

SHU Syndrome, Fettig explained, is one of the many negative mental health outcomes of solitary confinement in prisons – a place that goes by many names, such as special housing, special management, isolation, segregation, and “the box.” This practice is used widely in U.S. prisons as a disciplinary measure and control mechanism for inmates. It involves confining individuals for 22 to 24 hours a day in a cell smaller than six by nine feet, providing limited contact with other human beings for days, weeks, months, and even decades. Time outdoors is limited to a caged area the size of a dog kennel.

Displaying a photographed row of steel-clad doors, Fettig described the continuous screams that echo through the pod day and night – the sounds of people losing their minds, an anguished “expression of their soul,” Fettig puts it. No physical contact is allowed during family visits, and phone calls are rare. Not only is medical and mental health care severely lacking, but prisoners are also subject to frequent abuse.

Brother Baba Eng of Prisoners Are People, Too detailed his survival through solitary in a brief talk as well. He gave a vivid, distressing description: Guards beat you naked and defecate in your food. They taunt the prisoners with barking.

Solitary confinement is, by definition of the United Nations and Geneva Conventions, a form of torture. The Mandela Rules state that isolation beyond fifteen days is cruel and inhumane. In fact, the global norm is fifteen days – but U.S. prisons far exceed that in practice.

The U.S. exceeds many global norms when it comes to imprisonment. While we make up only 5% of the world’s population, we house 25% of the world’s prisoners, or 2.3 million people. On any given day in our country, it is estimated that 80,000 to 100,000 people are held in solitary confinement. Those figures are considered an underrepresentation, as they do not include the confinement of children, people in county jails, or detainees in immigration facilities.

This is not an accurately recorded practice either, Fettig explains. A large part of the problem is that there is little to no oversight or accountability in our prisons. The public does not have access to seeing SHU pods or monitoring their conditions, and even the ACLU needs a court order to view them.

“I’ve sued states that say, ‘We don’t know who’s in solitary or how long they’ve been there,’” Fettig tells.
             
The Effects
We all know that our need for human contact is innate. It is necessary for normal socialization, stability, and – frankly – our sanity. Over thirty years of research on the effects of solitary confinement have highlighted that it’s not only detrimental to the individual but to the prison environment and community at large as well. Self-mutilation and suicide are common. A recent study of 8,000 records from Rikers Island revealed prisoners in solitary are 700 times more likely to take their own lives than people in the general prison population.

Fettig relayed a story of a client of hers who kept refusing to return his food tray to the corrections officers. The officers would drag him out of his isolation cell and beat him as punishment. Fettig asked her client why he wouldn’t just return the tray, and the man replied that it was the “only time he gets contact.” The effects of being alone are so severe he would rather be beaten than have no contact at all.

Confinement leads to confusion, memory problems, myopia, deep anxiety, PTSD, and physical and neurological damage. Brain function declines within the first seven days of isolation.

Despite this evidence, we expect to release prisoners after solitary confinement and witness successful reintegration with society.

Solitary confinement emerged as a way to control excessive prison populations. As our number of prisoners surged beginning in the 1980s and overcrowding and poor conditions led to violent outbreaks within facilities, states built Supermax prisons specifically designed for mass solitary confinement.

The theory behind solitary, however, was not vetted. Fettig warns that solitary confinement was a “gut” instinct policy, rather than one based on empirical evidence. In fact, empirical evidence shows solitary confinement makes prisons more violent and less safe for prisoners and C.O.’s. There is even a 20% higher recidivism rate for people released into society directly from solitary as opposed to being released after re-acclimating to the general prison population.
 
Myth Busting: Who Is in Solitary?
Some proponents of solitary might argue that the alarming violence and higher recidivism amongst those in solitary is self-fulfilling; it is due to the fact that “the worst of the worst” get placed there. But is this true?

Fettig’s answer is, “It’s not the people in solitary confinement; it’s the practice.”

The idea that only the most dangerous, unruly prisoners are isolated is a myth. While prisoners can be sent into confinement for fighting or breaking serious rules, only a minor infraction can in fact be reason enough to send someone there for long stretches of time. Fettig cited actions that have put her clients away such as talking back, having “too many legal documents” in their cell, and even something as benign as possessing “too many stamps”. Even more alarming, many C.O.’s are not trained to deal with mental illness, so often it is dealt with in this manner.

People with developmental disabilities, aging prisoners (over 70 years old), pregnant women, and children under the age of 18 are not excluded from this population, either. In other cases, members of the LGBTQ community who are being sexually abused by other prisoners are put in solitary as a safety precaution.

In 2014, New York State passed a bill to exclude people with mental illness from solitary confinement, instead recommending obvious alternatives such as health care and proper mental health treatment. Still, it is estimated that 20% of people in solitary suffer from mental illness. The legislation also banned isolating minors, pregnant women, and people with developmental disabilities. However, legislation is not the only step required to enforce these much-needed reforms.
 
Progress – but not fast enough
In December 2015, the NYCLU reached a historic settlement in the class action suit Peoples v. Fischer. The agreement has prompted New York State to limit the length of solitary confinement, reduce the number of people placed there, and increase rehabilitative efforts.

Still, our state has the highest percentage of people in solitary confinement. More oversight and accountability from the public is a must if this practice is to truly be corrected, Fettig recommends.

Furthermore, in an unprecedented motion this past January, President Obama announced a ban on confining juveniles and inmates serving time for low-level violations in federal prisons. While attention from our president indicates positive movement, unfortunately this executive order does not hold power over state and local prisons and jails.
     
Our legislators are in need of a harder push. The Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Bill is a long way from getting passed through the New York State Senate and has yet to be added to the floor calendar. Organizations such as CAIC urge the public to sign a petition in support of this bill, call or write to their representatives, and voice their support.
           
At the very least, people are growing more aware. In New York, a ban on the infamous “loaf” stirred discussion on how we feed inmates. Recently, The Guardian released a 3-D virtual experience of solitary confinement on their website. But is discussion leading to action?

It appears easy for people to dismiss our prison conditions with a wave of the hand and an assumption that if they deserve to be in prison, they deserve to be treated poorly. But pragmatism and evidence have eroded this logic to a dull nub; we cannot continue to address crime with inhumane acts. By turning a blind eye to this revolting form of torture, this clear violation of human rights, do we not lose a part of our own humanity as well?
 
 
 
 
Further Reading:
 
“Historic Settlement Overhauls Solitary Confinement in New York.” (16 December 2015). New York Civil Liberties Union. http://www.nyclu.org/news/historic-settlement-overhauls-solitary-confinement-new-york
 
Panetta, Francesca. (27 April 2016). “6x9: a virtual reality experience of solitary confinement.” The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/27/6x9-vr-virtual-reality-experience-solitary-confinement-faqs-explainer
 
 
“Solitary Confinement Facts.” American Friends Services Committee. http://www.afsc.org/resource/solitary-confinement-facts
 
Quandt, Katie Rose. (26 February 2014). “Is This the Beginning of the End for Solitary Confinement?” Mother Jones. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/02/children-pregnant-women-developmentally-disabled-solitary-confinement-reform-new-york
 
Shear, Michael D. (25 January 2016). “Obama Bans Solitary Confinement of Juveniles in Federal Prisons.” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/us/politics/obama-bans-solitary-confinement-of-juveniles-in-federal-prisons.html?_r=0
 
Senate Bill S2659. The New York State Senate. https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2015/S2659
 
Casella, Jean and Aviva Stahl. “Opening the Door: What Will It Take to End Long-Term Solitary Confinement in America’s Prisons? Colorado Could Be the First to Find Out.” Solitary Watch. http://solitarywatch.com/2016/04/29/opening-the-door/
 
“Think Outside the Box.” New York Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement. http://nycaic.org/legislation/